Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that a tie resulting in 50-50 was bad. I meant good.
I think the idea is that Matt is talking about is this.
It is reasonable to assume that at least one of my games at a tournament will be harder due to a bad matchup or player skill. If I have taken the time to build a well balanced list that can reasonably compete for most/all mission types and I fight this bad matchup/equal opponent to a draw. Should we not both "screw" each other, based solely on which round we play?
I personally am a big fan of "massacre" scoring, where If you win big you get 100% of the points (but this should be very difficult to achieve). Likewise, if it is a narrow win/loss or a draw, you should get 45%-55% of the availible points.
There shouldn't be a situation where a draw results in both players getting 20-25% of availible points, for a number of reasons.
1) the round the result happened in shouldn't determine the amount of points you get. A draw in RND 1, should net you the same amount of points as a draw in RND 3.
2) Leaving points on the table like that more likely results in both players/teams getting a LOSS instead of a draw, which is what really happened.
3) This now leaves BOTH teams having an extremely hard time placing, where having 2 wins and 1 draw in a 3 round event should put you right in contention for 2nd-4th.
I get your point about separating the field, but there are other ways to do it.
I (of course) highly recommend the way we did it at templecon. (ETC) style. You have 2 mission "objectives" One is primary, one is secondary. Primary is worth more, secondary is worth less. Then you also have a sliding scale VP table. I found that the scores moved around quite a lot.