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I brought copies of each list I played in the 30k tournaments at AdeptiCon and gave them to my opponents, as we were told to do. Half of the people did not, but we played anyway and had a good time.

These were generally narrative events with a much more laid back group of players than the 40k championship.

For that style event, you should really stick to the "Bring lots of copies of your list" rule and stick to it.

Just my 2 cents from an inexperienced, greenhorn tournament player.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 axisofentropy wrote:

 Tironum wrote:

I have seen numerous posts over the past few years that very large events cannot handle the staff requirements. Either get more staff or find a way to fix things.

This is not a serious proposal. Many staff are volunteers, and most participants aren't willing to pay additional entry fees required for this staffing.

I agree with axisofentropy. There simply is no way to verify that many lists. We heard the team tournament announcement that 450 players where there. How many people do you need to review lists quickly and accurately for that kind of turnout, Tironum?

 axisofentropy wrote:

 Tironum wrote:

I have seen numerous posts over the past few years that very large events cannot handle the staff requirements. Either get more staff or find a way to fix things.

This is not a serious proposal. Many staff are volunteers, and most participants aren't willing to pay additional entry fees required for this staffing.

Its not a terrible proposal. As long as checking lists didn't disqualify me from playing, I'd be happy to volunteer a little bit of time to check through lists. It could actually be a hybrid to Reecius' crowd sourced idea. Have a pool of 10-20 experienced players and send them each 5-10 lists to check. It wouldn't take them long, they could flag lists that look wrong for closer scrutiny by a judge and it would reduce the burden on the TO.

 axisofentropy wrote:

 Tironum wrote:

I have seen numerous posts over the past few years that very large events cannot handle the staff requirements. Either get more staff or find a way to fix things.

This is not a serious proposal. Many staff are volunteers, and most participants aren't willing to pay additional entry fees required for this staffing.

It is not hard and does not require additional entry fees. It does however require the staff to be knowledgeable of the releases and take a few minutes to interact with a paying customer. Saying that we have too many players and cannot be bothered to give an individual some time is a joke.

Look at how many times players show up with an incorrect lost or unpainted/unassembled models. If you will not enforce rules, how do you expect players to follow them.

The "get more staff" suggestion isn't an easy one to just do. NOVA's volunteer roll, for example, is about 170 names long. At the end of the weekend, most of them can't even walk straight without falling asleep. When you have a volunteer for every 10 or 11 attendees, and it's still not enough to pre-check every list from every single organized play event across a massive con, it's not that easy to just 'go get moar!'

That's also a relevant component of these events. NOVA, LVO, AdeptiCon, etc., are majority NOT 40k (well, I don't know for sure with LVO, they have a truckton of 40k players!), yet most of their stuff is still organized play, so it's not as if all the volunteers are sitting about fixated on 40k events to the detriment of all others.

Also, again, it's very much NOT about hardcore enforcing rules and hyper competition and get it right and all that. You enforce every rule that you know gets violated, b/c rules are important and fairness is important, but there's a limit to how restrictive and dispassionate and "RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH" you want to get with an event, especially when folks pay thousands of bucks to be there and enjoy themselves.


EDIT - tweaked first sentence, which was originally unfair/too dismissive

Public review isn't the only way to check lists. It's easy enough to enter point values for each model into a database, then you can just automate a cross reference that would take all of a couple seconds to verify every list in the tournament. You could whip up an excel spreadsheet to do this before lunch.

 slip wrote:
Public review isn't the only way to check lists. It's easy enough to enter point values for each model into a database, then you can just automate a cross reference that would take all of a couple seconds to verify every list in the tournament. You could whip up an excel spreadsheet to do this before lunch.

This might have been a sarcastic comment, and if so ignore my comment. But otherwise: This is obviously extremely difficult to do for 40k at this point, almost impossible. Even just the array of models available now is staggering, then the wargear, then other upgrades. Then you have formations like the ever popular Gladius that completely change how points work for a large number of models. And all of that is just summing points, well before you even start considering legal force organizations, squad composition, etc.. I assume a big part of why Army Builder and such have seem to have become much less popular the past few years (at least, that's been my observation in my group/at my small events) is because none of the tools could keep up. Could it all theoretically be automated? Sure. But the effort would be very consuming, to the extent that it would be tough for anyone but GW to support commercially (even if GW legal left them alone), and the community as a whole has lagged at it of late (I believe).

 tjkopena wrote:

 slip wrote:
Public review isn't the only way to check lists. It's easy enough to enter point values for each model into a database, then you can just automate a cross reference that would take all of a couple seconds to verify every list in the tournament. You could whip up an excel spreadsheet to do this before lunch.

This might have been a sarcastic comment, and if so ignore my comment. But otherwise: This is obviously extremely difficult to do for 40k at this point, almost impossible. Even just the array of models available now is staggering, then the wargear, then other upgrades. Then you have formations like the ever popular Gladius that completely change how points work for a large number of models. And all of that is just summing points, well before you even start considering legal force organizations, squad composition, etc.. I assume a big part of why Army Builder and such have seem to have become much less popular the past few years (at least, that's been my observation in my group/at my small events) is because none of the tools could keep up. Could it all theoretically be automated? Sure. But the effort would be very consuming, to the extent that it would be tough for anyone but GW to support commercially (even if GW legal left them alone), and the community as a whole has lagged at it of late (I believe).

You are vastly over estimating how difficult it would be. Yes, entering all the point values would be time consuming. I've created similar databases for concrete compression strength test cylinders that encompass statically relevant quantity testing of multiple physical properties of every product offered by every company in an entire bidding process to verify that your structure will in fact stay upright, for every single structure that goes up in my city that uses concrete. (All of them.) The other maybe hard part is getting the entrants to adhere to a basic submission forum, which would greatly streamline the process and could be neatly imported into the database. I've done reports on over a thousand individual cylinders using these databases on a good day.

That was tough. Coming up with a database for dinky models and basic arithmetic is child's play. You don't even need to use calculus or imaginary numbers or worry about municipal, environmental, fire, and safety code. Whether you want to pay someone what it's worth to do it is a whole nother matter, and I guarantee is what the problem is with army builder. (Gotta remember, maintenance costs $$$) There's no unit that couldn't be totally accounted for with a relatively simple IF/AND statement and 40k point values don't change nearly as much as construction contract stipulations do.

But yeah, I'm sure GW's legal team would want to have words with you at some point. Getting their okay would be even more time consuming and expensive. (Ugh, they'd probably make you rent a license for the finished product too.)

The contract and price is pretty reasonable. The GW legal team component isn't going to happen, even though you could do it without using any formal unit / etc. names on the public-facing side of it, and thus avoid any pitfalls. It is a nice dreamy suggestion, though! Maybe somebody with the chops will do it, if it is that simple to do, at that reasonable a rate.

MVBrandt wrote:
The contract and price is pretty reasonable. The GW legal team component isn't going to happen, even though you could do it without using any formal unit / etc. names on the public-facing side of it, and thus avoid any pitfalls. It is a nice dreamy suggestion, though! Maybe somebody with the chops will do it, if it is that simple to do, at that reasonable a rate.

Beyond the legal stuff, it would be *literally* impossible to do this in a simple excel sheet.

I started typing out some examples of why it would be so, but I think it's pedantic at this point. Can't be done.

With a crowd-source solution, there's going to be 2 major areas that present a challenge:

1. How do you get the lists submitted? Ideally, they would upload a pdf or image via some website, but this will require profiles/accounts. What about walk-ins/last minute sign-ups? You'll also need an on-site method; maybe they can send you a list digitally at the reg desk, maybe you have a kiosk where they can enter it, or maybe you have a scanner and upload it to their account for them. Lots of options, all with challenges.
2. How do you weed out the wrong/malicious reviews from the accurate ones? I see this going a certain way, but others may have additional ideas. First, every list has two things: a crowd score and an official score. Crowd score is the % correct it looks, based on the go/no-go of everyone looking at the list. The official score is the judge-verified version (granted that judges make mistakes also). With this data, I think you get some critical pieces. First, you get a pretty good idea of when a list hits a certain threshold, it needs to be officially reviewed. And second, you can start tallying who the "good" public reviewers are, assuming they have an account also. With that info in mind, you can reward good reviewers, or just value their review higher, etc.

I may be making this too complicated, but who knows. You could just have anonymous reviews and trust the community to be respectful

I wanted to give a shout out to Best Coast Pairing, Torrent of Fire, and any other groups that, as self respecting independent contractors, have in fact realized:

- There are problems in running tournaments (such as scoring and list verification);

- There is a market to pay for that problem to be solved;

And have or are engaged in the entrepreneurship to see if the market can support addressing the problem. These products don't all work well for my events (which tend to be heavily narrative and use varied scoring and other mechanisms), but I've tried to or have used some of them, I'm glad they work for many users, and it's cool for people to take that step rather than just railing on a message board. Thanks!

chipstar1 wrote:
With a crowd-source solution, there's going to be 2 major areas that present a challenge:

1. How do you get the lists submitted? Ideally, they would upload a pdf or image via some website, but this will require profiles/accounts. What about walk-ins/last minute sign-ups? You'll also need an on-site method; maybe they can send you a list digitally at the reg desk, maybe you have a kiosk where they can enter it, or maybe you have a scanner and upload it to their account for them. Lots of options, all with challenges.
2. How do you weed out the wrong/malicious reviews from the accurate ones? I see this going a certain way, but others may have additional ideas. First, every list has two things: a crowd score and an official score. Crowd score is the % correct it looks, based on the go/no-go of everyone looking at the list. The official score is the judge-verified version (granted that judges make mistakes also). With this data, I think you get some critical pieces. First, you get a pretty good idea of when a list hits a certain threshold, it needs to be officially reviewed. And second, you can start tallying who the "good" public reviewers are, assuming they have an account also. With that info in mind, you can reward good reviewers, or just value their review higher, etc.

I may be making this too complicated, but who knows. You could just have anonymous reviews and trust the community to be respectful

I think you could do a hybrid. Require early submission of lists (approximately 15 to 30 days before the event, whatever your cutoff for new materials is). Have a volunteer pool of experienced players (say approximately one per every 10 players anticipated) vet the lists and flag any lists with issues for a judges review. Last minute entrants could then be outsourced to reviewers if time permits or reviewed by a judge day off. As long as reviewing lists doesn't disqualify someone from playing, I'm sure you could get plenty of people to help out.

 slip wrote:
You are vastly over estimating how difficult it would be. Yes, entering all the point values would be time consuming. I've created similar databases for concrete compression strength test cylinders that encompass statically relevant quantity testing of multiple physical properties of every product offered by every company in an entire bidding process to verify that your structure will in fact stay upright, for every single structure that goes up in my city that uses concrete. (All of them.) The other maybe hard part is getting the entrants to adhere to a basic submission forum, which would greatly streamline the process and could be neatly imported into the database. I've done reports on over a thousand individual cylinders using these databases on a good day.

That was tough. Coming up with a database for dinky models and basic arithmetic is child's play. You don't even need to use calculus or imaginary numbers or worry about municipal, environmental, fire, and safety code. Whether you want to pay someone what it's worth to do it is a whole nother matter, and I guarantee is what the problem is with army builder. (Gotta remember, maintenance costs $$$) There's no unit that couldn't be totally accounted for with a relatively simple IF/AND statement and 40k point values don't change nearly as much as construction contract stipulations do.

But yeah, I'm sure GW's legal team would want to have words with you at some point. Getting their okay would be even more time consuming and expensive. (Ugh, they'd probably make you rent a license for the finished product too.)

I'm sure others here have worked with similar databases (I have), so throwing out big resume phrases like: "concrete compression strength test cylinders that encompass statically relevant quantity testing of multiple physical properties of every product offered by every company in an entire bidding process to verify that your structure will in fact stay upright" (which is just a fancy way of saying you had a spreadsheet that compared data against other numbers) doesn't make you any smarter than anyone else. I'm telling you it's not the same. It's probably possible, but the data entry would be a nightmare; because the problem isn't adding points, it's determining legal army construction which takes more than IF/AND statements.

chipstar1 wrote:
With a crowd-source solution, there's going to be 2 major areas that present a challenge:

1. How do you get the lists submitted? Ideally, they would upload a pdf or image via some website, but this will require profiles/accounts. What about walk-ins/last minute sign-ups? You'll also need an on-site method; maybe they can send you a list digitally at the reg desk, maybe you have a kiosk where they can enter it, or maybe you have a scanner and upload it to their account for them. Lots of options, all with challenges.
2. How do you weed out the wrong/malicious reviews from the accurate ones? I see this going a certain way, but others may have additional ideas. First, every list has two things: a crowd score and an official score. Crowd score is the % correct it looks, based on the go/no-go of everyone looking at the list. The official score is the judge-verified version (granted that judges make mistakes also). With this data, I think you get some critical pieces. First, you get a pretty good idea of when a list hits a certain threshold, it needs to be officially reviewed. And second, you can start tallying who the "good" public reviewers are, assuming they have an account also. With that info in mind, you can reward good reviewers, or just value their review higher, etc.

The upload issue is not a huge deal. It could be addressed in a bunch of different ways technically. On the whole the software to support human peer review is not trivial to do well, but not terribly complex either. By far the biggest issue is just getting or enabling people with the skills to allocate the moderate amount of time needed to do it right/robustly.

Beyond that, the design of the mechanisms rather than their implementation is not obvious, like you talk about in the second point. I don't have super concrete thoughts on this. But one place to look for ideas are the better academic conferences and journals enabling public peer review. I'm not really in tune with the current state of that world, but there are a lot of people thinking about and working on approaches to solving very similar problems. For example, a long time ago, SIGMOD (a prestigious conference about database research) had organizers do quick triage on paper submissions to weed out obviously inadequate or inappropriate submissions (too many/too few pages, unacceptable formatting, etc). The surviving PDFs then all got posted to a website that served them up on their own pages. On those pages people could post comments and have a discussion raising questions or objections and debating the merit. Groups of organizers then took those comments into account in deciding whether or not to accept each paper to the conference. That seems like exactly what would be useful here, enabling judges to quickly approve non-controversial lists while homing in on lists with potential problems based on comments or some other community flag, much like chipstar1 is describing.

 tjkopena wrote:


The upload issue is not a huge deal. It could be addressed in a bunch of different ways technically. On the whole the software to support human peer review is not trivial to do well, but not terribly complex either. By far the biggest issue is just getting or enabling people with the skills to allocate the moderate amount of time needed to do it right/robustly.

Beyond that, the design of the mechanisms rather than their implementation is not obvious, like you talk about in the second point. I don't have super concrete thoughts on this. But one place to look for ideas are the better academic conferences and journals enabling public peer review. I'm not really in tune with the current state of that world, but there are a lot of people thinking about and working on approaches to solving very similar problems. For example, a long time ago, SIGMOD (a prestigious conference about database research) had organizers do quick triage on paper submissions to weed out obviously inadequate or inappropriate submissions (too many/too few pages, unacceptable formatting, etc). The surviving PDFs then all got posted to a website that served them up on their own pages. On those pages people could post comments and have a discussion raising questions or objections and debating the merit. Groups of organizers then took those comments into account in deciding whether or not to accept each paper to the conference. That seems like exactly what would be useful here, enabling judges to quickly approve non-controversial lists while homing in on lists with potential problems based on comments or some other community flag, much like chipstar1 is describing.

The peer review part is a really great idea. In fact, for peer/abstract review, I bet there are pre-built Wordpress plugins (what FLG, NOVA, etc's websites are running on) to do just that. That is a really great idea! Reece/Mike/Others, probably worth investigating this.

I do have an idea but it would take some time to do, furthermore I'm not sure the legal grounds.

Create an open source webpage that lets you build army lists. Make everyone use that tool to create their lists. The lists will be linked to a unique number.

The player would turn that number in, the event would then print their lists for them.

You would of course need some sort of peer review checking of the army files.

Rynner wrote:
I do have an idea but it would take some time to do, furthermore I'm not sure the legal grounds.

Create an open source webpage that lets you build army lists. Make everyone use that tool to create their lists. The lists will be linked to a unique number.

The player would turn that number in, the event would then print their lists for them.

You would of course need some sort of peer review checking of the army files.

I was actually just about to type up something similar.

This is an ideal and workable solution. Fantasy Flight Games has something similar for their Living Card Games where you can put up a deck list and have people comment on it. Obviously, dealing in Detachments/Formations/Decurions is a little more complex, but nothing a halfway decent database designer can't do. I know. I design financial industry software for a living. If you thought 40k was complicated, try wading through all the financial industry regulations that have been put into law in the last ten years.

So...

1. Set up a website that has an army list builder interface (obviously the most complex part, but very doable). Allow users to register and store their army lists electronically. Lists are systemically checked for legality each time they are saved and get flagged as either legal or illegal.
2. Allow tournament organizers to set up "event pages" on this website.
3. Users can sign up for an event and systemically "attach" the list that they'll be using to the event by choosing from a drop down of their existing legal lists. Users are required to "lock in" their lists at least, I don't know... 12 hours before the event's start.
4. Add a comments system for list/event review as well as an area for providing feedback for the integrity of the army list builder interface and you're golden.
5. For Phase 2, go crazy. Make an iOS or Droid app to act as a view only. Heck, tie it into the event and use it to track dead units on both your list and your opponents. Wouldn't be that hard to do.

Now, obviously this would cost time and money. The FFG LCG one works well because it's administrated by FFG. GW might need to be involved with the above, but it would be glorious if done correctly. Biggest two issues I see are that you'd need access to GW's IP and I'm not sure that there is much of a revenue stream. I'm envisioning something free and ad supported, but with "premium options" that allow you to schedule events or whatever. I'm just throwing out ideas right now.

It would need to be community supported software I think. I.E. A bunch of us who want to see this thing exist would need to collaborate on it.

I'm a web developer for a living and would be interesting in partnering up with a few people who want to make this a reality.

Thread cleanup necessary.

Edit: And complete. You may notice that the thread just got a lot shorter. Be warned.

Rynner wrote:
It would need to be community supported software I think. I.E. A bunch of us who want to see this thing exist would need to collaborate on it.

I'm a web developer for a living and would be interesting in partnering up with a few people who want to make this a reality.

I don't think we (as a community) would be able to use GW's unit data. Coding an army list builder is one thing. Populating it with actual units is another. I'd love to be a part of something like this, but I just don't see getting a blessing from GW.

 Kriswall wrote:

Rynner wrote:
It would need to be community supported software I think. I.E. A bunch of us who want to see this thing exist would need to collaborate on it.

I'm a web developer for a living and would be interesting in partnering up with a few people who want to make this a reality.

I don't think we (as a community) would be able to use GW's unit data. Coding an army list builder is one thing. Populating it with actual units is another. I'd love to be a part of something like this, but I just don't see getting a blessing from GW.

The big legality is when you start listing out points values and special rules. That's when GW gets their lawyers whipped up into a frenzy. And that's why all of the army building applications rely on user-submitted files, for a deferral of responsibility on who is actually impinging on GW's IP.

chipstar1 wrote:

The big legality is when you start listing out points values and special rules.

Points values and the names of special rules are fine. Listing the effects of those special rules and/or wargears are not.

Not like you'd want to include those anyway. It's a simpler and better design to not.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Rynner wrote:
It would need to be community supported software I think. I.E. A bunch of us who want to see this thing exist would need to collaborate on it.

I'm a web developer for a living and would be interesting in partnering up with a few people who want to make this a reality.

I'm not sure why this would take more than one weekend from one person.

What would the tournament play say to the idea that you must submit a list generated from:
Army Builder
-and/or-
Battle Scribe

???

The onus would be that the community would be more involved to vetting the dataset as "accurate" and updated in timely fashion.

Top lists are generally reviewed by judges, I am pretty sure that if someone actually won prizes at an event like LVO/BAO/Adepticon/ect with an illegal list (or not having one) that they would likely be properly disciplined for it much like what happened at feast of blades

 DarknessEternal wrote:

chipstar1 wrote:

The big legality is when you start listing out points values and special rules.

Points values and the names of special rules are fine. Listing the effects of those special rules and/or wargears are not.

Not like you'd want to include those anyway. It's a simpler and better design to not.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Rynner wrote:
It would need to be community supported software I think. I.E. A bunch of us who want to see this thing exist would need to collaborate on it.

I'm a web developer for a living and would be interesting in partnering up with a few people who want to make this a reality.

I'm not sure why this would take more than one weekend from one person.

Point values are definitely NOT ok. A lot of forums (maybe even this one?) don't even allow the posting of point values for units or wargear because of notices from GW.

And again, a gross underestimation of how long it would take to do something like this. I think this is a MUCH LARGER task than anyone realizes. It is definitely not a weekend.

Nah... I could whip up something in a weekend, as long as I had CODEXNAME, UNIT NAME, FORCEORGSLOT and POINTS in a spreadsheet.

Having a software do that for you is easy....

The hard part is maintaining the dataset.* Meaning, multiple eyes to vet the data, responsive engagement to address changes, CODEX changes, etc...

*basically the Army Builder model

*shrug*

chipstar1 wrote:

Point values are definitely NOT ok. A lot of forums (maybe even this one?) don't even allow the posting of point values for units or wargear because of notices from GW.

'Definitely' is possibly a little strong.

A lot of forums (including this one) don't allow the posting of individual points costs in order to avoid potential legal issues. Whether or not it would actually be an issue is another matter entirely.

So long as full rules aren't posted, so that players would still require a rulebook and codex to actually use whatever list is generated, it would probably (note: not a lawyer) be fine. Forum owners just like to stay firmly on the path of least resistance, and not have to face the potential of warding off legal complications if they can be easilt avoided.

 whembly wrote:
What would the tournament play say to the idea that you must submit a list generated from:
Army Builder
-and/or-
Battle Scribe

???

The onus would be that the community would be more involved to vetting the dataset as "accurate" and updated in timely fashion.

I would imagine that would lose a lot of players. Is Army Builder still a subscription service? If so, then for a lot of players that would mean Battlescribe... and the Battlescribe list format is horrible.

 insaniak wrote:

chipstar1 wrote:

Point values are definitely NOT ok. A lot of forums (maybe even this one?) don't even allow the posting of point values for units or wargear because of notices from GW.

'Definitely' is possibly a little strong.

A lot of forums (including this one) don't allow the posting of individual points costs in order to avoid potential legal issues. Whether or not it would actually be an issue is another matter entirely.

So long as full rules aren't posted, so that players would still require a rulebook and codex to actually use whatever list is generated, it would probably (note: not a lawyer) be fine. Forum owners just like to stay firmly on the path of least resistance, and not have to face the potential of warding off legal complications if they can be easilt avoided.

 whembly wrote:
What would the tournament play say to the idea that you must submit a list generated from:
Army Builder
-and/or-
Battle Scribe

???

The onus would be that the community would be more involved to vetting the dataset as "accurate" and updated in timely fashion.

I would imagine that would lose a lot of players. Is Army Builder still a subscription service? If so, then for a lot of players that would mean Battlescribe... and the Battlescribe list format is horrible.

Army builder is now a single payment.

Once someone masters the art of herding stray cats, that person should be the one to advise the gaming community on how best to deal with army list submission and review.

Honestly, there are just too many factors and variables in play for this to go off without a hitch.

You need enough competent staff or volunteers from the event, to manage 60-160+ army lists.

You need them to be able to do this in a reasonable window not too soon and not too late before the event starts.

You need players to cooperate with submitting lists on time.

You need the stars to align just right.

You need to hope the Stock Market doesn't crash.

If all you want to do is make sure the points add up to less than X amount, sure, thats easy enough to do in a weekend...

But 90% of army validation is more than adding points together.
Think about things like...
- up to 3 models may swap either their (A or B) for one of (x, y, or z)
- you may take one (a or b) for every 10 models in the unit
- the model may take one of (x, y or z) unless it takes A. if it takes A it may take one of (u, v, w)
- This model may take A unless it is from faction supplement X, in which case it can take B.
- Formation A is made up of 1-4 X's and 0-4 Y's. Formation B is made up of 1-8 Formation (A, B, C, D) for every formation E
- Upgrade X costs 10pts for unit A but 20pts for unit B
- ...

The code base behind ArmyBuilder and Battlescribe is tens of thousands of lines of code - not something that can be replicated easily in an excel sheet.