First, let me say this is a relatively minor complaint I have with the game. I love X-Wing but I've always had a nagging problem with MOV. When I started playing, I didn't really pay much attention to tie-breakers but when I started winning, tie-breakers became an important consideration to me.

One, I've never agreed with awarding half points on large base ships if you get half way through the ship. Large base ships typically have very low agility and go down faster than a small base ship with an equal number of points put into it that's built to tank shots. I think large base ships are needlessly penalized. If you don't destroy the ship, why are you getting any points for it?

Two, I think MOV is the worst way to break ties. It doesn't indicate how well you played, only how many ships you blew up, which large based ships are prejudiced against for no good reason. You can play some of the easiest opponents in the room, wipe them out 100-0, and get rewarded for having easy matchups while someone else has the hardest matchups, still wins but wins by fewer points because he was playing better opponents. He's penalized for having to play better players even though he still wins.

Three, they don't even use MOV to pair players during Swiss, probably because they realize it's a useless indicator of anything. If you're going to use MOV, at least be consistent and use it to pair players in Swiss rounds.

I think you should only get what you destroy and tie-breakers should only be based on your (and your opponent's) strength of schedule. Thoughts?

They used to pair MOV and it turned into a lot of mirror matches with swarms and not swarms. Big ships are halved because if a Fat Han is left with 1 hull, I guess you get none of that 60 points. Too bad. I do think that small ships should be halved as well though due to things like Miranda.

Going point by point:

1. Before there was half points on large ships, it was very common for a player with a fat Falcon, Decimator, Outrider, etc. worth 51+ points to kill half his opponents' list, then spend the rest of the game running away with 1 or 2 hit points left, winning the game on MoV despite being inches away from a total loss. Giving half points for large ships prevents this kind of abusive gameplay.
2. MoV is like Democracy ("It's the worst, except for all the others"). What else can you use for a tiebreaker? Strength of Schedule is the only other option I've heard seriously suggested, but it has its own problems. Depending on how you calculate SoS, people who drop from the tournament can heavily skew the results. It also can create weird situations where someone who won their first four games and then lost the fifth one has way higher SoS than someone who lost their first game and then won the next four, which some people find just as counter-intuitive as the MoV situations you mentioned.
3. I actually sort of agree with this point. I don't think MoV is meaningless, but I do think it should be used as part of pairings.

You dony agree with half hull on large ships?

You sweet summer child, you were fortunate to miss the drudgery of wave 5

@tortugatron - If MOV was applied to pairings, there would be no bias towards matchups besides performance, which is what you want to influence pairings anyway. I know why people explain away half points on large base ships. I just strongly disagree with it. I do agree with you that if they're going to implement a half point rule, it should apply to all ships, regardless of the size of their base.

@EdgeOfDreams - (1) I don't think it's abusive to run with a large base ship. Small base ships do it all the time. The large base ship is just punished for no good reason. If you're playing a regen ship or a Defender (both examples of hard ships to even land a hit on), what's the difference if a large base ship has one point left on it or a regen / tokened up ship has one hit left on it. Nothing. It's far easier to hit a large base ship because of their low agility. I guess if someone sinks 60%+ of their squad into one ship, choose a better ship to focus down?

(2) Strength of schedule is exactly what I'm proposing be used as tie-breakers. It doesn't matter if a player drops. If a player with a losing record drops, who cares (as far as tie-breakers go). They'd already be contributing a low SoS. Not much difference. If you lose your last match but won your first, you should have better SoS because you played stronger competition. That's exactly how it's supposed to work. As you advance through the tournament, the player with the best record who beat the best players should be the champion.

(3) Yeah, if you're going to use MOV, use it consistently.

@ficklegreendice - I've been playing since Wave III.

I think the half point rule should have been based on the cost not the size of the ship.

You can run a naked Shuttle for 21 points and lose 10 MOV for taking 5 damage even though the ship is cheaper (and easier to kill) than many small ships.

Not sure what the cut off would be...50 points or more maybe?

I'm not totally thrilled with the quirks of Margin of Victory, but it's a decent system for gauging relative performance across several rounds.

Large base ships typically have very low agility and go down faster than a small base ship with an equal number of points put into it that's built to tank shots.

It seems to me that squad diversity is pretty good right now, even with some small-based ships being point vaults, and that's partly because of the half-point rule on large ships. We still see plenty of two-large-ship lists, but you'd see a lot more of them making final tables if MOV worked the way it used to.

I do think it's weird that MOV isn't used during Swiss rounds.

@markcsoul - I agree. That also would have been a better system.

They used to pair MOV and it turned into a lot of mirror matches with swarms and not swarms. Big ships are halved because if a Fat Han is left with 1 hull, I guess you get none of that 60 points. Too bad.

Yes, so instead of fixing the actual problem (Boost on Large ships moving them too fast and making it trivial to arc-dodge and range away from enemy guns), they kludged together "half points on Large ships." And it's a terrible rule.

Was the issue Lambdas? Firesprays? YV-666s? No, the problem was turret ships with Engine Upgrade. So why were Lambdas, Firesprays, and YV-666s nerfed?

Was the issue limited to Large ships? No, the problem was also regenerating Small ships. So why weren't they nerfed?

As (pretty much) always with FFG, the answer is "because it's easier to just make up a half-points rule and hope nobody notices we're not actually fixing the problem." Everything is, and has always been, about what's easier, rather than about fixing what's actually broken. So now, instead of fixing the problem in the game, the design team has to continually design around broken Large-ship Boost and around a tournament rule -- not a game rule, a tournament rule -- duct-taped onto the game system.

It's not a coincidence that the rule change spelled the end of serious competitive use for Lambdas -- excepting Palpatine, a borderline broken card -- for Firesprays, and for YV-666s -- excepting Zuckuss, a broken card. It's not a coincidence that the competitive Large ships are those balanced around the tournament-only rule of half-points, and the abomination of Large-ship Boost.

If I seem frustrated, it's only because I'm frustrated.

Anyway, all of that said, I do agree that MOV-as-tiebreaker is probably the best of a bunch of bad options.

What is the complaint against using SoS?

It is calculated by a rather arcane metric that van **** you if someone you played against dropped early

What is the complaint against using SoS?

The player has absolutely no control over it.

@ficklegreendice - A player who drops will far more likely than not have a terrible record (hence why they're dropping). Such a player wouldn't be giving you good breakers anyway. You shouldn't get the same breakers for beating a player with a bad record as a player with a good record.

@Tbetts94 - It's a breaker, not a match win. You still control the outcome of your match. A tie-breaker is to determine where you stand relative to the field. It shouldn't be in your control.

@ficklegreendice - A player who drops will far more likely than not have a terrible record (hence why they're dropping). Such a player wouldn't be giving you good breakers anyway. You shouldn't get the same breakers for beating a player with a bad record as a player with a good record.

@Tbetts94 - It's a breaker, not a match win. You still control the outcome of your match. A tie-breaker is to determine where you stand relative to the field. It shouldn't be in your control.

A player that expects to make the cut is more likely to drop than a weaker player, especially if the tournament is being held at a convention or something with side events to participate in. A player that doesn't expect to make the cut is going to stick it out until the end because they are there to play a lot of X-Wing regardless of their performance. Strength of Schedule punishes you for playing and beating strong players early in the tournament.

If players shouldn't be able to influence or control tie breakers then why not just use a random number generator to break ties? It treats all players fairly and is easy to do.

Sos is worse.

Imagine getting a random first pairing, you beat the guy and he drops after the second round. Your friend beats a guy in the first round and you end with the same record. You're not getting Into the cut because of the first game just because of that first random pairing.

I think they should break match point ties with a coin flip. MoV mainly rewards you for easy matchups where you can seal-club your way to a perfect MoV, and SoS only works well if no one who's any good drops from the tournament. There isn't a system that's going to have enough information to really determine which of two players with equal match scores is actually better, so just acknowledge that we don't really know and break the tie randomly.

The advantage to keeping MoV as the first tie breaker is that it encourages a player that gets an early lead to keep engaging as oppossed to running away once they've gotten into the lead.

MoV is just as useful as anything else and generally far easier to calculate and for a player to control.

I'll completely agree that the "half damage = half points towards MoV" should be applied to all ships. I also think the "half damage" should just be for the naked ship and if you're thinking Regen is an issue perhaps it should be awarded when a ship first drops below half. While talking about the naked ships that is also where I think the half points should come from so you aren't including all the upgrades.

Even with MoV as a tie breaker I'd have liked to have seen a more variable scoring systems instead of the current win-lose. If the difference in points killed was less than 12 the game should be scored a draw (2/2) and difference of 12-25 be close wins/loses (3/1) with only a blowout over 25 points being a complete victory (5 points). A system like this should give you a lot wider range of scores making tie-breakers used less commonly although much of their use is already in the scoring.

Strength of Schedule may work fine IF you are keeping a long running record of a player's strength (the DCI anyone?) so that you can seed properly from the beginning and actually build a proper SoS. With random seeding, and not using some kind of scoring to seed later rounds you can run a very real risk of randomly getting screwed out of SoS by playing a much weaker opponent or two early in a tournament. The great player stuck with the complete newbie may trash the guy who goes on to lose the rest of the day; the second round he could then get stuck with someone else who also isn't very good and may have only "won" the first due to a bye. Two wins against opponent who will do nothing but suck points and there was't a thing you could do about it.

@Steven - You don't need to track players over time. That's not reasonable or desirable. You just need to track players through the tournament based on performance.

I think there's a misunderstanding of the purpose of a tiebreaker. It's not something players are supposed to be able to control. It's to track a players performance relative to other player's performance across the event in the event of a tie. My problem with using MOV to measure performance is it's not a measure of anything meaningful unless you define meaningful as staying involved aggressively for the duration of a match.

@ficklegreendice - A player who drops will far more likely than not have a terrible record (hence why they're dropping). Such a player wouldn't be giving you good breakers anyway. You shouldn't get the same breakers for beating a player with a bad record as a player with a good record.

@Tbetts94 - It's a breaker, not a match win. You still control the outcome of your match. A tie-breaker is to determine where you stand relative to the field. It shouldn't be in your control.

Because of the way that swiss pairings work a player that might have a reasonable expectation of making the cut that takes two early loses would have had a very good chance to win all of their remaining matches. They drop because they took two early loses and are no longer in the running to make the cut. Because they drop with a 2-0 record instead of the 2-3 or 2-4 record that they probably would have had it hurts their opponents' strength of schedule.

A player that expects to make the cut is more likely to drop than a weaker player, especially if the tournament is being held at a convention or something with side events to participate in. A player that doesn't expect to make the cut is going to stick it out until the end because they are there to play a lot of X-Wing regardless of their performance. Strength of Schedule punishes you for playing and beating strong players early in the tournament.

If players shouldn't be able to influence or control tie breakers then why not just use a random number generator to break ties? It treats all players fairly and is easy to do.

I just want to second this. In my experience the players who drop especially early are those that have higher expectations and are often better players than an 0-2 record but play enough that they don't want to stick around the rest of the day.

Additionally the reason people aren't paired on MoV now is that they originally did but it ended up being a penalty for people with byes since they would get paired against each other R2, which didn't make a lot of sense and defeated the purpose of a bye.

unless you define meaningful as staying involved aggressively for the duration of a match.

I think that seems to be something FFG is getting at, yes.

One, I've never agreed with awarding half points on large base ships if you get half way through the ship. Large base ships typically have very low agility and go down faster than a small base ship with an equal number of points put into it that's built to tank shots. I think large base ships are needlessly penalized. If you don't destroy the ship, why are you getting any points for it?

Thematically? An X-wing (Or Corran in an E-wing, or Soontir Fel, or any other small base ship) is designed to have easily replaceable parts. If you take a hull damage, think of it as a crack in the cockpit transparisteel. That can be replaced in a matter of days. Even if an X-wing is at 1 hull, limping home, there are innumerable other X-wings out there that can be cannibalised for spare parts. In short, small-based ships are expendable (with the exception of Defenders, Phantoms and E-wings).

Compare that to a YT-1300 Resistance Sympathiser. That sympathiser has his live invested in that freighter, and if it limps away on 1 hull, its going to cost a fortune to replace, because the general rule is that larger parts have lower availability. To say nothing of the Falcon (For which the half-point rule was made), where any kind of damage whatsoever was a nightmare to fix, or Slave-1, etc, etc.

Gameplay mechanics wise: I could load out 2 shadow casters with 2 Burnout Slams and Engine Upgrade, plus lots of defensive upgrades like Laats Razzi and have a solid 100 pt list. Then, I would both slow-play and run away from you (Taking pot-shots with the mobile arc). You will never catch me. Not with that loadout. If you have less than 100 pts in your list you'll lose when time is called. And to kill me you'd have to completely remove the fastest ship in the game, with 10 hull. That's an extreme, stupid example, but it does illustrate the problem - large ships can run, and you won't catch them in time.

For small base ships, most of the craft that are impossible to kill in the end-game (Like Corran, Soontir Fel, Whisper, etc), are balanced tactically. All it takes is to focus on them early and they go down. The 2015 and 2016 world finals both saw the abrupt death of Corran, because a good player recognised their danger in the late-game and killed him early-game. It's just about impossible to kill Fat Han in a round of shooting (Barring a Crack-Black swarm with good rolling), meaning that it's impossible to take away his late-game bonus, hence the much more manageable half-points scenario.

Two, I think MOV is the worst way to break ties. It doesn't indicate how well you played, only how many ships you blew up, which large based ships are prejudiced against for no good reason.

I'd say that how may ships you blew up (and how expensive they were) is the only way to tell a judge how well you played.

@WWHSD - I don't understand your example at all. How does a player that took two early loses have a 2-0 record? He would have an 0-2 record and since his performance is so poor, he'd be contributing low SoS even if he didn't drop. It doesn't matter if a player with a bad record drops because they're not helping your breakers anyway. All matches are not equal. Some players have a much harder schedule and if you don't use that as a primary tiebreaker, you're relegating all matches to equal status, which they're not. MOV doesn't work because it doesn't indicate how hard your schedule was relative to other player's schedule. It just shows how many points you destroyed which isn't a useful metric for performance over the course of an event. If a player plays Paul Heaver and beats him by five points and another player played Joe Schmoe and won 100-0, MOV doesn't indicate anything meaningful because a player with a much easier schedule just got rewarded for playing worse opponents. So, when you use MOV as a tiebreaker, you're literally punishing the better players and rewarding the worse players. It seems like it's just a way to force people to stay aggressive during a match.

@WWHSD - I don't understand your example at all. How does a player that took two early loses have a 2-0 record? He would have an 0-2 record and since his performance is so poor, he'd be contributing low SoS even if he didn't drop. It doesn't matter if a player with a bad record drops because they're not helping your breakers anyway. All matches are not equal. Some players have a much harder schedule and if you don't use that as a primary tiebreaker, you're relegating all matches to equal status, which they're not. MOV doesn't work because it doesn't indicate how hard your schedule was relative to other player's schedule. It just shows how many points you destroyed which isn't a useful metric for performance over the course of an event. If a player plays Paul Heaver and beats him by five points and another player played Joe Schmoe and won 100-0, MOV doesn't indicate anything meaningful because a player with a much easier schedule just got rewarded for playing worse opponents. So, when you use MOV as a tiebreaker, you're literally punishing the better players and rewarding the worse players. It seems like it's just a way to force people to stay aggressive during a match.

I typed that backwards. I meant 0-2. A player that typically makes cuts and wins tournaments that takes two early loses and then drops gives terrible SoS to the opponents that beat him. If that player had played all of their rounds they would have likely had a winning record overall and had a positive effect on SoS.

I'm of the opinion thatcMoV is as good a tie breaker as we are going to find in X-Wing. Encouraging people to stay aggressive during a match is a good thing and leads to more interesting matches.

I stated it in another thread, and I still believe there can be a system that blends both SoS and MoV to determine a tie. To resolve the issue with drops, you count it as half win points. You can't say for sure what kind of player they were and if they would win or lose. Take MoV and have an SoS multiplier. Best of both worlds in my opinion, but it is just my opinion.