Soft-scores in Events

[thediceabide]

Hey everyone, I've heard a lot of chat lately about soft-scores in events. This is something that I really came to miss before ending my 40k career, and still find myself missing in some other games, but I've also heard a lot of chatter about the shortcomings of different methods of tracking. This got me to thinking about how you could get the strengths of soft-scores, while maintaining predictable and measurable results, but still reward things like Best Sport and Best Paint in the subjective manner that they should be...

The solution I've been toying with in my mind combines both scoring rubrics, with the less predictable judged painting and favorite opponents.

Basically, there are a possible 20 points per game round. You can score 0-10 based on the result of the game (the normal major-win being 10), then 5 points come from sportsmanship, and the remaining points are filled by painting. At the end of the tournament, the player would also submit who their favorite opponent was.

Sportsmanship Rubric (1 point per):

• ___ Prepared to start on time

• ___ Prepared for the game (has their supplies, printed list, etc.)

• ___ Knowledgeable of the rules (at least core and their own units)

• ___ Fun to play with

• ___ Played at a reasonable speed

So, the way this would look in a 5-round event: There would be 50 points of Battle Points, 25 points of Sportsmanship, and then Painting would be judged out of a possible 25 points, for a total of 100. The player with the total cumulative score, and at least one favorite opponent vote would be Overall Winner. Best General would be the most Battle Points. Best-paint would be solely determined by judge(s), ideally excluding commissioned armies (going to have to rely on a bit of honesty here). Best Sport would be the player with the most favorite-opponent votes, with a tiebreaker being their sportsmanship score.

This method seems that it would reward painting, without meaning you cannot win a prize if you're a bad painter. It scores Sportsmanship based on an actual number instead of leaving it totally subjective to assigning a value between 1-5.

I'm sure there's an easier way to write this up, but so far I'm pretty happy with it, though I'm totally open to suggestions or other ideas. I don't really run too many events, certainly nothing big, but maybe @Ben, @Dan Heelan, @Terry Pike, or @PhantomPhixer may like the idea.  

[thediceabide]

1 minute ago, Auticus said:

I love soft scores.

But would never implement them anymore after watching them get used and abused for years.  Chipmunking is a thing.  

Good luck!

IDK, after watching 40k at the LVO this year I think that something is necessary... their armies were broadly speaking awful looking. It used to be that they were inspiring, but as time goes on, there is more half-baked proxying (literally saw someone using a gold stormcast army as their space wolves with 0 attempt at conversion), more half-assed conversions (anything with 4-legs is a Thunderwolf, anything tall is an Imperial Knight, anything tall and manga-looking is a Stormsurge), and far fewer actually decent looking, let alone good looking armies.

[Arkiham]

TO's just need to grow some balls and tell people to remove models which don't meet the required standards tbh, if that means forfeiting the game then so be it.

 

just spraying some base coat on a model and splashing 2 other colours and calling it done when the skin, the armour, the weapon, the shaft the belt etc is all the same colour its an obvious poor attempt at putting an army down likely for filth reasons and tbh is disrespectful. they may as well not even bother as they clearly couldn't care.

 

maybe increasing the base amount of colours from 3 to 5 is whats required. its not asking alot. it isnt going to matter to the people who are painting their armies to a good standard but it will affect those looking to "cheat" the system 

[Spiky Norman]

Painting is a skill, and getting good at painting takes a lot of practice and is a hard process for most everyone, so I do not understand why this aspect is called "soft", implying that it is somehow of less worth that the "hard" score. "Hard" scores which also takes practice and can be hard, but has a big added element of luck, which has nothing to do with skill.

[TerrorPenguin]

The most revent episode of the rolling bad podcast has a good discussion on this and is worth a listen.

One point they all agreed on is that we should stop distinguishing between 'hard' and 'soft' scores. It should just be your score. You get this many points for winning games, you get this many points for having a fully painted and based army, but it's all your score.

[deynon]

I refuse such ideas. I òaint my armies, moreover for a TO, but I refuse to make the painting forced and moreover to male it so heavily meaning.

The armies can be bought painted so you don't show simething related to the hobby doing so.

Who judges the painting? I've seen quite a lot of discrimination during painting examination sometimes, some even wanting the highlight painting to give maximum points to a model...

Sportmanship never worked. It's a mocking to say it. It's a sort of arm wrestling usually. It doesn't mean anything. Moreoveer on 3 games TO is simply useless to give a prize.

It's much better to give more important part to someone who modifie and paint their own army  as prizes eventually, but here you have a problem: do you prize the one who have realised the army or the one who bring it? Cause they are not necessarily the same person. And sincerely I value more someone who did itself the work other than someone who have better army but didn't make it.

[RuneBrush]

Completely agree that they shouldn't be classed as hard/soft scores and I think it depends entirely upon the tournament you're attending what points are available to what areas of the hobby.  One of the nice things is that we have many different facets to our hobby - collecting, painting, gaming, modelling, background etc.  However this is actually where some of the issues arise, what I class as "The Hobby" though shared by some people, isn't going to be the same as others.

Personally, I'd like to see tournaments starting to be classified/graded/someotherbetterword.  So when you look at a tournament you can determine if it's appropriate to bring along a hard-meta army or should aim for something a bit more friendly.  Equally if you're OK to bring an army that's got a minimum paintjob or something of Tabletop standard or better.  Before anybody asks - I don't know how you could do this, and it's something all of the TO's would need to chat about in order to create some kind of standard.  It could even allow for players to anonymously mark if they felt their opponent was "taking the micky" and potentially flag up a TO needed to double check the list (although that would add even more burgeon onto the already hard pressed TO)

[Terry Pike]

12 hours ago, thediceabide said:

___ Prepared to start on time

This should just be a thing anyway, you should be stood at the table with all your stuff ready to go a few minutes before the round timer starts.

12 hours ago, thediceabide said:

___ Prepared for the game (has their supplies, printed list, etc.)

Again, this should just be a tournament standard. Not having the correct buff tokens is something I call my opponents out on now. Its really not hard to paint a spare base and write +1 to hit on it.

12 hours ago, thediceabide said:

___ Knowledgeable of the rules (at least core and their own units)

There are like 1000+ warscrolls in the game, how do you define what is knowledgeable of the rules. I know pretty much all the Chaos grand alliance rules and yet still forget some special rules and ranges of some effects.

12 hours ago, thediceabide said:

___ Fun to play with

Everyone will have a different way of scoring this. I could have fun against list X with my list Y because I easily beat it, whereas the next player with list Z could be smashed off in a turn by it, same opponent both times, I may give him the point for this because I had fun taking his models off, the other guy may not give him the point because he didn't even get to play a game. Is this score meant to be aimed at the army or the person pushing it on the table.

12 hours ago, thediceabide said:

___ Played at a reasonable speed

Whats a reasonable speed? I often play with armies where an entire turn can last 5 minutes against opponents that take 40+ minutes for a single turn. They are probably playing at a reasonable speed but they have selected an army that has 100+ models to move and shoot. So do you score them zero because they intentionally took an army that will only get to play 2 turns max, even though they themselves are not slow playing you.

The main issues with soft scores:

• to inconsistent to be fair in scoring
• people don't fill them out properly as they don't like confrontation
• players just give each other max score
• the criteria/questions are often misleading and not filled out correctly
• players can use them to knock down an opponent that may be challenging them for a spot on the podium

[TerrorPenguin]

2 hours ago, Terry Pike said:

This should just be a thing anyway, you should be stood at the table with all your stuff ready to go a few minutes before the round timer starts.

Again, this should just be a tournament standard. Not having the correct buff tokens is something I call my opponents out on now. Its really not hard to paint a spare base and write +1 to hit on it.

There are like 1000+ warscrolls in the game, how do you define what is knowledgeable of the rules. I know pretty much all the Chaos grand alliance rules and yet still forget some special rules and ranges of some effects.

Everyone will have a different way of scoring this. I could have fun against list X with my list Y because I easily beat it, whereas the next player with list Z could be smashed off in a turn by it, same opponent both times, I may give him the point for this because I had fun taking his models off, the other guy may not give him the point because he didn't even get to play a game. Is this score meant to be aimed at the army or the person pushing it on the table.

Whats a reasonable speed? I often play with armies where an entire turn can last 5 minutes against opponents that take 40+ minutes for a single turn. They are probably playing at a reasonable speed but they have selected an army that has 100+ models to move and shoot. So do you score them zero because they intentionally took an army that will only get to play 2 turns max, even though they themselves are not slow playing you.

The main issues with soft scores:

• to inconsistent to be fair in scoring
• people don't fill them out properly as they don't like confrontation
• players just give each other max score
• the criteria/questions are often misleading and not filled out correctly
• players can use them to knock down an opponent that may be challenging them for a spot on the podium

Would you get rid of 'soft scores' altogether? 

Do you think that would affect the tournament scene and people's overall enjoyment of tournaments? 

Personally I'm in favour of a simple favourite game vote and a separate painting competition. I do like the favourite game vote as decider, instead of points killed.

[Sleboda]

I like there being awards for soft score categories, but do not like them factoring in to the championship.

I once took the worst build of a Tomb Kings army I could make to a tournament.  My record was 1-4, but I won the event because I paint well, wrote a cute story, and was a friendly, easygoing opponent.

Also, by playing on the lower tables, I was playing opponents who were not tanking my scores deliberately as a way to keep down the competition. 

Soft scores are a weapon that hyper-competitive jerks can use to give themselves a leg up.

[Jamopower]

I have always liked, and also used in the tournaments I have organized myself, the old grand tournament system where the painting factors for about one win worth of points, and of which 80% is easily attainable by anyone and the favorite game votes would give some minor points that basically factor in for draws. I have also usually included some small extra points for minor things, such as returning the list in time, or for some themed reasons. Also in larger tournaments, the prizes should imo be given for top3 best overall, best painting, best sportsman and best general.

 

I have once also attended a tournament that gave 80 % of the points by painting, so that everyone ranked each army from 1 to the last and then the max points got divided with fixed factor based on those rankings. i.e. the person who was ranked first won the tournament and everyone got to play few games in nice atmosphere with nice armies. It was one of the best tournaments I have attended

[David Griffin]

It all depends on the kind of events you want to run and/or attend. As long as the Sports and Painting scoring systems are clearly outlined in the tournament pack beforehand, players know what they are getting into and can choose whether or not they'd like to attend.

If you have read a tournament pack that rewards painting, then you know going in that well-painted armies are going to have an advantage, and you can plan accordingly. 

I think it's important that we run different kinds of tournaments that incentivize all aspects of the hobby. There's nothing wrong with a tournament that leans on soft scores, and there's equally nothing wrong with running a tournament that focuses purely on the gaming side. It's healthy to have a mixture of both. 

 

[thediceabide]

4 hours ago, Terry Pike said:

This should just be a thing anyway, you should be stood at the table with all your stuff ready to go a few minutes before the round timer starts.

Again, this should just be a tournament standard. Not having the correct buff tokens is something I call my opponents out on now. Its really not hard to paint a spare base and write +1 to hit on it.

There are like 1000+ warscrolls in the game, how do you define what is knowledgeable of the rules. I know pretty much all the Chaos grand alliance rules and yet still forget some special rules and ranges of some effects.

Everyone will have a different way of scoring this. I could have fun against list X with my list Y because I easily beat it, whereas the next player with list Z could be smashed off in a turn by it, same opponent both times, I may give him the point for this because I had fun taking his models off, the other guy may not give him the point because he didn't even get to play a game. Is this score meant to be aimed at the army or the person pushing it on the table.

Whats a reasonable speed? I often play with armies where an entire turn can last 5 minutes against opponents that take 40+ minutes for a single turn. They are probably playing at a reasonable speed but they have selected an army that has 100+ models to move and shoot. So do you score them zero because they intentionally took an army that will only get to play 2 turns max, even though they themselves are not slow playing you.

The main issues with soft scores:

• to inconsistent to be fair in scoring
• people don't fill them out properly as they don't like confrontation
• players just give each other max score
• the criteria/questions are often misleading and not filled out correctly
• players can use them to knock down an opponent that may be challenging them for a spot on the podium

Yup, the fact that most of these "should" always happen, doesn't mean it does always happen. Showing up on time and prepared should happen every game, so for most players, should just be free points, but you and I both know, it doesn't always happen and is annoying when it doesn't. The bigger concept here is to give a simple sportsmanship rubric. For the rules, I suggested only knowing the 4 core pages, plus your own units, a far cry from what we were expected to know in 8th. The last two points are designed to keep subjectivity in, without having the whole thing be entirely subjective. You may be someone who always gives them their opponent 5 points, but if they show up late and don't know their rules, by checking off marks in the rubric, you'll only be giving them 3.

[thediceabide]

1 minute ago, David Griffin said:

I think it's important that we run different kinds of tournaments that incentivize all aspects of the hobby. There's nothing wrong with a tournament that leans on soft scores, and there's equally nothing wrong with running a tournament that focuses purely on the gaming side. It's healthy to have a mixture of both. 

The problem is that here in the US (especially the west coast), people would drink Frontline Gamings bath water... their ITC tournaments "allow" for soft scores, but never use them to determine the winners. You can run events that reward all the aspects of the hobby, but people don't, and that's why the 40k armies at the LVO this year were attorcious. This is worsened by the growing use of tournament software which has no place for soft scores as well.

[David Griffin]

11 minutes ago, thediceabide said:

The problem is that here in the US (especially the west coast), people would drink Frontline Gamings bath water... their ITC tournaments "allow" for soft scores, but never use them to determine the winners. You can run events that reward all the aspects of the hobby, but people don't, and that's why the 40k armies at the LVO this year were attorcious. This is worsened by the growing use of tournament software which has no place for soft scores as well.

At the AoS tournament at LVO, you had to have a best game vote to podium, and players with painting nominations received extra tournament points as well. Seeing that LVO is Frontline Gaming's big event, I think it's safe to say they do support soft scores.

I've run or helped run two ITC events locally in the past month, and both have included a Best Sports and a Best Painted award. I understand what you're saying here, but I'm not sure using tournament software and soft scores are mutually exclusive. I do agree however, that the Best Coast Pairings app in particular could do a better job including options for soft scores and other objectives to make it easier for TOs to implement.

[thediceabide]

1 hour ago, David Griffin said:

At the AoS tournament at LVO, you had to have a best game vote to podium, and players with painting nominations received extra tournament points as well. Seeing that LVO is Frontline Gaming's big event, I think it's safe to say they do support soft scores.

I've run or helped run two ITC events locally in the past month, and both have included a Best Sports and a Best Painted award. I understand what you're saying here, but I'm not sure using tournament software and soft scores are mutually exclusive. I do agree however, that the Best Coast Pairings app in particular could do a better job including options for soft scores and other objectives to make it easier for TOs to implement.

GW ran the event at the LVO, it wasn't run using any form of ITC rules, pairings, scoring, etc... The armies in AoS were decent looking because it was run by GW, not by ITC. Did you get a chance to check out the 40k armies? It was a terrifying example of why soft scores are needed. It's good to hear that some TOs are keeping Sportsmanship and Best Painted (I'm curious how you scored these), but it's definitely not the majority of ITC events, and many TO's just lean on Best Coast to do all the work.

I think the point I was trying to make originally, is that you can have Sportsmanship and Painting count, and have them be based on both quantitative and subjective terms. Using the measurable game results for Best General, subjective for Best Sportsmanship and Best Paint (where measurable scores would be tie-breakers), and a combination of the two for Best Overall. Much of the complaint I've seen around best sports has to do with it being too subjective, or a meaningless "Rate your opponent 0-5" where people just hand out 5's. Similarly, I've seen people who were mind-blowing painters and sculptors lose best painted because the judge just used a rubric to determine who the best painted was, without any attention given to quality.

I'm also in the camp that we shouldn't call them "Soft Scores" anymore, painting is hard.

[amysrevenge]

For sports scoring here are a few things:

• You CAN use sports scoring to pick out the very worst offenders.  There are many ways to do this.  I prefer a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down, followed by TO interview.  I would expect the VAST majority of games to have a thumbs-up, and maybe 1-2 games in an entire weekend to get a thumbs-down.

 

• You CAN use sports scoring to pick out the very best opponents.  There are many ways to do this.  I prefer some variant of Favourite Opponent voting.

 

• You CANNOT use sports scoring to sort the field in the middle.  In a 160-player event, you'll have 3-5 at the bottom, 3-5 at the top, and 150-ish in the middle all more or less indistinguishably adequate.  There are many ways to arbitrarily rank them, but no accurate way.  It is utterly ineffective as an objective tie-breaker - to, for example, determine placing between 57th and 58th place out of 160 - in any meaningful way.

 

You can easily manufacture a scheme that will assign points to players and then have it affect the placement, but you're fooling yourself if you think that it is anything other than arbitrary.

[Gaz Taylor]

I played at Alliance over the weekend which was run by @Ben and 'soft scores' were used to help work out tie breakers. So you got three points for a major victory, 1 point for a minor and 0 for losing. Ben used the most favourite opponent scores to sort out any ties and then Victory points to sort out any ties again. I felt it worked really well.

 

[thediceabide]

1 minute ago, amysrevenge said:

You can easily manufacture a scheme that will assign points to players and then have it affect the placement, but you're fooling yourself if you think that it is anything other than arbitrary.

Obviously I disagree, haha.

I think that Best General should certainly be the player who won the most games, by the most points. But I don't think that the Best Overall should reward only beating your opponents face, but also encompassing the other aspects of the hobby (Sportsmanship and Painting).

Sportsmanship using thumbs-up/down to pick out the worst offenders just doesn't work, I've been playing in ITC events from the beginning, and have never heard of a single time that someone was asked to leave due to being given too many thumbs down, even despite blatant cheating, or threatening violence... All of which should have resulted in immediate elimination, instead they just receive their single thumbs-down and continue to play (and win in one case I remember). Sportsmanship shouldn't be a measure of this, but should reward the fair and generous behavior or treatment of others, especially in a sports contest. Thumbs-up/down is a meaningless form of measurement, just like arbitrarily ranking your opponent on a scale of 0-5 is.

Similarly, ranking your opponents from favorite to least favorite means that if you played against 5 great players, someone is going to get screwed. I think the concept of the single "favorite opponent" vote that they did at the LVO was a good idea, but also meant that sportsmanship, outside of needing a single vote, didn't play into the final rankings.

The complaints many have of Sportsmanship is the subjectivity, so adding a rubric to guide them, followed with the totally subjective "favorite opponent" means that you can place high in the event by being a good sport. Like how having a painting scores with a rubric encourages decent looking armies (3-color minimum is an awful requirement), having sportsmanship with a metric at the very can encourage players to be ready and prepared.

[amysrevenge]

3 minutes ago, thediceabide said:

The complaints many have of Sportsmanship is the subjectivity, so adding a rubric to guide them, followed with the totally subjective "favorite opponent" means that you can place high in the event by being a good sport. Like how having a painting scores with a rubric encourages decent looking armies (3-color minimum is an awful requirement), having sportsmanship with a metric at the very can encourage players to be ready and prepared.

But what kind of good sporting behaviour is both a) easily quantified and b) can separate the 17th best sport from the 63rd best sport in a field of 160?  I mean, the 5 point scale from above should be 5/5 for about 95% of the games at the event - the other 5% will be divided between people not understanding how to vote (or deliberately mis-voting for competitive reasons lol) and flagging proper poor behaviour.  I would expect that 140+ players out of 160 should have a clean sheet from that system, 30 points in 6 games.

 

(As for thumbs-down - I'm not advocating some sort of two-strikes-and-you're-out approach.  I'm advocating a one-strike-and-you-sit-down-with-the-TO approach.  You can't have objective tournament expulsions - it has to be TO discretion.)

[Criti]

A simple 1-5 scale with confrontation and a max spend may fit the bill.  Something like, you only have 12 points to spend in a 3 game environment.  That prevents you form giving out too many max scores.

To prevent min scores comes the confrontation.  3 is the baseline.  If you're scoring someone higher, the game was EXCEPTIONAL in some way.  If you're scoring someone a 5, you practically wish you could carry their babies.  If you score an opponent as a 2, you must justify why to a judge.  If he accepts the reason, the 2 stands.  If he doesn't, the 2 becomes a 3 and you lose a point yourself.

A 1 must be justified to a judge WHILE THE OPPONENT IS PRESENT.  I think it is widely accepted that most low scores come from people trying to hold down the competition.  I doubt they'd have the testicular fortitude to do so if they had to stand in front of their opponent and explain their choice of score.

[Gaz Taylor]

12 minutes ago, thediceabide said:

 

The complaints many have of Sportsmanship is the subjectivity, so adding a rubric to guide them, followed with the totally subjective "favorite opponent" means that you can place high in the event by being a good sport. Like how having a painting scores with a rubric encourages decent looking armies (3-color minimum is an awful requirement), having sportsmanship with a metric at the very can encourage players to be ready and prepared.

 

2 minutes ago, amysrevenge said:

But what kind of good sporting behaviour is both a) easily quantified and b) can separate the 17th best sport from the 63rd best sport in a field of 160?  I mean, the 5 point scale from above should be 5/5 for about 95% of the games at the event - the other 5% will be divided between people not understanding how to vote (or deliberately mis-voting for competitive reasons lol) and flagging proper poor behaviour.  I would expect that 140+ players out of 160 should have a clean sheet from that system, 30 points in 6 games.

But this is why in the UK we tend to have Good Game votes rather than sportsmanship votes. Personally getting a best sportsman vote is probably the most difficult thing to get at an event as it's all down to who you play, how you play, and how the game rolls out. I think it's easier if you specify the voting to be for a Good Game rather than best sportsman because it is so subjective to every one. Even with a list of how to select who should get your vote, different people will interpret in different ways and I think if you need to be very specific then it's missing the point.

[TerrorPenguin]

34 minutes ago, Gaz Taylor said:

I played at Alliance over the weekend which was run by @Ben and 'soft scores' were used to help work out tie breakers. So you got three points for a major victory, 1 point for a minor and 0 for losing. Ben used the most favourite opponent scores to sort out any ties and then Victory points to sort out any ties again. I felt it worked really well.

 

Agree that this worked well! (And no just because I came higher in the table because of it  )

[amysrevenge]

Yeah yeah this sort of thing is fine.  I think trying to dig into it any deeper is... futile.

 

Priorities for sports scoring (my opinion)

1. Discourage the worst behaviour
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3. .
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5. .
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7. Reward the best behaviour
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14. .
15. Occasional tie-breaker
16. .
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18. .
19. .
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23. .
24. .
25. .
26. .
27. .
28. Rank players from best to worst

[thediceabide]

36 minutes ago, Gaz Taylor said:

I played at Alliance over the weekend which was run by @Ben and 'soft scores' were used to help work out tie breakers. So you got three points for a major victory, 1 point for a minor and 0 for losing. Ben used the most favourite opponent scores to sort out any ties and then Victory points to sort out any ties again. I felt it worked really well.

Hmm... I'd love to hear more details of how @Ben handled that.