Wargaming ASKEW: Don’t Let the Soft Scores Get You Down
I know you have trained your whole life for these moments. You just cannot get enough of that competitive smell. You know the kind of funk reserved for Moroccan bathrooms and Thai hostels. It is day two of a five game tournament and you wonder to yourself, “Was I fake enough to get the max points on the soft scores”?
If this was Ard’ Boyz you would have already made a few 12 years old cry, but not this tournament. Faced with soft scores (sportsmanship and composition) you have no choice, but to keep everything under control. Keeping the inner douche in check is hard because some judge had a bad day and thinks Eldrad is soooo overpowered.
Why can’t you be yourself? You want to yell at your opponent when they dare make a few good rolls. You just want to quick play– avoiding the inane chit-chat that actually might make you feel guilt for being a tabletop tough guy. You just want your three of the three same units to do there job and have the game over by the end of the deployment phase.
Sadly you’re once mighty Netlist is forced to take things like Swooping Hawks and Ogryns to appease the comp gods. This is the horrible burden every win at all cost player (WAAC) has when soft scores are involved. Why should his list and your list be hampered by soft scores?
Let me tell you why we need these soft scores. Running tournaments for me feeds both my love of math and love for judging the subjective. Making things more complicated is fun for everyone anyway. My goal is never to make a simple tournament, instead one that requires late night trips to Kinkos and have meetings making sure I didn’t miss a broken unit combination by searching forums.
Why would I want to keep track of only battle scores? I mean if all I had to do was sit and count the points of who won and loss it would be pretty dull for everyone. I can also tell players love filling out convoluted score sheets to feed my spread sheet fetish.
If I don’t have these soft scores it means the WAAC player doesn’t spend that extra hour finding the loop holes in my system. Isn’t that what we want: the illusion of a fair system that really doesn’t keep the WAAC player under control.
You know what else is great about my patented soft score system is? It is easy to hide behind the system itself. Instead of confronting a WAAC player and setting them straight, I have the system to take blame away from him (and me) while puting all the responsibility on everyone else.
I am all for judging if I can use my beloved Excel spreadsheet, I rather avoid human contact. Oh, precious Excel spreadsheet how I just love how you get when you sort all those different scores. Not only does my system wash my hands of bad players it also makes sure that his opponents are too scared to speak up.The WAAC player has no problem calling me over to make a ruling, his opponent on the other hand is bound by some weird “benefit of the doubt” notion. Hmm, or is he afraid that if I am called over the WAAC player will give him a zero sportsmanship. I really don’t have time to police games, I am too busy having an intimate conversation with my spreadsheet. Should I either use paint scores or comp scores for tiebreakers?
Another problem with ditching soft scores; you are left with doing the unthinkable– playing by the actual rules. I know I should get an enema for even thinking it. It would require putting my purely subjective and untested system against the professionally play-tested system.Who would want to play with rules they are familiar with, when you can play with rules I made up after a few too many beers? I am glad that no one wants to blame me because often I am the only tournament in town and as long as I put the word tournament in the title, then at least we can all pretend it is competitive.
