Sunday Sermon: Do we need referees?

    
   

Now that's what I call a flamboyant referee!

EDIT: Just to make it clear right from the offset this Blog is me asking the question, not prejudging and saying we do, after SinSynn raised a concern. Rather than let it lie, I'm mking things clear. Fact is I haven't been to a tournament in a while, so I'm going on a few complaints I've received recently. In my own experience I found tournaments to be fine and in the main cheat free when I did attend them. Just want to know what people think now.

This thought has resurfaced recently after conversing with some highly disgruntled gamers I know via various means. Many felt they had played somebody recently at a tournament who were to quote one of them 'seriously taking the piss'. Now this thought originally occurred to me about two years roughly, while having a discussion with a couple of people who had just attended a HoMachine tournament. Now both were seething, and I might add rightly so, at a number of things that they, and indeed I, would consider to be cheating, or at the very least unsportsmanlike behaviour. One of them basically said he could stand bad organisation of a tournament, even bad comp and missions. Hell he even accepted at some point he was going to come up against bad match ups he could do nothing about, but... he could not abide flagrant cheating. Lets be honest here, any half decent human being would feel the same way I'm sure, cheats suck ass! Whether it's loaded dice or elastic tape measures, it's all just a bit lame. Even more so when you consider we're pushing little toy soldiers around a board. Seriously? Cheating?

Do not argue with this man. He is right. That is all.

So what is the solution to this? Well I guess that depends on where you encounter the cheat now doesn't it? When I was at university I came across such a startlingly obvious form of cheating I called the guy on it in front of everyone. It was at our university club. What was he doing? Well two things really, the first and most obvious were his dice. He had two colours the red ones rolled high and the blue ones rolled low, suspiciously so. Any way me being good at stats worked out he was having unbelievable luck, although to be honest any idiot could've worked it out they were that badly disguised, so I asked if I could use his dice. He got really defensive about it and I remembered thinking "hmm I don't need to be a psychologist to see he's hiding something". The other thing was pre-measuring in a game that didn't allow pre-measuring. He had 4 pieces of metal rod on his side of the table he thought I couldn't see. He'd lean next to them and then lean on the board. Now if he'd asked me before the game if we could pre-measure, because he was crap at ranges I'd have probably said yes because it was just a fun game... supposedly!


However, it started to get really quite annoying, so I called two friends over to see what they thought before I called him on it. When I did he got exceedingly aggressive, which was dumb because I'm a big bloke, about 6' 3" and he probably made Kylie Minogue look like an Amazonian warrior. But I'd called him on it when I'd got hold of his metal rods and what turned out to be his clearly and very badly concealed loaded dice. that taught him a lesson about going to the toilet mid-game! With the evidence literally in hand he confessed his sins. I packed up and said I don't play with cheats. Thing is neither did anybody else, so he never got a game again I don't think at the university club, or at least not to my knowledge as he was the year below me. So if it's at a club or a local shop you can just refuse to play them pack your stuff up and walk away. This is whether they're openly cheating or you just don't trust them, which ultimately is your decision and personal choice  I'd suggest. So I'm not talking about that sort of situation when I ask if we need referees. But, what happens when we have disputes that are at organised events, and you had no choice whether to play the cheating scum bag across the tabletop from you?

Are match referees required? Now, I don't mean the two or three guys you see running around an event like blue arsed flies trying to deal with every issue that crops up. No, I actually mean a referee who is designated for that game or maybe two tables next to each other? Someone to keep an eye on things and keep people honest. I'm genuinely not sure whether we do or not, or indeed if cheating is as rife as some people I know have claimed it is recently. The truth is though that in some game systems the rules are so bloody ambiguous that the rulebooks alone just aren't good enough to provide a solid and unambiguous framework for us to play our games clearly. Where this is the case what are the possible solutions open to us? The first and most often used option is the small cadre of 'officials' that most tournaments seem to have organising events, and to use them to make 'rules decisions'. For those sorts of genuine rules disputes I think this works fine. For things like loaded dice etc. I'd suggest this is quite frankly more than adequate too. But what about the sly cheating? Moving miniatures that extra inch to get the charge in or blatantly lying about dice rolls? How can somebody who didn't witness that sort of cheating adjudicate?

It seems to me that for many tournament goers who have contacted me and answered my questions on this topic to give me a picture of what's now going on... it's these little niggly transgressions that grate on people nerves the most. I want to be clear here though and say I'm talking about hard nosed tournaments here, where the players are going out to prove they're the best gamer that weekend or whatever. Where people know they're going to play strictly competitively, in these sorts of environment are we now at a stage where we need to see more referee's? I'm honestly tossing this one out to you guys because I've had brief chats with a number of tournament gamers not only here in good old Blighty but also across the pond in the good old U S of A and they have all said something needs to be 'done'. It seems some people are getting so fed up with these minor transgressions adding up and being unable to do anything about it that it is ruining their own enjoyment of tournaments.

Just remember that referees can get it wrong sometimes... erm... all the time!

As many of you who read this Blog will know, I haven't attended any tournaments for quite a while. This is mainly because I just can't face going somewhere and spending and entire weekend playing game after game anymore, but also because I didn't like how it made me approach the hobby. Now I never became a cheating scum bag, but I did become 'that guy' with 'that army' and I started feeling guilty at the faces filled with abject despair across the table from me. So I have to admit that I am currently unaware as to what it's like out there now. when I was gaming at tournaments I'd say I very rarely came across flagrant cheats, and the minor transgressors made up 1 in 10 gamers at most. Honestly I never felt it was that bad, and most of these people who moved figures a bit too far etc. were mostly harmless. But, has it now gotten so bad with some gamers that something needs to be done about it at certain types of tournament? So I'm asking you lot a few simple questions:

1. Has niggly cheating at tournaments got to such levels that more needs to be done by event organisers to counter it?
2. And if so, simply put, what more can be done to stop it and eliminate it? Because the suggestion of match referees seems pretty overly 'intensive' to me.
3. Or is it just part of the package that this kind of crap goes on? Does it come with the territory and do you just have to suck it up?

On this one my fellow gamers I'm going to defer to you lot. The floor is yours. Peace out!