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Without naming any names and all I would like to know as a sampling have any of you experienced instances of Monkey Business or rigging games at tournaments or just plain scoring switches to make one player win a tournament despite another player winning all his games.

It happened to a friend of mine in a Space Hulk tournament back about 1990. Basically he was gaining too many points in a scenario, so they changed the rules half-way through the game in order to stop him.

That does not mean it happens nowadays.

Not so much monkey business or cheating as unfair handicap. I was in the league at my local games workshop about 10 years ago, when it first opened. I made it all the way to the final match, when the rules were presented a week in advance to me and the other finalist. It would be cleanse, BUT you could use all the models in your collection for your specific army for this fight.....I was playing orks, the other guy was playing blood angels. Do I think it was fair that because he had more money than I did, he got a 3000 point advantage, and the game was pretty much decided on deployment? Not really, but it sure is a good way to scare all the regular customers into buying more. Oh you made it to the finals huh? Well its a store league, first prize is a free battleforce, second place gets a pewter limited edition warhammer! Remember whoever owns the most models wins! Get buying!

Despite the 3000 point handicap, he was left with only 800 points at the end of the game, me of course being wiped to the ork (its very sad when a horde ork army is outnumbered by basic marines) and I moved from the area about 6 months later. But I never got over that cheeze scenario, and complained about it often.

OH and the best part- 2000 points of his army were bought that week, and painted 3 color slop by him and 3 of his friends. When he won he gave the battleforce to a guy who had given him 90 dollars to help him buy more advantage, although he was going to pay him the money back even if he lost.

I have seen Blackmoor play in a couple of RTT's at a store in the San Diego area, win all 3 of his games and not get any award. Despite the fact that he was the sole undefeated player in both instances.

Darrian

I once attended a Rogue Trader in a college town. There was an odd number of players registered, so the store management called one of their friends to come fill up the list. The guy brought an unpainted dwarf gunline. He didn't have to pay to enter, which was fine... but he also won best army. (not best general, or best painted [Ha!], or best sportsman- so I am a little confused about the criteria they used.) It is one thing to reward a friend for doing you a favor, but there were people at that tournament who had driven about 5 hours to attend (I myself drove an hour), who were more than a little .



I guess that isn't really rigging games or mucking about with scores. But it was insulting to everyone who really came prepared to play. I think that particular store's next couple of RTT's were pretty much unattended.

Darrian,

That is actually not unusual. I've won 2 RTT's where I lost one out of 3 games. The reason I won was due to the fact that the 3 game winner got dinked on his sportsmanship and army comp. I got nearly perfect scores on those and that brought my score up to just a few points above him. It is possible but quite uncommon to see.

I have not been in any RTT where I have seen any of the tournament organizers go beyond what was expressed in the RTT packet.

My favorite showing of blatant cheating was at a RTT in Dallas, Texas during 2001. The tournament rules were posted online. Sign up started at 10:00am gaming started at 11, tournament was to end by 7, armies must be painted.

I show up at 10:00am with my fully painted steel legion on a nice display board, sign up and watch as 4 other players sign up. The organizer says "We don't have enough gamers here so we're going to wait."
11 rolls around and he desides we still don't have enough gamers. He calls his 3 friends in Whichataw Falls, who were supposedly on their way, to find out where they are.
It turns out they're still sleeping, so they wake up and start heading towards the tournament (roughly a 2 hour drive).
The 3 guys get there at 12:30 and don't have lists made so they make lists on the spot. Around 1pm they're ready to start gaming.

Missions are handed out and its a victory point based clense (aka points for kills nothing for quarters) I'm paired up against one of the late guys, he has an unpainted 1/2 assembled thousand sons army that's 500 points short.
The judge explains that I can't get a massacre because he's short 500 points, and that if I dock this player on sportsmanship I'll be "penalized severly, because the list is a crappy thousand sons list, and he's 500 points short."
The game ends with me decimating him down to 1/2 a squad in his quarter and a dread in my table quarter, but due to the new "bonus objectives" I loose. Turns out that table quarters are worth 500 points (in a 1500pt tourney). He contests my quarter, and controls his own, plus a 250pt squad and a 200pt dread means his win.

Round 2 sees me against an ulthwe player. He comes on piece by piece and I blow him off the table, I loose 1 chimera. Massacre for me.

Round 3 I'm paired up against a salamander marine player. He gets his vehicles and bikes into terrain where they kill/imobilize themselves. Massacre for me.

So awards start at Midnight. I'm the only guy with 2 massacres and a loss. The next guy behind me has 2 wins and a loss.
Turns out the guy who had 2 draws and a loss won, due to his sporstmanship score, btw it was the thousand son player.
Best painted went to a guy with a 1/2 painted space wolves army.

Needless to say I've never been to an RTT since.

And people wonder why I stay away from tournaments.

One of my friends entered his space marine army into a tournament once back in the Rouge Trader or early 2nd edition days of 40k. One of his opponents had the gall to try and get him thrown out of the tournament because all of his space marines were painted differently (like each individual model had its own unique paint scheme). I couldn't beleive that sort of crap was happening.

I know I've been to a tournament where my painting score tied with a guy with a not completely painted army and another, I scored 1 point higher (Out of ~45ish) than a guy with only half his army painted...

In ATL the terrain is always size 3 (25% of the board, natch) and the first mission of the tournament will be the escalation mission. Not sure I'd call it Monkey Business, but its dependable as clockwork.

I'd just call that part of the local metagame. In that environment everyone should be fielding armies with those things in mind.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any such problems with the organizers of an event. I’ve heard of events with such issues, but I’ve never attended one. Part of that may be due to the fact that I usually learn something about the people or store running it, and if I knew beforehand that they had little experience with the game or poor organizational skills, I skipped it. That’s happened a couple of times.

I’ve played Rogue Traders (or similar) tournaments for both 40k and WH at five different stores in NH and MA, and GTs in MA, MD, VA, NJ, NY and IL.

Actually, I can think of one, but it was more an issue with the players, and the only problem with the organizers is that they weren’t firm enough. This was at a WH Gladiator event. The concept is an ultra-competitive, there is no comp, bring your best and your cheesiest, there’s-no-whining-in-Warhammer, there will be extreme scenarios which aren’t necessarily fair, deal with it or go home. All the event flyers and rules made that clear. It was still a fun event, meant to showcase people’s skills, both at wielding their lists against the cheesiest things their opponents could come up with, and at dealing with unfamiliar and weird scenarios.

I can’t remember now whether it was three or four rounds; it was several years ago. Anyway, it was a good-sized event- 20+ players. Attending were a lot of people who drove a long distance, and quite a number of very experienced RT players, including the (at the time) current points leader in the US RT Hall of Heroes for Warhammer nationwide.

Coming into the last round, the tournament leader was a relatively unknown player using Lizardmen, not much of a tournament veteran, who had driven a couple of hours to get to the event. A couple of other players were close, including the RT champion/highest rank in the Hall of Heroes dude (hereafter referred to as HoH dude). Anyway, the last scenario happened to screw mages. It was called something like “Where’s that damn wizard?” and any models that contributed power dice would start the game in reserve. HoH dude happened to be playing Vampire Counts, and felt like he was screwed by the scenario. He happened to be paired up with a buddy from the same store who was playing Brettonians. Bret guy (IIRC) wasn’t really in the running, and they both thought the scenario basically took HoH guy out of the running to win the event. So they decided they were going to play Pitched Battle instead of the tournament mission, and whined to one of the judges until he let them.

In a shocking turn of events, HoH dude got a massacre against his buddy playing Pitched Battle. The less-experienced player (who I believe was using a Slann, so did get handicapped by the scenario), still managed to get a win with good points, but wasn’t able to stay ahead of HoH dude, who had the most total VPs at the end and thus won the event. When the scores were posted, the Lizardmen player hadn’t won anything, and since he had a long drive he left before the actual award presentation. Also before anyone could protest the result.

In this case HoH dude almost certainly won because he refused (with the consent of his friend and a judge lacking backbone) to play by the same rules as everyone else.

I hate to attribute anything to malice that can be explained as a simple mistake, but I did attend a tournament once that was 5 games but only about 20 people, so the one person who had by far the nicest army happened to the be only person to go 5-0. But since he bought the army, he was given a zero for painting and a local won.

This wouldn't have been so fishy except that the person had played the bought army there in a few tournaments and always recieved full points. And at no point did he ever present the army as his own work.

But the fishiest thing of all is when GW boned me out of my 2003 2nd place best tactician award. Bastards!

Thank goodness for complaining! If it weren't for complaining I'd have to fill my time with something less fun like work or self improvement.

I attended a team tournament at the Bellevue/Seattle Battle Bunker a while back and it was a failry craptacular event. My story is similar to Foda_Betts is that the event started late and the organizers really ruined the overall experience.

The premise of the tourney was that 4 players would each make up a 1000 point list and that we would be paired up randomly for our games. It was going to be a 2-day tourney and it sounded like a blast so we signed up and got to work.. The four of us actually put enough thought into it to make up our lists to try to compliment each others well and we made sure that all of the minis we fielded were painted up and looked nice. We even had a written fluff story about how the four forces decided to team up. Well, this tourney just happened to be on the weekend that followed the release of Apocalypse and it became painfully obvious that the organizers just wanted to push this one aside to get in more Apocalypse stuff or something. The tourney was changed from a 2-day to a one day and even when we showed up 20 minutes before the start tie the doors weren't even open yet! They didn't open until 15 minutes after the start time and no one seemed to be in any big hurry or anything to get started. When we approached the organizer he wasn't the least bit interested in our written fluff, our paint jobs, or even our army lists! Sweet! The scenarios were all team based like "table quarters MUST be occupied by two coalition units to count as held" and such. This made it really mistifying when two players were allowed to join in late with just two 2000 point lists instead of four 1000 point lists. So me and my teammate have to try to argue with the single opponent across from us as to how on earth we figure out who is the victor. The staff weren't interested in helping us out on that either. We thought we might at least be able to pull off a best painted since one of our guys was a ringer who had a spectacular White Scars army featured in a White Dwarf and the rest of us had forces at least done to an average level, but alas we lost that one to a team with half painted and primed Eldar.

So, I guess there was no cheating but the staff really destroyed the enjoyment factor for that tourney. [/rant]

40kenthusiast wrote:In ATL the terrain is always size 3 (25% of the board, natch) and the first mission of the tournament will be the escalation mission. Not sure I'd call it Monkey Business, but its dependable as clockwork.

Its not really monkey buisness if you know about it before hand and its more or less balanced. In this case, you know about it and its not really off the wall. Its not like you have to play on open fields...that would suck.

Wow, apparently "best painted" awards go to half painted armies all the time. Maybe I should start stripping my mins now.

Phoenix wrote:

40kenthusiast wrote:In ATL the terrain is always size 3 (25% of the board, natch) and the first mission of the tournament will be the escalation mission. Not sure I'd call it Monkey Business, but its dependable as clockwork.

Its not really monkey buisness if you know about it before hand and its more or less balanced. In this case, you know about it and its not really off the wall. Its not like you have to play on open fields...that would suck.

I feel mine was, even If I knew a week beforehand. What was I suposed to do, take out a loan from the bank and slop job 200 more models to fight someone on even terms. I like the even points distribution much better, otherwise its whoever has the most money wins, like how the MTG tourneys turned out to be.

The premise of the tourney was that 4 players would each make up a 1000 point list and that we would be paired up randomly for our games. It was going to be a 2-day tourney and it sounded like a blast so we signed up and got to work.. The four of us actually put enough thought into it to make up our lists to try to compliment each others well and we made sure that all of the minis we fielded were painted up and looked nice. We even had a written fluff story about how the four forces decided to team up. Well, this tourney just happened to be on the weekend that followed the release of Apocalypse and it became painfully obvious that the organizers just wanted to push this one aside to get in more Apocalypse stuff or something. The tourney was changed from a 2-day to a one day and even when we showed up 20 minutes before the start tie the doors weren't even open yet! They didn't open until 15 minutes after the start time and no one seemed to be in any big hurry or anything to get started. When we approached the organizer he wasn't the least bit interested in our written fluff, our paint jobs, or even our army lists! Sweet! The scenarios were all team based like "table quarters MUST be occupied by two coalition units to count as held" and such. This made it really mistifying when two players were allowed to join in late with just two 2000 point lists instead of four 1000 point lists. So me and my teammate have to try to argue with the single opponent across from us as to how on earth we figure out who is the victor. The staff weren't interested in helping us out on that either. We thought we might at least be able to pull off a best painted since one of our guys was a ringer who had a spectacular White Scars army featured in a White Dwarf and the rest of us had forces at least done to an average level, but alas we lost that one to a team with half painted and primed Eldar.

Glaive Company

You got ripped bad by them there mate.

IMHO- I think all Redshirts/GW staff should be asked to do a 2-day 'Event Management' course.

The systems are fairly Generic whether it be a Barmitzfa(?) or Tourney, and would give them a little more idea how to run a multi-person event. Just my opinion, as I have been to a few GW organised(Iuse the tem loosely!!) and been dissapointed every time. For the $50.00 AU fee, you would think I would even get a certificate out of a printer of attendance???

Anyhoo, yes, Monkey-business is something that I guess we have to get used to if we are not playing in the Basement with good mates. IMHO.

I've played in tournaments where the owner of the store decieded to play favorites. He'd say at the start of the tourney that highest point players were paired off against highest point players in the last few rounds, to insure the top players face stiff competition. However, his partner would often bring out the scorecard when it was all over, and you'd find matchups were changed. Sometimes the player currently in the lead play would play a weaker army, if they were a friend.

I've also seen missions tailored to favor a certain type of player, or hose a particular army. I've played a game with a seer council eldar list where escalation included all HQ choices, after being asked which list I was playing.

And of course lastly there are times when the store organizer's partner would bring out the score sheet and say "Hey, this guy is supposed to be in second, not fourth". Always after the event, he never had the nerve to do it in front of the organizer.

Without naming any names and all I would like to know as a sampling have any of you experienced instances of Monkey Business or rigging games at tournaments or just plain scoring switches to make one player win a tournament despite another player winning all his games.

Yes, many times over. I just deal with the fact that the locals at area tournaments will be favored. I like playing with a handicap.

I once played a mini tourny at a now long-dead FLGS where they INSISTED my ork codex was misprinted, and that all my killa kans (I have a bunch) were AV 10-10-10.

When playing against marines with bolters, it REALLY makes them next to useless without AV 11, so needless to say, they never saw combat.

PD: Did they pull out a "real" codex to show you up?

Ouch Penguin dude....that blows.

Lemartes wrote:

Without naming any names and all I would like to know as a sampling have any of you experienced instances of Monkey Business or rigging games at tournaments or just plain scoring switches to make one player win a tournament despite another player winning all his games.

Yes, many times over. I just deal with the fact that the locals at area tournaments will be favored. I like playing with a handicap.

I have played at RTTs all over the country, and it seems like a lot of them are geared toward the locals winning. I have played in Portland OR., to San Diego Ca, to Chicago Il, to Orlando FL to all points in between.

Darrian13 and I drive down from LA to San Diego to play the locals, and he has alluded to some problems. I brought what I think is one of my best painted army, but received some of the worst paint scores. The last time I was there I played Mech Chaos, and there was so much terrain on the tables, that I literally could not leave my deployment zone without taking a difficult terrain tests. Also the locals where playing footsloggers so to them the terrain was not an issue.

One time I did not like was when I played at Kubla Con in San Francisco. I went 5-0 and I ended up winning and I got out of Dodge with my trophy. But then in the following month they had a re-count and they said that I did not win, and it was an accounting error, and the guy who went 4-0-1 won. I went over the scores, and I did not score the full comp that I should have (it was a fixed comp check boxes), but I did not care.

I was up in Salem OR and I was playing at an RTT with a very strict and detailed comp rules. I had a very comp friendly army (I always bring tame lists to parts unknown) and I was matched up against the guy that said “screw the comp” and brought the hardest army he can make. (Still almost won the game and ended in 2nd place).

But in spite of my problems in San Diego, the guys are great, and I would drive down there anytime for 3 great games. Also the guys in Salem were good guys, and my new home stores in Florida have been mighty hospitable. I took 2nd place in Jacksonville in my first RTT here, and I have some fun games in Orlando last month, and I am looking forward to another RTT in Orlando Saturday at a different store.

It is a shame we all have stories similar to this one.....


Blackmoor wrote

But in spite of my problems in San Diego, the guys are great, and I would drive down there anytime for 3 great games. Also the guys in Salem were good guys, and my new home stores in Florida have been mighty hospitable. I took 2nd place in Jacksonville in my first RTT here, and I have some fun games in Orlando last month, and I am looking forward to another RTT in Orlando Saturday at a different store.

Those sorts of stories are excellent.

A few years ago, I attended an RTT in a smallish shop that had a turn out of about 16 folks. I managed to go 3-0-0 with my DE, which hadn't been so much outstripped by advancing codices by that time.

I ended up losing to a good friend of mine; I came in second. I found out later that his round 2 opponent had actually tabled my friend, but the guy he played had to leave early, and couldn't continue the event. Since my friend's opponent couldn't play in round three, they turned in a score sheet that had my friend being the winner and tabling his opponent. If this little fudge hadn't occurred, I would have won overall, since I was the only player who actually did go 3-0-0.

My worst RTT experience happened about five to six years ago... a shop in another town was holding the event at a hotel so some of us from another store decided to attend. The most coveted award was to be Best General and the head judge made a big show out of the huge purity seal that would be given away for this. This fellow from another country was their hired gun so to speak and was always placed on tables that gave him a huge advantage against us out of towners. One of these games was on an oversized table so that his hammerheads would have the advantage of long range against one of our mates mechanized Space Marine army... also there was little to no cover on the oversized table. Needless to say the Tau player simply sat back with his three Hammerheads and destroyed all the Space Marine player's treads. I got to play the Tau next, having won my first two games by massacres over the locals. The head judge came up to our table and parked himself there for the entire game. The Tau player bent the heck out of the rules and always the head judge would agree. The game was still very close and I somehow managed to squeeze out a minor win. However when I went to look at the listings I saw that I had been given a loss. I asked the head judge what happened and he said that the points had not been added correctly. Oh well... never played there again.

- G

GBF, it sounds like a good way to kill interest in attending thier Tourneys eh?

"I know, I have an itchy nose, I might just scratch it with this chain-saw..."

Another great idea.

I've seen first hand, and heard horror stories of, friends of the event manager winning best painted, best sportsman, best overall, etc.. when clearly they weren't.

My very first rogue trader event was in Toledo, OH at Bashcon several years ago. I took Speed Freeks with me, went undefeated, got nothing but compliments on my conversions and paint scheme, and saw all of my opponents give me perfect sportsmanship scores (they didn't bother to hide it). There were about 105 players in the event, so they got one of their judges to play spoiler and make sure everyone played. Guess who won? He was also running Speed Freeks, but his list hid all his trukk boyz and warboss and such behind 10" long custom buggies he would drive sideways across the table. Another player from my area gave him low sportsmanship scores, but somehow they were perfect at the end of the tournament. ANother player running Nids from my area was set up in a no win scenario to take him out of the running. He knows this because one of his buddies actually heard a couple of locals laughing about it when they thought they were out of earshot.

Being a sucker for punishment, I tried again a couple years later with a friend of mine and the T.O. and head judge showed up late without missions, told each table to pick one out of the main rulebook, and announced the only extra bonus or penalty points would be based on what he thought deserved it. No swiss scoring system was used and all the local winners ended up playing folks with losing records. The out of towners meantime butted heads with one another and took each other out of contention.

Both events were run by the same game store owner, and I have avoided anything his name is on ever since.

I'm going with my buddies up to Pandemonium in Michigan this sunday for an Ard Boyz regional event. Apparently some of the players felt it was unjust for the missions to have been leaked at the last regional qualifiers, so they got GW to throw another one. I am not eligible to play as I have already qualified at a regional, but I'm tagging along to watch for shennanigans. Wish us luck!

I attended a tournament back in August 07 in my local area and i ended up winning the tournament with my DE

there was a ton of monkey business going on

the TO's friend was playing with the TO'S army the TO judged his own army for painting which was of course painted by a "blue table" like company. when asked about it, the TO replied oh its ok i dont like that army i dont play it anyway. He then proceeded to play that army in the local ard boyz event and won with it the next month.

the scores took 45 minutes to post after it was over because i had lost my first game but had scored max on all of the accessory scores sports. painting, comp etc and after 45 minutes i ended up winning by only one point

the scores for painting went to a guy who scored the max of 27 points in our league.. but later when the scores were posted on the web site he only had an 18.. now 6 people will swear in a court of law they saw the 27 which by the rules of the league could not happen

i could go on but, it wouldnt make alot of sense unless you knew the league.
we had guys playing the same army in 4 events and getting 4 different base painitng scores.. needless to say the league went down.. no one would come to play in a rigged league