Objective Secured

WATC – the event.

The 2018 WATC is over and it is time to congratulate the WA gaming community for a fantastic showing and a great representation of what Western Australia has to offer!

From (not so) little things, big things grow.

WATC has grown since it’s inception in 2016. In 2016 we were amazed with the turn out of 16 teams of 4 and 64 players, 2017 we were imagining that the change to teams of 6 would mean that we potentially took a hit to the numbers. We were wrong, while we saw a smaller number of teams, only 12 teams, we had 72 players attend. Between 2017 WATC and 2018 WATC the WA gaming community decided to come out in force and this year we had 20 teams of 6, 120 players in the room, a non-playing captain, and about 150 spectators in throughout the day! We also had to turn away two teams and we had interest from some interstate teams as well, but we physically could not fit any more teams in the room!

In my previous post about WATC I wrote about all the help we received for the event and I could wax lyrical about it for thousands of words but instead I will just say thank you again to everyone who helped get everything to the event, set up, assisted through the day, packed up, parents who stayed, partners and families who came along to show players support, all the spectators who came through and of course the players who trusted us to put on a good event, brought such great attitudes and were great sports even without a sportsmanship score component.

What is WATC

So what is there to say about the event? 120 players and 60 boards in one room equals a VERY full room. The room was loud, there was a sense of bustle and concentration but even though it was ‘a competitive event’ there never seemed a point where the energy turned nasty. There was always a sense of fun and good natured banter. There were a couple of players who spirits sagged and attitudes went with them as their game did not go as expected, but overall, it seemed like the players were less worried about the results and more interested in having four games and being a part of the experience of a team event with that many players. We had players from all over WA (and one from interstate) and players of all ages from 9 all the way up. It was fantastic to see the young gamers who played in Young Bloods at the start of the year recruit a few more players, form a team and come along for the event. They were great sports behaving with maturity well beyond their years!

For the players who weren’t at the event, it was a one day teams event. Teams of six players with codexes only able to be represented once per team. Four games, 2 hours per game (plus 15 minutes match up), 1500 points, swiss style match up process. With the sheer number of teams, we were running with the distinct possibility that we could have two teams on four wins at the end of the four rounds.  With this in mind, win-loss was our primary way to determine the overall winners we would rely on team games scores (calculated with a differential to allow an even playing field) for count backs. (In English, the team that won the most rounds would win overall but there was a chance that two teams would win all four of their games and we wouldn’t have time for those two teams to play off so we needed a way to determine the winner. Each team had 6 players and at the end of each game the players convert their raw score using a differential table to a score out of 20, this means that each team gets a score out of 120 for a round and a score out of 480 for the whole event. Those game scores were also recorded and that score out of 480 would be used for the count back if we were in a situation where two teams finished the event on 4 wins each.)

It turns out that we didn’t need it. In fact, going into round four, we only had two teams who were on three wins and they were separated on game points by only 7 points. This meant that if those teams drew the round and the margin was narrow enough we could have been in a situation where we had a draw and no way to offer a count back. As I was madly coming up with ideas around how we could determine a winner (I came up with the solution that if we did get a draw for both win-loss and game points we would have our first ever event with a tie!) the games were all going along smoothly and we did in fact get an overall winner.

What went wrong?

Before I congratulate the winners, how did the day run? Overall the day seemed to run quite smoothly!

We had a few hiccups.

• One player arrived with his models still on sprue so, while I was checking everyone in, his team were in the foyer madly assembling the models. We had been really clear (we thought) that all players must have all models painted to table top standard and WYSISYG would apply so the team captain came up with solutions. The player could either be removed from the team and they would play one player down, that player could be given a points penalty for every game, or the captain was happy with what we ever else we decided. All players are given one warning for our events, so he was told that the models would need to be assembled with weapons (WYSIWYG) and must be based and at any future event he would be asked to remove unpainted models from the table.
• One player overslept and missed his first game and was incredibly apologetic.
• I stuffed up the scoring after round 2 (well I entered the scores correctly but then when I went to assign tables for round 3, I forgot to press the button for round 3, went through the full match up process and re-matched round 2! That meant I had to (get Mike to) delete all the scores for round 2, delete the newly assigned tables for round 2, manually match up the teams to the previous match ups and then re-enter the scores for round 2 and then actually assign the match up for round 3). Oops! Even with all that it still only put us 5 minutes late in the schedule!
• There was also a slight confusion with the match-up process for the last pick in the process. This was useful feedback. The current match up process video we have is available here but it highlights that we will need to re-record that video to cover the match up process for the final pick more clearly.

Can we go bigger?

At the end of the event (and a few times previously) Mike spoke about looking for a different venue for next year as the event continues to grow. Neither of us want to be in a place where players are missing out on attending events (if you follow us on Facebook or listen to our podcasts etc you know how hard I pushed to get this to 120 so I don’t want to turn players away and have them miss out!) and so in an ideal world we would look at getting a bigger venue for next year. Logistically though, I just don’t see how that is possible at the moment. Finding a bigger venue is not easy, if we do then obviously we wont have Outpost’s boards and terrain which means that is another 18 boxes of terrain that we need to buy, build and transport on top of any additional boxes of terrain that we need for the extra players (i.e. to get an extra 2 teams in we need an extra 6 boxes of terrain so that is now 24 boxes of terrain that we need, in a year! That’s a new box a fortnight and even if I could push that much mud up hill to get Mike to help me make, build and paint the terrain (not likely) I have no idea where we would store it!).  On top of terrain, we need tables and boards for the full number of attendees and we have to work out how on earth to get it to the venue. Our lotto dream (ok MY lotto dream) is to buy the old Masters building near us (huge space and amazing parking) and we can have it set up and store a tonne of boards and terrain there, however, without a Lotto win or a rich gaming benefactor popping up in the next few months I really am not sure how we would make it happen, but hey, maybe Mike has a plan for that he hasn’t yet shared with me! It could happen, I’m just not sure how, but I am open to suggestions if you have them.

Data from the event.

Ok, back to this event. I will have a look at the data that we received from the event next week (once our kids are back at school) and see what information I can pull out. It will be interesting to see how many turns players got in per game and look at the results for different armies and codexes if I can find a relatively easy way to process 240 rounds of data and 480 individual points of data easily and succinctly.  We gathered information on the codex used, number of turns, win/loss and game points. There is a lot of information to analyse. I knew I should have paid more attention in my stats classes at uni! Jake from Beyond Games and Hobby has asked for data on how the number of models impacted on the number of turns players finished. I’m going to be honest here, the chances of my sitting and working out a model count for each army is slim! If someone else does the counting we will put those numbers into the giant spreadsheet we are working on!

Team shirts!

Before I wrap up, I have to say how much I loved seeing the team shirts! Some of them (From Adelaide with Love) can never be unseen and I have to give a shout out to Coach Diamond for wearing that shirt all day. The back story to that is that a lovely gamer Matt Davey went and moved himself over to Adelaide. He attended in spirit as all the team from ‘From Adelaide with Love’ had photos of Matt on their shirts and their non-playing captain ‘Coach Diamond’ had an almost naked photo of Matt on the back (it was actually PG rated but I’m still going to need some bleach for my eyeballs, what was seen can never be unseen!). It was great to see the team spirit and the comraderie. And the team shirts were fantastic! Keep them coming next year! I also loved that team ‘Here for the Beer’ had 8 names on the shirts. Apparently they had 2 other players who wanted to attend but couldn’t due to the limit of 6 players so they became honorary team members and got their name on the shirts and they got team shirts too. Love it!

My snapping a couple of photos of the team shirts came close to turning into a Dude-oir photo shoot. 🙂 Check out these spunky players!

            

2018 Winners

For now though I will congratulate our 2018 WATC winners.

Special mention to Isaac who was awarded a ‘Favourite opponent’ prize by the Toy Soldier Cartel. Isaac was so passionate about the event and his games. Even at the end of the event, when everyone else was weary, Isaac was still excited and wanting to relive the games. Thanks to Toy Soldier Cartel for providing that award.

 

 

 

 

Ok, drum roll please! It’s time to announce the winners (it’s actually no secret since we did it live on Facebook AND Mike posted them in the Objective Secured results page None the less, I shall pretend that there is an air of excitement as you read the winners. In third place The Toy Soldier Cartel, in second place The Style Boyz and in first place, (our only team with a female captain!) The WA Underdogs. Yay!!!! Big congratulations to you all!

I also have to mention that Tom White, Peter Platell and ObSec’s own Mike Basc were the only players in the room who could walk away with their third consecutive winners medal for WATC. They were all on the same team (I’m not sure if that was smart to pool your strengths or if they made a poor choice to put all their eggs in one basket) and that team was the WA Underdogs and so an extra congratulations must go to Tom, Pete and Mike for going three for three in WATC (oh that rhymes, I’m a poet and did not know it!)

This is the only ObSec event that Mike actually plays in and I TO by myself (as the captains negotiate any queries). It was my absolute pleasure to be your TO for this event and I look forward to seeing you again at the next event if you were an attendee or perhaps meeting you for the first time in the future if you haven’t made it to one of our events yet!

For the photo reel check out tomorrow’s blog post.