Can I just say, I am mildly annoyed... today I went through the competition and went undefeated. I finished on top of the points scoring table with 27 points (out of 36) with 4 wins, 2 draws and zero losses.
Brendan "GardenGnome" Morrison finished 2nd on the table with 26 points and was unlucky given he had one bye and I had beaten him in Game 5.
So, why am I unhappy? Why am I mildly annoyed? Well I was not awarded the trophy, but was awarded second place and Brendan who had only one loss was not awarded second or even third... he didnt finish with a prize at all.
The person who was awarded first place was a player I had drawn against and who had lost the last round to Brendan... yet was given first based on "Sportsmanship Stats".
I wont name the guy, (but you may guess) and he was totally surprised and this was not his doing and mildly embarrassed, but what sort of scoring system does the matches played get disregarded for an arbitrary assessment out of 10 for Sportsmanship? I know many of you may say "well I should have been a better sport" but define what that is? I had 6 great games against 6 good coaches and I rated all of them highly. From what I can tell, there was very little issue with anyone. Sportsmanship was evident throughout the two days.
But apparently, the organisers decided that the scores out of 60 for sportsmanship would be added to the scores out of 36 for actually playing and winning.... I could have done better if I forfeited all my games, but got everyone tea and coffee... oh well.
But onto the results:
Game 4: 1-1 vs Ogres (Casualties 3-0)
Against Steve Thoms and his Ogres, who at this stage were sitting in first spot I was a bit worried. He hired Morg'N'Thorg (sp?) and I in turn hired Grim Ironjaw and basically it became an Ogre vs Dwarf slug fest. He scored halfway through the first half and I was really struggling against his 7 Ogres. Receiving his kickoff, my line just crumpled and he stormed through and got the ball again and I looked like going down 0-2 before half time. But a failed "Go For It" spoiled his massive lead and I was still in with a shot.
Second half, I fared much better. With the ref in my back pocket, I fouled an Ogre out of the game and was able to grind down the field for the tieing score. As an added bonus, I won the casualty count (amazing vs Ogres) and was now on top of the ladder.
Game 5: 2-1 vs Dark Elves (Casualties 2-2)
Against Brendan Morrison's Dark Elves, you know what you're going to get. Brendan likes to cause carnage and his Dark Elf team had come back into contention after an early beating and he made no secret that the only way he knew to win was to take your players out. Again I elected to kick and he promptly scored in 2 turns (as elves do) and I proceeded to take the next 14 turns to grind away.
It was tough and Brendan put up a great fight, but I slowly wore him down and numbers shone in the end. 2-1 and (in my mind) a last round win would seal it for me.
Game 6: 1-0 vs Dwarves (Casualties 1-0)
New player Pete "tribalsinner" Armentsen (sp?) came to me a few weeks ago and asked for some games to help him learn how to play on table top as he had only discovered Blood Bowl in January and apart from on fumbbl, he had never played. He was playing Dwarves and asked me for some tips which I gladly gave.
Now the apprentice had come home to roost so to speak and we squared off in the final game. It was probably the funnest (is that a word) game of the tournament - two Dwarf teams, in a blizzard, struggling to move a ball against each others walls of Longbeards and Troll Slayers...
But eventually, in the 2nd last turn of the match, I finally scored. One nil! Pete deservedly won the encouragement award as a new player and that was probably the only good thing in the presentation ceremony.
Not really, Dan Collins got the wooden spoon which was funny and it was overall a really great tournament for playing in... but the fact that the places won and lost on the game boards were screwed with by a completely senseless system of sportsmanship being more important... not that its unimportant, but really...
/grumble grumble....
6 comments:
I had many issues with the disorganisation of this tournament.
Most of the ones you highlighted are actually a fair ways down my list.
First off:
Byes - why were there byes? I'd have been extremely pissed off if I'd had a bye, probably would have asked for $5 back. I paid to play 6 games. There were definitely enough people wandering about that you could have given one a spare team each game and had no bye.
So then not only is there a bye, but lets also completely screw over the person who had the bye! Lets give them 3.5 pts out of 7, just to make doing well in the tourney that much harder. Lets also give them such a paltry amount of advancement that you put them behind even further after that. Utterly ridiculous!
Again, never any enforcement against slow fucking play! Its no wonder people are still slow as fuck when they continue to get away with it. Its funny how people improved at EucBowl when we forced people to finish.
We're still using the same retarded scoring system that has been promulgated by Babs, that rewards winning far too little in favour of margin and CAS. I was the only one 4/0/0 after day 1, and yet I was coming 4th - how ridiculous is that? Closer games and games where you take more CAS than you dish out are generally harder to win anyways, so why do the other sorts of games need further reward except as a tiebreaker anyways?
I'd like to see a sensible basic scoring system in place before anyone bothers harping on about the injustices of the sports being included.
I don't have as big of an issue with sports being included as you do Clay. Coming from Fantasy, this is standard practice over there, and has lead to a lot of good things in terms of peoples demeanour, which despite the hype, as you yourself found at Cancon, there are still some real saddos around, and WHFB simply doesn't have these twats anymore for this reason. That said, the way they seem to have done it seems completely insane! Normally in WHFB you have about 60% of the overall score being game score, 20% with sports, and 20% painting, with the latter two not having as much scope for difference as the others. This means that though Sports plays a part and means you can't be a dickhead like Mr Handslapper and win, you still need to do very well in your game scores to have a chance.
Last but not least - once again the prizes were not very well spread out. People simply shouldn't be able to win more than one prize. Spread them out - you send more people home happy. This time Dan ended up with both First Overall and BEst Painted. Why not give Best Painted to the next one down? It gives that person a huge shot of encouragement.
I wrote a post on NAF last year where I thought a few things were done poorly. This post was received extremely poorly, and it seems it was pretty much ignored as well. For the vast majority of BB tournaments in Australia, there seems to be no new ideas, no desire to innovate, and no desire to improve. The fact that we actually gave a rats arse and tried a few things is probably what made EucBowl so successful last year, and hopefully will be even more so this year as we try and tinker with it based on the feedback from last year.
As you can probably tell from this rant, there is no way in hell I'll be travelling for Broken Hill for this one next year. I'd much rather organise a bit of an SWL gathering or some such and play in that.
The SWL Tournament.
Hmmmmm.........Why dont we in SWL all discussand come up with a set of tourney rules that the SWL as a whole can vote on and decide on...theres an idea....Then we run those rules at all tournaments SWL'rs run. Something to consider
Chunky: Well said and I agree with all your sentiments. I dont have an issue with sportsmanship either, but rather the obvious weighting it was given.
I appreciate the thought behind the product that Euc Bowl has between you and Doubleskulls and as such whilst you may or may not agree with a method, at least there is an explanation.
I saw little of this yesterday...
BYES: why? I heard a myriad of ideas as to how to prevent them, but nothing was even attempted.
PRIZES: Agree. Also that other people could be in the running for painting if you didnt paint the team. I painted my guys straight up, but resented the guy (Phil?) who claimed he could enter his Lizards despite his boasting he bought them the night before. I personally love my custom board but do find it uncomfortable answering questions about it or taking any kudos for it. Cant believe anyone would be so insensitive to be the opposite.
POINTS SCORING: Agree. CAS's seem very heavily biased. Surely something can be done. Why not 5 for a win, 1 for a loss, +1 for 2 or more TD's, +1 for 2 or more CAS's?
Its 2:30am... why am i up typing this now?
AND ANOTHER THING!
But first I'll adress JK's point.
I wouldn't actually want to standardise the tourneys JK. In fact, technically most of them are somewhat standardised at the moment, and this I think is part of the problem. We want to encourage tournament organisers to try out things they think would be quite cool, they are after all the ones putting in the effort to run it. To be fair, I really don't think Emma would mind if someone offered to step up to the plate and run Leviathan, but at this point it was the best BB tourney run last weekend in NSW. There are only 3 people/groups running tournaments atm. Perhaps we need some people to take the initiative and run some themselves. Then we can vote with our feet.
But for now - more ranting:
I really do hate the draw system they use there. I was in the top 4 pretty much the whole way, yet I only played one of the other 3. I would have appreciated the opportunity to knock you buggers off (or be knocked off) one by one. Instead, by the time I finally got to play one of you, it was in a situation where the scoring system forced me into a win by at least 2 situation despite being the only one with 4 wins at that points. I was never going to win the CAS in that game, and though I had a red hot go at the win by two, in the end the risks I was forced to take didn't pay off, when it was 2-1 my way, partially leading to the draw. Of course had I known exactly how much of a wildcard sports was going to be, I may have just gone for the win and seen if sports would boost me up - and I believe it would have boosted me up to 2nd.
Oops, one more.
The rules displayed for the tourney before the event were pathetic. There was no mention in them of how a bye would be handled, there was the misleading info that stars were not allowed fullstop, there was no information that sports would be incorporated into the mix at all, let alone how it would happen.
A lot of the problems detailed in this post and its comments could have been solved simply by more communication. After all, if we attend the tourney knowing in advance how it is to be run, then at least we know what we're in for.
I like chunky's rants. Specially about getting away from standardisation. There's heaps of scope for creating different styles of tourneys just by modifying the way the thing is run in a couple of small ways. And if done in an environment that kept it as social as possible, it'd keep tabletop bb interesting for a lot longer than otherwise.
Would it work though? Probably not unless whoever was organising it did a great job. People generally like standardisation over creativity. Even if the standardisation sucks. I still like the idea you're thinking though chunks! Dont stop on any account.
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