ETC points deductions. Already.

So we're not off to the flying start we'd hoped for. Sigh.

The deadline for list submission for ETC lists was mid-July so they could be checked in advance by judges and other teams. It turns out a fair few of the teams including ourselves botched the job and as a result of it have been docked points. Thankfully for us it wasn't a heavy Team Points (TP) deduction but a Battle Point (BP) one.

In fairness, the referees had to impose some form of sanction and it could be much worse from our point of view so while it will come back to haunt us in some fashion (of that I have no doubt) it's definitely not the end of the world and allows us to get on with our games and try to grind our way through the other teams, which I'm fully confident we can do. See below to find out who else has been burned.



Army list submission Bonus point award

For the 5th year in a row this year we have seen some illegal lists submitted, others not respecting the required submission format...I find it very strange that teams of 8 international veteran players can't draft 100% correct rosters in English following a simple format with several months heads-up. Those who do not manage this little effort cost everyone a lot of time during the list corrections process, and more for teams who rehearse game pairings (which I can tell is increasing year after year). That is why the rulespack is planning a sanction system to motivate entrants to comply to a clean list submission (also as a deterent to those who would be tempted to adjust their list composition after seing other nations rosters), and this year the referee corp is in charge of awarding this bonus.

Eventhough list submission wasn't perfect, it must but aknowledged that this year was probably the best in terms of initial quality submission, list format compliance and national teams involvement in list correction. Every team made and effort to follow the submission template, to correct their assigned rosters in time, and to reply to requests and adjust rosters in a timely fashion.

In deciding about the bonus point award, we were faced with 7 nations with serious issues :
-one missed the checking deadline : Latvia
-those with 1 illegal roster : Austria, Republic of Ireland, Norway, USA
-those with 2 illegla rosters : Czech, Poland
For this year, we decided to leave out the minor format or computing mistakes, as well as be forgiving to those teams suffering list change due to player dropouts.

We had long talks about it, and in the end we couldnt bring ourselves to apply the preplanned sanction to offenders : 2 Match Points (MPs) is a crippling blow to a nation's chances to place on the podium, and seemed too high when considering that we found all teams where really involved in getting things right plus the cost and length of travels involved to attend to ETC.
As a consequence, every team is awarded the match point bonus for list submission.

However, as guardians of the law, we couldnt either let offendents get away with poor list submission entirely for free. We decided to assign a 20 Battle Points (BPs) malus per serious mistake. This penalty will be applied to the rankings after the round 6, as to not affect previous game pairings. This means that:

Austria, Republic of Ireland, Norway, USA and Latvia will get a -20 BPs penalty.
Czech and Poland get a -40 BPs penalty.

This is not the sanction planned in the rulespack which was deemed too strong. Its not an insignifiant measure either : BPs are the second criteria for rankings and every year they influence rankings in a major way. To illustrate this point : if they hadn't been untied on BPs twice, Poland would have been all-time ETC champ. This is the best compromise we have found between either punishing too hard or letting everyone walk.

Respectfull comments are welcome as usual, but beware that this is a referee decision to which undue opposition could not only be sanctionned with forum moderation but also with yellow card BPs malus. Next year, we will no doubt adjust the system to make it more applicable, if you have any suggestions don't hesitate to post them.

chtiofonce on behalf of the referee team

So we get a 20 BP penalty that is imposed at the end of game 6 so it doesn't affect how the games are planned out every round, as do several other teams. The big ones hit are the Czechs and Poles who take a 40 BP penalty which will quite likely come back to bite them in the ass: the latter are seen as perennial favourites and if they are tied for Team points at the top I can see them being pipped to the post.

I also find it amusing and ironic to see Englishmen missing a penalty and actually profiting from it. Actually Gareth Barry and Stuart Pearce did that too in the Pizza Hut ads.

Ah well. It'll be grand.