Comp is BS. I think it's a terrible idea to punish people for using the armies and units they like. On the other hand, current 40K game balance is a hot mess. For the sake of fairness something has to be done about the dominant armies being played by dominant players so that the guy who really loves his Dark Eldar has an outside shot. The win rates of armies that include Eldar and Tau over ones that don't is pretty disheartening.
Seeding is a pretty good approach to providing decisive tournament results when you can't have the mathematically required number of rounds to pick a true winner. The problem with seeding is that 40K tournaments are so different in terms of terrain and scenarios or just the variance of 40K as a rules system. It's hard to get a very good sense of how good a players is outside of the extremes of the scale. The best players rise to the top, the worst fall to the bottom, but there are lots of good players that can fall in between due to pairing and luck. The solution so far has been to have two day tournaments where the first is essentially a seed for the second. That approach worked pretty well for 5th edition, but with the skill multiplier effect the power armies have this edition, we're seeing second day top brackets looking pretty homogeneous in terms of army selection.
My solution: mirror matches for first round. Pair the first rounds according to primary/ally choice. We get to cut half of the power army players out of contention right off the bat while still rewarding player skill. This cuts the skill multiplier effect of army selection out of the results for the first round. It incentives diversity in codex selection while not penalizing the band wagon jumpers out rite. You're going to lose to a better player with same army eventually in the tournament. Best that it happens earlier before you knock out decent players hamstrung by poor GW balancing.
An interesting starting point... Not sure it will change the eventual winner, but it might make it difficult to have ALL of the top 10 spots be pretty much the same army... And it would certainly make the middle of the field a lot more interesting. I'm a fan of the idea of having a "best 'x' army", but that would only really be practical in the largest events.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, this is not an issue exclusive to GW. I ran PP events a long time ago, and the first Tournament I ran has 12 players, 10 from on faction, 9 with essentially the same army. Mind, PP fixed the issues and things balanced out eventually, but that was one of the silliest events I had ever been involved with...
That's the point really. Not to change the eventual winner, so much as to prevent one unbalanced codex from dominating the entire field.
DeleteAnd there's one big difference with PP, and that is that they will address balance issues in their games in a timely manner. GW has clocked out when it comes to balance so it's all up to the TO to even things out.
That's a very interesting idea....hmm
ReplyDeleteI like this idea. I've long touted the notion of a general's tournament with pre-set army lists, or even a single army for each player to remove the sense of imbalance.
ReplyDeleteI like the concept but does it really make a difference. If you have top level players with top tier lists knock each other out you make it easier in the later rounds for the top list/tier players to win instead of more difficult. Now maybe this is good for the hobby but there is a reason that basketball brackets are the way they are.
ReplyDeleteNow what I am thinking as a "way of comp" is to not allow the FOC to alter even with allies. What do you think? That limits what allies can add. In other words you cannot have 3 hqs unless you have extra HQ's as part of your codex.
I don't think TO the should muck with anything as central as the forece org slot.
DeleteI wouldn't even propose this if game balance wasn't so bad. The top armies in the game are in a different class from the bottom ones. The idea here is to let gaurd or dark Eldar have a shot at the top tables. Something that won't happen if Taudar stomps every other army combination in the first two rounds.
The basket ball analogy falls apart since some armies are like NBA teams and others are high school teams. It requires a whole differ approach to make sure every one has a good time.
Something I disagree with is here is the notion that armies in Warhammer 40k are somehow dramatically imbalanced. They're about as imbalanced as White and Black in Chess and the rest is player skill (or lack thereof) and public perception.
DeleteI would say that is 75% correct. The problem is there are a few units that are currently tournament breaking. And because of that, there are currently several armies that on their own can't deal with the tournament meta. You could probably take 5-6 units out of the game and stabilize things.
DeleteA 40K ban list might have merit from a competitive standpoint. But no one in the community could do that with any kind of accepted authority.
In previous editions I found that the unit-of-the-month typically had a counter to it that simply wasn't well known, and that as it became well known (usually because of so much time between releases) the players adjusted naturally.
DeleteThat was before GW threw the wrench that is flyers into the game. Your army list is pulled in too many directions now. You can't build against horde, mech, MC, flyer, flying MC and tech against the unit-of-the-month all at the same time.
DeleteWe'll have to disagree on that point: I think it's pretty straightforward to 'build against' another army. The thing is that the game is less a rotation of pure strategies now, and more a set of mixed strategies, and in particular about managing the risks associated with sets of strategies rather than just writing stuff off as having hard-counters.
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