It is time to give the power to the players? Come see what may be a great way to ‘fix’ a lot of what ails 40k tournaments.
I think we can all agree that the golden days of Warhammer tournaments are behind us, however there is still hope for both competitive and casual players. Checkout our ideas for a comp system that rewards personable players and penalizes the WAAC types.
Back in the day, you could not win a 40k major tournament without having a painted (and quite possibly converted) army. These days doing actual hobbying on your army seems to be just a formality on the road to victory, and personally that makes me sad.
Bringing Hobby Back
I feel like this isn’t Magic Cards or X-wing folks, we’re not just buying what we need to play with. We are part of what may be one of the most awesome niche hobbies out there, Tabletop Wargaming. As such I feel like as competitors we should not only put some hobby love into our armies, but also perhaps “play with our opponents” instead of “against them”.
No one wants to play against “that guy”, so in short just don’t be that guy to start with. Put some time into hobbying your army, perhaps make a creative yet competitive list that encourages interactive play. Sometimes meeting your opponent halfway goes miles to making a new friend and game you can remember for years.
Da Comp
We talked on the podcast the other day about a comp system that gives the players the power to police themselves, while solving the past issues of “soft scores”, and awkward zeros for sportsmanship.
Our idea is just to let players rate all of their opponents by favorite to least favorite on a scale of 1-5 for example if the event was a 5 round tournament. Then the scores are averaged out and multiplied out into everyone’s overall score. So a fun player with a fun list, or just by being super nice and personable, may get 25 extra points and a “free” extra win points wise by having all his opponents vote him the best they played.
Conversely a player was a complete B-hole, or brought a WAAC list and just went though the motions of playing, well then there is a good chance he’ll get 5 sub-par comp scores from his opponents. Sure its a completely arbitrary system, but think about it, the scores should average out over the course of the event. If you have a random bad game and your generally a fun guy with a cool army OR even a fun person with a tough army, your score should bounce back to the mid range of 20-25 when the rest of your opponents rate you well.
If you’re not a fun person, and none of your opponents enjoyed playing you (for whatever reason) you could find your self a game down off the lead points wise if you’re not careful.
Best of all perhaps is there is real way to have collusion on scoring. There would be only 5 spots – someone has to be the best, and someone has the be the worse…. that’s just the way it is.
I think this would fix a lot of what ails the 40k tournament scene, and it’s based on the social contract we talk so much about on the Long War show.
What say ye? Time to give the power to the people?
Make Hobbying more enjoyable, download a free audio book from AUDIBLE on us!
Will Comp Scores Fix 40K? – Long War Episode 12
About the Author: Rob Baer
Rob Baer
Job Title: Founder, Publisher, & Managing Editor
Founded Spikey Bits In 2009
Socials: Rob Baer on Facebook and @catdaddymbg on X
Bio: Virginia restless, miniature painter & cat dad. He blames LEGOs for all this, as there was something about those little-colored blocks that started it all. Spikey Bits started with Rob trying to stay motivated to hobby on his backlog of projects and share his knowledge with others during the early blogging era.
Scale model hobbyist in the 80s, miniature wargamer, and trading card player ever since. He’s played every edition of Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy since 5th Edition, but Titans of all sizes will always be his favorite! It’s even rumored that his hobby vault rivals the Solemnance Galleries, containing rulebooks filled with lore from editions long past, ancient packs of black-bordered Magic Cards, and minatures made of both pewter and resin.
