Saturday, June 22, 2013

Blog Wars 5 - The Aftermath (and 200 followers!)

Before I go any further I wanted to point out that at the start of the year one of my resolutions was to push for 200 followers. Well we're about half way through 2013 and I'm up to 200 today!! I'll have to look through my other resolutions and see how I'm getting on with them! Anyway, a big thanks to everyone who reads, the followers thing means more to me than pageviews so I really appreciate it.

Blog Wars 5 was held at the North West Gaming Centre in Stockport today. We had new record of 30 players all competing for the crown which had been previously controlled by Andy Humphris. I knew we'd be having a new winner today and, without any further beating about the bush, I'm pleased to announce that winner as Franco Marrufo with his dirty, dirty broadside spam Tau and Eldar list. He never really looked in danger of not winning throughout the day but it would've been interesting to see him play Andy for it. Maybe next time eh?

Chris Benstead took second with a Chaos Space Marines army that he hadn't used before the day. Respect to Chris for that but it doesn't say much about the rest of us! In third place was Rob McDougall who beat his good mate Frank Marsh by a single point.

I placed a respectable 6th with my Tau army. I'm pretty pleased with that performance considering I didn't really play the ideal armies for my list. More on my games over the next few days (might be longer since I'm very busy this week). I'll also be posting details of the painting competition shortly it was a close run thing in both the army and special character competitions. For now here's the full rundown of the results which have also been added to the results archive which can be accessed via the tab at the top of the page.


I've had some great feedback from people (thanks for filling in the forms guys) that I'll go into more detail about in a later post (probably when talking about the plans for Blog Wars 6) but for now I want to briefly talk about the scoring system.

I was determined to simplify the scoring system for Blog Wars 5 as previous events have been overcomplicated. As much as I like the 5th edition style VPs (i.e. score based on how many physical points of your enemy army you've destroyed) it doesn't really encourage people to play the mission. Therefore I opted to employ the 6th edition version of VPs and separate people based on how many points they'd given away. I wanted an emphasis on the primary mission so that people would actually focus on it rather than worrying about how much of their opponent's army they'd destroyed.

I'm fairly pleased with how the scoring system worked today. As the tournament organiser it was very simple to enter into the spreadsheet and it seemed like most people scored their games correctly. Not having to add up the old style VPs (I wish they'd call them something different in 6th) meant the results came in a lot quicker. Hopefully everyone playing today found it simple too.

That being said it isn't without it's flaws. We did play Purge The Alien today and if you come up against an army with few points on offer then you're limited in how much you can score even if you table them. Also, as a couple of players found you can win all of your games narrowly and not place very high. I have to say I don't like the idea of you winning all your games but being down the bottom end of the table. Obviously these games were close run things but winning should be rewarded better. It's something I'll think about between now and BW6 and hopefully come up with a solution.

I think some people found it difficult to work out how the placings had been figured out. To clarify it goes:

  1. Total VPs scored (Primary plus Secondary)
  2. Goal Difference (total VPs scored minus total conceded)
  3. Total Primary VPs scored
  4. Total Secondary VPs scored
  5. Total VPs given away

The idea is that it rewards people who push for maximum points from their games whilst trying to prevent their opponent from scoring many. Basically that's the whole idea of the game for me. If that doesn't separate peopel then primary VPs come into effect so that it rewards people who played the mission. Clearly closely fought games don't score highly though and the person winning should be rewarded better. I'll hopefully address this for next time.

The only other issue with the scoring system was that we randomly ended up with The Emperor's Will as the final mission. This is crap as there really aren't many points available and it's easy for the primary points to be 3s or 0s for both sides meaning secondaries determine the winner. One solution that was suggested was to make the objectives worth a lot more points e.g. your home objective is worth 5 pts whilst your opponents objective is worth 10pts if you manage to steal it. This means there's 18 potential points available (3 from secondary) which brings it in line with Crusade with 5 objectives. The other alternative is to fix the missions but I'm not necessarily a fan of that. It needs some thought and any feedback or suggestions are gratefully received.

Right, I'm shattered so that'll do for today. Once again a big thanks to the staff at the NWGC for helping make it such an enjoyable day again. Hopefully see you all again later in the year for BW6!

14 comments:

  1. Congratulations to one and all.. Well done Franco..well done Alex for what I'm sure what a cracking event, And congrats Chris for an excellent placing! Shame it wasn't with the Nids though lol... In the eternal words of the Austrian Oak - "I'll be back!"

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  2. Thank Alex - another awesome tournament! Really please I won 3/3 games, shame I didn't place anywhere near the points though - I agree with you that the points system is nearly perfect, but a few tweaks to reward actually winning would be great, like bonus Primary VP for winning your game or something (especially for me lol)

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    1. I've been looking at the scoring system and I'll be writing a post about it shortly. I've been in a situation where I won all my games but placed low so I know how frustrating it can be. Anyway, more about that soon. Glad you enjoyed it.

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  3. What was Franco's list??

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    1. Basically a crapload of HYMP broadsides with missile drones, commander with marker drones, riptide, some kroot, piranhas, ethereal and some eldar allies including Eldrad. Generally a hell of a lot of firepower with some psychic support.

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  4. Hi Alex,

    Just wanted to say a big thank you for organising another excellent tournament. It seemed to run flawlessly from my viewpoint.

    I was lucky enough to enjoy three brilliant games against Robert Gorst, Nathanial Gibbs and Iain Anderson - Marine players in all three cases. I'd like to say thank you for the games, and sorry about the Vultures - they really are filthy... but I love 'em!

    Also, winning the Eldar codex in the raffle has helped me decide upon my next army. I have set my mind on building an Eldar Exodite army of beast-riders over the next year or so, and it was winning the raffle that finally decided it for me. I guess it was fĂȘted to be in the stars!

    Graham S.

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  5. Also good to see that the next Blog Wars will be brought to us with the number 6 and the colour yellow!

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    1. See what you did there Graham. I'm rapidly running out of colours that actually work. Can't use orange, black or grey as they don't stand out enough on the background!

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  6. Cool. Any photo gallery's from the event ?

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    1. Literally just posted them up - see the latest post.

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  7. Thanks for this great event Alex (though I got pretty much ROFL-stomped...)! :-P

    Also thanks to everyone to bear with me and my terrible english and translation errors (Even though Gary told me otherwise: weapons aren't twin-linked, they are synchronised! It definitly says so in my book!)

    And a big cheer to the folks at the venue, especially that nice girl, that kept endlessly walking around and bringing us our drinks to the table! That was much appreciated, as you could keep concentrated on the games.

    Looking forward to BW6 and seeing you folks again!

    Cheers,
    Hendrik

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  8. Great event again, and a really nice new venue. I got in 3 great games against really great opponents and despite two loses and a very narrow victory, enjoyed every minute of the day. Already looking forward to BW6.

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  9. Sadly I couldn't make this with the change of venue (the increased travelling costs hit at a bad time basically) but I'm hoping to be able to attend BW6, and can make the new venue with a bit more forward planning.

    Just thinking about the problem with tournament points, I think I spotted someone down in 20th place that had won all their games. Wouldn't by far the simplest solution be to keep the exact same list of 5 ranking criteria, but introduce a step 0 - 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss. Now in a short tournament like Blog Wars you'll end up with a lot of people getting the same scores, and that's where the mission points come in to break things up. But at least then the players who win all their games would be in the mix for the top places...

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    1. Glad to hear you're hoping to make BW6.

      There was indeed someone in 20th who won all their games. A few comments after the event made me go back and look at the scores and I've been playing around with different ways of compensating. I'll go into more detail in another post but it's a similar thing to what you suggest.

      The thing is that I do quite like the margin of victory being a big factor. If you make it purely down to W/D/L you make things a bit black and white. Granted that's how it works in sport where a loss is a loss no matter how close it was. Don't want to get too carried away discussing it in comments so I'll save it for the full post.

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