http://fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=3973

I was pleased to see how simple it will be to do the tiebreaker, but I do have one concern:

With your Light Side deck you will be able to choose your strategy independent of your DS deck, because if you both win with LS it just matters how quickly you win.

However, with your Dark Side deck, you have to make sure to build in destroying objectives, because you'll never have more than 2 if your LS deck lost. Every objective destroyed is important, even if you can legimately win without destroying any. I think this will cut down the strategies open to DS players because now you have to make sure you can destroy LS objectives with your deck.

I would propose a change to the rules already. Again, I like how simple they are. But the DS winning tiebreaker needs to only focus on how your DS deck versus how your opponent's did, just like the LS wins both tiebreaker. My suggestion would be when both sides win as DS compare how many of your own objectives were destroyed.

Example: Me and my friend Brian both win as Dark Side players. When I won the dial clicked to 12 the turn after I lost my second objective. When Brian won it reached 12 with only one of his objectives destroyed. Brian's the winner by tiebreaker and gets the 3 points.

Scoob said:

I agree with you, and your proposal matches what my tentative plans were for tie breaking in the OCTGN tournament I'm running later this week. However, I understand why they didn't go with that idea: not enough room to differentiate. The options for DS objectives destroyed are 0, 1, or 2. By also including how many LS objectives you destroyed you cut down on the number of true draws a little. It's a trade off that I could see going either way, and I guess they wanted to go towards less draws.

dbmeboy said:

I agree, you want to cut down on the number of draws as much as possible. But in the scenario in question, namely that both Dark Side players win, the options are greater than 0, 1, or 2 objectives you destroy. I'm not sure what the upper limit is, and it's sure to change if the LS continues to gain cards that bring the dial back down, but I could conceivably never win the Force Struggle and need to get 3 or more objectives to push the dial to 12. But by definition our LS sides will be at the 0, 1, or 2 level because otherwise there wouldn't be a dual DS victory. In short, I think it's not adding that much to the variance at this cost, with the cost being that you need to build objective destroying DS decks to improve your chances to winning tiebreakers.

So maybe there's another way to cut down on the number of matches ending in a draw. My proposal was to make sure that you're comparing who did better at preventing the other side from reaching the objective of the game in a game win. Who "won better".

I don't think we're saying anything different. In the situation where both players won with their DS, the LS had to have destroyed 0, 1, or 2 DS objectives in each game. Unless you come up with a different way to measure how far away from victory the LS was other than destroyed objectives, that only leaves those 3 options.

That said, I'm personally with you: I'd rather have more 2-2 true draws than have the tournament rules dictate deck strategy.

I admit that I have not done any number-crunching yet, and my gut reaction could be wrong. But, the tie-breaker rules seem to give an advantage to aggro builds. Even with the LS, a control-type strategy where one would build up slowly and take all three objectives late game, although you would win, would have an ending deathstar dial higher than a more aggressive build, even though both builds might win consistently. Likewise with the DS. One could have a nice control deck, and win consistently, but it does not add to your destroyed objectives total.

Control seems to have gotten the worst of it here. I am in favor of a tie being a tie.

Hey guys, I've read the whole things a couple times…

What score do i record for a player who gets a bye?

Darik said:

It actually doesn't mention byes at all, but I'm going to be giving them the entire 4 points. The downside of the bye comes in the big hit to the SOS for the final standings. From Nate French via the Rules Questions link: "Strength of schedule is calculated by adding up the match points that were earned by all of a player's opponents. A bye will earn no match points, and so contributes 0 points to a player's strength of schedule."

Many thanks…I will likely just go with this for Netrunner tournaments, too. Their tournament guide also does not mention byes.

Nate French says, byes count as wins, so 4 points.

This means that if a player has no opponent for a round, he is considered to have won both games for that round. (This happens both with byes, and if an opponent doesn't show up for his match.)