My venue is competitive AND a fun place to hang out at with your friends. Who says they have to be mutually exclusive?

Wow...Really??...If ONLY fellowship gets a prize, this is a BAD idea. Heroclix? More like "Judgeclix'...

If your giving a prize to the winner of Fellowship and the overall winner, then it's not an experiment, just the standard format. FWIW, I would say that if you the awarding of Fellowship at your venue is seen as shady (either judge favoritism or just a bunch of friends voting to give one of their group a prize) then you have a problem that you should probably address, even if it's only one prize that is problematic. I'd suggest only allowing players vote for people they played, with the judge breaking ties. And do your best to split up the friends!

I'm not sure it's what you intend, but it sounds like you are saying "this is how we do it, it works great, and you should do this too." Different venues have different play environments, and I applaud a judge that realizes that and tries his best to suit his events to his players. FWIW (probably not much, but you get what you pay for ), I would be much more likely to participate at a venue that only gave out Fellowship prizes than one where I was told to accept the cheese. I think I would have a much more enjoyable play experience at a venue that placed little to no emphasis on winning games, but all th emphasis on how you conduct yourself during games.

I say all this as someone who takes 1st place at my venue FAR more often than I take Fellowship. I don't consider myself the best player at my venue, but i do okay. I go to the venue with my brother, and i'm not sure we've ever voted for each other for Fellowship. So it "screws me", so what? If it results in a more fun environment that is less intimidating to new players, I'm all for it!

I am interested in seeing how this expeiment turns out. I think it could work in the right venue. Please keep us posted, Jackstar7!

I think it's a good idea to try as an experiment. I look forward to hearing how it goes after running some events this way.

I think you're missing my entire point. IF you ONLY give LEs to Fellowship winners, then you open up a scary precedent as it is a purely SUBJECTIVE award, which is bad, in my opinion. If you give An LE to the Winner AND the Fellowship winner, then nobody cn really complain because getting an LE by winning is an OBJECTIVE thing, nobody can accuse anyone of shady/foul play.

As for your comment about our venue, why is it that we have an unusually large player base then? Obviously our way works as we attract Plenty of players (old and new) from all over, I just don't like venues putting unnecessary rules for winning, if you feel you need to handicap your players so it's a "level playing field" then something is wrong because you are penalizing good players for winning.

I understand each venue is different, but people are so quick to put restrictions on things as opposed to educating your players to PLAY BETTER, which is what we do, and it works because they win AND they all have fun.

Okay, two things.

1 - Someone winning doesn't mean something shady didn't happen. Judges can be in cahoots and give favorable rulings for one example I've never seen happen, ever...

To just blanket say that winning is an objective measure takes many many elements for granted, which brings me to point #2.

2 - There's no question Fellowship Only (and yes, it's an LE fig for each of two Fellowship winners, or more depending on prize availability) is subjective. That hardly means it's flaws are particularly greater than rewarding winners.

After talking to the core group and the other judge, we all agreed that we could bring in newer players, could allow a vastly more relaxed environment which encourages the pieces that don't make the typical metagame-driven environment viable, and generally eliminate sharking and over-use of Gauntlets and Gamma Bombs and the like.

But just because that's true doesn't mean people won't be improving their game and trying to win each battle. Sure seems like home games are a vibrant part of the experience of Heroclix, so I don't know how our plan it poisoned from the start, doomed, or dumb (to address various comments).

It's something we're going to try and I'm not advocating it for everyone because there are plenty of shops that enjoy and relish in the competition of the game and want to see that rewarded. We're choosing a different path for the time being (and not even exclusively).

I wanted to let people know we're trying it, I'll do my best to report how it goes, and maybe we see good results and other places that share our style of players can start their own experiment.

Thanks to those offering (even skeptical) interest and support.

I think this is a cool idea, I'd like to hear how things go! In our little Heroclix group (me and a handful of friends and relatives) all play together, but only one of us has a Gamma Bomb. Pretty much every time it hits the table, someone (playing or not) will groan. Luckily for us no one has a Gauntlet/gems... yet.

Make Fellowship a random roll. By doing this every one has the same chance of getting the prize. At our store we hold two games for each Le as we get multiple kits. Fellowship is done by roll off but only the players who don't already have the said figure are in the running to get it out of fellowship.

While I understand the virtue of making it random, that doesn't actually encourage friendly behavior and good sportsmanship. We've got players as young as 7 who still are learning how to win and lose without tantrums and other obnoxiousness, so rewarding the attitudes and creativity of the players without leaving things to chance (where a pouty person could just as easily walk away with an LE) wouldn't quite work for us.

I think the judge can have a fairly solid opinion of the day and get opinions from myself and any other players who have no need or interest in the prizes being handed out.

I'm torn on voting as I like everyone getting a say, but I don't like the notion of a group being able to swing a vote in their direction by showing up en masse. It's going to be some experimentation... but we'll see the net results in a month or two.

Rep given for bringing up a good idea though. Thanks!

I respect that you are doing this, believe me, we always try an find extra ways to give out extra LEs (helps when our venue has 3 OP Kits to give out). A couple of examples:

We gave out a special fellowship award when one of our players lent someone pieces to a player to complete his team as well as pay for his entry.

We always give out a special award if there is a "cool" or "unique" team. But there is a reason that the prizes WK gives out are for 1st and Fellowship. It satisfies both the competitive and casual player base, by eliminating one, you alienate them. I am interested to see how this experiment works. If your goal is to not attract competitive players then this will work for sure.

Doing it randomly completely defeat the point of it being a fellowship prize. If you're doing that, just call it a random door prize. More accurate that way.

Well, I'm curious to see if it repels them or they come and give it a shot anyway. That'll be the real test.

I've done this a couple of times, for good prizes, too.

It worked really well. People still want to win, but they are going to play in a more friendly way in the meantime.

The hardest part is deciding who won. I had two prizes, one went to theme and one for sportsmanship.

Lately, I've been doing "fellowship first" where the fellowship player gets first pick of two prizes. That seems to be a decent compromise.

WK doesn't "give out" prizes anymore. The hosting venue has to not only meet a certain purchase requirement in order to get access to them (which is usually pretty low, all thigns considered), but then they have to purchase the OP kit. WK offers a suggested way of distibuting them, but just like the suggested formats for the IG events, it is completly up to the venue that bought the kit on what they want to do with it.
Our local venue had little interest in Star Trek. A buddy and I bought the requirements and paid for the OP kit and the store owner just gave us the whole kit to do with as we pleased.

That said, I think the OP of this thread had an interesting idea and I would be curious to hear how things turned out for them. Depending on the environment and the playerbase, I can both see how this could work out well and not so well.

Glad to hear there's some precedent out there! And I do like the Fellowship First idea. Perhaps that's where we'll end up later.