Red Corsair wrote:I still can't understand where Reece is getting all his data about having first turn being stronger in ITC format, almost every competitive minded player I know hates the bottom of turn scoring edge, which is arguably the only real flaw in an otherwise great system.
I'm personally not a fan of the
LVO/
BAO format (I've been somewhat outspoken about it on here at times), but there's definitely no mystery as to where that data comes from.
At any major
GT (which
BAO/
LVO certainly are), you're looking at
maybe 10-20% of the field who have a serious chance to win the tournament--it's not something a
TO would go out and advertise, but it's a well known fact at these sort of events. To have any sort of chance at winning a
GT, you have to be playing a top-level list
and be a high-level competitive player (which is why you tend to see the same handful of names at the top tables of
GTs). The
vast majority of players at a
GT are lacking one of those two things.
That fact alone means it's nearly impossible to take meaningful stats away from
GT results--you're going to get watered down by the not-necessarily-competitive tables where more or less anything goes. You would also basically have to throw out the first two or three rounds, where good players and/or good lists are beating up worse players and/or worse lists, regardless of turn order or mission or any other potential handicap.
Things like turn order and mission format imbalances really only come into play when two equally skilled players are playing with equally powerful lists--and at a 100+ person
GT, those two things really only occur in the last couple of rounds (or completely by the luck of the draw, any earlier than that). It's an overwhelmingly tiny portion of the games that occur.
If you wanted meaningful stats, you'd really have to boil things down to "this is what our best players did aganst each other," but at that point you're also going to run into the problem of having such a small sample size that it's still hard to pull any meaningful conclusions from it. And again, no
TO is ever going to take the stance of "these are the only games that mattered and we're going to base our balance decisions off them"--that's a good way to piss off the other 80% of your paying players.
But yeah...I play with a pretty heavily competitive crew and it's common knowledge that everyone prefers bottom of turn in that format. I mean, I've heard Brett and Alan both independently say they knew whoever got bottom turn was winning their finals game last year.
jy2 wrote:But really, what competitive event plays almost pure Maelstrom other than the
ETC? Usually it's a mix of Eternal War missions and perhaps modifiied Maelstrom elements or other weird mission objective types.
I dunno, Maelstrom has really caught on lately. I think
NOVA was the only tournament I've attended this year which
didn't have a heavy Maelstrom component, but they obviously had the pick-your-own-mission format where one option was always turn-by-turn scoring. Adepticon was notably
pure Maelstrom this year; a lot of smaller tournaments use the
BAO/
LVO Maelstrom too, since it's a compact system that's easy to implement for
TOs.
My next tournament is the Renegade Open, and I'm actually really interested to see what they've done--last year they used
BAO/
LVO Maelstrom (and it was not well received)--their new system looks really interesting. In essence, it's the
BAO/
LVO Maelstrom, but expanded to 12 items (and six objectives, two of each marked 1-3) but you
pick which two you want each turn (and can only use each once), and you cannot score them until the
following turn.
The Michigan
GT did a similar thing (but with a normal Maelstrom deck); you draw cards this turn, but can't score them until next turn. It eliminates one of my biggest problems with Maelstrom in general--there's no ability to plan or react to your opponent's cards, since they draw them and then immediately score them, and that contributes a
ton to the "luck" factor of Maelstrom formats. Giving everyone a turn to react to their opponent's cards is a really smart choice.
.....Bay Area Open GT 2013 - Best Tyranids 
.....LVO GT 2014 Team Tournament - Best Generals
