Revised 14 March 2003 -- after additional input!

Well, after some discussion with one of my opponents (the cheery and fun-to-play Francisco "Paco" Rodriguez) after the awards ceremony, I attempted to figure out the Baltimore GT scoring system: After I initially posted this, however, I not only got a fair amount of feedback, but I realized that some of my calculations were off. Sometimes by a lot. So, here is my revised attempt at breaking down the GT scoring system.

Battle: who the heck knows? This is the one part that makes absolutely no sense, and got Jim (in particular) in a bit of a fury. Just to show you how little sense this part of the scoring made, here's a list of all the Warmongers, arranged by final Battle score, as well as their final overall win-tie-loss records.

Warmonger	Points	Record
Nidal Nasr	153	+5=1
Chris Bacolo	144	+4-2
Ken Lacy	144	+4-2
Wilson Badillo	141	+4=1-1
Matt Birdoff	140	+5-1
Jim Keleher	137	+5=1
Vincent Polidoro	122	+4-2
Jin Lee	113	+4-2
Louis Bonini	111	+3-3
Duncan Watwood	110	+3=1-2
Tony Perez	108	+2=1-3
Gene Wainwright	93	+1=1-4
Gary Kwan	93	+1=1-4
Leah Gustavson	83	+1-5

I've put into bold the names of Warmongers that got particularly bizarre scores. Even across folks that got the same records, however, there were strange things happening. Both Chris & I went +4-2 and got 144 points. On the other extreme, Jin had the exact same record (+4-2) and got only 113 points. Nidal went +5=1 and got 153, whereas Jim got the same record and finished with fewer points (137) than I did. And Matt may have gotten shafted most royally of all -- he finished with a better record than I did (+5-1), and yet only garnered 140 battle points, fewer than I did. And he finished second in the Grand Tournament by only 3 points. How does this work again? GW desperately needs to provide full disclosure, otherwise there's going to be very persistent rumors about how they have (yet again!) messed up the scoring at a Grand Tournament event.

One very good idea that came up is a scoring system something like the following: 20 points for each victory in games 1, 2, 3, and 6, and 10 points for a loss. 40 points for a victory in games 4&5, and 20 points for a loss. Plus bonus points from games 4&5. That's not a perfect approximation, but it does get results that are somewhat closer to what many of the Warmongers got. At any rate, it's 100% clear that battle points were different from battle to battle.

At any rate, here is the complete (Warmonger club) results list from the Grand Tournament, including the six opponents that I faced myself. The complete results lists can be found at the GW website: both 40K and WFB results.

Name	Army	Total (Rank)	Battle	Sports.	Appear.	Theme
Matt Birdoff	Black Legion	367 (2)	140	90	102	35
Nidal Nasr	Emperor's Wounds (Marines)	358 (5)	153	100	80	25
Chris Bacolo	Emperor's Children	351 (10)	144	92	80	35
Jim Keleher	Iron Warriors	348 (12)	137	105	81	35
Jin Lee	Biel-Tan Eldar	344 (16)	113	95	101	35
Ken Lacy	Alpha Legion	330 (26t)	144	91	60	35
Justin Hill	Fantasy: Dogs of War	325 (27)	123	85	82	35
Wilson Badillo	Worldeaters	322 (34t)	141	76	80	25
Mike O'Brien	Word Bearers	321 (37t)	131	105	60	25
John Bianchi	Fantasy: Dogs of War	313 (42t)	93	105	80	35
Paco Rodriguez	Imperial Guard	313 (45)	123	95	60	35
Vincent Polidoro	Death Guard	307 (56)	122	90	60	35
Rob Kopp	Fantasy: Goblins	300 (64t)	130	85	60	25
Scott Ripley	Elvis's Noise Marines	302 (67t)	122	85	60	35
Kevin Coleman	Fantasy: Goblins	294 (69t)	119	80	60	35
Justin Stogdill	Iron Warriors	300 (75t)	125	80	60	35
Louis Bonini	Rolling Thunder (Marines)	297 (78t)	111	71	80	35
Duncan Watwood	Ravenwing	297 (78t)	110	92	60	35
John Burke	Death Guard	292 (90t))	101	76	80	35
Tony Perez	Night Lords	289 (98)	108	76	80	25
Gene Wainwright	Thousand Sons	284 (110t)	93	76	80	35
Gary Kwan	Word Bearers	283 (113t)	93	95	60	35
John O'Brien	Fallen Angels (DA)	282 (117)	107	90	60	25
Leah Gustavson	Black Templar	243 (151)	82	66	60	35

Black Crusade armies are listed in bold. The six non-Warmongers on the list (names in italics) are the six opponents I faced in the GT. The four underlined armies were in the Fantasy competition. Note that overall rankings are out of 162 40K players, and 136 Fantasy players. This is down a fair bit from last year, although possibly this has more to do with the fact that there are many more GT options available to people this year as compared to last.

Sportsmanship: Again, who knows? My first guess was that each person got a rating from 1-5 from each opponent, which was then multiplied by 3 and added up. Then each person got 5 points for every opponent that voted them in as "best sportsman". This is what best seems to match the sorts of numbers that are listed. For example, I got a final Sportsmanship score of 91, which (if I was correct) meant that I got three scores of "5" out of 5, three scores of "4" out of 5, and two of my opponents voted me as best Sportsman out of all six opponents they faced. Wahoo! And I was in the top 25% when it came to Sportsmanship...

Unfortunately, my first guess didn't compute. I assumed that there was some kind of base-3 involved, because the ones digits cover the spectrum from 0-9 (and a base-3 system would be the only way to capture that). However, after doing a more involved 'spreadsheet' of the Sportsmanship totals, I have to admit to being stumped. If there's some system there, I can't readily see it, although I still believe that "Best Sportsman" bonus points were worth 5 points each (take a look at the spread between the top few scores -- those guys maxed out on Sportsmanship, AND collected "Best Sportsman" votes). Also, I'm not sure why GW lists this category as 'max 125', and whether that includes bonus points for Best Sportsman or not.

Here's a table of all the Sportsmanship results (both WFB and 40K) from the Baltimore GT. There's probably a pattern here, but it's really beyond my ability to calculate. Possibly the Sportsmanship category was weighted in some fashion, much like I believe the Battle points were. In any case, without some kind of disclosure, GW is just shooting itself in the foot. Keeping the scoring a secret is an amazingly bad idea -- particularly when the tournament already is plagued by the spectre of past scoring errors.

Appearance: Here, at least, it's pretty clear. It looks like there are four basic scores: "0" for Not Finished, "60" for Needs work, "80" for Very Good, and 100 for "Great", with various bonuses depending on whether or not any of the 4 judges who looked at your army liked it or not. This was one area where people got seriously screwed the most. There were absolutely NO fine distinctions made between the vast majority of folks (=60), and the only ones who got 80+ were those who (a) caught the eye of the judges, (b) used painting techniques that were GW-sanctioned, and (c) were heavily converted to some degree or other. All other armies need not apply.

As an example, Justin, who painted probably the most incredible and exquisite army (Dogs of War) among all the Warmongers, inexplicably received a miserly "82" for his paintjob -- because he had no screamingly loud conversions, no screamingly obnoxious base, but rather very beautiful and subtle details. Fortunately the other players, who obviously paid more attention to these things than the judges, voted him a well-deserved #2 for Player's Choice.

There were some armies I saw in the "60" category that clearly deserved to be more highly ranked, some armies in the "100" category that clearly got there because of flashy conversions and little else, and some armies in the "80" category that I (not so humbly) would submit were substantially more butt-ugly than my own Alpha Legion's paint job. What a total crap-shoot! At the very least, some kind of weighted average, taking into account the fact that FOUR judges (supposedly) looked at each army, would have been nice. Possibly one of the most disappointing parts of this year's scoring.

Theme: Basically if you weren't obviously a cheesy bastard you got 35 points. Anyone who in the judge's opinion was being cheesy, or anyone who didn't even make up some names for their army on their army list, got a 25. Some people got even less, but I'm guessing that it was for not bringing a legible army list, or having numbers that were wildly off.

In all, however, I'm very happy with most of my scoring. The battle points totals are completely mysterious, but also the part that I had the most control over. Sadly, I didn't perform as well in my first two games as I would have wished, but my opponents were all great folks, as reflected in their generally high Sportsmanship scores, and they seemed to all like me fairly well, so I have few complaints. I do wish that the GW judges had FAR LESS control over who does or does not win these things. Given a choice between vagaries of player (opponent) choice, and judge (GW volunteers) choice, I think, as it stands, that I would happily go with the former over the latter, by far.

But in the end, it's a game with little toy soldiers, and I did pretty damn good, in the 84th percentile overall. There's no way I'll ever be masterful enough a painter to win one of these things, particularly not in the hyper-competitive Baltimore GT, so I'll take what I got and be happy (and quietly hope, of course, that things...continue to...improve in the future)

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