Monday, June 6, 2011

6/4/2011 Team Tournament

The team team tournament I ran on Saturday wen off pretty well except for the poor turnout.  We had 4 teams of 4 show up, and fun seemed to be had by all.  Steve's team from Saltire Games won first place.  They beat out Spag's G2D4 team by one point.  I ran the tournament BP style even though I'm a big time w/l evangelist.  I felt since one pair of a team could win and another lose, there was no good way to avoid the tie situation.  This lead to the winning team taking first place even though they where technically beat by the second place team in the first round.  I still think this is a fair situation since every team played every team, and the result came down to Steve's team scoring 6 points against the team that Spag's team only scored 5 against.  It's not a situation where Steve's team only played easy opponents, and Spag's team played only hard ones.

I was disappointed about the low turnout.  We just barley made 4 teams thanks to the second G2D4 team needing to be rebuilt the day before.  There are a few things that I think effected the turnout for this tournament.

Getting yourself to a tournament is easy; getting 4 people to a tournament is hard.  
There are occasionally people who drop out of tournaments at the last minute.  It's difficult to get a team together full of people who you are relatively sure will make it.  Even then emergencies happen and one player has to back out and take his whole team with him.

Advertise, Advertise, Advertise
I thought that we would have no problem getting 6 to 8 teams together from the local hard-core tournament population.  Unfortunately a good group of them couldn't attend, and I did put out advertisement to catch guys from a larger radius. 

The Uber-Team
Word got out that the players that win most of the local tournaments where forming a super-team to compete.  This may have put some people off of the tournament.

A bad case of GW-itis
GW went off and did their usual thing.  You know how I feel about the about the recent GW news(though it looks like there may be some real quality issues with Finecast; hopefully they're just early production problems that will get cleared up in a few months), but I don't doubt that a few local where put off enough by the news to shelve their armies for a few weeks.


If anyone has any comments or criticisms about the format or the way I ran the event, please let me know so that I can address them the next time I run a tournament.

7 comments:

  1. I can only hit about 1 tourney a month. The Kokomo tourney's going to be my tourney this month. (originally I was going to go to the Gateway GT over June 4-5th, but that fell through)

    also, I've never really liked the team format. Personal preference.

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  2. i think the low-turnout was actually a good thing in this case. this meant there was a true round-robin event, so each team ended up fighting each other team.

    i do know several people that chose not to attend because of the third reason, but i think the main reasons were actually the coordination issue, and the fact that every weekend this month and last has had an event, so some people are probably just burned out.

    maybe next time expand this to a 2 day event, but allow teams to have 6 players each so that they can split up the gaming load?

    overall, i like the team events. conceptually i don't, but they usually end up being fun and wacky affairs with, mostly, surprising list compositions. at 1000 points i think more people would usually be able and interested if it was less of a tournament and more of an event.

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  3. I forgot to mention that there's a lot of 40K events going on this summer. I don't want to begrudge other group for running events, but I'm afraid that this summer might burn a lot people out of 40k tournaments.

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  4. I had a great time and I'm pretty sure that all of the other guys on team Steve did as well. We were hoping for a larger turnout but in the end we got the full three games in so its all the same to me. I really like team tournaments just for the fun of playing alongside the armies you're most familiar playing against and building cohesive lists across multiple foc's.

    I liked the personal objectives for each team member. Five objectives standard was good. Thank you for not doing a capture and control! I'm not crazy about quadrants in 1-on-1 games but it worked pretty well as a third objective for the team event. I don't think anyone likes dawn of war. As a fast assault army with mostly troops and a psychopath of an hq I like it better than most but overall, nightfight in the first turn can be a real game changer and i don't know if I would use it for tournaments.

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  5. My issue was primarily with reason #1. 3 out of the 4 of us couldn't make it this past weekend.

    Like Farmpunk, I'm a "1 tournament a month" guy. Perhaps having 2-man teams would make it easier to come up with a team that could commit.

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  6. It was fun. There wasn't any pressure either in this event for me. I really didn't care about winning, but having a great time! That being said, I am still a little pissed about loosing all my puppies on substandard armor saves!!!!!!!!!!! See my tears!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL!! Man but those 12 cookies I ate helped me get past that! And that stupid ruling of having to roll off for the kill point! Really????? LOL. Just kidding...Kind of........ :)

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  7. "I don't think anyone likes dawn of war"

    I'm not a big fan of it either. It, like Kill Points, sticks around because it's in the rule book.

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