A Blogger's Challenge

Jonathan Freitag runs a long standing blog, the Palouse Wargaming Journal, which has just celebrated its 13th anniversary¹. In his latest post² he mused on the effect blogging has on battle reports building on a post from 2019³ which looked at how visitors read battle reports.

I know Jonathan as we are both active on the Society of Ancients forum and from Jonathan's statistical work on the Great Wargaming Survey.

After I'd commented on his anniversary post⁴, Jonathan replied that he would enjoy seeing my views on the topic of battle reports. A challenge I couldn't resist; even if it does lead to a blogger writing about blogging!

Musing On ADLG & BHGS Rankings

Introduction

Every once in a while I check the UK Art de la Guerre (ADLG) ranking provided by the British Historical Games Society (BHGS). Not least because I find them statistically quite intriguing if somewhat strange. This week I decided to dig a little deeper and do more than just note my latest ranking. I have written about rankings before in 2023 (see the postscript).

How the rankings work

They are convoluted and closer to an algorithm than commutative arithmetic:

• Players receive points based on where they finish not on the result of individual games.
• The points available differ by event: larger competitions offer more points.
• The rankings only contain the results of events in the previous twelve months.
• All results are included until the seventh event and beyond, when only the player's six best scores count.

Until players have attended their seventh event, their ranking records both their performance and their attendance (a tracker). For example: two players can have different rankings not because of performance differences but simply because one player has attended more events.

More importantly, below seven events the ranking is a "warts and all" measure. Beyond that, poorer results get dropped and the ranking begins to represent the best of a player.

Confused? I was and I still am. Read on for more detail and analysis. Be warned it's a longish read.

Life In Mono

Yesterday I posted a general update containing a picture of some "work in progress" (WiP). Now I don't normally post WiP shots but I was testing my new tripod and the pictures were was so good it would have been a shame not to include at least one of them. It helped that the figures were the excellent 15 mm 3D prints of Arab camel riders from Red Copper.

To publicise my post I shared the picture on Bluesky, where I am vexillia.me.uk, and the Society of Ancients forum. To my surprise it generated quite a decent response. As the likes rolled in (it was more of trickle really) I started messing about with the image. In the end I removed the background and produced a monochrome version:

Have a play with the slider to compare and contrast (desktop only) then read on for an interesting painting tip.