Best Overall and WarZone Events
Since Warzone: Atlanta’s inception in 2015, WarZone Events has always wanted the focus of the event to include every aspect of the Warhammer 40k hobby. There are events where you can win the whole event by making the best strategic decisions and having favorable matchups as you play through your rounds but we wanted WarZone Events to include that and more.
Why bother?
That player may have made the best decisions, built the best list, and faced favorable matchups but what did their army look like? Airbrushed gradients of a single color? Primer plus random bits painted random colors to meet a “3 color minimum”? How were they as an opponent? Did they argue every other interaction? Hide dice rolls behind buildings? Belittle their opponents? It’s not to say that every person who wins an event did any of these things but we’ve all seen it happen to one degree or another.
We wanted to create a way that rewarded a player for embracing the game as whole and we have worked every year to nail down a system that quantifies what we consider to be the three main factors of which each have their own trophies: Battle, Paint, and Sportsmanship.
Battle has always been the easiest factor to quantify.
Whether you go off of a Swiss score, battle points, win path, or opponent win percentage the data is readily available to evaluate and determine your Best General.
Paint can be a bit of a struggle.
You wouldn’t think so but creating a rubric that people can understand your expectations and then using that rubric to score each individual in a 100+ person event can be difficult to convey. It only becomes more difficult to score with limited man power without someone feeling like they deserved a higher score or a box ticked that wasn’t ticked. In the past several years WZ has moved to more of a guidelines approach rather than a rubric to ease some of the pressure off of both players and staff.
What does this mean for judging a player’s army? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The judges involved know what qualifies an army to be Battle Ready or Parade Ready and ultimately they will come to a consensus of who deserves to be on the Judge’s Podium which is where the top 10% Parade Ready armies will be evaluated for what they have accomplished and sometimes, for what they have not.
Sportsmanship has always been the most difficult factor to quantify.
A player cannot judge themselves of good or bad behavior so it must be up to the opponent to judge if they believe their opponent behaved in a sportsmanlike way or not. This means that a player’s Sportsmanship score must be dependent on the disposition/bias/energy level/memory of their opponent each round. This does leave the door open for the players who will tank their opponent’s score to troll or to keep them out of Imperial Envoy (Best Sport) or for Best Overall and the opponents who will simply give the highest marks to each player they face. We believe that players who are on either side of that are the miniority.
So what is an Organizer supposed to do? Sportsmanship is the most important factor to a successful event and a successful community so it must be quantified and rewarded somehow. In the past WarZone Events and its predecessor have implemented questionnaires that would be filled out by each opponent after every round. This adds some work to the players at the end of a round where they are already looking to move to their next table and next opponent. It also creates an incredible amount of bookkeeping for the Organizers to not only keep track of the scores that have been submitted but also for the scores that haven’t been.
WZ Events has also tried the Best Opponent approach where at the end of each day players write down who of their opponents that day was their favorite and players were scored by how many votes they received. This is less work on the players and less work on the Organizers. The downfall of this approach is that many players don’t remember their opponents past the last game they just played! An opponent truly had to stand out in order to receive multiple votes in a day which occurred each year but how many players were shorted a vote simply because their opponent couldn’t remember their name?
For now, WarZone Events encourages its Organizers to use an End of Game Questionnaire that we hope will be minimal effort for all parties and more accurately find the players who truly embody the Spirit of the Game.
Math is the best part at the end.
Three factors: Battle, Paint, Sportsmanship. Each held in equal regard for Best Overall so each factor is 33% of your overall score. How does this break down?
Battle
Let’s say you have 5 rounds. Each win earns you 6.6 points. Each Tie earns you 3.3 points. Each Loss earns you 0 points. Maximum score if you win all 5 games is 33 points.
Paint
Following our current guidelines, Battle Ready earns you 5 points. Parade Ready earns you 15 points and the top 10% of players will receive incrementally more points depending on their placement with the player who wins Best Paint being the only player who wins the maximum 33 points.
Sportsmanship
If 5 rounds are being tracked, maximum points earned from the questionnaire each round is 6.6. 5 questions on the questionnaire, different questions having different values. Maximum points for 5 rounds equals 33 points.
Overall
If a player were to max out these factors it would be 33 plus 33 plus 33. That would take a true renaissance player to achieve but that would give them 99 points. A Battle Ready Player with 4 Wins and 5 average scores in Sportsmanship has 51.4 points. This means excelling in one factor does not mean you are in a good spot for Best Overall!
Conclusion
At Warzone Events our goal is always to provide the best experience with the most transparency. These events are your way to get away from the stressors of life and enjoy a hobby with others who also have a passion for that hobby. We hope that this article helps remove any questions you as a player may have about our process and helps ensure you have a great time at our events.
