In Magic, it is considered colluding and highly illegal. I hope the next update they make to the rules take IDing out.

actually it's perfectly legal in mtg and quite common

To quote mtg tournament rules:

"2.4 Conceding or Intentionally Drawing Games or Matches

If a game or match is not completed, players may concede or mutually agree to a draw in that game or match. A

match is considered complete once the result slip is filled out or, if match slips are not being used, a player leaves

the table after game play is finished. Until that point, either player may concede to or draw with the other, though

if the conceding player won a game in the match, the match must be reported as 2-1. Intentional draws are always

reported as 0-0-3."

Edit: pdf herehttp://wpn.wizards.com/sites/wpn/files/attachements/mtg_mtr_8apr16_ena.pdf

ID only exist in paper Magic. On MtGO, you cannot ID. Scott Larabee recently stated that if they had essentially a chess clock, they would remove IDs from paper magic as well.

My solution for IDs is simple- there are no draws. There must be a winner. To paraphrase Yoda- Draw not. Win or win not. There is no draw.

My solution for IDs is simple- there are no draws. There must be a winner. To paraphrase Yoda- Draw not. Win or win not. There is no draw.

That's all well and good until you get a legitimate draw (258 to 258, wow!) and paraphrasing Yoda won't settle the dispute as to who actually just won.

If it is a legitimate draw then 2nd player is the winner with an MoV of 0

My solution for IDs is simple- there are no draws. There must be a winner. To paraphrase Yoda- Draw not. Win or win not. There is no draw.

That's all well and good until you get a legitimate draw (258 to 258, wow!) and paraphrasing Yoda won't settle the dispute as to who actually just won.

Then you play an additional amount of time or until the next person to score. There are ways to settle it.

If it is a legitimate draw then 2nd player is the winner with an MoV of 0

That's not an unworkable idea, but the question becomes why second player? Why not first? How would we determine fairly which of the two should be the tiebreaker?

Then you play an additional amount of time or until the next person to score. There are ways to settle it.

There are ways to settle it, but your method gives a big benefit to the first player, who has the first opportunity to snag extra points. Requiring additional playing may drag a tournament out even more than it already was, which punishes those not involved in the draw too.

I think what caldias said is the rules as written right now.

Then you play an additional amount of time or until the next person to score. There are ways to settle it.

There are ways to settle it, but your method gives a big benefit to the first player, who has the first opportunity to snag extra points. Requiring additional playing may drag a tournament out even more than it already was, which punishes those not involved in the draw too.

Having been a judge for over 15 years, I can tell you the extra time is negligible. Even allowing as much as 10 minutes. If anything, it's great for spectators.

There's basically no situation in an Armada tournament where an intentional draw is going to be in the interest of either party at the top tables. In Swiss only formats, there's always someone in 3rd place that can sneak into 1st (or 2nd) with a solid win, and in elimination cuts, there's effectively no situation where the 2nd place player won't be sitting on a bubble with 3rd place breathing down their throats.

If you have 29 players, there **might** be a 1st place that is safe before a cut after 4 rounds, but 2nd place almost certainly won't be with just 5 tournament points.

29 -> 15 - > 7 - > 3 "undefeated" players at a minimum. 3rd place will be right on 2nd place's heels.

If you have 45 players, much the same happens.

45 -> 23 -> 11 -> 5 -> 2 is the most pessimistic view of how many "undefeated" players are left, and that requires an "undefeated" opportunity dropping each round. Again, 3rd place will be right on 2nd place's heels.

You have to have 91 or more players just to do a top 4 cut, which is the only situation I can imagine where a 2nd place might not be in danger of elimination (dropping only to 4th) by taking a 5 point draw. As more players are added, the chances of 2nd place being in real danger increase.

91 -> 45 -> 22 -> 11 -> 5 -> 2 being the most pessimistic way of looking at the number spread.

Remember, that 2nd player in each of these situations, is a player who's scored well, but not well enough to catch the 1st player already.

Essentially, while it is a potential hot button issue for games like X-Wing, it is NOT currently an issue for Armada, and almost certainly will not be an actual issue on anything more than just paper.

As always, I could be wrong about this, but frankly I don't think that I am here.

You've essentially highlighted why people that think this is a big deal for Armada don't actually understand the tournament system at all.

The only time an ID is realistically going to come up in Armada is at an even that draws enough to have a Top Cut of 4 or more. And only in the situation where both 1st and 2nd are 6 or more points ahead of 5th and on. That is the only case in which an ID makes any sense as both players can easily recognize that 5 points gets them into the Top Cut. And even if you don't let players ID, if they were inclined to do so they are just going to play to a draw anyway by flying away from each other for 6 rounds. I mean hell they could start all thier ships at zero and burn through 6 rounds in about a minute. So why waste the time of them having to set up in that situation for a game that was never, regardless of the ID clause, going to actally get played out.

If it is a legitimate draw then 2nd player is the winner with an MoV of 0

That's not an unworkable idea, but the question becomes why second player? Why not first? How would we determine fairly which of the two should be the tiebreaker?

That is indeed the Rule as given already...

... and it is for the same reason that if all ships are destroyed simultainiously, the win goes to the Second Player...

... And that Reason is the fact that the First Player has a distinct advantage as per the standard rules... That's why Second Player gets better Objective benefits - to swing it back to 'fairer'...

So essentially, if it ends up being a perfect draw, the second player was deemed to have played better, because the first player was playing with the very game giving him an advantage.

Well if anyone was following the X Wing Roanoke Tournament today....the you know what hit the fan. Top 8 all took the draw and effectively closed out the 9 to 20 position players. I certainly hope this was intentional to force FFG to re examine the rule. There's some serious discussion going on about that right now.

I've got to be honest, if I spent money and time to go to a tourney and there was a possibility to get into top 8 as an outlier, I'd be pretty miffed if ALL of the top 8 players at the time did this. To me, that does smack of collusion. Guess we all have to see how this plays out? Please do not flame me on this. I am not a tourney player, but I sincerely feel terrible for those players who were cheated out of a possibility of getting in on the edge due to this rule.

No one was cheated of anything. Every one of those players that did not make the Top 8 had every opportunity to put themselves in a position to advance in the rounds prior. They lost games and left themselves in poor position as a result. What your actually asking people to do is purposefully shoot themselves in the foot and potientially leave thier standings up to tiebreakers which are not under ther control.

Then why have a even round tournament? That's a terrible idea. If this were an odd number of rounds, wouldn't this have mitigated this? And I asked to not get flamed, please. I am genuinely trying to understand this.

Xwing is a very different situation, as I grasp the game, tournament wise.

Man. It clearly is. There is serious division over this on that forum right now. I'd really hate to see that in Armada, but I guess it is both legal and possible with the rules.

Yeah I mean, theres pretty much never a cut in armada. Which seems to have been what made it worth doing in Xwing, I guess.

Yeah, what differentiates X-Wing and Armada is that with X-Wing, there is a real incentive to "just make the cut", and because of the "short" rounds, the tournament structure is set to exacerbate this. Even worse, in X-Wing, most of the cut tournaments you can't even sniff the top 8 if you have more than two losses, and (prior to this rule change) you were usually an outside chance to make the cut with 1 loss. Typical tournaments basically went down with maybe 2 guys with a 2 loss record making the cut. But even still, if you had only lost twice you could still believe that you were in the running.

Plus, Wins / Modified Wins / Ties / Losses in X-Wing are scored very strictly. Anything that wasn't a win is effectively a "loss" in terms of getting one of the top spots. Wins are a "full" 5 points, while modified wins (game going to time with 11 point or less difference) only scores 3 points to the winner, and ties score 1 to both players. Losses give players nothing at all. Because points are the most important thing, and winning players are "expected" to get 5 points, you tend to see some extreme crowding around the 1 loss / 2 loss crowd going into the final round of Swiss.

The Roanoke Tournament is getting a ton of salt because those 3 slots that would almost certainly be filled by 2 loss players getting a great final round win, or a player who had been doing very well all tournament dropping to 2 losses in a squeaker of a game, Instead, those slots are being filled uncontested without a game being played - what then is the point of that final round?

In Armada at least, the two biggest problems X-Wing has are not there. There is very little in the way of cuts (top 2 from 29 through 90 players in a tournament) so you aren't going to see crowding near the top the way you do in X-Wing. Also, there is a greater variation of the scores, such that a player going 8 point victories over 2 rounds still has a short of overtaking a guy who did 10 point wins twice and agrees to a bye in R3 - and those multi-10 pointers are hard to come by. Just look at the last couple of vassal tournaments for proof of that. There were two player that scored 29 points in the Vassal World Cup during POD play (which is easier to get good matchups with than standard swiss - and after Round 2 in a traditional tournament, they'd have been playing one another!

So, again, big drama for the X-Wing crowd. It actually started a bit earlier, with the Hoth open, when one of the two 1-loss matchups going into the final round of swiss agreed to a draw, and the other didn't. That let local Pittsburgh X-Wing Hearthrob Ryan Flemming sneak in with 8th place - and the rest is history. If the other group agreed to a draw, no Ryan in the top 8, no U-Boat Meta blowing up the X-Wing boards to the point that even I hear about it.

I guess this can happen in Armada, but I haven't seen a sizable tournament where you'd need a top 8. Maybe the regionals? I think I may just continue learning the game and not worrying to much about this. Sounds like the X Wing Community may be a bit chaotic for a while.

From 29+ Players, all the way to 90 Players, there is a cut, but its only a cut to the Top Two.

At 90+... That's when you cut to The Top Four.

And a 90+ player Armada tournament is equivelant in table-size and area to a 180+ X-Wing Player Tournament.

I know X-Wing is Popular and all, but that's still a very large venue.

Yikes!

Yes, in short, we should be aware of possible implications of the rule... But it won't have the same impact upon Armada as it does in X-Wing...

... Unless there is some form of Custom Tournament Format where you get a Larger Cut towards the end of the Thing...

But even then, according to the rules, that is a Custom Tournament that has to be described beforehand, ergo, people will know what they are getting into.

There will be no surprise like this.

I certainly hope this was intentional to force FFG to re examine the rule.

Judging by the online 'slanging match' currently going on between the the World Champion and the 'former' World Champion I don't think there was any intention other than for the top eight players to lock themselves in place. As you mention GrandMoffMatt it's quite a heated discussion over there at the moment. Though speaking personally, it kind of makes me feel my decision to switch from X-Wing to Armada (both in terms of friendly and tournament play) may have been thoroughly justified!

Yeah. I think one of the champs is local to my neck of the woods, by I don't know him. Welp. Time to move on, I suppose. :-)

I need to get some more ships.

X-Wing math gets even more messed up. The 4 players undefeated going into R5 could have drawn in both remaining rounds, knowing they are safe from the cut.after all, if you have 4 players with 20 points and 8 players with 15, the 15s have to play to earn that slot. Then you have 4 at 21 and 4 at 20, locking out the top 8.

That's 2 rounds those players don't have to play.

Again, not a problem for Armada, but wow what an issue for X-Wing.

One of the reasons I'm concerned about this, is that since Armada does trend towards smaller events with no cut it actually means that there's a lot more impact on the Swiss round scoring - making it possible for people to ID directly into first and second place. If, for example, two players competed in a Store Champ and one had already won a bye to Regional, then they could draw or even concede to send the other player to a Regional without having to actually compete for the slot.

Another reason is that since Armada has missions that don't require destroying an enemy ship, it's possible for one or both players to take missions that are frankly almost impossible to naturally draw during the course of normal gameplay such as Fire Lanes, Opening Salvo and Contested Outpost.

Wait. . . What? I have yet to see someone draw their way into first place.

In all the tournaments I have been to, games get to mid 20's in points. It is also been a fact that depending on what happens to the top 2 players that numbers 3 and 4 could have a chance. I have seem #5 move to 2nd and what was second drop to 4th (happened to me). Even if I had a 5-5 I would have losty spot.

Can someone show the possible tournament scoring math how the top 2 drawing can freeze others out?