2012 Highlander Tournament

We had a strong turnout with 12 signed up, but unfortunately papa Nurgle visited Beau's household the week before the event and he was unable to attend come Sunday. Therefore we had 11 players and had to have a bye. It was great to see some new faces, and there were some very nice-looking armies on display. I was pretty happy with how the 3 missions turned out. They were sort of inspired by the Nova Open missions with a mixture of objectives/kill points and primary and secondary objectives. Despite all this we managed a draw on the top table in round 3! Painting was judged on a simple 10 question rubric. For each checkmark (for example: Was extra effort put into the HQ? Were the bases done? Etc.) the player got 2 tournament points. Each player's choice vote that player received also added one to the paint score for a theoretical maximum of 23. Sportsmanship was broken down into 10 checked boxes over 3 rounds for a maximum possible of 30. Here I used the player's choice votes as a tiebreaker only. Battle points capped at a max of 20 each round so the maximum possible score attainable was 113 (60+23+30). Dom submitted his list late and did not supply a list (or a codex!) of his own so he was penalized 2 tournament points. Gavin did not supply a list so was penalized a single point. The scores were as follows:

--------------Round1--------Round2--------Round3--------Paint--------Sport---------Total
1. Ben 20/ 19/ 8/ 20/ 28/ 95
2. Jesse 20/ 20/ 8/ 17/ 30/ 95
3. Mark 19/ 20/ 3/ 17/ 30/ 89
4. Mike B. 19/ 3/ 19/ 16/ 29/ 86
5. James 4/ 15/ 18/ 18/ 30/ 85
6. Scott 18/ 3/ 19/ 8/ 29/ 77
7. Gavin 7/ 6/ 19/ 12/ 30 (-1)/ 73
8. Matt 15/ 3/ 18/ 7/ 30/ 73
9. Haydon 3/ 13/ 4/ 16/ 30/ 66
10. Mike A. 3/ 18/ 3/ 6/ 29/ 59
11. Dom.0 4/ 7/ 3/ 4/ 8 (-2)/ 24

The two ties for 1/2 and 7/8 were broken by a single player's choice vote. It literally could not have been any closer! Well done to Ben our overall champ! Jesse also showed extremely well with second place and a very popular army (he received 3 votes for "coolest army"!). James took down best painted with his sexy Grey Knights, and Haydon won best sportsman by virtue of 2 player's choice votes. There were also a couple door prizes that went to Mike A. and Gavin. Special thanks to Matt who volunteered to take the bye in round 3. Congratulations to all of the winners and I look forward to crushing you all in the next league!

This forum won't recognize spaces so I seperated each number by slashes. That's the best this un-tech-savvy dinosaur can do...

Awesome Tourney Tim, had a blast. Scares me to know what Ben will do with that trophy before he goes to sleep tonight... lol

Glad you enjoyed it, it was a pleasure to run. There were very few issues all day and the games seemed to go pretty smoothly. I also wanted to thank Mark for helping me set up the tables on Saturday!

Next time. I never did see the trophy. Anyone have a pic of it?

ROFLMAO:)

I liked the format. makes you think a little more outside the box for list building.

The nova style scenarios were good. I'm not certain about the 7 objectives mission, Though i guess it pays to invest in troops.

giving BP's for full force org chart is lame though! pfft, who uses fast attack selections?

Best sportsmanship question evah "did your opponent whine or gloat? yes/no"

Rhaevyn wrote:Best sportsmanship question evah "did your opponent whine or gloat? yes/no"

lol, nice. me and beau re-worked his score sheets a bit for the next tournament he does, and i think i re-worded one of the questions closer to something along those lines. looking at the new sheets, i don't 'think' people with get a total 10/10 every match, if the person checking the list off actually reads and thinks about the question first rather than just going 'check, check, check'. there's one for sure that now that i re-worded it, i think people might not check it off every time;
"did you feel your opponent made a Fluff/Themed list for their codex, instead of just a Power Gamer list meant to do well?"
in a way, that's more of a bonus point on your sportsmanship score for not focusing on making your list an uber one that should win most or all of the time, but one that would be cool to see on the table and gain your opponent's approval.

I like the sense of that, but it might give someone an excuse to dock a point if they feel their opponents list thumped 'em too badly, even though it was a good game overall.

I think using the "favorite opponent" question as a tie-breaker makes the most sense.

Mark: yes it kinda does, but A) there are plenty of other places on Sportsmanship you can be sandbagged and B) I don't think anyone here is that big of an ass. (I could be wrong). I think the important thing is everyone scoring it on the same level.

I'm not a fan of being able to dock people for my perceived notion of cheese or power gaming. Its a tournament, and its a wargame. I dont want folks to go easy on me, or to Nerf their lists just to mollify me so that i'll give them a better comp score. or Worse, having my opponent dock me points because the army i placed on the table did not match with their notion of what my Fluff should be. Especially as GW seems to Retcon their own fluff at will.


Have your way with me, smile while you do it. Next time i will be better prepared.

Unfortunately the nature of the game means a large investment of time. so if you get beat up, you feel sore about it, and you usually cant just have another game. in other games you just adjust, move on, and adapt. do a best two out of three, three out of five, etc If the game were able to be sped up by half, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the crying about cheese and power gaming would cease to exist.

Did Dom seriously only get 8 points for sportsmanship? I usually get the worst score on that one.

Late list, no physical list, no army book. not wyswig. no measuring, not painted, could not answer questions about army if asked.

hard to get all those check marks if its non-existant.

Yeah, Dom.0 has a long way to go in making his games enjoyable for his opponents. Hence the sportsmanship score. He was on time for all three of his games, so that accounted for 3 of those 8 points. As for the fluff thing, IMHO that is a very subjective sort of question to have on a response form. One person might think an army is fluffy and another may not. It's a tournament, bring what you think will win games. That's what I'm doing and that's what I want my opponents to do. I took a "fun" space marine list (with a whirlwind!) down to Regina for a pickup game with one of the locals and he brought Grey Knights. He tabled me in just over an hour. Wasn't much fun for anyone. Lesson learned.

I think that's what the issue is. If someone brings a fluffy SW list, they are not going to enjoy their game vs SW Razorspam (and vice versa most likely). That said some fluffy lists (Deathwing springs to mind, Steel Legion) are completely viable in a tournament, and can easily fall into both catagories.

Maybe "Was your opponents list fun to play against?" or something along those lines.

Razorspam and leafblower are two armies that get trotted out a lot in these examples but really, nobody locally has the models to make anything resembling either of those armies. I don't think it's something we really need to be concerned about. The closest to a tournament calibre list that can be produced locally would likely be Mike V's Dark Eldar. Although DE made their splash on the tournament scene before GK came out. It's still a tough list, but DE certainly have their vulnerabilities. Mike doesn't play in a lot of tournaments anyhow. Some (or most) of the lists that we might think are "good" locally would be laughed off the table at major 40K events. Just sayin' is all. I think we need to give this whole fluff versus cheese thing a rest.

I throw the name out there because most ppl know them and it gets the point across.

I have to agree though, its a moot point. Noone is bringing broken lists, and people are having fun, so it's not a real problem at all.

just ran accross this point @ whiskey and 40k about nova scoring, i thought it was relavant.

linky http://whiskey40k.blogspot.com/2012/02/changes-to-nova-scoring-formatting-for.html

We used sportsmanship as a 33% component of Best Overall in the first formal year of the NOVA, and the net result of that usage was ... sub-ideal. The SCORING approach was actually well received (ranking opponents), but having such an impact on who won the event from extreme subjective evaluation of potentially-sandy-because-they-lost-or-simply-don't-enjoy-the-hobby-the-same-way opponents is the antithesis of an event that encourages comradeship and mutual understanding.

Rambling aside, we use sportsmanship at the NOVA, both in terms of awarding a Best Sportsmanship award with equivalent prize value to the other top awards, and in terms of regulating extremely poor sportsmanship. People who incur repeat negatives in the sportsmanship department risk their ability to win ANYTHING - Best Overall, Best General, whatever - without placing 33% (or any %) of someone's final score in the hands of someone who played them.

Using sportsmanship as a component of the score would of course not be as much of a problem if not for players who treat it as a form of "comp" scoring; we've all seen them, and they're unfortunately one of the worst parts of our hobby: the guys and gals who will look at someone's list and downgrade them on sports b/c they think the list is "cheesy" or overpowered, regardless of whether their opponent treated them with respect and gave their best effort at sportsmanlike behavior. That kind of judgmental approach toward peers who are enjoying the game their own way within the rules is something we want to avoid/suppress, and so we want to avoid empowering someone to apply that judgment to someone's material score.

Very insightful and well-said. I agree with everything quoted there.