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DevianID wrote:
Breng, if a mission is solely won on a single primary mission, and you lose that mission because of an odd match and your opponent going second despite your best effort to try to tie it, that mission is not balanced for win loss tournament play. A mission where all secondary win conditions are rendered pointless if you meet one primary condition simply punishes some armies and rewards others. In a win loss format each match needs to be fair for players. It's like a football playoff game granting 8 points for field goals for 'variety.'

It's nothing like changing field goals, that's a really poor analogy.

Perhaps the real point here is that win/loss isn't the only way to play. That combining book missions isn't actually playing 6th ed, and likewise rewards some armies and penalizes others.

I remember in 5th, all the people playing the parking-lot armies complaining about the kill point missions because they'd lose those ones. They argued that kill point missions were inherently unbalanced, tried to add caps, tried all sorts of things. When the real problem was their perception of how the game should work. They'd convinced themselves that MSU shooty was the best army, so they then argued to remove the mission that hurt MSU-shooty.

Whatever. If your army can't handle "the relic", it's not a good 6th ed army. All combining missions does is provide alternate ways for the same army to win each match, without having to alter itself to handle the outlier missions. Is it any wonder that we see the same lists at the top of tournaments that run this way? "I didn't bother to plan for how I'd win "the relic", because I knew I could ignore it and win on secondaries."

 Redbeard wrote:

DevianID wrote:
Breng, if a mission is solely won on a single primary mission, and you lose that mission because of an odd match and your opponent going second despite your best effort to try to tie it, that mission is not balanced for win loss tournament play. A mission where all secondary win conditions are rendered pointless if you meet one primary condition simply punishes some armies and rewards others. In a win loss format each match needs to be fair for players. It's like a football playoff game granting 8 points for field goals for 'variety.'

It's nothing like changing field goals, that's a really poor analogy.

Perhaps the real point here is that win/loss isn't the only way to play. That combining book missions isn't actually playing 6th ed, and likewise rewards some armies and penalizes others.

I remember in 5th, all the people playing the parking-lot armies complaining about the kill point missions because they'd lose those ones. They argued that kill point missions were inherently unbalanced, tried to add caps, tried all sorts of things. When the real problem was their perception of how the game should work. They'd convinced themselves that MSU shooty was the best army, so they then argued to remove the mission that hurt MSU-shooty.

Whatever. If your army can't handle "the relic", it's not a good 6th ed army. All combining missions does is provide alternate ways for the same army to win each match, without having to alter itself to handle the outlier missions. Is it any wonder that we see the same lists at the top of tournaments that run this way? "I didn't bother to plan for how I'd win "the relic", because I knew I could ignore it and win on secondaries."

A huge +1 to this.

My point about changing field goal points still stands. If in the playoffs 1 playoff match has substantially different rules, whether in the NFL with 8 point field goals or in 40k with the 'relic' as the only win condition that mattered, and your playoff match consists of only a single game before never be used again in the rest of the playoffs, its a terrible addition.

Your point about an army not being able to handle the relic being a bad 6th ed army is not true. If you built a list by sacrificing a lot so you can do well in 5 out of 6 mission types you have a good army. Someone who is amazing in 1 out of 6 mission types and terrible at all the others has a bad army. Do you honestly believe the 1 in 6 person who won the relic was the better player? If the point of a particular tournament is to find the best player, and your missions dont allow that, then you have bad missions.

In battle point missions, relic (or 5th ed kill points as the only win condition) is fine, as over the course of the event the better balanced army will win despite losing bad matchups by keeping their losses to a minimum. In win loss events, the only round that matters is the one you are currently playing. Effectively win loss is many 1 game tournaments, thus each game needs to be balanced.

A good pass/fail test for a win loss format is that if a particular mission was duplicated for all the games, would the winner be determined fairly or would the winner have had an unfair advantage.

In 5th I really liked using all 3 missions at once. Kill points hurt MSU parking lots, Emp Will was considered a drawfest, and objectives favored the MSU. With all 3 equally in play at once, you had an advantage, a neutral, and a disadvantage mission condition at the same time. Thus MSU or Deathstar or whatever, the mission would balance out overall allowing playskill and luck to determine the outcome.

Now note that only a select few Nova style missions were formatted in such a way that the winner of a single primary invalidated the rest of the objectives on the mission sheet. Those are the missions that I dislike. If you have relic, objectives and quarters, but really just winning the relic is enough to win the entire game despite anything else the opponent does, then certain armies will have an overwhelming advantage in that mission. With a win loss format that bad match will knock out better balanced armies, and those armies can effectively just stop playing the rest of the many game event. That is simply not acceptable if you want a fair event.

I disagree. 5/6 missions are not non-relic. There are only 3 mission types. Objectives, kill points and the relic. All others are variations of that. An army that can not do well with the relic is not deficient at 1/6 missions, they are deficient at 1/3rd of the missions and yes they are then a bad tourney army.

Redbeard is dead on when he says tourney organizers have been pressured to eliminate, or at least minimize, non objective based primary missions and it is having an amazing affect on the meta.

 Redbeard wrote:

DevianID wrote:
Breng, if a mission is solely won on a single primary mission, and you lose that mission because of an odd match and your opponent going second despite your best effort to try to tie it, that mission is not balanced for win loss tournament play. A mission where all secondary win conditions are rendered pointless if you meet one primary condition simply punishes some armies and rewards others. In a win loss format each match needs to be fair for players. It's like a football playoff game granting 8 points for field goals for 'variety.'

It's nothing like changing field goals, that's a really poor analogy.

Perhaps the real point here is that win/loss isn't the only way to play. That combining book missions isn't actually playing 6th ed, and likewise rewards some armies and penalizes others.

I remember in 5th, all the people playing the parking-lot armies complaining about the kill point missions because they'd lose those ones. They argued that kill point missions were inherently unbalanced, tried to add caps, tried all sorts of things. When the real problem was their perception of how the game should work. They'd convinced themselves that MSU shooty was the best army, so they then argued to remove the mission that hurt MSU-shooty.

Whatever. If your army can't handle "the relic", it's not a good 6th ed army. All combining missions does is provide alternate ways for the same army to win each match, without having to alter itself to handle the outlier missions. Is it any wonder that we see the same lists at the top of tournaments that run this way? "I didn't bother to plan for how I'd win "the relic", because I knew I could ignore it and win on secondaries."

Pretty much agree with Redbeard here, but this is tangential to actually finishing games. Altered missions are a form of comp as they alter which lists are successful in a similar fashion as hard comp restrictions or soft scores alter a meta.

I play tyranids, gk, eldar, dark eldar, and csm in roughly ten 3 round RTT's a year and one GT. Since 6th came out, I've finished approximately 25% of my 1850pt games due to random game length in a timed setting (2.5hrs). About 75% of my 1500pt games finished naturally (2hrs), and 100% of my 1000pt games finished naturally. I read dozens of competitive 40k blogs and have watched all the live streams from adepticon and NOVA. I can honestly say the guys who claim "I always finish my games naturally in a timed tournament" are the minority.

Games may have been decisive by the end of turn 4, with one player seriously crippled, but that is not the same thing. I would gladly play every game at 1500pts if that meant more natural finishes. With point costs decreasing, new codexes can fit nearly as much in 1500 as 4th/5th ed at 1850. Like others have also said, knowing turn 5 is the last due to time is a massive benefit over the possibility of playing 5-7 turns randomly.

 Redbeard wrote:

DevianID wrote:
Breng, if a mission is solely won on a single primary mission, and you lose that mission because of an odd match and your opponent going second despite your best effort to try to tie it, that mission is not balanced for win loss tournament play. A mission where all secondary win conditions are rendered pointless if you meet one primary condition simply punishes some armies and rewards others. In a win loss format each match needs to be fair for players. It's like a football playoff game granting 8 points for field goals for 'variety.'

It's nothing like changing field goals, that's a really poor analogy.

Perhaps the real point here is that win/loss isn't the only way to play. That combining book missions isn't actually playing 6th ed, and likewise rewards some armies and penalizes others.

I remember in 5th, all the people playing the parking-lot armies complaining about the kill point missions because they'd lose those ones. They argued that kill point missions were inherently unbalanced, tried to add caps, tried all sorts of things. When the real problem was their perception of how the game should work. They'd convinced themselves that MSU shooty was the best army, so they then argued to remove the mission that hurt MSU-shooty.

Whatever. If your army can't handle "the relic", it's not a good 6th ed army. All combining missions does is provide alternate ways for the same army to win each match, without having to alter itself to handle the outlier missions. Is it any wonder that we see the same lists at the top of tournaments that run this way? "I didn't bother to plan for how I'd win "the relic", because I knew I could ignore it and win on secondaries."

To be fair I rarely agree with Redbeard, nothing personal we just end up on the opposite side of things a lot, but in this I agree 100%. One of the reasons the local Meta in our area is healthy and armies that are considered "dead" like DE can compete is we don't shy away from playing the missions in the book. Including the Relic.

Relic is a crap mission, plain and simple. You might as well call it "first blood wins" when the players are of equal ability, because that's what happens almost all the time if you play it by the book. The previous version of it (take and hold) was a much better mission and when they test ballooned early versions of this turkey at Hard Boys a couple of times, people hated it. You can get the same blood bath in the middle of the board just by counting all scoring units within 6inches to determine victory. Hell, add elites into the scoring bracket for this one since they are the only slot to get no love elsewhere.

Scouring is not a bad mission, per se, but the set up for it is very lengthy and the random objective thing is just plain stupid if one guy ends up with all the good objectives on his side of the board. There were a lot of faster and more intelligent ways to do this type of mission, mostly by giving each player a 3/2/1 objective and having alternating placements requiring at least one each in no mans land. That was me after a post work cocktail and it took me all of 20 seconds to come up with a better version of that one.

The rest of the missions are solid as written, though.

None of these have anything to do with this discussion, however.

Started a new topic for mission discussion: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/553151.page#6064318

People here are pointing to things they feel slow down the game now. On the flip side pre measuring and shooting over melee should help speed up the game. There is no way an FMC heavy list should slow down the game. Think about it.

There's a lot of assertion that is blatantly false. For instance, claiming the Relic is 1/3 of Missions b/c there are "lots of Objective missions which are all the same" is ... bizarre as an arguing tactic. Relic occurs 1/6th the games played, so it stands to reason it should be primarily important 1/6th the time in a tournament situation. The same is true of KP. And NO, Big Guns / Scouring are not even remotely Kill Point missions, for reasons that are too OT to enumerate here.

Tiered and Cumulative Missions designed correctly reflect the import and play style of things like stock standard Relic if designed well enough, which they are in the case of more than one tourney environment. They are NOT, however, exact replicas of the missions in the book. Nor should they be required to be ... even scoring and formatting at ALL in 40k is not "standard" 40k. It's tournament 40k, which these days is more or less entirely player invented.

Surprisingly, wild assertions that TO's are "pressured" to use Objective heavy situations, instead of the reality that we playtest thousands of games across a global contingent of gamers stress-testing the effectiveness of common armies in the "stock" book missions alongside their tournament counterparts to ensure similar performance ... just seems like strawman argument.

More "complex" seeming missions may slow the game down; that's totally legit. Guessing badly at the motivations behind mission design = not legit. It's strawmanning. I don't see someone going "Hey, TO, why did you design your missions?" Instead, I see "THEY JUST DESIGNED THEM FOR THIS MADE-UP REASON THAT SOUNDS BAD."

It's TOTALLY not about satisfying some competitive win/loss obsessed group that has a different viewpoint than you. Which is why it doesn't make that subset entirely happy.

PS - I totally feel on a personal level that Relic is a terrible mission, poorly designed, and I think that's a quite broadly held view. The majority isn't always right, but it's right fairly often. That said, the game of 40k uses the Relic, and often in a pretty "win or lose" kind of way. Completely eliminating the value of Relic, therefore, is as NOT 40k as making it more common than 1/6th the time. The same can be said of KP for those who don't like KP. The same can also be said of Objectives (Which, whether you like it or not, are the 67% majority of 6th Edition Missions). If you have 2 KP missions, 2 Relic missions, and 2 Objective missions in a 6 round tournament, you aren't playing 6th Edition 40k. The same is true if Relic and KP are primary or parallel major win conditions in every round. Also not 6th Edition 40k. But tournaments in general aren't 40k. What they are ... is a ton of fun, where the vast majority of attendees have a blast getting in games of 40k with people from all over (in some cases) the world.

Edited 11:05-ish for overly reactive initial language.

Pre-measuring actually slows down the game, if used to its full advantage. Whereas before, I might guesstimate some things and then move my guys, now I'm free to measure each potential move before deciding on my course of action. It takes more time to do all these measurements, and with more information, I can take longer to make the decisions.

Also, while some FMC lists play quickly, they can also take a lot longer to set up. Daemons, especially, can take ten to fifteen minutes to make all your gift and power rolls, if you are playing an opponent who is not overly familiar with that codex, or what all those things do. Against an opponent familiar with daemons, it might only take a minute per FMC to roll and record what they have, but not everyone knows that codex well.

 Redbeard wrote:
Pre-measuring actually slows down the game, if used to its full advantage. Whereas before, I might guesstimate some things and then move my guys, now I'm free to measure each potential move before deciding on my course of action. It takes more time to do all these measurements, and with more information, I can take longer to make the decisions.

Also, while some FMC lists play quickly, they can also take a lot longer to set up. Daemons, especially, can take ten to fifteen minutes to make all your gift and power rolls, if you are playing an opponent who is not overly familiar with that codex, or what all those things do. Against an opponent familiar with daemons, it might only take a minute per FMC to roll and record what they have, but not everyone knows that codex well.

Again I agree 100%. I play FMC Daemons and while in game it can go quickly the pre game is slow. The other thing is with pre measuring I find myself in clutch positions taking quite a while to decide just how to move those 3-4 FMC. With low model count armies every move is that much more important, you can't afford to be sloppy so while it may only be 4 models carefully measuring it all out takes a long time in certain situations.

MVBrandt wrote:
There's a lot of assertion that is blatantly false. For instance, claiming the Relic is 1/3 of Missions b/c there are "lots of Objective missions which are all the same" is ... bizarre as an arguing tactic. (

Edited 11:05-ish for overly reactive initial language.

Thanks for the strawman attack. Your ears must have been on steroids yesterday because I didn't even type the words NOVA. Maybe you didn't read what I wrote. I said the relic is 1/3rd the mission type. Objectives, kill points and the relic. All book missions are variances of those three.
.

i don't see how people have issues. alot of the time i either table or get tabled (Damn you dark eldar). Its about knowing the rule and not having to refer back to your rule book.

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

 Redbeard wrote:

DevianID wrote:
Breng, if a mission is solely won on a single primary mission, and you lose that mission because of an odd match and your opponent going second despite your best effort to try to tie it, that mission is not balanced for win loss tournament play. A mission where all secondary win conditions are rendered pointless if you meet one primary condition simply punishes some armies and rewards others. In a win loss format each match needs to be fair for players. It's like a football playoff game granting 8 points for field goals for 'variety.'

It's nothing like changing field goals, that's a really poor analogy.

Perhaps the real point here is that win/loss isn't the only way to play. That combining book missions isn't actually playing 6th ed, and likewise rewards some armies and penalizes others.

I remember in 5th, all the people playing the parking-lot armies complaining about the kill point missions because they'd lose those ones. They argued that kill point missions were inherently unbalanced, tried to add caps, tried all sorts of things. When the real problem was their perception of how the game should work. They'd convinced themselves that MSU shooty was the best army, so they then argued to remove the mission that hurt MSU-shooty.

Whatever. If your army can't handle "the relic", it's not a good 6th ed army. All combining missions does is provide alternate ways for the same army to win each match, without having to alter itself to handle the outlier missions. Is it any wonder that we see the same lists at the top of tournaments that run this way? "I didn't bother to plan for how I'd win "the relic", because I knew I could ignore it and win on secondaries."

To be fair I rarely agree with Redbeard, nothing personal we just end up on the opposite side of things a lot, but in this I agree 100%. One of the reasons the local Meta in our area is healthy and armies that are considered "dead" like DE can compete is we don't shy away from playing the missions in the book. Including the Relic.

Holy crap, I'm in agreement with Redbeard! Sorry, doesn't happen often as we tend to have differing views but since I know he's a swell guy I accept his often wrong viewpoints This however isn't one of them......I'm gonna go check my temperature and make sure I'm not sick

I am not sure how the argument can be made that pre measuring slows the game down. First, it cuts out a billion arguments, because you know what you need to roll to hit the charge. Second, it eliminates that long pause while a player was trying to guestimate if he was 23 1/2" away or 24 1/2" away from his shooting target. The release of 6th edition has done a lot of things that slow down the game, but pre measuring is actually the one thing they did that sped it up.

DarthDiggler wrote:

 Redbeard wrote:

DevianID wrote:
Breng, if a mission is solely won on a single primary mission, and you lose that mission because of an odd match and your opponent going second despite your best effort to try to tie it, that mission is not balanced for win loss tournament play. A mission where all secondary win conditions are rendered pointless if you meet one primary condition simply punishes some armies and rewards others. In a win loss format each match needs to be fair for players. It's like a football playoff game granting 8 points for field goals for 'variety.'

It's nothing like changing field goals, that's a really poor analogy.

Perhaps the real point here is that win/loss isn't the only way to play. That combining book missions isn't actually playing 6th ed, and likewise rewards some armies and penalizes others.

I remember in 5th, all the people playing the parking-lot armies complaining about the kill point missions because they'd lose those ones. They argued that kill point missions were inherently unbalanced, tried to add caps, tried all sorts of things. When the real problem was their perception of how the game should work. They'd convinced themselves that MSU shooty was the best army, so they then argued to remove the mission that hurt MSU-shooty.

Whatever. If your army can't handle "the relic", it's not a good 6th ed army. All combining missions does is provide alternate ways for the same army to win each match, without having to alter itself to handle the outlier missions. Is it any wonder that we see the same lists at the top of tournaments that run this way? "I didn't bother to plan for how I'd win "the relic", because I knew I could ignore it and win on secondaries."

A huge +1 to this.

A huge +1 for both of these...so...+2? LOL.

Pre-measuring can slow things down for people who can think 1-2 turns ahead and weigh all options like a chess match.

Watch the ustream video from NOVA where Ben plays Nick (necrons + orks vs daemons + csm). Even though Nick only has FMC's, heldrake, and a couple minimum scoring units on the table, there's a couple points where he takes 5-10 minutes just thinking and pre-measuring all his options.

This is a "pro-gamer" who plays half a dozen GT's a year and has been to europe with our ETC team. Sometimes two pros on a top table can actually play slower because they're that much more cautious to not make errors. I could be wrong but their game may have ended on turn 5 or 6 due to time without rolling for another turn.

I think that getting rounds done in a timely manner needs a three point approach to solving the issue:

1) Player Practice/Preparation-
More players need to do practice games with their army to get a higher level of familiarity with them, especially anyone playing a horded out army. People have gotten lazy, mostly because in 5th, aka Mech is King, edition most of the models sat on your tray representing the contents of your transports. The amount of models that actually moved around on the table, even in large guard armies, was fairly small. The new shooting allocation rules have aggravated the situation, by making the placement of individual models incredibly important. These things speed up with practice.

Also, having pre sorted color blocks of dice in the right quantities, markers for wounds/hull points, psychic power cards, and your own objective markers cuts down on a lot of time consumption and confusion. I would also add that 6" tactical ruler that GF9 puts out, because using that thing instead of a tape measure all the time saves tons of time as well. These sorts of small preparation speed up the game a ton.

2) TO Pro active Enforcement-
If you are the TO, you need to roam the hall and be watching like a hawk. If you see IG Gunline guy pulling his models out of the bag before every game and putting them back, then you know this jackwagon is eating 30 minutes of every game doing this and there is a good chance he is doing other things to slow games down to three turns. Tell this guy that he needs to go steal a tray from McDonalds or something, because he is being disrespectful to other players.

If you see Nid guy slowly moving individual gants around and his opponent looks like he wants to commit seppuku out of shear boredom, then maybe you need to go have a chat with that table. If Tau guy is taking longer in his own movement phase to move two riptides than the assault army that is bum rushing him, then you should probably come talk to that table, as well. It is actually really easy to see where the problems lie in a room, assuming you have not overloaded yourself and have other people handling scoring and so on. People's body language can tell you a lot and alert you to potential drama before it happens. Certainly by the third round you should have an idea of who the potential problem people are and be encouraging them to play more briskly. In fact, lots of potential issues can be headed off simply by a TO actively letting players know he is eyeballing certain things, because people doing it intentionally do not want to get caught and the unintentionally slow players do not want to be labeled as such.

3) Tournament Design-
If you are going to have a billion rounds and complex multi tiered missions, then you need to cut corners elsewhere, like preset terrain, disregarding mysterious objectives, or extending time limits. The simpler (and closer to the book) the missions are, the less time consuming games are. If, as a TO, you want to reinvent the wheel, you need to trim in other areas to keep people on pace and (ideally) make your players aware of those changes as far in advance of the event as you can, so they can be prepared for the additional in game decisions they will have to make (see step 1). Basically, you cannot realistically have complex missions and every single bell and whistle and expect even modest sized games to end on time consistently, so pare it down to what is most important to you as a TO.

 Phazael wrote:
I am not sure how the argument can be made that pre measuring slows the game down. First, it cuts out a billion arguments, because you know what you need to roll to hit the charge. Second, it eliminates that long pause while a player was trying to guestimate if he was 23 1/2" away or 24 1/2" away from his shooting target. The release of 6th edition has done a lot of things that slow down the game, but pre measuring is actually the one thing they did that sped it up.

I'm guessing you have not watched very many top players use pre-measuring then. All the time during movement I see guys measure distance, check LOS, re-measure slightly differently, re-check. Measure Distance between various units, measure full move + charge, measure distances to various objectives.....

What pre-measuring has done is that it allows players to check themselves more often rather than estimating and moving.

Interesting discussion.

Book missions are varied to encourage well rounded lists, I agree. When taken in that limited context, it sounds like a 100% positive.

However, in the context of 2 players playing a game with specific lists with specific terrain, missions like the Relic and Kill Points, can be an almost auto-loss scenarios. And while yes, book missions when taken as a whole may have an over-arching balancing effect from a 30,000 feet above perspective, on the level of actually paling them they can be horribly unbalanced.

For example, when you draw Tyranids in the Relic, or Bikers, etc., and they go first, your odds of winning are reduced down to damn near zero for the majority of armies in the game. I have never, ever lost the Relic with my nids, not even remotely close, against any other army. I actually feel bad for person across from me as I know based simply on my army's characteristics, I have almost no chance of losing. That isn't a real competition in my mind, and not fun.

That's not to say Nids (or any army) can't be beaten in that scenario, just that it is improbable. An army has such a big advantage due to starting conditions neither player had control over serves only to make the mission both unfair and--more importantly--unfun. A tournament is supposed to be fair and fun competition, that should be the overriding principle when making any tournament structure decisions, IMO.

Therefore, the argument that using book missions encourages players to build "better" lists or more balanced lists or what have you, is flawed. All is does is alter what is optimal, just like comp.

Furthermore, book missions are so wildly varied that if your list is weak in any one of the 6, you really reduce your odds of being able to win a tournament and you will subsequently see certain armies that are better equipped to do all 6 rise to the top. The meta simply shifts as it always does whenever a change is introduced into the system.

That is just one example and I am sure you can make arguments both for and against this with examples to back it up. In the end, we have found that layering missions, using the book missions as a base, creates more complex, and balanced missions that tend to level the playing field for the widest variety of armies and lists. It allows, in general terms, the better player to win by playing to objectives, while still playing the list they want to play.

Is it perfect? No. Does it allow players to game the system? Yes. However, we as gamers will ALWAYS game the system and when you have a game where each faction is intentionally different, there will always be those with an advantage--or perceived advantage--within a given system. It is unavoidable and honestly, who'd want to change it? If you want total equality, play chess. We will never have it in 40K.

Therefore, we do the best we can to create missions and time limits and systems that create as much fairness as possible, accepting that while we will always strive for that goal, we will never achieve it.

I agree with everything except the kill points statement. As an MSU player, KP are there specifically to limit the more abusive MSU builds that exist (Tervispam, Parking Lot Guard, certain DoC builds) and this is a good thing in the same way that the bulk of the other missions emphasize core troops.

I also think tiered missions tend to facilitate weird builds that only work in that format, but that's not necessarily bad as long as its fostering diversity. If your top 10% lists all look the same, then your tiered system likely needs some tweaking to bring it in line, as what I felt happened at Nova this year. BAO last year had some diversity issues, but that I feel mostly had to do with the choice to include forgeworld without any comp to counterbalance it and not the mission structure, which is a completely separate argument.

As someone who loves tossing odd missions out there for play, I am not going to argue against tiered missions. I do think that when you do this that there needs to be relative representation of the base mission types, at least on some level. So, in a six game format, KP should be emphasized once, table center once, and standard objectives the other four games.

And again, this has zero to do with time consumption. The BAO did have measures to shorten things up, but I think if you are doing a 7 round in two day event, it needs to have certain shortcuts like static terrain placement, no mystery objectives, and perhaps bonus battle points for reaching a natural game conclusion.

We had the most diverse top 10% of any major GT this year by a very large margin, actually on the 40K side of things.

Here's our data accounting for allies as a half army:



Compare that to some of the more recent results such as NOVA where 7 of the top 10 were Tau.

Now, the meta then and now are different and we had different structures so it is apples and oranges, but all of our events this edition have been similar.

And hell, while I'm at it, here's some more data from the BAO pertinent to this conversation. Bare in mind we ran 1750pts with 2 hour 15 minute rounds.



And when asked about points values that players wanted:

 Reecius wrote:
We had the most diverse top 10% of any major GT this year by a very large margin, actually on the 40K side of things.

]Compare that to some of the more recent results such as NOVA where 7 of the top 10 were Tau.

Now, the meta then and now are different and we had different structures so it is apples and oranges, but all of our events this edition have been similar.

All of your events were pre-Eldar/Tau. What armies are played are based on what codexs are released prior since those are often the new hottness. I think the BAO was after the CSM codex so you had a lot of different armies since allies leveled the playing field. I would like to point out that 4 out of the 6 top armies had IG because of the inclusion of Forge World.

And hell, while I'm at it, here's some more data from the BAO pertinent to this conversation. Bare in mind we ran 1750pts with 2 hour 15 minute rounds.

Pre-6th edition codexes, and even then 40% of the games are not finishing.

Forge world also rendered any flyers a huge liability and note that if you lumped all MEQs together, they only barely outnumbered IG. So, looking at the actual breakdown of numbers in the pie chart you provided, it certainly appears that 3/4 of the top ended up being some form of MEQ with Hyperions, IG with Sabers/ect, or Helldrake Spam with a side of Flamer Spam. This does not seem to differ from what I saw when walking around that weekend, as the IG/SW Kopach copy cats were out in force and you could barely walk two feet without tripping over helldrakes or air defense forgeworld pieces.

But yes, your top end was certainly much more diverse than what Adepticon or Nova ended up being this year, aside from the IG spammage (Tau and Necrons have more or less taken over that role).

The troubling thing to me is that 40% of your games did not finish, which is startling even if you assume most people were being completely honest. If you take concessions and low model count shooting fests that were happening (as they always do), that number is fairly staggering. I have heard that Nova was even worse in that regard, but they do not have the exact numbers you do, so that could be purely anecdotal.

I guess the question is, are you guys really ok with nearly half of the games not getting finished? I mean, if I was Alan and running Draigowing all weekend and not getting past turn three, I would be fairly irritated at my opponents and probably displaying that irritation a little more visibly. I know its not Alan's fault, because I have in the past played him with my 180 foot guard army and we were done first in the room, playing six full turns. And his army NEEDS six turns to win most book scenarios and even more so on the tiered ones. Right now the system you guys have in place is incentivizing win in three turns gunlines, which is probably why IG were all over the place at BAO and Taudarcrons were all over the place in the Adepticon and Nova top brackets.

Again, not trying to be disrespectful (Frontline has done a lot for the 40k scene on the west coast), just a serious question about the direction the competitive end of the game is heading.

 Blackmoor wrote:

 Reecius wrote:
And hell, while I'm at it, here's some more data from the BAO pertinent to this conversation. Bare in mind we ran 1750pts with 2 hour 15 minute rounds.

Pre-6th edition codexes, and even then 40% of the games are not finishing.

 Phazael wrote:
The troubling thing to me is that 40% of your games did not finish, which is startling even if you assume most people were being completely honest. If you take concessions and low model count shooting fests that were happening (as they always do), that number is fairly staggering. I have heard that Nova was even worse in that regard, but they do not have the exact numbers you do, so that could be purely anecdotal.

I guess the question is, are you guys really ok with nearly half of the games not getting finished?

...

Right now the system you guys have in place is incentivizing win in three turns gunlines, which is probably why IG were all over the place at BAO and Taudarcrons were all over the place in the Adepticon and Nova top brackets.

Again, not trying to be disrespectful (Frontline has done a lot for the 40k scene on the west coast), just a serious question about the direction the competitive end of the game is heading.

I'm also curious about TO thoughts on this... the graph that Reecius showed looks, to me, to be way too many games not finishing, and that was even before the more recent codexes that seem to be time-consuming to play. Seems like it's at least worth considering 1500, since the poll also showed support for that point level, or longer rounds (and perhaps, gasp, less of them ).

@Blackmoor

No, all of our events were not pre-Eldar or Tau. Anime Expo was after both and we still had a very diverse field, although the sample size was much smaller.

There are several considerations to keep in mind about games not finishing.

1.) The green games were games reported as not finishing due to one of the players being inexperienced. Those you can not attribute to the system as those games will ALWAYS go slow. You always get inexperienced players at tournaments whom do not finish games because they are inexperienced. It is a constant, it is something that can not be helped. Look only at the games that did no finish in the red section. Everyone has to start somewhere and we encourage new players to come out which means, we accept that they won't always (or even usually) finish their games on time.

2.) The BAO had logistical issues with overcrowding. Anime Expo ran smooth as silk, with only a few games not coming to a natural conclusion, which again, were almost always new players.

@Phazael

Buddy, you're killing me with this misinformation, haha! The top 10% had flyers aplenty, and Forgeworld was fairly thinly represented, actually. FW didn't dominate nor did it render flyers obsolete, that is simply not true.

And we always strive for games to finish but the thing is, not many TO's have the data we collect and not many of them will so openly and honestly share it. That is not a dig at anyone else at all, it's just that we showed the data we gathered even if it wasn't flattering, because we felt it could help the community as a whole.

Even when you remove the games that didn't finish due to inexperience from the mix, it is a large portion of games. We recognize that. However, as we run additional events this year, we are seeing that with adequate spacing between tables and informing the players of the time limits better, games flow right along and our completion ratio has gone way up.

We have Duel Con next weekend and then Comikzae in November, so that will give us a lot more data, and in the current meta, too. I think that will be very revealing.

Misinformation is a strong word, but this is what I observed and feel free to correct this somewhat anecdotal data. The flyers in the top ten were generally either Helldrakes or FMCs, both things that are pretty resistant to FW anti-air units, or capable of hovering in cover to gain some resistance. In fact, Helldrake bitching was the primary topic of conversation among 40k players that weekend. And with good reason, as there were more of those than the Cron fliers that all the pro-FW people were moaning and groaning about on dakka in the lead up to BAO. That's not really pertinent to the discussion, however, so I don't want to derail the topic nitpicking what was otherwise the top 40k event of the pacific time zone.

But no, not many TOs collect that sort of data and fewer still make it available for public consumption. Again, not being critical, just seriously asking if you are ok with a 40% incomplete rate on tournament games. That's really the main question I would like to hear you (and MVB) comment on in more detail. I know in the little 10-20 man things I run I have started awarding a point for completing games to at least turn five, so I have an idea of what the completion percentage is like, and its not very good, though it has steadily improved. In the three RTTs I have run since tracking this information, 72 out of the 134 games reached at least turn five, which means that at best I am seeing something like a 60%ish completion rate this year (ironically close to your large event). I saw dramatic improvements in the RTTs where I dumped random objectives and kept to the simpler book missions (like nearly all games completed in those RTTs) with preset terrain. The one constant is that the horde staller guys never seem to get past turn three and armies using lots of psychers (new elder especially) slow the game to a crawl.

I would really like to see Brandt's information on this topic, as its the most directly comparable to BAO in terms of game logistics and general format.

My opinion?

Trying to correlate tourney data between events that span significant time and changes to the game is dubious at best in evaluating or attempting to ascribe any meaning or value.
The data is fantastic for understanding what happened at any particular event over a 3 day period as a snap shot in time sort of analysis. But beyond that it is pretty meaningless.

For the AdeptiCon Championship at 1,850 pts with 2.5 hour rounds we asked the following question on all result sheets:
FINISH? Yes or No *
* Finished games are those that are ended by a Variable Game Length die roll (pg. 122) or where all 7 game turns were fully played out.

We had every round between 92-94% of the results sheets marked Yes.

Now of course that data isn’t scientific in the least, but it shows that people felt like they were getting in full games. That said, we are always looking at way to tweak the events to better accommodate the current state of the game.

A 90%+ completion rate would be fantastic! That seems really high. I don't know if MVBrandt has collated the data from Nova yet or not, or if he's willing to share it, but my impression was that 90% was not the norm (but a "norm" would require comparing events, and you make a good point on that ).

If most events were seeing that high of a completion rate, this topic would be a non-issue. Perhaps it is, but that's not what seemed to be the consensus coming out of the most recent event (Nova). Again, very curious about the data there once it is compiled, if you can share it!