Weird tournament / league idea - "Draft"

[andalucien]

Total Pie in the sky here, just thinking out loud.

So, this tournament would occur in two phases.

1) The list building phase.  This would be an interactive "pregame" that would finish up a week or so before any games were played.  More details below.

2) The game playing phase.   Everyone meets up on a Saturday and plays in a 3 game tournament.  From this point forward, it's pretty much a normal tournament, using the lists that were built in phase 1.


So, about the interesting part, phase 1:
Some folks complain about the lack of internal and external balance in codices these days.  And it's not hard to see why, with Tau and Eldar monopolizing the top tables everywhere.  It actually seems like balance is more out of whack now than it ever has been.

So what if we let the free market correct the balance issues? 

Make a finite number of each unit available to be played in the tournament.   Let's say, 6 of each troop, 6 of each dedicated transport, 3 of each other unit in the codex (and maybe only 1 of each special character?)  The available units must be bid on, with points, in order to grab that unit for your army.  Bidding starts at 20% below the codex price for a unit.

So, if you're the ONLY person bringing an army (like sisters of battle), you have no competition and can  get whatever stuff you want for a bargain.

However, if you want to play a popular army with a universally spammed unit (say, Eldar with Wave Serpents), you're going to end up paying an increased price for that unit.  The price of the unit will go up exactly as much as the market will bear.   You might have 3 or 5 people bidding for only 6 wave serpents.

Allow people to switch armies at any time, which automatically retracts any auctions that they are currently winning. 

Pros:
- This plan would directly incentivize people to play with "unusual" armies and units. 
- Rewards creativity.  If you can think of a good way to use a unit that nobody else wants, you get a huge advantage.
- Invalidates all forms of whining about imbalance.
- The list building phase would just be barrels and barrels of fun.  Maybe almost as fun as the game playing phase.  What's everyone's favorite part of a magic draft?  The actual draft.  What's everyone's favorite part of fantasy sports?  Also the draft.

Cons:
- Lots of bookkeeping.  Probably impossible without a well done web program to keep track of it all.
- Might be too weird for folks / hard to understand.
- Lots of gotchas you'd probably have to discover as time goes by and tweak...

[PhoenixFire]

Interesting idea, but i don't see how it would ever work.

What happens when like your example a player with an Eldar army of 5 Wave Serpents and whatever else is "outbid" and can't field those units.

What if that 5 wave serpent army is all he owns for models and CAN'T field anything else, then i guess he just drops out of the tournament?

I can see it having potential in a campaign setting or something but IMO it would never work in a tournament.

[MM3791]

They already do army list comps in Fantasy.. banning special characters, certain magic items, restricting certain units, and giving points bonuses to weaker armies and points penalties to stronger armies. I don't think that will work with 40k, but the thing is now with fast codex releases, the meta game changes faster then ever before. I'm sure in 6 months the meta will shift again, I'm already hearing that White Scar grav bikers are pretty awesome.. I can only imagine what the new nids will get.

[Grand Master Steve]

Army comp used to be a huge thing in 40k back in 3rd ed. In a tourney you were frowned on if you list consisted of less than 50% troop choices. Its engrained into me so when I play I always bring as many troops as i can. One of my first tournaments i used IG had 3 full platoons a command squad, a hell hound and 2 leman russ. People thought the list was a blast specially since back the Hell hounds were....volatile. I would use it as a decoy let em blow it up hoping it would take some with it.

[Sam Butler]

Army comp used to be a huge thing in 40k back in 3rd ed. In a tourney you were frowned on if you list consisted of less than 50% troop choices. Its engrained into me so when I play I always bring as many troops as i can. One of my first tournaments i used IG had 3 full platoons a command squad, a hell hound and 2 leman russ. People thought the list was a blast specially since back the Hell hounds were....volatile. I would use it as a decoy let em blow it up hoping it would take some with it.

it may be we will see a return of comp systems to the mainstream.

that said... in regards to the suicide hellhound   durkka durrka.

[Grand Master Steve]

Army comp used to be a huge thing in 40k back in 3rd ed. In a tourney you were frowned on if you list consisted of less than 50% troop choices. Its engrained into me so when I play I always bring as many troops as i can. One of my first tournaments i used IG had 3 full platoons a command squad, a hell hound and 2 leman russ. People thought the list was a blast specially since back the Hell hounds were....volatile. I would use it as a decoy let em blow it up hoping it would take some with it.

it may be we will see a return of comp systems to the mainstream.

that said... in regards to the suicide hellhound   durkka durrka.

it was a great play 

[MM3791]

We don't need comps to return, players just need to learn how to play their armies. Playing smaller point games is a good way to learn.

[Benjamin]

I'd say this concept is more an auction than it is a draft.

I've considered a strict draft, where there is a pool of units to play, players are assigned an order to pick those units and players compose an army from there. However, the logistics of such an event are a complete nightmare. Far too many rules interactions and questions, totally not worth the effort on a larger scale.

I'll come back with some feedback after I've given this some thought. My immediate concern is for players with limited resources who are outbid on the only models they own. I guess they'd have to overpay for their choices, but if two players are in the same situation, one gets left behind.

[Grimwulfe]

I think we would be better served instead of trying this in a tourny setting sit down as a group with EVERY codex and go through the pain staking task of balancing every book.  This is the only way a comp system will work.

Doing something likr DaBoyz did is NOT the way to go with comp if its done it needs to be done cohesively and not applied with a broad paintbrush but yet a fine detail brush.

[bradpowers]

I dunno, instead of thinking about it as something to balance the game (which is, IMO, inherently unbalanceable*) it could just be a really fun thing to do on a Saturday.  I'd be down for this event.

*When I say inherently unbalanceable, I mean without a computer program that is able to monitor EVERY game, EVERY die roll, and every tactical situation.  Obviously, this isn't feasible for a tabletop game played by many, but it's how the best balanced computer games do it.

[Grimwulfe]

Brad I would have to argue this point.  Fantasy has done it and did it they way that works.  If they can do it there is no reason 40k cant do the same.

[bradpowers]

I've never played fantasy, and so I don't know what you're talking about, but with due respect, I doubt it.  People will balance a game based on perceived imbalance or brokenness, and leave some things that are imbalanced, but not glaringly so, as is.  I think the only fair way to do it is as I mentioned.  As a species, we're not very good at making reasonable, impartial judgements about probabilistic processes (hence the existence of the lottery!). 

Regardless, it's a topic for a different thread.  This one is about an interesting tournament idea, not on whether 40k can be balanced.

[andalucien]

One of the complaints I often hear about comp systems is that people disagree with the actual values assigned in the comp system.  All the people that own wave serpents are like, "Screw you, tourney organizer!  Who are you to say how much a wave serpent should cost?"    So an interesting benefit to the "auction draft" as opposed to normal comp is that there would be nobody to blame for the price of your units, and not even a way to say that they are incorrectly priced.   They are priced according to what people are willing to pay for them.

So - a couple people have brought up the biggest issue for this type of event... people tend to have only very limited selections of models because the models are very expensive and time consuming to paint.   So it's not like many people will do the auction, fist pump over having stolen some Wraiths for cheap or something, and then go out and buy some before the tournament games... 

This could be helped a bit... instead of a true hard scarcity (limiting total # of Wave Serpents Available) it could be an artificial elastic scarcity... like you would be guaranteed to be able to run any number of any model, but the price of that model would go up depending on how many other people were running the same unit.   This would also solve another problem I thought of, where if you're free to switch armies during the draft, there would be no reason not to jump around running the price up on auctions for units that you have no intention to actually play. 

Again, DEFINITELY needing a web application that everyone logs into and uses over the draft period of a week or so (like an online auction draft software for fantasy sports) to keep track of everything, it could never work otherwise.

The actual game rules issues wouldn't be a problem... the auction/draft wouldn't have any effect on gameplay, only on list selection.  In the end, all armies would still have to be legal 40k armies - only difference would be the base points cost for units during the build process.   Just don't have old style victory points as a part of any of the missions

Reason I'm particularly interested in this is that I've been looking for a way to write a web app that interacted with 40k in some way.   I sat on my ass for too long and Torrent of Fire happened, and seems to have snapped up the only real business opportunity, so it's down to "fun toys" like maybe this could be....


 

[bradpowers]

I think that if you eliminate codex hopping from the concept (which seems to me will be rife with abuse) and you limit the number of players (otherwise, yeah, this'll be a beast) it's tenable.  I'd be willing to give it a try in the next couple of weeks...  Who's in?  Frankly, if we sit down as a group, decide on some rules that are fair, and go from there, I think it'd be a hoot.

[robpro]

I see this working better with a kill team type format. You get 100 bid points to put your 200 point kill team together and we auction off units. You could end up with less than 200 points if you burn it all trying to get 4 wraiths, you could have more than 200 if you pick things up cheap (which would give you a sideboard to swap things out between games, not extras in each). You would still want to do this a week before since it would likely take 2-3 hours to resolve the bidding.