Hey everyone,

I am looking to gather ideas surrounding alternate scoring methods for X-wing either for Tournament tie-breakers or in-game scoring?

I've also heard of some methods for modifying MOV and the "half-points" rule to extend to small ships - Does anyone have ideas for anything like that?

Any and all ideas welcome. Just trying to generate thoughts.

So there is the 20-0 + objective method. Allows for a very spread out group of results and means people need to play.

i don't think it works in xwing but I think objectives should be implemented

Well, one example I've seen thrown around is extending the half-points rule to small ships - the issue revolves around "to what extent" and minimizing complexity.

Is it better to limit half-points to small ships that cost over 40 points? Or have over '8 HP" [insert another HP total here]? Or to all small ships (which can make calculation weird for some low HP ships)?

Is that too complicated period, or causing another distortion in some way?

Does someone have a cleaner way of accomplishing this goal?

Personally, I'd say that the half-points limit should be on how many points a ship COSTS, not its base size. Gone are the days that all large base ships are worth lots of points and all small base ships aren't. A fat Miranda can easily be over 50 points, and a slimmed down blocker Scout can be 25 or 26. I'm not sure where I'd put the dividing line though - maybe 34 points, so if it's more than 1/3 of your list, you get half points for getting it to half health at the end of the game.

I'd also want to do SOMETHING about regen, but I'm not sure what. It really rankles that you can trivially put ten damage onto Corran, Miranda, or Poe, and the luck of the dice can make none of it stick.

1 hour ago, thespaceinvader said:

Personally, I'd say that the half-points limit should be on how many points a ship COSTS, not its base size. Gone are the days that all large base ships are worth lots of points and all small base ships aren't. A fat Miranda can easily be over 50 points, and a slimmed down blocker Scout can be 25 or 26. I'm not sure where I'd put the dividing line though - maybe 34 points, so if it's more than 1/3 of your list, you get half points for getting it to half health at the end of the game.

I'd also want to do SOMETHING about regen, but I'm not sure what. It really rankles that you can trivially put ten damage onto Corran, Miranda, or Poe, and the luck of the dice can make none of it stick.

One idea I've had about regen (and I'm not saying it needs fixing, but since we're talking about it) is to put the number of shields that the ship has on the regen card. When you regen, pull a shield from the card and place it on the ship. Not entirely sure the best way to word it for Miranda, but it would essentially end up giving T-65s 2 extra shields from R2D2, the T-70 & E wing 3 extra shields from R5-P9/R2-D2, and potentially 5 shields on the YTs via R2D2 Crew. Miranda would presumably be the same, having 4 shields able to regen, though I'm not sure how to word it for her, and then does her burn a shield add a 5th to that pool or is it gone for good?

At the tournament scoring level I'd go with a number of different tiers. Draws would be any game that doesn't see a difference or less than 12 points killed and would score 2 points to each participant. The close victory/defeat would award 3/1 respectively and would cover games that end with difference of 12-30 points. A total victory would be your 4 point with kills more that a 30 point difference. Complete elimination of an opponent would be worth +1 point. Now that 30 point line between close and total victory could be move (most likely down to maybe 24) and total victory could include tabling the opponent anytime and be worth 5 points but the entire idea here is to break up the actual tournament score so you can hopefully avoid having a large number of people having identical records/scores making tie breakers necessary.

When it comes to each game if you're going to do half scoring then it should be for all ships, or at least those above a certain number of points (I'll throw out 30), regardless of size.

14 hours ago, Tlfj200 said:

Hey everyone,

I am looking to gather ideas surrounding alternate scoring methods for X-wing either for Tournament tie-breakers or in-game scoring?

Any and all ideas welcome. Just trying to generate thoughts.

Most handsome hat?

I'd like to see more of a gradient in scoring as well. Rather than just win/loss record with MoV as a tie breaker, divying up points based on the strength of victory or closeness of defeat.

I think it would result in fewer drops because a close loss would no longer necessarily mathematically eliminate you. A resounding victory might get you back in the race.

4 hours ago, Sekac said:

I'd like to see more of a gradient in scoring as well. Rather than just win/loss record with MoV as a tie breaker, divying up points based on the strength of victory or closeness of defeat.

I think it would result in fewer drops because a close loss would no longer necessarily mathematically eliminate you. A resounding victory might get you back in the race.

That was the penalty before they switched to the current win/lose scoring. A Modified win wasn't nearly as good as a full win yet every lose hurt the same (never mind if it was 1 point as time expired!) no matter how well, or poorly, you played. Draws, which really should happen more often than exact ties although now it seems they can't happen at all, were just pissed all over and never did anyone any good (OH GOD NO! They were intentionally done they were that strong!) as they are barely better than a lose.

Now even with a wider gradient in tournament scores a tie breaker may still be needed and MoV would be appropriate even as tournament score would more closely reflect what the MoV may actually be. Using MoV as a tie breaker still means that if killed more in a draw situation you gain some advantage from it despite being a game with no clear winner there.

5 hours ago, Sekac said:

I'd like to see more of a gradient in scoring as well. Rather than just win/loss record with MoV as a tie breaker, divying up points based on the strength of victory or closeness of defeat.

I think it would result in fewer drops because a close loss would no longer necessarily mathematically eliminate you. A resounding victory might get you back in the race.

So basically just use the current MOV rules to rank players? Or would you propose a different mechanism for calculating the closeness of a match?

5 hours ago, Transmogrifier said:

So basically just use the current MOV rules to rank players? Or would you propose a different mechanism for calculating the closeness of a match?

In some ways yes but with a much wider brush as individual points generally wouldn't matter as much in a single match

Games are often much closer than the final scores indicate. One thought I had was to give half points for a small ship if you get it down to 1 hull left. Right now you score 0. This way you'd get some points for seriously damaging a ship but there would still be an incentive to finish the ship off to get full points.

7 hours ago, Transmogrifier said:

So basically just use the current MOV rules to rank players? Or would you propose a different mechanism for calculating the closeness of a match?

A different one, with MoV as a (rarely needed) TIE breaker.

Say a 10 point scale. 10-0 would be a win by 81+ points, a 9-1 would be 60-79 MoV difference, etc. 5-5 is a draw and a 6-4 split would be the modified win of Olde but it wouldn't hurt either player nearly as badly as it did before.

I like the idea of objective points as @Timathius suggested, because they give someone who's getting rocked the hope to grab a point or two. But the problem is they're so matchup dependant in the first round. You might pair the best player in the room against the worst, and have two very good but equally skilled players matched up too. The equally good players might still have a lopsided battle but likely a good player will limit the amount of objective points his opponent could score. On the other hand, the matchup with the skill disparity could easily end up as a full point score (10-0 +full objective points, or whatever). The only chance the winner of the other battle has of catching up is by getting full points on someone else, which is harder and harder to do as Swiss pairings level the playing field.

Can someone help me review if extending the half-points rule on small ships would somehow be overly complicated?

I feel that it shouldn't be too bad, and may help add some granularity to these newer small ships with "large-based" hit points.

32 minutes ago, Tlfj200 said:

Can someone help me review if extending the half-points rule on small ships would somehow be overly complicated?

I feel that it shouldn't be too bad, and may help add some granularity to these newer small ships with "large-based" hit points.

I don't really get the complaints about it being complicated. It's simple division and it only ever applies to ships left on the board after time expires, which tends to not be that many. If people somehow found it to be complex or time-consuming you could easily add an extra 2 boxes to each ship on the squad list showing the half health threshold and the number of points the ship awards when half-destroyed.

2 minutes ago, Jike said:

I don't really get the complaints about it being complicated. It's simple division and it only ever applies to ships left on the board after time expires, which tends to not be that many. If people somehow found it to be complex or time-consuming you could easily add an extra 2 boxes to each ship on the squad list showing the half health threshold and the number of points the ship awards when half-destroyed.

I, too, don't think it seems very complicated.

Also, adding the damage # and/or half points value to squad builders also seems good too. Why not?

I'm not entirely sure that extending the half-points rule to smaller ships would actually solve anything. Or, for that matter, that anything needs solving in the first place.

For starters, half-points rule on small ships would mostly affect rebel regenerators, such as Miranda, Norra or Poe. These ships can get pretty expensive (Miranda in particular) and if you can't finish them off, it's hard to get any points at all. Unfortunately if these ships manage to regenerate all their shields (quite likely in the late game, actually - especially if they're played defensively), they might still not be at or below half HP at the end of the battle. On top of that, these ships aren't exactly dominant, so I don't really see any reason to nerf them (Miranda might be the exception here, but in her case it's Sabine that is the source of the problem, not regen).

Secondly, the two-tier tournament structure that FFG favors for their games results in MoV having a secondary importance. When it comes to Swiss, the vast majority of players do or don't make the cut based on how many games they've won. In case of, say, a top 16 cut you can expect that maybe 2-3 players will make the cut due to having a high MoV. The rest simply won enough games. In elimination it becomes even less important, because the winner takes it all and it doesn't matter at all whether he won by 1 point or 100. So, applying the half point rule to small ships would only really matter if it affected the final result of the game. Which would happen from time to time but A) majority of games do not last full 75 minutes and B) a significant percentage of the few games that do not get resolved before time runs out still have a decisive winner on points, so they wouldn't be affected. In other words, the change in rules would have very limited impact in the end.

Last but not least, I do like the idea of being rewarded for keeping ships alive. Quite often the difference between an average player and a master is that while both have received about the same amount of damage, the former got his ships destroyed while the latter didn't lose any, because he managed to spread the damage around. I understand why the half-point rule was introduced for large ships and I agree it was a good move back in the days of Fat Han, when the lack of that rule rewarded the kind of behavior that was profoundly unfun for either player. I don't see any pressing reason to extend this rule however.

53 minutes ago, Lightrock said:

For starters, half-points rule on small ships would mostly affect rebel regenerators, such as Miranda, Norra or Poe. These ships can get pretty expensive (Miranda in particular) and if you can't finish them off, it's hard to get any points at all. Unfortunately if these ships manage to regenerate all their shields (quite likely in the late game, actually - especially if they're played defensively), they might still not be at or below half HP at the end of the battle. On top of that, these ships aren't exactly dominant, so I don't really see any reason to nerf them (Miranda might be the exception here, but in her case it's Sabine that is the source of the problem, not regen).

I agree - this alone wouldn't address regenerators (Corran, Miranda, Poe). Something else would need to be implemented to address that [if it needs addressing - partially a different argument]

55 minutes ago, Lightrock said:

Secondly, the two-tier tournament structure that FFG favors for their games results in MoV having a secondary importance. When it comes to Swiss, the vast majority of players do or don't make the cut based on how many games they've won. In case of, say, a top 16 cut you can expect that maybe 2-3 players will make the cut due to having a high MoV. The rest simply won enough games. In elimination it becomes even less important, because the winner takes it all and it doesn't matter at all whether he won by 1 point or 100. So, applying the half point rule to small ships would only really matter if it affected the final result of the game. Which would happen from time to time but A) majority of games do not last full 75 minutes and B) a significant percentage of the few games that do not get resolved before time runs out still have a decisive winner on points, so they wouldn't be affected. In other words, the change in rules would have very limited impact in the end.

For smaller tournaments, I agree.

For larger tournaments, this isn't quite true. However, for larger tournaments, FFG has moved to a 2-day format, and has added MANY more swiss rounds. Still, MOV comes into play, and many would argue MOV is not entirely a good representation for how "well" someone has done.

56 minutes ago, Lightrock said:

Last but not least, I do like the idea of being rewarded for keeping ships alive. Quite often the difference between an average player and a master is that while both have received about the same amount of damage, the former got his ships destroyed while the latter didn't lose any, because he managed to spread the damage around. I understand why the half-point rule was introduced for large ships and I agree it was a good move back in the days of Fat Han, when the lack of that rule rewarded the kind of behavior that was profoundly unfun for either player. I don't see any pressing reason to extend this rule however.

I'm of two minds on this:

First, I think destroying your enemy should be more favored over just staying alive - the game is built around the premise of a dog fight. (also, separate from thematics, I would argue the game is more interesting around killing your opponent, rather than simply staying alive. To that end, MOV scoring deters some ships and upgrades from being used as they are punishing for in-game and tournament scoring: See decimators, Darth Vader crew, and Ghost (ghosts have trended more to crazy protection, ala Biggs or super Hera, not because other ghosts can't be good, but because their downside of bleeding MOV outweighs the upside of supporting the objective of killing your opponent.

Second, half-points were implemented precisely because running a large-based ship with low HP wasn't fun, and didn't accurately reward an opponent for severely damaging your ship. Again, one might argue that if you toilet-bowl a large base ship that is near death, and your opponent has a few healthy small-based ships left, that the big ship player didn't really "win" in the sense of the dogfight [but some may like that game].

Now, with the proliferation of small-based ships with large-ship HP, we have a possibly similar issue as the one presented before the implementation of the half-points rule: severely damaged, but not dead, small based ships protecting quite a few MOV, and rewarding [again, a separate argument] unfun playstyles or victors.

All of that said, I am trying to walk through if extending half-points to small-based ships even addresses that concern (and separately would love to hear if people don't even think that concern is a concerrn). And as noted earlier, this alone does not address regenerators, just large-hp small ships.