WolfgangSenff said:

If substandart deck get's to finall table wouldn't it mean it wasn't so substandard ? Or that they player had either ultra luck or outskilled his opponents?

michaelius said:

It's a hypothetical situation - what if that person meets a metamate in every single table up to the final table, and they all collude to make his substandard deck win each table?

If melee wasn't included in the championship, we'd get one less champion card. And looking at some of the excellent champion cards of recent years , I think we'd probably be one sweet card poorer.

the major flaw i see is the title of Overall Champion. its sounds like the abolute peak you can reach as a player, even above joust or melee champion.

but in order to with this title, you have to play both.

for me its totally okay how corey/erick became melee champion. its part of the game. but this also means that a single player without fellow players from his meta has no chance to win; he will never meet "freinds" at the table, and often he will stand alone against teams.

if people want to play melee, fine, melee IS fun! if players want to play melee as a competitive tourney format, its also fine. those who dont like it, can play smething else. but needing a good result in melee to become the champ is not good. i´d rather keep both tourneys sperated.

WolfgangSenff said:

How realistic is that though? With over 70 competitors from how many different metas, you have to have a deck that's good enough/be skilled enough to get through at least 1, more likely two rounds on your own without 'help'. In a smaller tournament, yes, maybe that's possible. I think that volume of players here made it extremely likely that four of the best decks made it to the final table. There may have been a better deck that didn't make it, but there's even some luck in jourst (setup/draw/matchups).

As to melee not being considered for the overall chamption - I totally disagree. The best player/overall champion should have a broad skillset/be able to adapt to a variety of deckbuilding situations/scenarios. The best way of proving that is by playing a variety of formats. Limiting the champion to joust only makes him less diverse/more specialized (is the best kicker in football the best player in the league? or the best left handed relief pitcher or pinch runner the best player - no, it's generally the player who is considered to have the most well-rounded skill set)

WolfgangSenff said:

I think this hypothetical meta would stand a better chance to have one of its meta member win by usually colluding to help a strong player with a strong decklist. Even with superior skills, the substandard guy is really asking for it so support the person with the stronger deck if given the chance.

"You must defeat the STANDARD deck to stand a chance"
(a long forgotten martial artist)

FATMOUSE said:

Let me clarify a bit more. Table talk is allowed as long as it is at the table. If players are aware of an alliance, then it's fine. They can take countermeasures. It is all within the game. If the talk is a pre-agreed deal to king-make one of the 2, then I cannot find it in the rules of this game, or in any rules of any game ever made including the father of all "alliance and backstabbing" games: diplomacy.

@ Gualdo Now, I agree that the 2 most likely deserved to win since they had the best deck and the best ability. What I say is that the other 2 at the table didn't deserve to loose that way.

@FATMOUSE You can talk about representation of books but people there are real, and the feeling for the 2 that lost is not that of a good experience. I guess the 2 took a trip to Indiana to have a good time, right ?

What I'm discussing here is that there are honorable ways to win and a not honorable ways to win. That was not honorable. So the card will still be to me the Beggar King Card or the Sorefoot King Card, if you prefer.

First of all, there is no "best deck" in melee; it all depends on everything else at the table and who is playing what way and who is siding with who and a trillion other things.

Second of all, King Making is not impossibru.

Thats right, not that.

So get over the fact that it happened. We were not at the table, in fact I was enjoying a beer on a deck at a lake up here in Canada in nice 29 degree weather after a canoe ride. Not there at the final table.

The concern over how it happened is more important. From the post were I read it earlier in this thread made it seem as if Erick has no respect for melee and decided to do it just for *****. If thats the case, I am disappointed - especially for the other people at the table who consider it a completely legitimate format. Like I said, we weren't there, so we don't know the ins and outs of it. It may have been that he hit a point and knew he wasn't going to win, so he decided to side with someone - which anybody would do.

Lets all get our panties out of a twist. It's embarrassing.

Since collusion/kingmaking are impossible to make illegal rulewise (without punishing thoughtcrime laff), why not just encourage metas to collude in this fashion? It would be interesting to promote complimentary deckbuilding between meta-mates and competition on a "meta v. meta" level rather then a person v. person level.

EDIT: To further extrapolate, what if melee was done in a 2v2 format, where you were pared with a random meta-mate each round?

Mathias Fricot said:

I'm not saying I know him super well, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of person who does anything just for *****. He's kind of a 100=percenter. If you want to see what I mean, just tell him you have a "fun" deck and see what he says.

hklown said:

If that rule were implemented the king-making would be less prevalent.

But they would have to change the description of the game to DCG: Dying card game...

Exactly what I was saying, most people trolling over this were not there - and the impression from a single post is not at all indicative of the attitude that was there.

Personally, competitive melee isn't that interesting to me (it's a lot of fun to play casually). So I respect the melee and overall titles but only really admire the joust one. That said, I don't see anything wrong with players teaming up. With the four player table, there is not much advantage gained. The other two players could (and should) team up and fight back. It's not that much different from the books. Some alliances are built on friendship and some on need.

ktom said:

Bingo.

WolfgangSenff said:

Of course, because that is how FFG decided to crown an overall champion. Who accumulates the most points in the Worlds Melee and Worlds Joust. Getting rid of that would not help anything at all. There can be arguments about how they total the points (which could be a couple different ways -- completely legit either way, just different in what you want to emphasize).

papalorax said:

Just because the company that makes the card game declares by fiat that X is how things should be done does not mean that X is ethical. This is the strangest form of fallacy I've seen in a long time. It's clear that I meant to discuss the ethics of it, though, not whether or not FFG decided how to handle it.

WolfgangSenff said:

Should the Green Bay Packers not be NFL champions because they only won 10 regular season games? Of course not, because there is a system the league makes to decide who is the champion.

Also I don't think there is a question of ethics at all. That's a pretty harsh world to throw around.

Worlds this year was the first AGOT tournaments I have ever played in (the joust was the first joust games I played with real cards). I can say without a doubt that everyone was beyond ethical. The people I played against were all great guys and each game was fun (well my top 16 against Bruno was defaintely not 'fun' for me but Jon was cool about it).

If you want to suggest a different way of crowning the world champion (only take into account final placement, include all games, include the Hand of the King format, include no games in the final, etc...) that would surely be a point of discussion people could have.

Exactly. I can make up a game and come up with any Cockamamie tournament rules I want, and it would never be unethical.

Inadvisable, stupid, uninteresting, non-fun perhaps, but unethical ?

Ethics would come into it if there were an element of lying or cheating, like for instance if the rules were changed mid-game to favor the game-maker's cousin.

It has been suggested that FFGs running of tournaments has not reached maturity and that they would do well just to emulate the procedures used in more established communities. I think that is a reasonable suggestion.

Edit: I hate these message boards.

Plenty of other people *do* think that there's a question of ethics here - hence the question I posed. Your example is invalid, in any case; more analogous would be: Is it fair that the NE Patriots won the Superbowl when their coach stole their opponent's playbook?

WolfgangSenff said:

In logical fallacy terms, this is known as ad populum (or ad numerum ). That is, the number of people believing a proposition has no bearing the truth or falsity of it, or even on the likelihood of it being true.

I explained why I thought there was no ethical issue here, and you merely restated the original assertion, with no more backing than before.

I believe, therefore, that you are unable to explain where the lying, cheating, or stealing supposedly occured. Why make an ethical claim when there actual legitimate issues you can raise? Why make it into something ugly, or allege bad faith?

WolfgangSenff said:

WolfgangSenff said:

Are you suggesting people cheated?

Before the melee started I was aware of the change that only the top 3 would get bonus points. So I can tell you that decision was not at all related to who was in what place. If you are suggesting that Corey and Erick working together was unethical I suggest you read ktom's post again. People have networks of friends and at a melee you will perhaps be seated with them one game. If you don't think those people will work together in all of the rounds, you shouldn't play in melee. There was open discussion over things throughout all my games.

JackT said:

JackT said:

I would agree that they go to a MTG rules system. No timed game difference, allow players to draw, and tie breakers based on opponents win percentage (not total number of points).

Additionally, I would change the melee to have swiss style seating. A problem with random seating is that you will have people with nothing to play for, playing against people trying to make the cut in the final round. That is a bad formula.

Really? We're debating the legitimacy of melee?

First of all:

Melee represents the flavour of the AGOT universe better than any other format. (highlander, hand of the king, joust, etc. "titles, titles...")

Why?

- Old loyalties/rivalries are at play. Some schmomight have Killed your Robb Stark with a Red Wedding Plot last game or last year and youhate the bastard. Or your buddy across the table is getting Red Venganced on a claim 3 mil challenge and the dude playing martel is a idiot troll on the forums. so you throw down a hands judgement just to mess his day up. This is totally evocative of the usuper vs loyalist or blackfyre vs targaryen conflicts than linger forever.

- "Aw thats not fair, he didnt have the best deck." Do you honestly think Joffery needed to be the best to "win"? Get with the program.

- Melee is often chaos. In the books it's described as alliances fracturing a forming moment to moment with flaming swords and steel going everywhere. Everything goes people, you do what you can to survive (that includes being wingman to someone)

Finally; I end with a quote I heard often said at tournaments that basicly sums all this up:

"You dont need the best deck to win a tournament; just beat every other deck."

Edit: Dang, these boards can be irksome.

JackT said:

I was not even replying to you, although that was impossible to tell (due to badly-programmed forum software). I was replying to Papalorax.

I agree that many people believing that there's an ethics issue does not mean there is one, but it's pretty clear that there is an ethics issue here regardless, considering Erick explicitly stated that he was king-making Corey, "To mock the melee format." (I dunno if that's the exact quote, but close enough). The fact that this issue can come up and is something that can and *did* decide the GenCon champion makes it relevant to discuss the possibility of an ethics issue, even if those issues are built into the system by the company making the game (I'd argue *especially* since that). This isn't to take away anything from Corey's huge performance, of course.

Thinking about it more, I wanted to claim that it was (obviously) argumentum ad verecundiam to say that, "Just because FFG says it's so, doesn't make it so." That makes a blindingly obvious kind of sense, but I think it does miss the issue, which is that FFG did not actually declare the format to be fair or ethical or anything. It's still relevant to ask the question though: Is it fair to have the champion be measured based on melee performance? It may not be, and if the people think it isn't, then at the very least FFG should probably take that into consideration in terms of playerbase happiness. It may not be "unethical", but the answer to the question does factor into things on their side, I hope.

P.S. In re: Cheating, no, I don't think they cheated - it's clearly within the rules. The question is whether or not it *should* be considered valid to have melee be counted for GenCon champion. I'm questioning the rules, not the players who play by them.

WolfgangSenff said:

What would you want the overall champion to be? There is a joust champion, melee champion, and an overall.

And there isn't a "rule" to decide the overall...there is a system. The company in charge of the game decides the system. They could decide that each game players are to report to them the total number of power they accumulated that game and the winner is whoever got the most power throughout the weekend...that would be perfectly valid (although it clearly would be a bad system).