Well this president’s blog, I thought I’d do a bit of a spicy topic – Sweeps
More specifically why I detest allowing sweeps at club shows.

For those of you that are more casual in the hobby or just aren’t familiar with the term, sweeps is where a single person is able to win multiple times (eg. first, second and third) in a single category.

It was a new term to me when I got involved in IPMS a couple of years ago and it put me off of entering shows at all… For over a year. It took a lot of cajoling from fellow club members to put anything into any show and even when I did, it wasn’t a great experience in large part because of sweeps.

I come from a background of painting gaming pieces and sometimes doing so for competitions such as the Golden Demon, Capital Palette and other gaming focused painting competitions. There’s been a lot of change in those competitions over the years but fundamentally they are very different to IPMS (I’d never heard of splitting categories until I joined IPMS for instance, many of these competitions can see a couple of hundred models put into a single category).

One of the other changes that has gained increasing favour over the years on the gaming side is open judging where each piece is judged against a standard criteria and awarded a gold, silver, bronze, merit, or nothing, based on how it measures up. There is no limit to how many can get gold or bronze or whatever as long as they’re good enough to meet the criteria. I’m sure many of you are rolling your eyes thinking ‘these bloody millennials just never want to see anyone lose’ and I suppose that’s fair. I don’t want to beat the opposition, or pound them into the dust… I am not in this hobby “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women”. I don’t want to sweep a category at the expense of other entrants’ enjoyment of the show just because I can and I also don’t want to be on the other side of that. I want to push myself to get better, little by little, year after year. In 2021 I got silver at Reaper Con, so in 2022 I pushed myself and got a gold. In 2023 I hope to get one of the best in show trophies, and maybe a gold in a different category. I pushed myself and I got better than my past self. But best of all I watched my friends do the same. I got to celebrate their wins without that twinge of jealousy because I’m not in this to beat others, I’m here to improve myself and help others improve. This is not a sport or tournament. It’s not player vs player. It doesn’t need to be competitive… So why make it that way? Almost all open judging is done as no sweeps so that only the best entry in a category by each person is judged and given an award, largely to keep the number of awards manageable but it seems intuitive enough and even contests that don’t have open judging tend not to support sweeps.

This wasn’t intended to be a monologue about the merits of open judging, and I think IPMS is still a long way from seriously considering that format. This is meant to be about sweeps…

The first IPMS contest I entered, last year, had good turn out. It is one of the more popular shows in region 9 and most categories had a good showing with half a dozen different folks entering and 10-12 different models on each table. I had finally put a couple of models in to be judged and they were awful… Missing parts, not great finish, one was an OoB build of a kit first tooled in the 70s. I didn’t expect to win and I didn’t. There was, however, something else I didn’t expect – to see the same three or four people win over and over again, often picking up two awards in a category. Even if some of these categories are lightly entered it’s still pretty disheartening for someone new to the scene to go through an awards ceremony and just feel so far below these apparent gods of the modelling world. Doing the whole circuit of shows, it was the same story over and over again, often with the same models (another bugbear of mine).

The hobby has an aging demographic and it’s only getting worse, but I truly feel we can address this with the scariest of all ideas… Change. Is a no sweeps rule the panacea? A cure all / silver bullet? Nope… Not even close. It’s a small, tentative step to maybe make things more welcoming to newer hobbyists or some of our cousins in the gaming and model car worlds. Such a small step that the nationals took it years ago… But not region 9. Apparently never region 9.

We had a misprint on our show flyers that was 100% down to me not proof reading copy as I should have that indicates we will only accept one entry per category, I’d intended it to be no sweeps and not meant to be yelling it to the world as if throwing down some kind of gauntlet decrying people flooding categories with their entries…
It was also a decision I’d made without input from the club, again something I shouldn’t have done but went ahead with clearly underestimating the degree of outrage I was generating in doing so.

The good news for all regular IPMS show attendees is that we are fully walking back on both 1 model per category and no sweeps rules. We’ll be running the contest just like every other contest in the Central Valley and wider Bay Area. I am honestly looking forward to seeing tables filled with the hard work of our members and those of other clubs. I also hope folks will consider bringing display only pieces from years past. We are hosting in a game store so we have a unique opportunity to really reach potential new members, ones that may not even be aware of what we do. So please, all of you, bring your A game to the show.

And me? Am I bitter? Sure I am. I honestly believe that this is doing a disservice to our hobby and impacting our ability to attract new hobbyists, the thing I am most passionate about… But equally, it’s not just my hobby and it’s not just my club. So for now I’ll continue to try and convince you all of the merits of my arguments while doing my best to represent the will of the club and the region.

Thanks for reading and apologies for causing all this upset and confusion.

Dev

Well it’s that time of year – time for some pompous ignoramus to wax lyrical about all their thoughts that nobody really wants to read. So here I am!

I am now about halfway through my tenure as president of IPMS Santa Rosa / IPMS Sonoma County (delete as applicable). It has been a humbling experience and I have greatly enjoyed it. The club is not the largest in IMPS or even in our district but I enjoy spending time with each and every one of you. We have seen a few new folks starting to come regularly and, I think, started to rebuild the club activities back beyond the more restrictive offerings that we had during the trials of the pandemic. I am keen to keep developing both of these things but I can’t do either alone.

Are there things that we need to change?

Are there things you’d be willing to take on?

Please, please let me know!

I am excited at the prospect of resurrecting our club show and this is another area we need all the help we can get! A huge thanks to all the people that have been active in the planning during our business meetings. Chris, Ray, Jack, Randy, Greg, Mark, Mike – This show wouldn’t be happening without your participation. If you aren’t on that list and want to help out just come along to one of our business meetings that are the hour prior to our regular club meetings.They are open to everyone!

One of the things I have been mulling over for the last couple of months is encouraging folks to branch out into areas they may not normally try. We started this a little with the Super Deformed quarterly contest at the start of the year but I would love to build on it. We have folks that love Ships, or Gundam or BiPlanes… I’d love to see everyone in the club dabble a little bit in a lot of these areas so we all relate to each other that little bit more and maybe, just maybe, discover a new subject passion!

Thank you all for joining me in this hobby voyage through 2022. Here’s hoping we make 2023 even bigger and better!

Hello Folks!

I suppose this is the space for me to post my thoughts and musings to any who might find them of interest.

I have really struggled to do much in my hobbying this year. Some commissions and occassional teaching gigs have really put me in a place where I was no longer prioritizing the hobby itself. I was still coming up with plenty of ideas for things to work on, grand plans for dioramas and of course purchasing plenty of kits that will no doubt live out the rest of their days on my shelves, slowly gathering dust. So I had ideas, I had kits and yet… nothing was getting done.

Why?

Was it that freehanding details on my thrice cursed 1:72 Fokker Eindecker was the worst idea in the history of ideas? Was I just another millennial blaming ‘Burnout’ for what was really just another facet of laziness? Probably…

So how to fix it?

Well there lies the rub… There are a few things that I’ve done in the past to help me out of a rut:

• Work on a totally different subject that’s completely new to you! Try a Gundam kit or a Submarine subject, maybe give figure painting a go?
• Work on something low stakes – a beginner kit maybe or something from the backlog that maybe’s been superceded by a nicer, newer kit.
• Try a new technique! This combines great with the previous option – get yourself a new kit and test out a new gap filling method, or practice panel scribing, maybe work on a new camo style. And if it doesn’t work? Well it was just a test kit! Give it to nephew or a cousin to strap some fireworks to and move on to the next thing!
• Work on something super familiar. A bit of a pivot from the previous suggestions but sometimes going back to a familiar kit or subject can take a lot of the pressure off and just make for an easy subject – Just ask anyone who’s built a Zaku before! For me, it’s often a case of going back to gaming pieces, I have a seemingly infinite supply of them, they’ll get use on the table and I can bang a squad out in a weekend.
• Work to a deadline? This can cause even more stress for some but for others this will really drive people to get through a model and call it done. Maybe they’re doing it for an IPMS show, or to gift it to someone or even just for your local IPMS show and tell next month.

Not an exhaustive list and I’d love to hear your suggested additions. 

What have I done to break out of this latest funk? Well I’ve returned to the familiar and have an added deadline! I am working on a host of Warhammer Underworlds miniatures that have been sat in a drawer for far too long. In a week I’ve already painted a half dozen pieces of terrain, a half dozen warriors and another dozen or so nearly completed!