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FFG Organized Play News

Organized Play

During Worlds they discussed the upcoming 2013 Organized Play stuff, and I grabbed some quick notes between Netrunner rounds. Apologies for not catching the FFG Employee who presented the meeting, however, this was an announced, public event that took place before Round 4 of the Netrunner tournament and Round 3 of the Melee on Friday evening.

The official word for all of this should be released sometime this week, but in the mean time, check the summary below:

Game Night/Tournament Kits

These kits will now be released in three Seasons, covering the downtime after the OP season (Jan-May), Regionals (May-approximately September) and Worlds (September-December).

The kits will now be more game focused, rather than item focused, much like the new Netrunner and X-Wing OP Kits. They want to put out things that you can actually use during a game.

Game Night Kits will now include a Tournament Organizer Prize, though it wasn't confirmed if it would be in the upcoming Netrunner or X-Wing Packs.

Game Night Kits will eventually include alternate art promotional cards that are reprints of existing cards with new/different/better art. The exception to this is Star Wars, which will receive Aurebesh texted cards. For those that don't know, Aurebesh is the name of the font that the signs and written communication of the Star Wars universe is. These cards will have the title and flavor text replaced with Aurebesh translations.

It was emphasized that there will be no competitive advantage from having the alternate-art cards, aside from having extra copies of the alternate art cards. This is to keep in line with the LCG credo of not requiring players to chase cards.

2013 OP Schedule

Regionals Registration opens for stores on January 7th, running through January 31st, with Venues announced sometime in February.

The full Regional season is April 1st through June 30th.

North American National Championships will again take place at Gen Con Indy.

World Championships will occur at the FFG Event Center November 7-10th. Official date announced was November 8th-10th, however, this was modified sometime Saturday during the public announcement of this information to being "A Four-Day Event".

This is likely in response to the event this year. Most players got to play at most 3 events, and were having to choose their top 4 games over playing the preliminary rounds of another game. Most notably this applied to Game of Thrones Joust Champion John Bruno, who got to the Top 4 in Netrunner, and Cthulhu/Warhammer players who's events ran at the same time.

FFG Event Center Regional Events

The FFG center's regional was announced as follows:

April 30th: Days of Ice and Fire/Minnesota Regional.
May: Star Wars/X-Wing will be held over a Star Wars Weekend event similar to Ice and Fire.
June 1st: Android: Netrunner Minnesota Regional.


​ Miscellaneous

FFG is looking into bringing back two popular programs: a Tournament Organizer program and a Player Ranking System. Both programs are in their infancy, and are not yet developed. They were very intent on letting us know that they are being looked at. The Ranking system will most definitely NOT be an ELO based system (He was exceptionally clear on this point.) The new TO system will likely start small and then expand from there.
  • WWDrakey, darknoj, DubiousYak and 1 other like this


11 Comments

Thanks for the update. All of this sounds good.
    • Kennon and Crevic like this
I love the idea of cards in Aurebesh. Reminds me of when they made Sperethiel cards for LOTR made by Decipher.

Just wish my FLGS was actually friendly :(
It'll be interesting to see what they do with these alternate art cards. I imagine they'll stick with cards that are the most use to the most players. Faction cards are the most obvious option, but it might be cool for AGOT to see new art for some of the most played plot cards, such as Valar.
Any idea why they don't use an ELO based system? Works for chess...
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JerusalemJones
Nov 12 2012 09:15 PM
Not excited about the dates of the MInnesota Regionals, since I was wating to host both Thrones and Netrunner, and the dates they chose with the dates I'm available seem really close together. Also, can pretty much guarantee that I'll miss the Days of Ice and FIre again, since they chose the same weekend as a Magic Pre-Release. Again.

AS for the kits, I'm sure excited about the idea of Alternate Art cards, since I've been pushing that for 4 years. Players always want stuff they can use in the game over "fancy bits," even though some of their fancy bits have been nice to have (power counters and playmats over the badges). I really hope the Regionals kits don't supersede a regular OP kit for that peroiod. That would hose those stores that don't host a Regional (and hosting a regional isn't cheap, those kits were $200 last year, iirc).
I don't know why the avoidance, though during the meeting they talked about how they feel that ELO discourages high ranking players from playing outside of major events, because losing to a low ELO player can tank their rankings.

If they do implement the ranking system, I hope it's closer to the Planeswalker points from Magic. It's not a perfect system, but it makes sense given the game.

Again, they'll add all the official dates and such soon to the site. They could change them.
This is really cool. Can't wait for alt art cards!
    • WWDrakey and Kennon like this
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Deathjester26
Nov 12 2012 11:28 PM
I don't even care about any of the details, the fact that we have any kind of information this far in advance makes me very, very happy.

Well done new OP guy!!!
    • Toqtamish likes this
Alternate Art cards sounds very cool.
Sounds like great news! Honestly, I'm skeptical about the ranking system just because most people don't really play much outside their local group which makes the rankings less reliable. Maybe they have a way to combat that, but I don't see how to do it without also allowing inflated rankings from repeatedly playing someone you can beat reliably. ELO has this problem as well, I have an inflated ranking on chess.com from playing my brother in law online, neither of us really plays anyone else and my rating keeps creeping artificially higher while his creeps artificially lower (unless we remember to check the "unranked" box each game).
Love.