So I wasn't playing the tournament scene at the time of the dreaded "Swarm hell" and SoS swiss rounds, but I have played quite a lot of tournaments with the MoV system.

As it stands now, it helps the meta with 2-ship builds, in that in a lot of wins you might get away with not losing a single ship if you run expensive, hard to kill ships. If you have a mini-swarm (be it Ties or even Z's), you are guaranteed to lose ships even in the best case scenario wins. This means that a player with more ships is more likely to be left out at some cut, or just have a lower position because of MoV.

Of course in a tournament setting match time and scoring should be taken into consideration, but do you feel like it's nudging players too much in the 2-ship direction? Right now, if you have more ships:

• It takes longer to move ships and choose maneuvers, slowing you down and potentially making your match go to time
• It's easier for someone with more HP to get a 12p advantage and make a run for it in the final minutes
• You get screwed on MoV, even on your best wins.

I've had very few tournaments with cuts to top x, most small and even medium tournaments just use swiss rounds, so every position besides the first and last is always dependent on MoV.

Notice I don't discuss balance of the game, just the effects of tournament conditions on the playing field. These are facts, dispute them if you like. My questions are as follows:

• Do you think the transition from SoS to MoV helped anything, or was the meta going to shift anyway because of wave 4 and the transition wasn't needed?
• Can you think of a better system than MoV or SoS?
• Do you like the fact that MoV is game-dependent, as opposed to SoS, which doesn't care what game you're playing?
• Do you think a return to SoS would change anything?

I'm asking these questions because I find myself more and more thinking about MoV when designing tournament lists, and purely discarding lists where I know I'll lose Ties every match. MoV will decide if you're nr 2 or nr 5 in a pure swiss tournament. A Phantom Decimator might win with 1 HP on the Decimator, while a Tie swarm will have less MoV for losing only one AP.

My main thing with MoV, is that it further rewards players who get matched up with new/inexperienced players in the early rounds. Having a first round easy match win should be reward enough for this kind of matchup luck. Giving them a bunch of tiebreaker points for their "seal clubbing" as well just seems... wrong.

I like it because:

Wide variance. And your in game score is relevant the whole tournament. Downside here is that you can't catch up as easily, but it rewards wins more than SoS

Drop outs. Players will inevitably drop out of tournaments if they aren't performing well, which is incredibly detrimental to your SoS. MoV is immune.

Even if you lose, if you play a good game, you can score enough MoV points to remain relevant.

It's the worst system except for all the others.

I really don't know which I like better. My first tournament I played in was SoS and got screwed with Modified wins and came in 5th even though I went 3 -1 and lost against the guy who went 4 -0. Its super frustrating when you'd think you'd come in at least second when there's 2 people who are 3-0 facing off. On the other hand I came in Second in another (MoV) tournament because I lost my first game and had 3 really good games where I barely lost anything and the players who were fighting for top spots tied their game and had bad MoV. At Nationals I had one of the highest SoS I believe and came in 9th. So I can't say which I like better, I really don't see people taking advantage of the MoV in this area anyways, people seem to play whatever they like. I don't really know what a good way to fix it or improve it is but So far I like MoV better than Swiss.

Here is what I would Recommend:

Here are a couple of fun options we use when not playing FFG tournaments

1) When half the points of your squad is destroyed, each turn you must roll 2d6. On a 10 or more your remain force bugs out and you lose. This simulates real combat situations where morale is a factor, it also encourages people to protect their more expensive ships because when they get destroyed they have to roll

2) We also allow each player to bring 3 obstacles or 1 large ship obstacle. It makes for a more equal placement of obstacles.

As for MOV here is what I think they could do to help it a little: Tournament Points

1) +1 bonus point for destroying over half the points of the enemy forces

-- This will make people turtle a little less, because they may just need to destroy 1 more ship for a bonus point

2) -1 bonus point for not tabling an enemy, this will force people to not give up so easily, and continue playing to score points if they can.

Lastly,

I think each player should bring 3 obstacles , or 1 large ship obstacle. Rather then letting the player with Initiative choose the obstacles. I know I would always bring debris or a large ship, not the regular asteroids. I will gladly fly through debris to take a shot at someone else ship.

Overall MOV is better then it was before, IMO.

a rebel swarm won the first atlanta store championship, so i wouldnt say anything about powerful 2 ship builds becoming the new tourney hotness.

it doesnt matter what you fly, you have to fly it well.

a rebel swarm won the first atlanta store championship, so i wouldnt say anything about powerful 2 ship builds becoming the new tourney hotness.

it doesnt matter what you fly, you have to fly it well.

You seem to be missing the point. I didn't say everybody will fly a 2-ship build, just that there's serious incentive for doing so. And one counter-example does not do much. Hell, it's not even a counter-example, I explicitly said that this discussion isn't relevant for the first/last players in the case where they win all games or lose all games.

I would be much happier if there was some consolation for damaging big ships. Something like, you get 1/2 points if it's lost more than 1/2 it's total hp.

I like it because:

Wide variance. And your in game score is relevant the whole tournament. Downside here is that you can't catch up as easily, but it rewards wins more than SoS

Drop outs. Players will inevitably drop out of tournaments if they aren't performing well, which is incredibly detrimental to your SoS. MoV is immune.

Even if you lose, if you play a good game, you can score enough MoV points to remain relevant.

Good points. I would argue against the last one though, because with SoS you are "assumed" to have played a good game against your opponent if you lost. So if you are beaten by the winner of the tournament, and you only have 1 loss, you have high SoS, but not necessarily the highest. This partly makes sense, partly doesn't, because it's hard to discriminate between the opponents that the winner faced this way. What if you face him in the first round and you would be able to beat everybody else? There has to be a better system than this or MoV...

I would be much happier if there was some consolation for damaging big ships. Something like, you get 1/2 points if it's lost more than 1/2 it's total hp.

Thought about that, but it would be a total nightmare to tally the score at the end of each match. Or would it?

In these lines, I was thinking you could put MoV where you count both the points total for that ship and a fraction corresponding to how much HP is left. So an undamaged Academy Pilot is 24 points, a 1HP Academy is 16 points, something like this. But it gets complicated fast, and would take too long to do in each tournament, wasting playing time.

I don't think so. Players have to do those calculations at the end of the game anyway, and most have printed out lists. You'd just need a ruling about rounding up or down. So if you get a 58pt dash to 2hp you'd still get 29pts for mov. This would be great especially in 60 min matches.

I like MoV better than SoS because of it's fairness. All your matches matter, and drops don't force people down in ranking.

MoV is way better. It can benefit 2 ship builds I guess but usually when you kill 1 of there ships you just took out half of there points. You gotta think about all these things for tournaments. What I bring and how I play definitely changes depending on the match length and what I'm playing against. If it's short rounds I'll most likely bring a 2 ship tanky build that's hard to kill in 60 minutes. If I'm playing against a swarm or a worst a new person playing a swarm since they take longer I'll be more aggressive at dropping a few of there ships fast so that way I gain the advantage and they have to come after me on my terms.

MoV is way better. It can benefit 2 ship builds I guess but usually when you kill 1 of there ships you just took out half of there points. You gotta think about all these things for tournaments. What I bring and how I play definitely changes depending on the match length and what I'm playing against. If it's short rounds I'll most likely bring a 2 ship tanky build that's hard to kill in 60 minutes. If I'm playing against a swarm or a worst a new person playing a swarm since they take longer I'll be more aggressive at dropping a few of there ships fast so that way I gain the advantage and they have to come after me on my terms.

I had that same experience, playing a 2-ship build against a swarm played by a new player. He was taking so long for each turn that I had doubts I'll be able to have a full win.

Sorry but could we speak using real words, for us "uneducated", please. I have been playing this game since it came out and frequenting this and other X-wing forums for over a year, but (even in context) I cannot puzzle out what "SoS" and "MoV" mean

Right now MOV is a disaster in 60min tournaments. For one, with most people running 2-3 ships it's often enough to just kill one. And also ships like Turtle Han are almost unkillable in 60min.

75Min is ok but there's the same basic problem in the current meta.

Sorry but could we speak using real words, for us "uneducated", please. I have been playing this game since it came out and frequenting this and other X-wing forums for over a year, but (even in context) I cannot puzzle out what "SoS" and "MoV" mean

That would be Strength of Schedule and Margin of Victory. The old and current ways of scoring x -wing tournaments.

We are talking about tie-breakers here right?

We use WLD records first and MoV as a tie breaker.

Although our 40k formats use SoS

MoV good SoS very bad

MoV rewards players on their performance not on the performances of the guy they played first who had to leave early or might be new to the game these things are out of ore control and we should not be punished for it. If you want SoS then i think we need player skill levels (somehow) to be matched up better then a random draw. But that sounds to completed I say stick to MoV

Bit of a funny story I was at a 200pt Epic tournament 3 rounds won all came second because of SoS the guy i played first did not win one game. SoS said he was the weakest of my opponents but was the only one to destroy a ship (Chewe) I did not lose a ship the rest of the day.

It’s weird my toughest opponent was my weakest

I think MoV is better but it should be changed to that when you make you list you need to calculate the Points Per HP (PPHP) which is ship value divided by hull&shield (round down). When time is up, you earn points based on the amount of damage you have down to ships that are not destroyed. So if you take down a Fat Han of 60 points to 4 hull (9 damage done), you would still earn 36 points instead of zero.

SoS screws people hard in big events (particularly gencon or FFG worlds when there are lots of other things to do) when someone they beat in the first round or two drops. It's not even uncommon to have multiple opponent's of the same player drop. I've heard of there being as many as 3. Now FFG tried to entice people to not drop by giving out an additional participation card at the end of the tourney at gencon, but still definetly heard more horror stories about that then someone's MoV being "too padded" by easy opponents.

No matter how you slice up the way you run a tournament, you affect the builds that will succeed in it. MOV I think is fine as it is. Sure you get the highest seed for having victories with the largest margin of points. To say someone gets rewarded for facing an easy opponent is a little harsh. They do after all have to face the guys who have the same record as themselves. This will weed out the players who should not be at the top. MOV is simply a tie breaker, the whole system still is governed by the match wins.

No matter how you slice up the way you run a tournament, you affect the builds that will succeed in it. MOV I think is fine as it is. Sure you get the highest seed for having victories with the largest margin of points. To say someone gets rewarded for facing an easy opponent is a little harsh. They do after all have to face the guys who have the same record as themselves. This will weed out the players who should not be at the top. MOV is simply a tie breaker, the whole system still is governed by the match wins.

Except in small to medium events where you only have the swiss rounds, then the whole placement is based on MoV, except for the first player (if he has only wins).

I agree that no matter what you do, you affect the builds that will succeed. In this case it helps builds which are already good in the meta.

SoS screws people hard in big events (particularly gencon or FFG worlds when there are lots of other things to do) when someone they beat in the first round or two drops. It's not even uncommon to have multiple opponent's of the same player drop. I've heard of there being as many as 3. Now FFG tried to entice people to not drop by giving out an additional participation card at the end of the tourney at gencon, but still definetly heard more horror stories about that then someone's MoV being "too padded" by easy opponents.

People dropping out is the best argument against SoS I've found and one I didn't think about as I haven't participated in large tournaments. It makes sense that they phased it out in this context. But the question then is what's next?