Been doing a lot of pondering about tournament results lately, and specifically tiebreakers and bonus tournament points awarded. Right now the system very much rewards being paired against easier opponents that one can run up the score against; a narrow victory against a tough opponent is much worse for your tournament performance than a 10-0 blowout against a newbie. This is compounded with the fact that that 10-0 will give you more tournament points than the 2-0 against a tough opponent - it's very possible for a person, in a 3-round tournament, to get a 10-0 blowout and a tie and place higher than someone with 2 narrow wins. While the points metrics have been tweaked in the last season update, this problem is not a new one. Players who get paired against easier opponents are rewarded twice - they have a higher chance of winning, *and* score more tournament points and tiebreakers. The alternatives both involve losing the extra points gained for a high-scoring out blowout victory. The first would be to simply not count tiebreakers/OPs for the first round in a Swiss-paired tournament. If we take the idea that the first round is paired randomly, then starting in the second round one is paired with players who are doing approximately as well as oneself on that day, and therefore, tiebreakers become more meaningful/fair. The second would be a method I'm particularly fond of, which takes into account "strength of schedule," and that would be to make the tiebreaker your *opponents'* combined game/match win percentage in the tournament. So given two players with equal records, the one who faced tougher opponents would win out. This does seem to doom players who are paired with less skilled opponents based on pairings, but I think that the existing setup only gives the phantasm of agency. There is another reason that moving away from OPs as tiebreakers and to OGW is a good idea, however - and that is that some missions have vastly different scoring opportunities based on if you have the first or second active turn. Most missions that score at the end of the round are much harder to do well in if you're taking the first active turn, and this is something that I'm not sure if the scenario balancing has fully addressed. There's no strategy to that, it comes down to a single die roll before you've moved a single model, and it drastically affects your chances of scoring high in the game, and by extension, your standings in the tournament. What are your thoughts on this? Are their options I'm missing? Do you think the current setup has benefits that I'm not aware of?
