What the heck is Doug's real name?

At the Chicago regional my opponent and I (both playing Daala squads) were tied with equal victory points at the end of the game.
I "won" the game for moving the highest point character (5pt snowtrooper) closest to map center last round.
He was unaware of that rule for tiebreakers or perhaps he would have won.
He played as skillfully as I did, earned well over 100 victory points and matched me in victory points.
I "won" with 2 points and he "lost" with 0 points. That seems wrong to me.

blast it! someone owes me ALOT of cookies!!!!!

You just proved me right. You can classify "win" with as many qualifiers as you want, but it's still a win.

But - it IS just semantics, and we could go back and forth forever.

And don't get me wrong, I understand the motivation to put that spin on it. We want to encourage players to finish games. I am on board with that. I just think these little semantic twists are not the way to do it.

Whenever I play outside a tournament - I finish the game, regardless of time. Period. It's not practical in a tournament to not have a time limit, and our system (3-2) certainly encourages people to finish games.




This is a drastic oversimplification.

If someone gets a 2pt win, it doesn't automatically mean they were avoiding engagement. Very often I find in my games that my opponent freezes up because they have no good moves (especially based on matchup and if I have set it up well). It IS a goal of mine to give them no good options, but the side effect is frequently that they take longer to make moves. They keep going through options and find nothing good - so they continue looking for other options. Now I have the "high ground", I'm often in gambit, and likely ahead on points as well. I think at this point it is THEIR responsibility to engage ME. It would be silly to let them sit back on their side with all their forces and overextend myself to my disadvantage. I'm the one in gambit. Technically, some judges would call my opponent stalling for this. But as we all know, a judge can't always be right there, and I don't want to be the guy constantly raising my hand to call a judge over. This happens at least to a slight degree VERY FREQUENTLY. A worse version of that is where I am definitely going to win the game, and the opponent runs away and locks doors just to prevent me from getting a 3pt win. Now this is definitely stalling on my opponents part. But once again - it's hard for a judge to call that without them standing right there. This alone has caused me to have 2 point wins. And the thing is - it's simple enough to do the math. Sometimes it doesn't matter.

At GenCon in the championship last year, I had one opponent with a healthy number of commanders, and I killed almost all of his attackers. He then LITERALLY spread his pieces to all 4 corners of the map and locked doors, knowing it would be impossible for me to get them all in time to reach 200. It was a cheap unsportsmanlike move, but rather than sink to his level, I just took the 2 point win knowing it wouldn't matter. I fear the same sort of BS will be multiplied if we add another element (1pt losses). People will try to prevent opponents from getting 1 pt (or allowing them to). Judges will have to be called over to declare if someone deserves a 1 point loss or not.

Is there really that much of a difference between someone who killed 99 points of a team vs 100? That could loom large in a tournament.

TINT gave an extreme scenario, I'll give one too.

What if someone was engaged the entire game vs a rock squad. GOWK is rolling hot and keeps shrugging off the damage. From round 1 the player battling GOWK is attacking and engaged, but he doesn't quite reach 100pts, because GOWK soaked up so much. Zero points for that player.

Another player is playing a sit back and smash team. He sits back while his opponent is earning gambit. The opponent is smart not to overextend and walk into his trap. He knows he's going to lose, but he safely takes pieces here and there. Then at the end of time he makes a big move to get to 100 pts, to at least earn his 1 point.

THIS doesn't seem fair to me.

That's from the losing players point of view - now let's look at the winning players PoV.


Player A is playing Player B. Player B has that GOWK rock squad. Player A outplays his opponent, but GOWK is rolling hot. He engages from round 1, they get 10 rounds in, furiously fighting, but in the end he can't finish GOWK off for the 3pt win. In round 2 player A faces a mirror squad. It's a chess match, where one wrong move on either side means losing. He outplays his opponent, but couldn't get to 200 in time. 2point victory. Then in round 3 he faces someone with triple override, and gets locked out. He doesn't even earn 1 point.

Player B is playing that GOWK squad. He plays reckless and fast. He is not skilled, and he rarely wins, because he just throws his whole squad at the other team. He does enough damage to at least earn 1 point. He earned 1 point vs player A in round 1, and had a similar match in round 2. Then he actually wins one (facing another 2-0), and stomps a noob for 3pts.

So now player B has 5 points and is ranked above player A with 4 points.

This is ludicrous.

Player A is clearly the more skilled player, and beat player B handily in the first round. Player B stomped a noob for the easy 3pt win, and Player A only didn't get a 3pt win vs player B due to Player B's insane luck with SSM saves.

The fact that Player A is 2-1, and BEAT player B, (who is 1-2) . . . and would be ranked below player B is asinine.

If this were a regional, that could mean Player A does NOT make the top 4 and player B makes it.



I for one value skill above speed. I am fine with the system we have because for the most part it breaks ties between players with the same record. Or in extreme cases, it can make someone leapfrog above, which is how it should be.

Let's look at some math:

In our current system, it takes three 2-point wins to equal the same score as two 3-point wins. So if in general if you want to make the top 4 you need to go undefeated and often you STILL have at least one 3point win - OR lose a match and you pretty well need ALL 3 point wins to guarantee yourself a spot in the playoffs. (Obviously this will vary slightly depending on number of players and records/tournament points of other players). This has always seemed appropriate to me. If someone can go undefeated, then they deserve to go to the top 4. If someone loses 1 game but has the rest 3-point victories, they deserve to go to the top 4. Anything less than that, and you risk not making the cut.

If that's not motivation to get 3point wins, I don't know what is.

If you add the 1point element, people with worse records can much more easily leapfrog better players. In my opinion this is not earning your way in.

In competitive tournaments, losing should not be rewarded

I'm sure that is what's happening on average - but the system inherently gives losing players more of a chance. And I inherently don't like that. If it only happens once, that's too much.

No - in this situation he had zero chance of getting to 100.

I have thought about that a lot as 3-2-1 scoring and 10 point gambit are the topics I am most interested in at the moment. The biggest thing I want to point out is that you would also reach 200 points faster if the gambit was raised to 10. Plus having gambit raised would make what ever pieces are getting gambit a "much bigger target". It would encourage much more of the king of the hill style play we used to see in 100 point games. At least that's how I imagine it

When Bev (who run the Hawera) group and I began running Save11 in NZ, we were very clear that engagement was our target. You have to understand that it was less about completing games (we actually had a very poor rate of completed games in the beginning) and more about fun. When you are rolling dice and smashing each other, you smile.

Our first attempt at this was actually massively distant from anything like 3-2-1. We instead scored tournaments by the amount of points you killed. This had nothing to do with wins or losses - just plain violence. We realised the flaw in this system when Aaron/Sharron won a tournament despite going 2-3 (while I was alone at 4-1!) based on the fact that he threw himself headfirst into every engagement. We then looked around at what was happening internationally and looked into the rather new 3-2 system. It certainly was better than the previous one (which we didn't like because of the one-dimensional nature of it) and we started to talk it out. Bev is really key here because he fought for us to adopt a system where people were charging for the middle. His brainchild was the 3-2-1, getting that crucial one point for scoring half the tournament build total. The idea was, as you know, awarding points for a tight tussle where both squads were at each others throats and giving everyone a chance to get something out of the game. Even if the other player is going to win, you can still get a point - never give up!

I'm yet to see, in four years, a situation where someone who doesn't deserve to be in the Top 4 gets there. But, I think there is a subtle difference to our intention, different than what we are reading in this thread. Our goal was not actually about finding Top 4 candidates, but, as I have said, about increasing engagement in the middle. It's easy to look at the system and see simply the scores at the end of Swiss, but there is a change in the attitude of players at every stage of the tournament which, I believe creates a very healthy environment. Every player starts the tournament knowing that gunning for the middle and never giving up is what we base ourselves on, our foundation. That subtle expectation that we have set, allows us to prefer to fight than to run away, but also to seek fun through combat, as the original rules intended. You have to understand, we likely don't get more 3pt wins than any other tournament, but we strive to love the middle of the map. That has an affect on people that play.

One point I'd like to make, which is totally personal and my own philosophy, is 3pts or death. There have been times where I have clearly lost and, with time running down, I could spread my pieces and prevent my opponent from getting that 3pts. It might even help me in the standings come end of swiss... but that is not the way I want to play. My opponent has beaten me and I'm going to honour that and send my commanders to avenge the deaths of their troops. I'm certainly not going to make it easy and I'm not going to hand him my pieces, but I'm not going to deny him his rightful 3pts either.

I don't think I can say one way or the other what system is best, but rather would say that 3-2-1 is the best for us. Kudos in thinking about it!

Tim has some good points about 1 point losses perhaps being a problem. I don't want a unskilled player to be getting ahead of a skilled player like in Tim's scenario. Then again with Gambit higher and the 3-2-1 point system it looks like Rock squads would be more popular.

Thank you for that kezz, sheds some much needed light on the subject.

This was posted in the 10 point gambit thread. I thought if fit this discussion as well. Personally I don't want to enable that type of game to be played, although we will always see some form of that no matter what rules we put into place.

It would seam that here in the states we reward winning no matter what the means; while, as kez has stated, the focus of their system is to encourage engagement and to take the center! I have to say that after reading what kezz has wrote it doesn't just make me like the 3-2-1 system more than the one we have; but it makes me respect the system, the people that put it into place and the emphasis that our fellow mini players have put on their game. What makes a game isn't just the rules and structure, but how the players play it. You guys have a better game than we do.