Last year was an exciting one for the International Tournament Circuit. With tens of thousands of participants and thousands of events, organised Warhammer has seen impressive growth.
We’ve observed it all in action and taken note of areas for improvement and perhaps even a bit of innovation. After careful consultation with independent organisers, focus groups, the Warhammer Studio, Best Coast Pairings, and a dizzying array of metrics, we have decided to make a few improvements to how the ITC works.
These changes will affect event attendees everywhere, and considerably improve the event organiser experience, giving much-needed tools and enhancements to the folks who selflessly dedicate their time and resources to putting on great events both big and small for their communities in every corner of the Warhammer world.
They are intended to make participating in and hosting ITC events easier and more approachable for everyone. Most of these changes are live as of today, and the rest will roll out over the next few weeks.
To allay any concerns, Games Workshop is not placing the ITC behind a paywall. Hosting and participating in the ITC will remain free, forever.
Season dates
This year, the 2025 ITC season will be backdated to begin on the 25th of November 2024, ending after the conclusion of the World Championships of Warhammer in November 2025. If you participated in or ran an ITC event between the 25th of November and today, no action is required on your part. These events already counted for the 2024 season and will count for 2025 as well..
For next season and beyond, the ITC season will begin the day after the World Championships of Warhammer and end with the conclusion of the next World Championships.
Previously, the season ran in the 12 months between one Las Vegas Open and the next. The Las Vegas Open will remain one of the most important events in the competitive calendar. With its player count and early-season date, it will be extremely important for the rankings, positioning contenders for the top ITC spot!
Country rankings and golden tickets
We have dramatically expanded the number and reach of the ITC regions, in order to serve and represent players and organisers in regions that have historically been less active in Warhammer. The baseline focus of the ITC Rankings will now be country-based, with players able to further navigate within the rankings page to see Regional and Global rankings if desired.
Regional and local levels of play are the foundation of the Warhammer community, and we believe this change will directly empower players and organisers in historically underserved regions, by providing more nuanced and focused information on their respective regions. To reflect this, we will also award qualifying spots for the World Championships of Warhammer based upon country standings at the end of the season and at the midpoint (officially the 1st of June in 2025). The highest ranked players who are not yet qualified in each ITC ranked country will receive an invitation to participate in the next World Championships.
In addition, we have adjusted the rankings algorithms for event sizes. The largest events will still award the most points and smaller events will award less, but the distance in point allocations between the top and bottom has been reduced. Additionally, we want to incentivize events in the most common size ranges to grow where possible. Consequently, events between 20 and 64 players will see the biggest growth in point valuation with each additional attendee, as will events between 128 and 256 players. So while every additional participant you make room for will increase the rankings value of an event, a little growth in event size from each of the most common current size ranges will yield the most player-by-player benefit for all involved.
This will improve the relative value of significant events in smaller countries and regions, helping ensure a broader and more inclusive impact of the ITC experience on events of all shapes and sizes, and encouraging the growth and excitement of the scene at Warhammer events worldwide.
For organisers: Automated tokens and official format templates
Games Workshop has run an Approved TO Program for several years, which helps event organisers obtain support for their activities. This program includes rules support and functions as the first step on the journey toward being a World Championships of Warhammer Qualifying event. To run an ITC ranked event today, regardless of how long or how many events you’ve run, you must submit manual requests for tokens for each event. Going forward, all members of the Approved Organiser program will now have token requests automatically approved, though they will still need to request and submit them, simplifying the process of running an official ITC event and automating what has long been an onerous part of the organiser experience.
The Approved TO Program already consists of a community of nearly 2,000 organisers worldwide. Games Workshop has worked with them over the past few years, and we recognise that independent organisers are largely responsible for the growth of the Warhammer events community, which now has hundreds of thousands of players participating in Warhammer events around the world every year.. If you're an event organiser who is not currently part of the Approved Organiser Program, please complete this application to join! The barriers to admission are relatively low, focused primarily around supporting TOs who run either very large events, or regularly help run Warhammer activities in their local communities.
You will also notice an increasing number of official event and scoring templates added to Best Coast Pairings. We use these standardised formats (drawn from the Tournament Companions where possible), as do many of our partners, and they provide ready-made settings and scorecards to accelerate a new or uncertain organiser’s journey. While they are not required for use in the ITC or otherwise, they should make it easier than ever before to quickly set up and run a Warhammer event in Best Coast Pairings. Please note, however, our goal is not to force the use of any one format, but to provide proven formats should you choose to use them.
Event rankings boosts and linking your MyWarhammer account
Last but not least, we have implemented the next step in our partnership with Best Coast Pairings, making it easier for Warhammer fans to run and participate in events hosted on the platform. You can now log into Best Coast Pairings using your MyWarhammer account, and link your account to your Best Coast Pairings login. This improves the user experience when attending your first Warhammer events, and also enables an increasing number of future experience improvements.
Events will also receive a small rankings boost for organisers as they progress. The first boost should be there for all events: if a TO has linked their MyWarhammer account, their event gets its first boost. If a TO has applied to and joined the Approved TO program, it gets a second boost. Finally, World Championships qualifying events receive the third boost.
These boosts function similarly to growth in event size (you can consider that an event will count as a few players larger for each boost), so they are relatively minor in their impact for large and well-established events in countries with big scenes. They will have their greatest impact on the rankings value of smaller events run by hard-working and up-and-coming organisers, and on the relative value of World Championship Qualifying events in smaller Warhammer scene and communities. Huge tournaments like the Las Vegas Open do not need additional rankings support, while the biggest and toughest events in passionate smaller scenes will see the impact of their event outcomes slightly more elevated compared to the present.
These changes will ideally accomplish a few things. First, they will streamline the overall experience for players and organisers. Second, they will refocus the ITC to be an exciting and rewarding experience not just for the largest events and communities, but for the entire event world of Warhammer. Finally, we anticipate improved communications between communities and continuing growth for the community and the hobby
We will carefully track all results, outcomes, and feedback. We will also spend time and energy thoughtfully assessing the concept of regions (such as multi-country regions like Australia and New Zealand, sub-regions of Europe or the United States, etc) to ensure rankings subsets adequately support the nature and engagement behavior of each Warhammer community. Ultimately, we look forward to continuing to iterate upon and improve the ITC every year for all organisers and players, forever!
