Hello and welcome to our new series on army appearance judging!I’m going to be talking through the different approaches I’ve seen and used over the years, the pros and cons of each, and ways to avoid their potential pitfalls.
This is intended to be food for thought for Tournament Organizers (TOs), and not a defense of soft scores or a discussion of whether or not we should incentivize people to improve their hobby skills. I’m just going to assume that if you’re reading this, you’re already on board. 😉 Maybe you are a first time TO and you are trying to figure out how you want to incorporate appearance judging into your event or maybe you are a long time TO and you are trying to think of ways to improve your players’ experience, or help push their skills to the next level, or reduce your workload, or all of the above.
In talking to other TOs about why they approach appearance judging the way they do, a few common concerns come up. Good TOs try to solve or avoid as many issues in advance as they can, because at any event there are going to be some number of unexpected issues that pop up that you have to deal with as quickly as possible. The bottom line is: you only have so much time during the event. Your approach to appearance judging can’t be so time-consuming that you have to choose between giving each army a fair shake or dealing with everything else you have to worry about.
Not every TO is a top-tier hobbyist. That can cause a lot of anxiety when trying to rank the top-tier armies at an event. People are passionate about their hobby projects and can be very critical of the judging if they feel their army was not given adequate consideration or recognition. You might not always be able to avoid bruising some egos, but you definitely don’t want to end up in a situation where people perceive your results to be wrong because you don’t have a strong enough base of hobby knowledge and skills to rely on.
So how does a TO navigate this minefield? Over the years, we’ve developed three basic approaches: crowdsourcing, objective criteria, and subjective assessment. TOs tend to rely on one or more of these approaches and mix and match them to meet their needs. No matter how you decide to go about it, you have to be transparent and set expectations appropriately well in advance. People are likely to be annoyed or upset if they are taken by surprise once they are already at the event, and there’s really no point in trying to incentivize specific behaviors if you don’t give people enough time to follow through.
Let’s start with the most straightforward approach: crowdsourcing, which is just a fancy way of saying “let the players pick.” For this approach, you let the players vote for their favorite army or armies. Players can and will use whatever criteria they want, but I’ve commonly heard TOs tell them to “vote for the army they would most like to take home with them.” Whichever army gets the most votes wins.
Crowdsourcing Pros
- Very low level of effort for the TO: All you have to do is hand out the ballots and then count them. Ok, maybe that’s not all you have to do. You still have to schedule time for the players to look at the armies and turn in their votes, and you have to remind them to do it during the event. You might also have to break a tie. But compared to the other approaches, this one involves the least amount of work for the TO both before and during the event. This can make it a very attractive option for smaller or single day events.
- Very low level of hobby expertise required for the TO: The players vote for the army they vote for, and the TO has little to no input into it or control over it. If you are a first-time TO or aren’t very confident in your own knowledge and skills, you might find this approach particularly attractive.
- Encourages players to look at the armies: This might seem like it’s not such a big deal, but hear me out. Between games, meals, socializing, and actually getting some sleep, people can get really busy during events and might not make the time to go around and look at all the armies. When you take this approach, looking at and talking about the armies becomes one of the social activities at the event. It gives everyone’s army a bigger audience than just their opponents and provides more opportunities to talk about the hobby work everyone’s been doing. Getting positive feedback from the other players can be rewarding and encouraging in and of itself.
Crowdsourcing Cons
- Inconsistency: How many votes an army gets from one event to the next can be highly inconsistent. There tends to be a novelty effect in favor of more recently completed armies. Players might vote for an army the first time they see it, but might not vote for it at subsequent events simply based on the fact that they voted for it before. Also, players will apply their own personal criteria which will vary widely from one player to the next based on their own personal hobby expertise. Anecdotally, the biggest display boards, brightest colors, coolest themes, and most impressive centerpieces tend to attract more player votes, while the technical details of painting and composition might not get the same consideration from players as they would from a judge.
- No transparency: As a hobbyist, what should you do before an event to make sure you do well? Based on the results of your last event, what should you work on to do better next time? The crowdsourcing approach offers really poor answers to these questions. Since the number of votes you get from one event to the next can be so inconsistent, it’s hard to tell if the work you put in between events is actually resulting in a better looking army. Has anyone actually tried to go around to all the players at an event and ask what you could have done to get their vote? The answers would likely be along the lines of “look cooler than the one I voted for.” Good luck figuring out what specific things you should do to accomplish that.
Potential Pitfalls
- Popularity contest: Some players might fall back to voting for the hobbyist instead of the army. It’s hard to avoid this altogether. You can discourage it in the event rules and remind people not to do it at the event. You can also place some restrictions on who the players can vote for. The obvious one is to tell people they can’t vote for themselves. Another restriction that I’ve seen often is telling people they can’t vote for someone in their club/region/travel group.
- Not everyone gets a chance to see every army: You can encourage people to get around and look at all the armies, but sometimes the number of armies, physical layout of the event space, or other logistical factors prevent everyone from getting a chance to see every army. I’m definitely guilty of it. I’ve been to more than one tournament where they announce the winner and I’m like “wait, which army was that?” The best way I know of to avoid this is by having a runoff vote. It’s pretty simple to do, just have a first vote where all the armies are options as usual. Then take just the armies that received at least some minimum number of votes, such as two or more, and place them all on a finalists table. Then have the players vote again on just the finalist armies and pick the winner based just on the second runoff vote.
- Incorporating votes into tournament scores: At most events, a small number of armies receive most of the votes and some armies don’t receive any. So you have to be very careful about how the results are used. Counting each vote as a tournament point without any sort of cap can result in an unexpectedly popular army receiving more points than the TO intended for soft scores to provide. It can also result in a larger point spread from the top to the bottom than the TO intends.
One potential solution would be to give tournament points based on the ranking instead of the raw number of votes. For example, the army with the most votes gets 10 points, the army with the second most votes gets 5 points, the army with the third most votes gets 3, etc. You might want the point spread to more closely match the actual share of the votes an army received though. In that case, you can award a number of points based on the percentage of total votes an army received instead of just a flat number. So you might still give the army with the most votes a full 10 points, but the second place army might get more or less than 5 depending on how close its vote total is to the first place army.
Another potential solution is to split the voting off into its own award that doesn’t impact the tournament scores, most commonly referred to as Player’s Choice. For Player’s Choice, you just count the votes and give the award to the winner without adding any tournament points based on the votes. At larger events, you will often see both a Player’s Choice award based on player votes and a Best Appearance or Best Painted award based on a different approach which still impacts the overall results. I’m a fan of having both awards so you are incentivizing both solid technical painting and big eye-catching features, and using multiple approaches helps balance the pros and cons of each.
Really interested as to where this goes. Nice write up.