I'm mythicFOX a UK Malifaux Henchman, tournament regular, film nut, and all round geek.
Also the Malifaux devil, apparently.

Friday 27 December 2013

The UK Tournament System

So the 2013 season is over and the community is looking forward to the year ahead. I'm grabbing some much needed hobby time before we kick in again with Masters in late January.  I've finally finished re-painting my twenty Arcanists, with the new plastic Joss replacing the old one.


The new Arcanist plastics look great and many of the models are great improvements on their old metal counterparts. I must say the huge new beasts in the Marcus box have convinced me to paint that crew next rather than the ‘Tina crew I had planned. I’m gripped by the call of the wild.
               
Following some recent questions I've had from new players I thought I'd use those post to give a quick explanation of how the wider UK Tournament system works and is scored. 

Events themselves are scored following Gaining Grounds. Firstly players score three tournament points (TP) for each game they win, one TP for each draw and nothing for a loss.  So a player with two wins a draw and a loss scores (3+3+1+0) 7TP.  

Where players are tied on TP they are ranked by victory point difference (VPD), this is the difference between the victory points they scored and those scored against them.  So if a players results were; 10-5, 10-5, 4-4, 4-8 they would score (5+5+0-4) +6VPD.  In the event of further ties players are then ranked by total victory points (VP) scored during the event, so in the above example; (10+10+4+4) 28VP.  This gives us the final standings for the event.  Some events deviate from this system but that’s fairly rare.  

The results of the event are then fed into the national rankings system.  Players need to sign up to Rankings HQ in order to have their results displayed in the rankings tables.  Each event is worth up to one-hundred rankings points to a player, based on how they finished and how many players attended the event.

The maximum score of one-hundred rankings points is available at events of twenty players or more. The maximum score is reduced by one for each player short of twenty the event is. So an eighteen player event is two short of twenty and therefore ninety-eight points is the maximum score. 

The player who wins the event scores the maximum and every player below her scores a reduced proportion of this.  So in a twenty player event first place would score one-hundred rankings points, second would score ninety-five, third would score ninety and so on down to twentieth place who would score five points.

Players are then ranked based on their three best scores in a rolling twelve month period. Making the best possible score thee-hundred points, although in the years the rankings have been running only two players have ever achieved this.
Once a year an invitational event, known as the Masters is held. The winner of the previous Masters event is invited along with the fifteen highest ranked players who are able to attend.  The winner of this is crowned Malifaux Master for the year. I’ve attended several Masters and contrary to what you would expect I’ve found them to be some of the most relaxed events I’ve ever played.
This year's Masters is accompanied by an open event anyone can enter. At the time of writing there are fifteen players signed up for the event, so it promises to be a fun one if you're looking to start your gaming year with a bang.

So that's how the UK system works for those interested. I hope Santa brought you what you wanted and I wish you all a happy new year.


Wednesday 11 December 2013

Wave One Meta Analysis

With the conclusion of the UK tournament season at Joel-faux, I thought now would be a good time to take a look a the picture that's forming of the UK meta. I've exported some (publicly available) data from Rankings HQ and given it a quick once over.

Before I jump into the numbers I want to really stress that we're talking about a small sample of results, eight events, in a reasonably small meta. So I'd shy away from making sweeping statements about what this really tells us about M2e wave one.

Firstly I've broken down the players by faction;

Faction%
Resurrectionist23.9%
Neverborn20.4%
Arcanists19.7%
Guild12.0%
Outcasts12.0%
Gremlin7.0%
Ten Thunders4.9%

I'm not overly surprised to see Gremlins low on the list, after all they only have models for two masters to date. I wonder the extent to which established players are returning to playing their book one masters, which would account for the relatively low number of Ten Thunders players.

I also tried to take a measure of how the factions are performing. You would expect a faction to take a proportion of the rankings points at an event equivalent to their proportion in the field as a whole. So Guild representing 12% of the field should expect to gain 12% of the rankings points, all things being equal.

Below is a table created by comparing the percentage of the faction in the field to the percentage of rankings points that faction earned. So a faction that was 10% of the field and collected 11% of the available rankings points would be getting +1% of the rankings points. In effect this should give us a view of how a faction is over/under performing;

M2e Faction%
Resurrectionist+1.50%
Arcanists+1.28%
Neverborn+0.51%
Ten Thunders+0.03%
Gremlin-0.58%
Outcasts-1.21%
Guild-1.54%

As a footnote I've corrected for impacts of individual performance by only allowing each player to appear in the data once for each faction. Where a player would appear multiple times with the same faction I've used their average result.

It's interesting to note that based on a similar sample of results from M1.5 taken for events earlier this year the results look very different;

M1.5 Faction%
Neverborn+1.94%
Resurrectionist+1.78%
Ten Thunders-0.43%
Arcanists-0.44%
Outcasts-0.69%
Guild-2.14%

It's worth noting that alongside the obvious changes in position on the table that the factions performance are closer to zero.

That's really all I wanted to do with these numbers. I'd again caution against reading too much into them, they're a small sample of results. I'd also say I'm not making a judgement on what this means about faction balance in Malifaux, I think there's a lot more for us to learn before we get a real handle on how the game truly balances out.