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Thank Jervis for that one, he then made T-ball of skulls where you get more points with BJ scores then actual gaming.

Jubear wrote:God I miss the early to mid 90s when tournaments were just based of player skill then some asshat at GW came up with the horrible idea that tournaments should be a full hobby experience and next thing you know TOs are ruining tournaments with painting scores.

Never existed. Why? Because the game didn't exist as a rulesystem that was playable competitively in the mid 90s. There was no skill involved in the mid 90s. The game was an unbalanced narrative mess which was made for 'fun' and 'models' and not competitive play. You are making up this magical land as it never existed.

GW's tourneys have been a full hobby experience since day one and GWs rule writers actually hated the competitive attitude during the mid-90s and felt it ruined the game they were making.

Really 4th and 5th edition WHFB was still balanced enough for competitive play and anything that was over the top was comped.

Seemed to work fairly well to me it and I rarely saw the same armies winning all the time.

Jubear wrote:Really 4th and 5th edition WHFB was still balanced enough for competitive play and anything that was over the top was comped.

Seemed to work fairly well to me it and I rarely saw the same armies winning all the time.

EH, matter of debate... heart of woe explosion characters and a bit of herohammer... Still doesn't change the fact that GW required fully painted armies in their stores, many indies did to and GW had open and very vocal contempt of the 'WAAC' attitude and claimed the games were not suited for competitive play. Any and all GW tourneys were always hobby competitions from day one. The fact they needed comp to be playable showed how the game on its face was not designed for competitive play.

Almost all of the GW games needed heavy comp to be playable in a competitive environment until the early 2000s. Because of this, the WAAC people were seen as outcasts because everyone 'knew' you could build an unbeatable army with zero skill required to play it which defeated the purpose. Hence events where a person needed to compete on multiple fronts as well as play the 'comp' game.

These events which were pure battlepoints and skill never existed until we had uncomped events which have really only broken ground in the past 4 years. Too bad Fantasy has become almost unplayable. How things are now and how they were 15 years ago are so different I think people frequently forget.

I don't think the game is as poorly-designed or unbalanced as Redbeard does, but I agree that if you don't care about painting or about playing with and against painted armies; if all you care about is the game, you are in the wrong hobby. Minatures wargaming is about the miniatures first and foremost, and this is obvious in every rulebook and advertisement. If all you want is a competitive game, then Chess is right there. Or if you want a fantasy theme, then Magic: The Gathering. Or if you want a wargame, then Advanced Squad Leader.

I absolutely respect and enjoy the competitive side of the game. I enjoy the heck out of playing and winning, and I play to win, and have been hardworking and fortunate enough to do so a fair amount.* But when I started playing (1999) almost all events, and certainly every GW-sponsored event, was about the overall hobbyist, requiring and rewarding painting, gameplay, and even a bit of comp/fluff. I got into the fluff, and I learned to paint. Like almost everyone, I started off rough and got progressively better. I've even managed to win a few painting awards, though when you compare me to the truly proficient I'm clearly a tabletop-quality style painter. I really disliked painting when I first tried it, and I still procrastinate at it like crazy. But I was satisfied whenever I got a unit finished. And I appreciated that the game really isn't that great when it doesn't include the spectacle of attractive armies on a nice table.

I can understand and appreciate how some folks get frustrated over inequities in their local area (like Jidmah's situation, where he gets penalized for a unique paint scheme, and where they don't give a separate prize for Best General), but a distinction needs to be drawn between feeling that one's local area doesn't have enough variety of events, and a general condemnation of anyplace having the kind of event that doesn't suit your personal preference.

Thankfully in most places multiple kinds of events exist. Including most prominently the pure Battles event, the "classic" overall-player-and-hobbyist, and the events which mix them both. The biggest and best-organized events mostly seem to be moving to the latter; witness Adepticon & the newer NOVA. GW, meanwhile, with Throne of Skulls has once more affirmed that for them the highest priority is players bringing everything to the table- play, paint, and sportsmanship. That should be indicative of what the game is designed and intended to be. Thankfully the players and TOs choose to expand it a bit beyond that. And we should all appreciate the work they do and respect that different folks have different priorities, and the best events are those that allow for all.


(*And BTW, in the natural course of conversation I told a girl at work this week about my ranking on Rankings HQ, and she was respectful. Granted, I was talking to a girl who does competitive Roller Derby, so not quite your general audience, but I don't think we're quite the marginal sorts that RB implied. )

Well if the all the pro hobbyist had there way every tournament would be paint score and sports without a battle points component.

Why even play the games at all after all its obviously requires no skill to do well.

Hell lets just show up at the tourny and set our armies up and hold hands and exchange the fluffy backgrounds of our armies while we braid each others hair.

Why are folk so scared of competitive play? Life is one big competition every thing you do from work to even your relationships is a competition.

Also I have never seen painting comp where the weapons loadout on a model was taken into account so why should painting come into a comp based around ones abilitys to direct his man dollies?

Also painting scores are also very subjective a good example would be that some armies are much easier to paint then others anyone can make SMs look good while elder can be a challenge.

feth Jubear, talk about hyperbole.

Has anyone actually stated that there should be no games played? Or that they shouldn't count?

If you want to go for Best Overall, get better at painting. If you want to be the best player there, then don't give a gak about best Overall and gun for Best General. It's what you're after.

People aren't scared of competitive play. If they were, they wouldn't be going to tournaments at all. But judging based on the effort put into painting your army is something that gets done at wargaming tournaments, because it's a large part of the hobby for most players.

You kind of need to expect there to be an award based on it, and for there to be a Best Overall award.

I mean, you could also say that Best Sportsmanship is a load of gak because the person you play might be a complete donkey-cave, he's just good at acting nice when you play a game. And that guy might edge you out in points because he got a better overall score based on acting like a nice guy on sportsmanship points.

Just get over the fact that gameplay isn't the only thing judged.

Lolz I am not scared of painting comp all my stuff is painted in such a way that I usually do well as It meets what the judges are looking for Ie coherent,basing with 2 different materials,3 colors and highlighting/shading.

But that aside I would never enter a dedicated painting comp as painting is a result of my hobby and not the focus.

Why are you so scared of entering a tourny that dosent have a paint score?

Is not the painting of your own army enough for you or do you need the validation of a score?

Also I have some friends that are real artist when i see what they can do with some oils and a blank canvas it just rams home that miniature painting is kinda silly when compared to real art.

Basically you are saying that your approach to the hobby is right and anyone any other approach to the hobby is wrong.

Tournaments should always require a painted army to play after all I am paying to play however I dont see why its such a bad thing to have separate prizes for each category.

There is no justification to get rude and personal in this thread. - Mannahnin

There is no justification to get rude and personal. -Mannahnin

Painting scores. Why I never play in tournaments; too much back patting and holier than thou going on because somebody has more free time than I do to spend hours on each fig. All my toys are painted but I'd rather play the game and spend time doing other things than hunkered over a magnifying lense with paint-stained fingers mumbling to myself and cackling at odd times while my family looks on with worried expressions and much "tsking".

Note: I'm kinda proud of that run-on sentence.

agnosto wrote:Painting scores. Why I never play in tournaments; too much back patting and holier than thou going on because somebody has more free time than I do to spend hours on each fig. All my toys are painted but I'd rather play the game and spend time doing other things than hunkered over a magnifying lense with paint-stained fingers mumbling to myself and cackling at odd times while my family looks on with worried expressions and much "tsking".

Note: I'm kinda proud of that run-on sentence.

So go to tournaments and try to get best general. Your painting level isn't going to affect you getting the award for playing the best in any way whatsoever.

Multiple posts deleted. Cool it. If I see more personal insults in this thread, people are getting suspended.

There are a few ways that I do run a tournament. The ones without the paint requirements are the ones that are requested the most, but they are the ones that I will fund the least, +$100 - $200 in prizes

The more "professional" ones require a painting element. The painting element is a very simple affair.

I will give you a simple run down on how it is judged.

Your army is graded awarded 0 points for an unpainted army. Points are awarded for the amount of effort put on the models of your army.

Is the army painted? A point is awarded.
Is the army painted with three or more different colors? A point is awarded
Is it based? A point is awarded
And so one.

These points are then applied to every game that is played in the tournament which makes up the overall score of the tournament. You can think of them is bonus points if you like for the amount of effort that you paint your army, not what is deemed "quality" of the paint job of the army that gets people all bent out of shape about.

This kind of judgement for painting takes the subjective aspect of what is "high table top quality/Professional painting" and what is not, out of the tournament.

If you want to add a "best painter" in your tournament I usually add an element of the a vote done by those people that are playing in the tournament to pick out who they think has the best paint job done in the tournament. Add their vote to a panel of judges to get and overall best painter award (that is if you want to add another layer complexity and to safe guard against friends voting one of their own to win the painting competition aspect of the tournament).

I do not use the term "Golden Daemon" because I consider that to be incredibly subjective and to be honest some of what I have seen is just crap.


Hope this helps a little.

Mannahnin wrote:(*And BTW, in the natural course of conversation I told a girl at work this week about my ranking on Rankings HQ, and she was respectful. Granted, I was talking to a girl who does competitive Roller Derby, so not quite your general audience, but I don't think we're quite the marginal sorts that RB implied. )

Was it the smile and nod and shuffle away kind of respectful?

This made me check RankingsHQ and find out that someone must have accidentally reported an event I was at. I'm now the 1075th best player in the US!

-Loki- wrote:
So go to tournaments and try to get best general. Your painting level isn't going to affect you getting the award for playing the best in any way whatsoever.

The problem with that is that I don't play well either.

Basically in local tournaments its all about wins and losses. Now we do keep sportsmanship and painting scores, but these are used as tie breakers. So while it helps your chances not to be a jerk and have a decent table top army if you massacre all of your games you still win. This feels the most fair as it doesn't punish those that are great strategists but poor painters or help those that paid for an "expert level" paint job. Rather it rewards those who put a little more effort into their army and their table top skill.

Akroma06 wrote:Basically in local tournaments its all about wins and losses. Now we do keep sportsmanship and painting scores, but these are used as tie breakers. So while it helps your chances not to be a jerk and have a decent table top army if you massacre all of your games you still win. This feels the most fair as it doesn't punish those that are great strategists but poor painters or help those that paid for an "expert level" paint job. Rather it rewards those who put a little more effort into their army and their table top skill.

Well you can think what you want, but in a lot of places this is the less popular attitude, such as where I play.

To suggest having tournaments based purely on who can roll the dice better is tantamount to heresy around rochester NY.

Akroma06 wrote: or help those that paid for an "expert level" paint job.

This is a myth which I do not feel reflects reality pretty much anywhere. I have this feeling that everyone who seems to hate painting assumes everyone else is a cheater who paid someone to paint their stuff to screw them out of prize support. You found us out. No one int he world paints except for one little old man in a mountain shrine in Asia and he paints 100% of models out there and sells them on ebay and it is a grand conspiracy to have paint scores to keep non-painters down.

But seriously... every time someone makes this argument it makes me cringe as it simply si not reality for a severe majority of people who have painted armies.

No tournament needs to make a strong differentiation between what is important and not when you think about it.

Encourage and allow all players to compete and enjoy their hobby the way they most see fit.

In the NOVA style, our Best Overall rightly is comprised 50% of appearance scores, and 50% of competitive scores. Our Best General is comprised 100% of competitive score (win/loss, bracketed). Our Best Appearance is comprised 100% of appearance score.

Not too complicated.

I don't see why people get so huffy. Typically you go to the types of tournaments you enjoy. If you want to be 100% about generalship than go play 'ard boyz. If you want to be judged by your painting skills go enter painting competitions.

I wish that I had a chance to join these tournaments that actually required painted armies and awarded prizes on an overall level. Most of the time I just see a sea of grey plastic and it makes me cry :(

Jidmah wrote:A tournament is about playing games to win.

That's only if you define a tournament as such. There is nothing about the word "tournament" that requires there to be any sort of game being played. There are plenty of different kinds of tournament, both sports related and not sports related, that are totally subjectively judged. Whether it is a sport like gymnastics, diving, or dance or an activity like singing or visual arts, there are many different tournaments that have absolutely nothing with "playing games to win" and are decided based upon the opinions of either a single judge or panel of judges.

You know, this subject keeps coming up every few months, and the same people always chime in with the same hackneyed arguments.

This is what it amounts to:

If you want to host a Warhammer 40K tournament, set up the format however you want, weighing whichever different elements of the game/hobby you believe to be the most important. Make sure that you make your scoring system completely transparent and available to everyone before hand. Yes, for the soft scores this transparency makes it theoretically possible for people to "game the system," but that risk is far better than having something like a confusing composition scoring system pulled out right before the first game starts.

If you do this, then only people who are interested in participating in that type of tournament will show up for it. During and after the tournament, pay attention to what the players say about their experience. Be willing to adjust the things that people were unhappy about. If you know people who opted to not show up to the tournament, listen to why they didn't come. Use both sets of information to make a decision about whether or not you wish to modify your format for future tournaments. Let the local attitudes towards tournaments dictate how your tournaments evolve. If your local area gamers like soft scored tournaments, ignore people on the web who act like soft scores are somehow the bane of modern civilization. If everyone in your area hates soft scores, do not insist on having them.

I'll seriously never understand why people make such a fuss about this when it comes up. We're at a point in the GW hobby/game that there are plenty of tournaments that cater to every different extreme of playing. There is nothing that requires someone to attend a tournament with a format they don't like. If you have the misfortune of living in an area with very limited tournament opportunities, then work with the locals to have tournaments of a style you prefer at least occasionally. Coming online to lambast someone you've never met and probably never will meet over their prefered style of tournament is, frankly, pretty silly. Instead, spend your time with your local community to make sure that there are enough opportunities for everyone to enjoy the gaming experience they'd like to see at least occasionally.


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Jubear wrote:Is not the painting of your own army enough for you or do you need the validation of a score?

Is not the playing of the game enough for you or do you need the validation of a win?

Nope I wantz all da prizes and prestige.

Surely it depends on the nature of the tournament, is it a competition strictly based on who can win games, or is it a more rounded reflection of the hobby? Thus sportsmanship and the quality of your army should be taken into account.

Surely as long as the tournament rules are clear from the outset there isn't a problem. Just pick the tournaments that suit the sort of competition you want to enter.

In the two tournaments I've run, I've made painting a nice sidenote.

Victories should count for about 70% in my opinion.
Sportsmanship 10% [to stop people dumping you so that they can beat you.]
Painting 20%.

I like to encourage painting, but since most of the people I play with are only starting out, its hard to get fully painted armies, so we assess what's there rather than saying 'I see a sea of grey.'

I think painting scores should be a factor in tournaments. Your army should represent every aspect of the Hobby every time you participate in a tournament for the hobby; modeling, painting, and playing. A person who actually tries to model, paint, and play should have a better overall score than those who are only focused on one aspect simply because they are embracing the hobby as a whole and are showing it through their army.

It doesn't matter if you're a 'Eavy Metal level painter or not. As long as you try and paint all your models (and Bases!), your overall painting score would be around 70-80% depending on who judges it.

Nothing is more insulting then watching an entirely grey plastic/metal army get plopped down in front of me and the player expecting to GET a painting score, much less anything else. If you put effort into all aspects of the hobby and go into a tournament, your effort should be reflected overall, NOT because you win with your grey eye-sore.

Agree.

I find competitive gaming very fun and rewarding but it is only one aspect of the whole gaming experience for me. If I only wanted to whack out some grey plastic minis why should I even bother to buy them in the first place, all I need is a codex and rule book and a bunch of cardboard props proxying all the minis. Better stick to this or chess if balanced gaming and/or winning is all that matters.

The hobby of miniature wargaming is about nice looking minis, cool themes AND gaming where all the aspect are covered, for me the aesthetics that meet the eye, the background and the intellectual challenge of duking it out against my very evil (fluff wise) opponent while enjoying a brewski and a good conversation is amongst the most fun things I can do with my clothes on.

However facing some unpainted or grotesque looking "army" with half the minis proxied or an army that has been quick painted just to cover the grey plastic is insulting.
Here I am, spending at least 10+ hours on EVERY miniature in my whole army with themed bases and conversions aplenty and the whole picture is spoiled by 50 wholly black sprayed black templars or a GK army that someone sprayed in mithril silver and added some quick ugly pink details on with a plastic toy dinosaur as a HQ stand in prox.
I mean why do I even bother when I could have whipped out my bucket of naked bases and used those to proxy everything with.

Sometimes I feel like just gaming, trying out tactics and rules and dont mind but usually the gaming part is supposed to come with a nice terrain table and pretty to look at armies and I am not hung up on good painting skill or less painting skill, just as long as I see some effort has been put into the whole thing, that makes so much to highten the gaming experience.

DeffDred wrote:Friendly games are for the folk who don't want to paint. They are into the "game".

Tournaments are for the folk who paint, play, collect and disscuss. They are into the "hobby".

I think you've got it backwards. People that are into the hobby tend to play "friendlier" games.

As to the original question though - I like to think the painting scores should be inversely proportional to the wackiness of the missions. Sorry, but if there is a mission that gimps my army just because I have skimmers, then there better be more final weight put on my painting.

I ebayed my army.

Not for the paint, but for the price and pieces vs a starter set. And it helps me get closer to my theorycrafted list faster.

I plan on repainting everything a uniform color scheme to fit with my army, lore, etc, etc, and getting into conversions and modeling and whatnot, but really I'm more interested in the gaming aspect.

So should I strip everything first and play a grey army? Or is everyone an elitist and I should just be embarrassed and not bother showing up?

MartiniPunk wrote:So should I strip everything first and play a grey army? Or is everyone an elitist and I should just be embarrassed and not bother showing up?

Firstly I would advise reading what 'pro-painting' people are actually saying. Secondly, I would suggest stripping and painting a unit at a time. Just means that you don't get overwelmed with all that you have to paint

SilverMK2 wrote:

MartiniPunk wrote:So should I strip everything first and play a grey army? Or is everyone an elitist and I should just be embarrassed and not bother showing up?

Firstly I would advise reading what 'pro-painting' people are actually saying. Secondly, I would suggest stripping and painting a unit at a time. Just means that you don't get overwelmed with all that you have to paint

Excellent advice from Silver here^

Whether or not, and to what degree painting should impact the scores in a tourney, I leave up to the TOs. I just hope that they continue to offer a variety of tournament scoring types. This allows each of the players to choose which type of competition they wish to enter.

As a personal opinion, I really really dislike unpainted armies. It takes a great deal away from the game. I cannot even force myself to watch battle reports on youtube if the armies are not painted. I don't get militant about it though. I realize that others hold differing views.