Grow your meta by listening to this

One WEIRD trick grew my meta by 32 players.

Tournament organizers HATE HIM!

Yes, please condense it to the five or six lines of text it almost certainly will be. I don't have the time, interest or energy to listen to podcasts, especially those that are 60+ minutes long. But I'll read the paragraph that contains the actual meat.

It's not an unreasonable request, given that I managed to sum up the whole thing in two lines. As it stands it's just clickbait.

So I have a question. How do you encourage players to finish playing out their games for all rounds of the league?

Based on your praise for scrums I saw a few months back I decided to give it a go. We played one game a week where it was preferred that players come to game night at the shop but they could also arrange games for other nights/locations to better suit their schedules. The first one went great and I think we had 8-10 people participate in the league. Another month or two later I ran a second one and only had 6 people participate and found a lot of people didn't finish out all of their games. In both cases people would show up in force for the first week and then slowly stop coming if it they lost a game or two. I just wasn't able to figure out how to sustain within momentum within a single scrum cycle let alone between separate ones.

Well, players cancelling their games has been a big issue with the scrum in the past. We've tried to address it four ways:

1. Making play spaces more abundant and accessible. Not just during store hours. Podcast goes into greater detail on this and why it's so important.

2. No prizes or entry fees. The games themselves, as well as bragging rights, becomes the motivation for playing. So even if you can't win the scrum, you still want to play because the games were your motivation going in.

3. Massive points break downs posted at the end. So you can see exactly what place out of 30+ you came in. I've never won but I struggle every game to do my best because I will totally still push for 6th and 7th place. This has a double purpose of watching underdogs and watching newbies come up over time. Plus the usual faction analysis, like "wow, all the Skorne players won again"

4. Each league serves as a qualifier for our annual steam roller (referred to as the BBQ Brawl in the podcast). Top 3 players from each scrum qualify, but if they have already qualified, it trickles down to the next highest place, etc. Perfect example: I have never come in top 3 but I play every game as invested as I can, coming in 5th or 6th sometimes. As a result, I'm going to be in the annual steamroller (where I will get CRUSHED and it will be awesome). In other words, you are always incentivized each scrum to do your best because you still can get rewards out of it.

5. Over time, the players who consistently dropped their matches are called out and eventually not invited back. It's happened a few times. This was only an option though after we got enough players that we could afford to do this.

6. Model sharing and mentoring. Does your army suck? Here, borrow mine until you get your own models or your CID drops. Can you not figure it how to win with Blindwater? Well there are 2 other Minions players who do much better. Try watching their games. I know from my own experience, my skill level has dramatically improved by watching and talking with the other Skorne players. This in turn helps keep me invested in the scrum and not dropping early.