With the recent discussion on arc-dodgey lists and how current scoring disincentives attempting to remove the opponent from the board, I had a thought. It may or may not be a good thought, my frame of reference is definitely on the casual side.

Instead of margin of victory, would there be significant benefit to only counting the value of the ships you half or destroy? In my opinion the benefits are:

- incentives removing as much of your opponents list from the table as possible

- encourages using lists that 'bleed MOV' under current ruleset

What do you think?

Well this would only affect the rankings of players who had won the same number of matches, during a tournement, and woudl favour lists that destroy lots of points, even if they also bleed lots of points.
In a single game the player with the highest MoV wins even if you are just counting points destroyed, this coudl affect the meta, again a subtle shift towards highly destructive, marginally less survivable lists, but only if the list is equally likley to win a match.

So how does this affect desicion making during the match?

Something that would really change the way we engage might be, the game is considered a stalemate if fewer than XX points of enemy ships is detroyed.
So imagine if 50+ points needs to be destroyed by at least one side otherwise the match is treated as 0:0.

This rule means your less likey to have matches where someone scores minimal points then scoots out of range for the rest of the match to snag a win.

Combine that with ranking by points detroyed instead of MoV and your really incentivising people to enagge and destroy, and make bold sacrafice plays once they are losing, rather then trying to maintian their MoV

1 hour ago, Scum4Life said:

So how does this affect desicion making during the match?

During the match? Not necessarily that much. Well, it does discourage a "stall and destroy as few points as possible" strategy, at least somewhat. A 200-175 win is now a lot better than a 25-0 win.

But not worrying about losing your own points if you can get the W helps players bring lists which "win bloody." I had some fun with Anakin double ARC when Jedi were new, but a big part of why it didn't work great is that, even if Anakin can clean up the win, the ARCs get really beat up.

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It isn't just a big-tournament thing. I feel like I've had the experience a few times of winning two games, losing one, but winding up in 3rd or 4th place due to bad MOV. 3rd and 4th in a small store tourney is often the difference between getting store credit and not.

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Thinking more, only going on points-destroyed and not margin discourages a "well, I'm already losing, so I'll protect what little MOV I have" strategy. It encourages a player who's behind to go for broke. The only way they could improve their final ranking is to kill more stuff, try to shoot down one more ship. That feels kinda good to me.

Encouraging less careful games sounds like a good idea for me.

Dice variance at those games could be higher due to them having a higher impact than flying (in a perfect game only one side would roll red dice), but should also be lower due to more dice being rolled, which would make the distribution more bell shaped.

Still, dice rolling is fun and it would make it easier for new players at their first tournament to kill at least a ship per round instead of only having to chase aces without shooting once.

At the same time it would have less effect on the highest placements as the tournament winner often wins all their games.