Pimpcron: Making Tournaments Fair
As always, Pimpcron has the answers to your problems.
Good morning people! Your teen heart-throb, Pimpcron is here to make the perfect tournament match up system. As you may know, I own Shorehammer which is a wargaming convention that just happened. When you start to think about fairness in match ups, it can be mind boggling. There really is no such thing as a fair matchup because of all of the different factors.
Games Aren’t Fair
If you only take the players into consideration, there are so many different factors to consider when pondering fairness. One of the players is bound to be better at strategy than the other one, making the game unfair. It’s possible that they are naturally better than their opponent, just a result of genetics. Maybe one of them was raised by parents that were mathematicians or world-class chess players? It’s possible that one of the players practices really hard for tournaments while the other doesn’t. Everything from the schools they were educated in, to the region they were raised in, to what they do in their spare time could contribute to their ability to do well in strategy.
What about your diet? One of the players may have done some heavy drugs or drinking in their life while the other is as pure as the driven snow? What if one of the players is going through a bout of depression, which would certainly affect their tactical ability and skills. Another scenario is that one player has been playing this army for years while the other just started their army a week ago. As you can see, when it comes to players, there are no fair matchups. Natural skill, learned skill, practice, experience and lifestyle can greatly affect their ability.
Armies Aren’t Balanced
What about all these crazy rules, models, stratagems, and force multipliers in this game? Some armies simply don’t shoot at all, while other can’t handle any close combat action. Many have lots of psychic powers while others don’t do psychics at all. Still more armies have lots of invulnerable saves while some dish out mortal wounds like Halloween candy. When you throw in the fact that the players may or may not be taking full advantage of their army’s abilities, there can be a huge power disparity between the two.
“Pssst. What’s the FAQ’d point value of a Warscythe? I didn’t study.”
I know that tournament matching apps attempt to fix this as best they can by having players create profiles that stay with them throughout different events, so that organizers can try to match up equal players from the start. But isn’t that unfair in its own way? The whole point behind a tournament is to attempt to find the “best” player. But if you start the best players against the best players, that gives them a worse (unfair) chance to do well because you are making it harder on them to win. As you can see, these attempted solutions don’t solve much at all. That’s where I come in!
Pimpcron Figured It Out
So given all of these variables and disparities between armies and players, a new approach needs to be taken. In my new system of tournament matchups, I will start the tournament the day before. I am putting each player under a battery of tests that will help gauge where they are mentally. I will have a team of psychologists put my players under several tests that will help uncover exactly how prepared for this event they are. Did they have past trauma that may increase their tendency to make bad choices? What does this ink blot look like? Do they hate their mother?
Next we make each player create a portfolio of what kind of games they have played in the past with a rating of how well they did at each. These will need to verified by references, of course; we can’t just take their word for it. We will need access to any relevant passwords and accounts if any of it was online.
(Sigh) “For the last time! I played Guard before it was good! Am I being detained?”
But We Knew We Could Make It More Fair
After that we will run criminal background checks to see if any of their convictions were deemed to be caused by poor judgement. This will be followed by short phone calls to as many of their past teachers as we can contact, to try and establish a pattern of learning. When all of this is over, players will roll two D6’s as many times as possible in the span of an hour to establish a luck rating. This of course will weight heavily into our overall scores. Finally, we assess each of their lists and expert Warhammer players will decide what kind of Power Level they are working with compared to all others. We are investing millions of dollars in this new system to handle the calculations. When it is all said and done, I feel like our players will finally have a perfectly fair chance of winning because we have looked at them from every angle. Oh, I forgot to mention the very in-depth physical we will administer to them as one of our qualifying tests. We truly will know them from every angle. We are currently working with insurance companies to see if they will cover this procedure.
Any other ideas to make this utterly fair?
Pimpcron’s Warhammer Convention
Or contact me at [email protected] for the latest rules if you don’t do the Facebooks.
