Wednesday, November 5, 2014

OP Month Two- announcement from TO




The Star Trek Attack Wing (STAW) Resistance is Futile (RiF) Organized Play (OP) Event for Month Two: Unimatrix Zero will be held at Fairfax Games and Comics on Sunday, November 16, 2014 starting at 1 pm. The store opens at Noon. Please arrive early to get your blind booster pack and decide which ship/cards to use. The contents of all five blind boosters are listed online. We can’t find the link anymore, so the next blog post will have them all listed. I recommend deciding ahead of time what you will use with your fleet(s) for each of the boosters, so that you are prepared no matter which ship you receive.
There are four documents from WizKids that are relevant to this OP: the initial rules description, the rules clarification posted 9/30/14, the alternative rules posted 9/26/14, and the updated suggested tournament format posted 10/24/14.  I recommend reading all of these.



Customization:
Point 1    I have some reservations about the new suggested tournament format as it applies to Borg fleets. I’m concerned that it isn’t reasonable to restrict something like a Tactical Cube to less than 60 points. I agree that 80-90 point cubes are brutal, but can you really get your points’ worth out of a cube at 52 points? Unimatrix Zero seems like a good time to test the theory, so I’m implementing the updated suggested tournament format and I am NOT altering it at all.
               Clarification: In talking to Bob, I realized that we had different interpretations of this rule. I thought that the ship build maximum was increased by 8 points (to 58 points) for any ship over 43 points. Bob believes that any ship over 43 points gets 8 additional points (51 point ceiling for a 43 point ship) for captain, upgrades, and resources that are applied directly to the ship. In considering the point, it makes sense that WizKids was probably thinking along the same lines as Bob. After all, ship costs are always even numbers, so why did they pick 43? And 43 is the first number that exceeds the 50 point ceiling when 8 points are added to it. Therefore, the ruling for November is that we will have a 50 point maximum per ship and any ships over 43 points may take up to 8 points in captains, upgrades, or resources.

Point 2    It has been my experience that most players that come to the Fairfax Games and Comics store have Borg  ships/cards and I don’t think this scenario will play as nicely with only one fleet. Based on the personalities of the people that come to my store, I’m betting they would want to tailor separate Borg and Rebel fleets. Therefore, I will NOT be implementing the Alternative Gameplay option of Players Bring 1 Fleet. I repeat, everyone should bring TWO fleets: one Borg and one Rebel.

Point 3    You will only have one blind booster for the competition. However, you are free to organize the options from that pack into two separate configurations: one for the Borg fleet and one for the Rebel fleet. You will NOT be allowed to make changes between rounds, though. So, if you play the Borg Fleet in Round 1 and Round 3, your blind booster ship needs to be in the same configuration in Round 3 that it was for Round 1.

Point 4    In the Alternative Rules, there is a bullet point that says that the Borg Fleet may take an action to discard a mission Token from a ship in order to remove one normal damage card. This makes no sense. All Borg ships have Regenerate. Even if the ship is NOT a “Borg” ship, if it is in the Borg Fleet, then it gains the Regenerate action. My read of this text is that you have to have an action to take and you need to spend a mission token. Why spend your mission token when you can just use the Regenerate action? There’s only one circumstance that I can think of where this makes any sense. If the ship has two actions available to it, then it could spend one of them to use the ship’s regenerate and the second one to enact this special regeneration (which costs a mission token). Thus, you could reclaim two hull points in one turn, but you’d give up 8 fleet points in the process. At this time I am disinclined to allow this rule to be used. If someone has an argument for using it, I will reconsider.

Point 5    Ranking and pairing. Yikes! Let’s just make it a little more complicated, since we don’t have enough confusion as it is. J I would really very much appreciate it if people could sign up prior to the event, so that I can try to have all the pairings worked out for the first round before arriving at the store. The three players from last month’s event will be ranked 1-3 this month. If anyone else shows up who played in the previous tournament, I will rank you (against each other) based on your overall standing in those three games. So, the highest you will be placed is 4th. If you have not played in any of the last four events at this store, that’s OK, too. Please note that these initial ranks are for the purposes of deciding who will play which fleet starting out and they have absolutely no effect on your ultimate standing for battle points/fleet points in the Unimatrix Zero Event.

Point 6    As you can probably tell from above, I’m planning to give the pairings guidelines from the original rules a shot. However, I reserve the right to dump those rules in a heartbeat and use the Alternative Player Matching rules released on 9/26 if I determine that they will be easier, or make more sense.

Point 7    Going back to the point about registering ahead of time…The rules for fleet building in this OP are unique. You won’t be able to go to a website like Dracos and have it do the work for you. Also, it’s been my experience that people don’t really check the math on their opponent’s builds when they are looking them over. To promote fairness, I encourage players to email me their lists ahead of time, so I can vet the builds. I’ll check to make sure the right number/type of upgrade are used and that the SP adjustments are factored in correctly. This will allow me to assure all the players that the vetted lists had no oversights.



Bob is on the board of directors for a local wargaming convention called Nova Open. You’ve probably heard him talk about it. Well, one year, this kid named Tony won the first place at the main tournament. (There are several tournaments for different systems going on simultaneously each year.) After he won, it turned out that he’d done his math wrong and he was 3 points over the limit. As a result, he received the nickname C3PO (for 3 points over, I’m not sure what the C was supposed to stand for. Maybe “clearly”. J) Anyway, a lot of people said it was no big deal and three points didn’t make that much difference when the point total was 2,000. But other people said he cheated and it there were sour grapes and a lot of nastiness. The next year, he came back and won again, but with a list that was exactly three points under the total, just to thumb his nose at his detractors.



Well, three points isn’t a big deal when the total is 2,000, that’s true. But it makes a very big difference when the total is only 120. I don’t want anyone claiming that someone cheated and I don’t want anyone kicking themselves later for not taking an SP credit that they were due.

Please note that the WizKids official forum  is now live. I hope to see you at the next event!

A-

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