Sunday Sermon: Do we need referees?

Now that's what I call a flamboyant referee!

EDIT: Just to make it clear right from the offset this Blog is me asking the question, not prejudging and saying we do, after SinSynn raised a concern. Rather than let it lie, I'm mking things clear. Fact is I haven't been to a tournament in a while, so I'm going on a few complaints I've received recently. In my own experience I found tournaments to be fine and in the main cheat free when I did attend them. Just want to know what people think now.

This thought has resurfaced recently after conversing with some highly disgruntled gamers I know via various means. Many felt they had played somebody recently at a tournament who were to quote one of them 'seriously taking the piss'. Now this thought originally occurred to me about two years roughly, while having a discussion with a couple of people who had just attended a HoMachine tournament. Now both were seething, and I might add rightly so, at a number of things that they, and indeed I, would consider to be cheating, or at the very least unsportsmanlike behaviour. One of them basically said he could stand bad organisation of a tournament, even bad comp and missions. Hell he even accepted at some point he was going to come up against bad match ups he could do nothing about, but... he could not abide flagrant cheating. Lets be honest here, any half decent human being would feel the same way I'm sure, cheats suck ass! Whether it's loaded dice or elastic tape measures, it's all just a bit lame. Even more so when you consider we're pushing little toy soldiers around a board. Seriously? Cheating?

Do not argue with this man. He is right. That is all.

So what is the solution to this? Well I guess that depends on where you encounter the cheat now doesn't it? When I was at university I came across such a startlingly obvious form of cheating I called the guy on it in front of everyone. It was at our university club. What was he doing? Well two things really, the first and most obvious were his dice. He had two colours the red ones rolled high and the blue ones rolled low, suspiciously so. Any way me being good at stats worked out he was having unbelievable luck, although to be honest any idiot could've worked it out they were that badly disguised, so I asked if I could use his dice. He got really defensive about it and I remembered thinking "hmm I don't need to be a psychologist to see he's hiding something". The other thing was pre-measuring in a game that didn't allow pre-measuring. He had 4 pieces of metal rod on his side of the table he thought I couldn't see. He'd lean next to them and then lean on the board. Now if he'd asked me before the game if we could pre-measure, because he was crap at ranges I'd have probably said yes because it was just a fun game... supposedly!
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