Organising Handicap Tournament

[Havkai]

Hello, everyone!
I come into idea of making such tournament with bonuses and penalties for players depending on chosen army, using tier lists, tournament results and such. I've heard someone already held such events but couldn't find any info or at least examples. My idea is having, for example, tier B army a clean 2000pts and 0 CP with higher tier losing pts and CPs and lower tier gets more. My goal is to hold a fun tournamentm where players can try playing with handicap and maybe motivate some casual players with more chances with comptetetive armies and lists. But I'd like to hear your opinions and ideas, how fun such event could be?

[sal4m4nd3r]

This is standard at Blood bowl tournaments. The challenge is coming up with tiers. Especially in a game where one faction might have only one competitive build. Like what if Deepkin were placed in tier one, but someone ran a thrall heavy army with allopexes, both of which are sub-optimal. They are “penalized” for bringing a competitive faction, but a sub-optimal build.

its certainly an idea I have given thought to. But creating the tiers is very hard. 

Edited September 18, 2019 by sal4m4nd3r

[Frowny]

sal4m4nd3r has hit the problem on it's head

 

What if you take lists beforehand and then redistribute them all out to the N participants and ask them to rank every list excluding their own from 1 to N in terms of competitiveness. Then use the average ranking to determine your handicap? 

It avoids the deepkin problem mentioned above. Maybe someone with a Warhammer Legends army would finally do well...

[Overread]

There's also the fact that not everyone agrees on what is and isn't balanced within the game. So you might give a higher penalty to a certain build ,but others might greatly disagree with how powerful that build is within the meta. Which is another core aspect, some builds are powerful within specific player environments which feature other standard types of build. 

A player who comes from a region where everyone plays lots of swarming variations of their armies might well consider different lists broken to one who comes from a region where there's a lot more monstrous and elite army variations fielded - even if they both play against similar faction types at both locations. Even the competitive scene  can have its own niche metas which grow up around it. 

 

I think you'd also get a risk that people would try and game the system - a broken list might be broken until you patch it with the handicap, which could in turn mean that a former weaker list might actually start to become more powerful. Granted that's sort of what you're after, but it might also swing things a bit too much. 

 

Finally handicappingon the army not the player sends a subtle message that the players and player skill don't matter and that its all won or lost on the army building stage. Which whilst there IS an element of that it is not the all encompassing truth ;but a handicap on armies based on armies alone could send that  viewpoint to players.

 

At best you might just go a few shades of nuts trying to come up with a fair system. It would be complicated, esp to not punish a whole army for a specific build; plus you'd have to work out hwo "much" of that build would qualify for a handicap. Are Sisters of Slaughter overpowered? Well are they overpowered if the player brings 10 - possibly not. Are they if they bring 90 with Queen support - maybe; but now where is the cutoff point between the 10 and the 90? At what point do you apply the handicap. 

[XReN]

If you want to run a fun event

DO:

Call it a game day or something fluffy and epic
Encourage people to bring fluffy lists, give them minor thematical bonuses
Get prizes for the best theme, best paint, best opponent

DON'T:

Call it a tournament
Have scoring and placings
Have prizes for how many other players each player stomped

EXAMPLE:

We had such event in March, it was called "Reborn of the Horn" (it was a second story-driven event, first was "The Horn of the Storm")
I had FEC list themed around GKoZD and 12 horrors - basicly a knightly spearhead, I had an ability called "Honor to be the tip of the spear" that allowed me to reroll only 1 charge die when I use reroll charges command ability on my GKoZD IF he was first unit to declare a charge in the charge phase.
We also played narrative missions only, some of them were homebrewed by orgs and it was yet the biggest AoS event this year in our city, we even had people visiting it from other cities. 

I firmly believe you will attract much, much more people this way than if you shoot half of players in the leg.