Phazael wrote:Also, a skilled player who has a string of bad luck is going to simply walk off with a loss in a straight W/L format, but he can salvage some points and remain in the hunt in a BP format.
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I am not knocking the W/L format at all, but it requires a lot of extra preperation and enough rounds to match the numbers to work. It also tends to push 90% of the room out of contention in the last round or so, which I am not personally a fan of. I think it works best as an Invitational/Championship format and not as a standard tournament system.

My original question is not which is better - W/D/L or Battle Points. My question is, how complex do battle points have to be? Should I put 3 scoring goals, like Adepticon (weighted) and NOVA (unweighted when used as BPs)? Should I just have one scoring goal and then use Victory Points for tie breakers like the rulebook suggests? Or should I go back to 4th edition missions? Have 5 objectives and each worth 1/5 of Game Points. Most Victory Points + Objective points = battle points.

Other than that ... why is there so much resistance to awarding multiple Best General equivalent awards? Not a challenge, so much as a curiosity. "We" the tournament organizing world seems to consistently try to come up with arcane ways to differentiate winners, none of which adequately address the fact that closer games yield smaller margins of victory, and so qualifying the depth of a win becomes an inherently flawed approach.

In terms of your opinion there - I agree with it. The NOVA missions, for example, live and breathe that notion, and so instead of having a simple scenario where it's win or lose one mission/goal, and if you draw, determine it off VP ... it's tracking and planning for 3 different goals all at once, any one of which can be the backbreaker for the game, and all of which contribute to your final seeding, and thus you are in SOME capacity rewarded for accomplishing more missions more fully.

As far as the flip, thanks? That's the point - margin of victory is SUBJECTIVE because it's not the mission difficulty in play, but the type of opponent you draw, his list, his talents, etc. - but the simple evaluation of being able to pull off the win or not. That's objective. You either won, or you lost. Won barely because you're bad and your opponent was simply worse? Good luck next round. Won huge because you're great and your opponent was good but you were just that awesome? You'll continue to have the chance to prove that. BUT it's far more common that a huge win isn't the measure of a great opponent beating another great opponent ... arguing otherwise seems pointless.

Regardless, therein lies the rub - when you reward best generalship awards to all those who haven't lost, you're avoiding any kind of comparison of individual games - and evaluating margin of victory is a WORSE thing in SMALLER game sets, where a higher margin of variability in match-up is in play, and where you haven't pared it down to the couple of guys who over a dozen games have won each of them by larger margins.

As you've helped me complete by "flipping" it on me - neither a close game nor a lopsided game can be adequately evaluated as a proper indicator of skill, especially over a very small sample set with COMPLETELY random draw for 33% of your games (in this 3 round chatterbox example).

So, in short - we already give out multiple awards at a tournament. Let's take painting as an example - best converted, best painted single mini, best army are common as a trio of awards. So in the OP's 32-man tournament format, why any hesitation toward having multiple awards here? You'll have 4 people undefeated. One will get the Best Overall, theoretically - depending on how heavily you weight competitive score; the other 3 (or 4, if you weight Overall so that 2-1's can win it, or even 1-2's) get a prize and a token of some kind (Trophy, whatever). It's not all that odd-ball, and it remains OBJECTIVE in its evaluation of the caliber of games they had to wade through to stand where they stand.

Just my $.02. Not a $.02 "against battle points," but against taking a dump on people who didn't beat on their opponents badly enough. There's no REASON to, since you're already going to award a single Best Overall that's (in most cases) mostly competitive % anyway. You still HAVE your "best," but you don't punish people based upon their performance in individual games that I think we all agree are full of too many variables to be "definitive" based upon how much they were won or lost by.

Norbu the Destroyer wrote:Hell thats what everyone is clamering for in college football, why not beat them to the punch for major tourneys and within 5 years more people will be watching 40K Adepticon championship finals on TV (or webcast) than the Fiesta Bowl

Norbu the Destroyer wrote:I think the Hobby as a whole has so much potential as people are always looking for something to do. Our hobby is growing as the Adepticon registration is showing. I think the NOVA tourney next summer is having similar success with pre-registration. At what point are these tourneys going to be.........Registration open...........Registration closed.........like a major concert. I am encouraged by these trends and I think Mathais..Milkhalia...and MVBrandt are on the right track to promote diversity, not taking criticism (constructive or not) personally and responding with cooler heads to getting this hobby to more and more people. Now I know its not just you folks, as it takes an entire commmunity to make this trend happen. Its everything from the polarizing figures that write battle reports, have controversial BLOGS, down to the local tourney organizers who donate countless hours of prep time to make an exciting weekend if even for just a handful of people.