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So little bit of discussion going down here in NZ, wanted dakka's view on things so here it goes.

There is becoming a discussion that tournaments are a whole "hobby" experience, not just about playing to win and kicking ass. Some suggestions are that it should be 50% game score and then 50% made up of sports and painting scores, to encourage the more painter minded hobbyist to participate in tournaments. There is also much discussion on how sports and painting are scored, how painting should be harder, to improve the stranderd of armies that we see, and sports should be changed so not everyone gets max score, otherwise its just pointless.

I will start off with my opinion. I go to a tournament because well, its a tournament, not a hobby expo, I go after months of preparation making my army and developing tactics, to play against the best lists and best players in the country. If you are not a competitive gamer, and care more about the painting, maybe this is not the place for you. I still believe in having a fun experience though, and hate waac gamers, but at a tournie, you really go there to do the best you can and to try and win, or is it becoming more than that?

So, whats dakkas views?

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you just trying to justify having an indifferently painted army, because you're a tournament player? In my opinion, if you're going to a tournament, you should be prepared to showcase your best painting efforts because there may be people at the venue who are interested in the game and they'd be unimpressed by a blob of unpainted or simply primered models. Wargaming offers the chance to play competitively and also put real effort into painting. I don't see why there shouldn't be room for both of these at a tournament.

I feel tourneys need to have a score for painting. Now it's generally a pretty soft score and easy to get near max points for from what I've seen.

Sportsmanship needs to be in there as well, just because there are and will always be rude pompous jerks.

Our shop has a bonus 10 pts for painting/sportsmanship.

Most people come away with 8-9 easily

I've won it before with a 1 >.<

They are important parts, but should be spearate from the overall scores. A buddy of mine got hosed at a tourney because "his vehicles, while well-painted, were not weathered." This is the same guy who walked into a tournament, misinformed as to the points level, 250 points under, tabled three opponents, and the guy who discovered his error busted him on sportsmanship. Both times, if it weren't for the subjective scores, would have won if not placed.

Look, it is a multi-faceted hobby, but when you are in a tournament, judge those characteristics on their own. It is far too easy to ding someone who just beat you or your buddy on aspects that had nothing to do with the gameplay.

Sorry I was probably unclear, I agree that painting is important and that you should put your best effort into painting, what i was meaning, is should overall score be 50% battlepoints 50% sports and painting points. Should painting play an even more important role is what I am trying to say.

The main reason I go is to play some really competitive games, I don't want to miss out placing well because although I win most of my games, someone does not like how my army is painted.

Most tournament are about 15-20% painting, 10% sports the rest battle are they not? I think it should stay this way.

Best general = raw game points, scores, win record.
Best appearance = best paint/conversion whatever.

Then make them separate but equal prizes.

Then best overall is 'best overall' of all the scores your particular event deems important. battle score, appearance, sports, comp, whatever.

Then everyone wins and best general can win a top prize for face smashing and people who want to hobby it up with theme lists that look good can also win a top prize.

Everyone wins.

(and in my observation, the person who wins best overall with paint scores included *USUALLY* was best general anyways and has the top record and best general seems to go to the second place person. I cannot remember an event where the top record for the day won best general but had such a terrible appearance score they didn't win best overall.)

jdjamesdean@mail.com wrote:
I feel tourneys need to have a score for painting. Now it's generally a pretty soft score and easy to get near max points for from what I've seen.

Sportsmanship needs to be in there as well, just because there are and will always be rude pompous jerks.

Our shop has a bonus 10 pts for painting/sportsmanship.

Most people come away with 8-9 easily

I've won it before with a 1 >.<

Thats were the debate is going here, that painting and sports is to easy to get good points in and should be harder to get (if its so easy why do we even have it approach)

In my mind everyone should have equal chance to get max sports score, I dont want to rank my opponenet 1-5 just becasue I have to, most of the time everyone is awesome.

I always thought that the main point of tournaments is to prove who is the best player. Maybe Im missing the point and it is becoming more of a hobby thing.

tuiman wrote:

I always thought that the main point of tournaments is to prove who is the best player. Maybe Im missing the point and it is becoming more of a hobby thing.

A good tourney is everything to everyone... not everyone expects the same thing from an event. You have to have an open mind and I think separate but equal prizes does an amazing job of catering to everyone without excluding anyone.

There should be 4 actual things one can win in a wargames tourney:
Best Painted
Best Sportsman
Best General
Best Overall(person with the highest average in all 3 others, perhaps with soft minimums on qualifying).

Personally at a tourney I could care less about winning. If I go, it's to have fun, meet people, and show off my painted stuff, in that order.

I think having a range of criteria keeps people honest. It's been my experience that people go to tournaments for a variety of reasons, and the glory of being the "best" is certainly one of them. I've never understood how some people can exploit 40k's poor balance and feel a real sense of pride and accomplishment thereafter.

I think the real winners are the people who put the greatest care into making the game a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I want a tough fight against a tough army that immerses me in the warhammer universe. I want the feeling of an effort being made by both parties to honour the spirit of the game.

In this sense, I don't see winning games as more important than painting and neither do I think winning games should account for more "points". Winning is not the real challenge, "forging the narrative" successfully is a greater test and a greater accomplishment.

My 2 cents.

Some nice points there Aes Sedai

Problem with most tournaments I've seen is that about 90% of the field ends up with full points for painting scores despite the obvious discrepancies in quality.

Sportmanship - there needs to be a lot of direction from the TO if you are to have a system that works, unless it's just there to distinguish the total tools from the rest of the field.

Both are important to the tournament overall, but inherently more difficult to judge than on the table results ...

The only sportsmanship scoring that actually works is pass/fail. And if someone is marked fail, it's up to the judge to figure out why and then remove the correct party (which could be either, neither, or both).

Painting will never work. It's always too subjective, and most people don't actually mean "painting" when they say it, but they won't admit that.

I think that score for painting and sportsmanship should exist at tournaments. They shouldn't necessarily constitute 50% of the points, but they should still be awarded.

Maybe I'm biased, because in PL points for painting are awarded using the blanket manner similar to what Darkness Eternal said above, and sportsmanship scores do not exist at all.

 AesSedai wrote:
I think having a range of criteria keeps people honest. It's been my experience that people go to tournaments for a variety of reasons, and the glory of being the "best" is certainly one of them. I've never understood how some people can exploit 40k's poor balance and feel a real sense of pride and accomplishment thereafter.

I think the real winners are the people who put the greatest care into making the game a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I want a tough fight against a tough army that immerses me in the warhammer universe. I want the feeling of an effort being made by both parties to honour the spirit of the game.

In this sense, I don't see winning games as more important than painting and neither do I think winning games should account for more "points". Winning is not the real challenge, "forging the narrative" successfully is a greater test and a greater accomplishment.

My 2 cents.

My main contention with this point is that this attitude is precisely what KEEPS 40k from being balanced. GW looks at the tournaments and how they continue to apply soft scores. They conclude that people like cinematic fluffy things and print rules to that effect. Look at actual competitive games. There's nary a hint of soft scores. It's straight up win/loss. But really, at this point, with a quarter century of inertia of the cinematic storytelling players, and the outright ostracization of competitively-minded players, I don't see 40k becoming a balanced game without a major shift in the community's overall attitude. A balanced game with a fair tournament system shouldn't have even a slight nod towards soft scores. The lack of balance persists because the soft scores persist and help fluffy armies in the hands of nice guys 'win' over intelligently constructed armies marshalled skillfully, creating an illusion of closer balance than is present.

I don't see winning games as more important than painting. However I don't think that both should ever be present in the same scoring system. Want to score aesthetics? Hold a painting competition. Want to score gameplay? That's what tournaments *should* be for. But in 40k, they're not, because too few people want it.

 DarknessEternal wrote:
The only sportsmanship scoring that actually works is pass/fail. And if someone is marked fail, it's up to the judge to figure out why and then remove the correct party (which could be either, neither, or both).

Painting will never work. It's always too subjective, and most people don't actually mean "painting" when they say it, but they won't admit that.

Painting competitions are insanely easy. Each player votes on which army is painted to the best effect. Or perhaps leave it to the judges to score it only. There isn't really a score system, other than a single vote per player, unless you have 3 judges who just decide a winner.

 Aerethan wrote:
Each player votes on which army is painted to the best effect. Or perhaps leave it to the judges to score it only.

People don't judge painting though. They judge how many rocks are on your bases, or how many non-standard parts you've used.

Appearance scores need to be in tournaments. Cool looking dudes are central to the game. If all you really want is hardcore face smashing competition there are far cheaper, better, and more balanced options than miniature wargaming. People choose mini's specifically because they love minis (or they like to feel smarter because they can't compete in the massive communities for truly "competition" oriented games, in which case I don't have anything to say to you).

And there is no reason not to include paint scores. As has been noted, there is an award for the face smashers (general), an award for the hobbyists (appearance), and an award for people who like to do both at a high level (overall). I don't see how anyone is left out in the set up.

I do wish paint scoring created a bigger spread than most systems currently do. The way many tournaments structure their paint scores it becomes just a tie breaker for battle points in the overall calculation. I think it would be better if the three awards rewarded three different types of player instead of basically two generalship awards and one hobbyist award.

It's a hobby as a whole; forgetting parts of the hobby doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

That said, it also doesn't seem to make sense not to reward superlatives within subsets of the hobby ... and there's no reason for a lack of coexistence. Give a 50/50 split Best Overall, give a 100% appearance-based Best Army, give a 100% competition-based Best General. If you want to do further subsets, such as 2nd and 3rd Best General, Best Single Mini and Single Conversion, 2nd and 3rd Best Overall, go for it ... sky's the limit..

Except, wait .... tournaments aren't an inherent part of the game as released by its designers. They're an enjoyable and enjoyment-oriented fabrication of each individual TO. As such, each tournament literally can and should be exactly what it wishes to be, in terms of what it focuses on and rewards. The above is simply what I do as a TO ... but no TO is wrong to do it as he or she sees particularly fit. Not everyone has to enjoy the hobby or its constituent parts the same way, after all.

 ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:
As has been noted, there is an award for the face smashers (general), an award for the hobbyists (appearance), and an award for people who like to do both at a high level (overall). I don't see how anyone is left out in the set up.

I do wish paint scoring created a bigger spread than most systems currently do. The way many tournaments structure their paint scores it becomes just a tie breaker for battle points in the overall calculation. I think it would be better if the three awards rewarded three different types of player instead of basically two generalship awards and one hobbyist award.

I agree.

IMO, the problem, like all of these discussions, is with the ridiculous idea of a OVERALL score in a tournament.

The Olympics are the biggest tournament in the world. They don't have an 'overall'. You can't win the Olympics - you can just win events. And many of these events are what we in the gaming world look down upon as 'soft' - scored by opinion. Nobody would refer to Gymnastics as a 'soft' sport compared to, say, Archery.

If we thought of gaming, painting, sportsmanship, comp, player choice, best army etc as separate events, with equal prizes for each, then these arguments wouldn't be needed.

------

@OP, the reason we include other things besides playing is because, for most players, tournaments are less opportunities to 'prove their skills' and more fun weekends away where you get to play on cool terrain with different armies and different people. The tournament scene reflects what they want. For me, I'm aware that I probably won't win the tournament, but I'm mostly there for a fun weekend away.

In terms of 'Importance', I consider things like sportsmanship more important and worthy of more prizes than Best General, because as a customer they affect my enjoyment of the weekend.

There is and should be room for both. Just about anyone can either come up with what someone will call a broken or ultracompetive list, go out buy the models and put them on the table. There are also those folks that can paint so well you'd swear their models blink when you look at them then you have someone with average painting abilities and like to build "fluffy" lists that encompass weaker units.

A tournament should include all aspects of the hobby. I run many of the RTTs in my area and do the following for soft scores.
Sportsmanship - straight up 1-5. I tell everyone that 3 should be the majority as a 1 means the worste game you've ever played and a 5 means you want to bear your opponents next child. If someone comes up outside the norm I have them explain why. If they can't justify the lousy game that score is discarded. We then have everyone rank their opponents in order.

Painting - again a standard is set and everyone knows it. While some may not think it fair a person with average painting skills can get the same score as a Golden Daemon quality painter as we look at it as "is this the best the player can do". Again the Golden Daemon quality painter will win the players choice of all the armies displayed.

I don't see the need to standardize tournaments and try to figure out what needs to be a part of all tournaments. Some tournaments can have soft scores play a large part in the scoring for tournament winner, some can choose not to, and some can find middle ground. It is obvious when reading through the varied opinions on this subject in the threads that pop up from time to time, that there are people who have many different expectations on what a tournament should be, and that there is room to have tournaments that cater to all of these expectations.

I think that ArbitorIan put it nicely when saying:

IMO, the problem, like all of these discussions, is with the ridiculous idea of a OVERALL score in a tournament.

The Olympics are the biggest tournament in the world. They don't have an 'overall'. You can't win the Olympics - you can just win events. And many of these events are what we in the gaming world look down upon as 'soft' - scored by opinion. Nobody would refer to Gymnastics as a 'soft' sport compared to, say, Archery.

If we thought of gaming, painting, sportsmanship, comp, player choice, best army etc as separate events, with equal prizes for each, then these arguments wouldn't be needed.

I disagree with this statement by Boss GreenNutz:

Just about anyone can either come up with what someone will call a broken or ultracompetive list, go out buy the models and put them on the table.

Too many people think that winning a game comes down to the contents of one's list. Having a strong list is important. But a player with mediocre skill level and a hard net-list will likely get tabled by a player with a ton of skill and a less competitive list. I think player skill plays a much higher roll in one's ability to win than simply having a strong list. This is evident by seeing the same players winning tournaments year after year.

What part of that isn't true? I didn't say anythng about winning with it but a hard list makes it easier if abilities are even and dice aren't fickle.

After the first "Leafblower" list won a tourney do you think the sale of Chimeras and HWTS went up or down? How many TWC models were sold/converted when the SW DEX was released?

I will stand by my assertation that if a certain list wins a big event that list will get copied. Coming up with one doesn't necessarily mean developing it yourself.

While a good player can win with a mediocre list a really good player with a broken or hard list can not only win with it, he can make you hand over your lunch money and get a date with your mom while doing it.

 ArbitorIan wrote:

The Olympics are the biggest tournament in the world. They don't have an 'overall'. You can't win the Olympics - you can just win events. And many of these events are what we in the gaming world look down upon as 'soft' - scored by opinion. Nobody would refer to Gymnastics as a 'soft' sport compared to, say, Archery.

If we thought of gaming, painting, sportsmanship, comp, player choice, best army etc as separate events, with equal prizes for each, then these arguments wouldn't be needed.

But they do have overall competitions within sports. There is an overall gymnastics category, the decathlon is the overall of the track & field events. Even the Olympics recognizes that someone who is above average in many disciplines should be rewarded. The decathlon winner would have no chance in a 100m against Usain Bolt. But they are above average in the 100m, and everything else and so there is a way for them to compete at the highest levels too.

Without overall awards we would have nothing but specialists at a tournament, which limits and marginalizes other ways people can compete. And with appearance scoring systems that don't differentiate properly and more or less give the some scores to everyone the "decathlon" winner is really determined by who is the fastest sprinter.

I've changed my opinion on painting scores, recently, and I no longer think they should be included in the final player score. Rather, just require painted armies at the tournament and have a separate Best Painted category. That would cater to both sides, hardcore players can easily do the 3 color minimum and then not have to worry about any negative scores, and hobbyists like myself have a shot at a prize and can also take pictures of our games for battle reports with painted models on the table.

 Oaka wrote:
I've changed my opinion on painting scores, recently, and I no longer think they should be included in the final player score. Rather, just require painted armies at the tournament and have a separate Best Painted category. That would cater to both sides, hardcore players can easily do the 3 color minimum and then not have to worry about any negative scores, and hobbyists like myself have a shot at a prize and can also take pictures of our games for battle reports with painted models on the table.

A couple people have said the same thing, but what good does this do? These awards and these rankings already exist. What harm does it do to have a category that trys to combine them? If the battle results are all that you care about, you can still do the 3 color min and go for nothing but battle.

 ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:


A couple people have said the same thing, but what good does this do? These awards and these rankings already exist. What harm does it do to have a category that trys to combine them? If the battle results are all that you care about, you can still do the 3 color min and go for nothing but battle.

True, if there were an 'Overall Hobbyist' award then I agree they should be combined. But for the past two years, every tournament I have gone to has done away with the 'Overall' award and now it's just 'Best General' for the person who likes to win, and 'Best Painted' or 'Best Army' for the person who likes to hobby. It seems like the best way to do things, honestly. I think an 'Overall Champion' prize to someone who does well in both categories was a failed endeavor, good players can always pay to have their armies painted.

Tournament - : a series of games or contests that make up a single unit of competition (as on a professional golf tour), the championship play-offs of a league or conference, or an invitational event

If you you want these things to be less about winning the games and more about how many rocks you've glued to a base, perhaps you should start calling them "exhibitions".

 Oaka wrote:


But for the past two years, every tournament I have gone to has done away with the 'Overall' award and now it's just 'Best General' for the person who likes to win, and 'Best Painted' or 'Best Army' for the person who likes to hobby. It seems like the best way to do things, honestly. I think an 'Overall Champion' prize to someone who does well in both categories was a failed endeavor, good players can always pay to have their armies painted.

I disagree on virtually everything. Maybe around you overall isn't used anymore, but every tournament I have ever been to, and all of the major national level tournaments have some sort of combined/overall category.

And getting rid of the overall/combined (whatever it's called) has multiple negatives with virtually no positive. More prizes makes tournament goers happy. More ways to compete and potentially win makes tournament goers happy. And only having generalship and appearance awards pushes people to extremes and rewards only those people on the extremes. Most tournament goes are never going to get the highest battle points in any event. Most tournament goers are never going to have the highest appearance score in any event. Having a category that properly combines the two encourages all of those tournament patrons to get better even if they will never be the best in either. They can still compete, they can still win something meaningful, they can be more than stepping stones to the battle point winners.

I think the real issue is people who want to focus on nothing but battle get their feathers ruffled because usually the prestige (and often the better prize support) goes to the overall winner. They want to win with generalship but then they want all the adulation and prize support that goes with being the tournament winner. Having someone else lay claim to prize support or prestige is offensive to their idea of what a tourament should be. Because after all they "won" the tournament the legitimate way. I find that attitude very off putting, bad for the tournament scene, and bad for the community.

Boss GreenNutz wrote:
What part of that isn't true? I didn't say anythng about winning with it but a hard list makes it easier if abilities are even and dice aren't fickle.

After the first "Leafblower" list won a tourney do you think the sale of Chimeras and HWTS went up or down? How many TWC models were sold/converted when the SW DEX was released?

I will stand by my assertation that if a certain list wins a big event that list will get copied. Coming up with one doesn't necessarily mean developing it yourself.

While a good player can win with a mediocre list a really good player with a broken or hard list can not only win with it, he can make you hand over your lunch money and get a date with your mom while doing it.

Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying. If so, I apologize. It just seemed to me that you were implying that anyone could show up with a netlist and be competitive at a tournament, and I feel that just isn't true. I feel that player skill plays a much larger roll than list composition in determining a tournament winner.