ANUCON2010 Results (and feedback)

[MrMoo]

1st Overall - Brodie Middleton
2nd Overall - Tim Neal
3rd Overall - John Lampe
Players' Choice - Alex Moncur
Best General - Michael Watson
Best Sport - Tom Wilson
Best Painting - Luke Jensen
The Max Wallace Award (The Person Who Most Needs New Dice) - Max Weber

Full results table is available here: lnh.id.au/anucon2010results.html

From me the TO's point of view, everything went okay - a couple of very minor hiccups (as expected, since this was the first tournament I ran - I've helped out lots with others before, but this is the first one I've actually run), but no major ones.

If anyone who attended has any feedback, be it good/bad/otherwise, feel free to let me know - if you want to provide feedback anonymously, you can post in this thread without logging in. Please make any criticism constructive though - "blah blah blah sucked because blah blah maybe try blah blah?" is okay, "blah blah blah sucked" isn't.

I should note two things though:
- the painting was of ridiculously high standard, and Brodie, Tim, Alex, and Luke were all contenders for best painting - the fact that the first three happened to win other prizes meant that I was very happy that none of them missed out on being recognised.
- sportsmanship overall was, from what I heard and from the scoring during the tournament, very good - the highest score you could give someone was "you'd buy them a drink if you hadn't spent all your money on warhammer", and if we actually did go down to the pub there'd be a lot of drinks going around. Tom however was the only person to get a perfect sportsmanship score so he very much deserved the prize there.

Cheers, and thanks to all my helpers and everyone who attended the tournament!

Luke

[Yaleling]

Congratulations to all the winners then! And by the sounds of it, to you too for running a good event Luke.

[MrMoo]

Full results table here: lnh.id.au/anucon2010results.html

[winter]

It was an interesing experience and fairly fun. Certainly good to play some armies I've never played before.

My only feedback is (and I know this will be unpopular):

I still think comp is silly.

If you are going to have comp, then don't have player comp.

Comp should be achieving something. That "something" should be definable (otherwise its just a completely subjective exercise which is a bad thing IMO) and should be able to be laid out before the tournament. Ideally players should be able to get feedback on their lists (I know lots of work).

The problem with anything player scored is that there is always something to be gained by marking your opponent lower. Especially as the rounds progress and especially if you lose. It is also again completely subjective and easy to argue in your favour e.g. He took a land raider and I didn't take melta. His army was too strong!

If you must have player comp, it should be done before any games start. It is way too easy for people to go "Man he just tabled me, that gets 0 for comp from me." Simply because they lost. It could have been bad/good rolling or poor tactics or whatever, but its very tempting to just mark the opponent down on comp.

[MrMoo]

I actually don't disagree with you - comp is always hard to mark IMO, especially in a non-subjective fashion - without an unbiased neutral expert regarding every army (which is impossible), there's always something that a comp system won't address.

Pure math comp (completely objective) never works, as there are always methods to getting around it. I used it for the tournament this time around mainly because I didn't have the time to go out and actually fully analyse everyone's lists, and that math comp at least stops (or at the very least penalises at little) some of the armies which I didn't want to appear.

The problem with peer comp before games is that people can come up with combinations which aren't immediately obvious on paper but perform well when played in certain ways on the battlefield. However, then it comes down the endless argument as to whether that's because the army is overpowered, or whether the player is just good, or possibly lucky. Is lash+vindicator overpowered or just good play? Is autocannon-spam guard overpowered or am I just good with deployment and target selection? Are the more recent codexes more powerful in general than older ones?

Frankly, I can't really see any other way of doing it. I'll stick to a mix of math/TO/peer comp, because (the intention is that) the math catches the obvious types of lists I'd like to avoid, the TO comp doesn't take forever (it already took me a while to give you all scores between 0 and 3 points - I can't see rating you on a larger scale than that in any reasonable time) and catches anything the math misses, and peer comp catches the armies which have hidden combos or which is significantly different from the way the TO thinks the list should perform on the tabletop. If I had had more time to mark lists, it would have been a more even split of math/TO/peer comp than it actually was (11/3/6).

Yes, peer comp after the game suffers from the "I can penalise my opponent for beating me" aspect - but so does peer sports. And peer sports was worth a whole lot more than peer comp at ANUCON.

When it comes down to it - comp is there to somewhat level the playing field between more powerful and less powerful armies (both in terms of codexes and unit selection). It will never completely level it, and sometimes it goes too far, but without it, we'll be seeing uber lists dominate over everything else. That's the reason (at least for ANUCON) for comp - so that the themed, more casual, less out-and-out-geared-to-win lists still have a chance to reach the top at the end of the day.

I hope that rant at least partially makes sense in regard to comp, and why it's there, and why it was like it was for ANUCON.

[winter]

I understand the general feeling of what is trying to be achieved out of a comp system, however I generally feel that it isn't defined well enough to ever actually achieve it.

With ANUCON as an example, I don't think that there were any "weak" lists that performed well.

I played the top 3 players and I think they all had hard lists, yet their comp scores were quite high. Compared say to Glen's army (sorry for using you as an example Glen, but I know the army fairly well) which had a shocking comp score and didn't finish in a place commensurate with its comp score.

So what was the goal of Comp and did it really achieve it?

I agree regarding sports, but as I said, it is much harder to argue that the guy was being a <redacted> if he wasn't than it is to just say "Completely subjectively I feel his army was too strong. Funny that he also beat me horribly". Of course you can also come up with sports reasons to mark people down if you like... which unfortunately just strengthens the case that anything peer judged is probably a bad thing for getting fair results.

If you take my case as an example, if I were a horribly cynical bastard the lesson learned from my first tournament would be to mark everyone I draw or lose against as low as I can in both sports and comp without drawing too much fire for marking them low. That is not a desirable outcome and doesn't really make it seem any friendlier a tournament as there is obviously a tension on how you should mark someone to increase your own chances

I wonder if things wouldn't simply turn out better if the TO simply says, "I expect you all to be good sports. If you cheat, you are out."

Anyways, as I said, in general I think comp is silly as it is too nebulous to actually achieve anything and seems to just muddy things up a bit. Also I think the peer based stuff causes some issues.

Overall though, it was still fun

[MrMoo]

Well, glad you still had fun

Glen's list was an anomaly - he did say to me he hadn't read the comp scoring guidelines when he submitted it, and he was ridiculously penalised in the math comp when his list wasn't really bad at all - his really low comp score is an artefact of the 11/3/6 lean towards math comp. (Which is something I would have fixed, had I not been overseas in the month right before the tournament).

I'll say one thing though, ANUCON is (intended to be) a friendly tournament - it's not like a chess tournament, where you just try to beat your opponent, there's also the goal of everyone having a good time. The sports scores and peer comp are (intended) to make that happen - sports so that people aren't being douche bags, and comp so that people can expect a certain "level" of army list. Of course, neither of those are going to be completely solid, and neither will be objective. But I think, as a gamer, as a TO, as a person, that wargaming is not just a competition to see who can beat who, and that's why sports, comp, and painting are part of the scoring for tournaments - and that's why your opponent should have the opportunity to rate you on it - because they have to have a good time as well.

[winter]

Yes I know what the desired outcome is, however I am just pointing out why I don't think that those outcomes are achieved by the implementation.

I'd just mandate the desired behaviour because otherwise its so open to "gaming".

p.s. I'll shut up about it now. I realise my opinion is an unpopular one within the Aussie gaming community.

[MrMoo]

It's fine Michael. Sorry, from your initial posts I thought you weren't clear on why we had comp at all, which is why I harped on about it.

The problem I see with mandating desired behaviour is mainly a matter of enforcement: the TO can't be everywhere at once, so it'd end up being one person's word against another. Also, what happens when the list with the non-obvious abusable combo slips through, or when the TO/panel/whoever judges comp beforehand misses something?

[marklp]

I was only watching this tournament for parts, and only been in two tournaments, one with no comp (pheno) and one with Peer comp at good games...and in general i think its the person your playing that really dictates it...and how gentlemanly they are in general. I have had good times in losses and wins.

To be honest, theres only a few lists that i think make comp needed, and i think, for the most part, in a TO panel judging system, they will be caught out. While some things can slip through, some combinations, i think it generally not enough to move comp drastically.

You could always do pre-tourny comp, but also ask for peer-comp, and then if the peer-comp drastically differs from the pre-tourny comp for someone, then you investigate, if its in the same area as you thought, just use the pre-tourny.

I suppose though it comes to the point of managing the amount of time spent on this.

Also, on math comp, i think it does achieve your goal somewhat at discouraging certain types of armies, so thats good.