Recently I've begun getting back into a game that was one of my passions. Back when I was in the navy I used to play a decent amount of Warmachine. For those who don't know Warmachine is a miniatures based wargame that takes place in a type of steampunk world. (Although they don't like the label steampunk, they prefer Full Metal Fantasy.) I enjoyed the game and was pretty okay at it. I could even hold my own in most competitive circuits.
So like I said I'm getting back into the game again, with some gusto. I'm finishing up painting all of the things I've had sitting around for the last 5 years and I'm relearning the game so I can start picking up the competitive game again. The last time I played they had just introduced the official second edition of the game which brought about huge changes and add in my six year hiatus from the game you can see a need to find a way to catch up fast. So I've started listening to some podcasts about it.
Today I listened to an episode of the Chain-Attack podcast. Specifically Episode 215 where the last half of the episode was dedicated to the opinion of one of the competitive players of the four man group they normally have on the show. He's a very skilled player with a firm grasp on the meta-game and theory behind it, definitely someone who's opinion is worth a listen. I disagree with the somewhat elitist attitude taken by this particular group of players, but that's always a complaint of mine with the way certain circles of competitive players talk about their chosen game.
Anyways, the last half of the podcast was about a valid complaint about the competitive circuit of Warmachine. The tournaments can have a rather random feel to them because of the haphazard way tournament brackets are created by Press Gangers essentially by pulling names out of a hat. This can lead to the final pairings in a tournament to be lopsided depending upon how the first brackets lined up. If the two most competitive players in an 8 man tourney face off first round you essentially know who is going to win the overall.
The player wanted a different way to approach competitive play. His primary suggestion was creating an Elo style ranking system to determine matchups better. Elo is a system that essentially ranks a player based upon their skill levels and attempts to take that into account when determining matchups and how valuable a certain win is vs an opponent. Your number of games played and your win-loss ratio is what helps determine this ranking.
Which in theory sounds great from a competitive standpoint. He gave some wonderful examples of other games that use these types of systems. Magic, Chess (where it originated), Poker, and League of Legends were mentioned specifically. All of which have very strong competitive structures. There are a few problems with translating this to a wargame though.
In Chess every single move in competition is written down to make sure theres no cheating, League is a PC game hosted on servers controlled by the company and monitored for fairness, Poker and Magic have some very strict conduct rules and similar measures in place to ensure that no one is cheating. Every single one has very strict judging criteria, professional, or semi-professional judges, and a code of conduct as well as ways to ensure fairness.
In order to ensure fairness in a wargame you'd have to have every single move able to be measured and recorded and have official ways of measuring outcomes like officially built, weighted, and measured dice. There'd also have to be a professional judging staff rather than the amateur volunteers that make up the entirety of Privateer Press' tournament staff.
Another major difference between those other games and Warmachine (and really wargaming in general) is the size of the player base, especially in competition levels. Warmachine probably has less players in total than what Magic alone has that play in competition. It doesn't have the literal centuries of time that Chess has had to build up a player base, or the ease of access and large financial backing that any of these games have.
To be completely honest there's not enough money in the entire game to really make implementing that type of system worthwhile even if it weren't for the fact that it would change the way people play the game.
And oh boy would that change the way people play the game.
I don't play MOBAs like League or competitive Magic specifically because of the player communities. Magic was no longer fun to play one I got into the competitive play (my attitude towards it got even worse when I had to judge Friday Night Magic as a DCI *shudder*). It draws a different crowd to the game and really affects the way the meta is presented and the attitudes of the players at the tournaments.
All in all I feel that a change like that will make it an even higher entry barrier as the elitists in a game that's already tough to get into even harder for new players to get interested in.
