One of the bigest problems at tournaments is the huge disparity of power levels in various armies. The brain trust at GW is unable to make army books equal in power and this leads to a huge tournament problem. To balance this many tournaments turn to comp as an idea that it is a handicap on the army to try to balance the playing field. Unfortunately this is often done haphazardly, with insufficient effort, or with no effect.
Presently there are 3 basic systems for comp which tournaments use: player scoring, judge scoring, or checklist scoring. Player scoring has worked very well with sportsmanship as it penalizes the real jerks but gives everyone else a roughly equal score. It is easy to use it removes the judges from the equation and leads to less bitching but it fails to score armies and tends to mark down winners reguardless of what they include. Judges scoring is better but relies on the judges to do a good job and gives the players little feedback to help them make a list of the basic score they would like. further attempts by players to tone down their armie are often of no effect so it fails to reward those who try and encourages players to not care about comp. Finally checklist systems allow players to game the system. Giving players a list to work with they can try to make the hardest possible army they can at a particular score.
With this in mind there is a system out there which has been used for a number of years and is constantly being revised and corrected and that is the Warhammer Players Society (WPS) comp system. It approaches each army seperately on a general system. It deals well with all sorts of armies and tends be well maintained with updates for new books and penalties for latest boken items. Now it is far from perfect and it does not include special characters or some optional armies, but it gives a good general framework. Presently with so many people supporting judged systems it seems odd that this is not atleast used as a guideline to help the judges or to give a general ranking which the judges can correct.