TARDIS32's Hiatus Mega Tournament Discussion Thread

General / off topic Forum Games
, , ,
1

Ok, so it’s not quite time to start this thing yet, because it’s such a big thing, I need to figure out how I want to do it. I think because this is going to be so huge, I’ll have a separate thread for discussion (what this one will become) and just keep the polls on the main thread when we start.

The first question is how often and how many polls per day do we want to do? If we did one poll a day it would take ~328 days to complete, since essentially it’s one story eliminated per poll, longer once placement matches are factored in (more on that next). Now I’m fine with this thing taking a while, we’ve got a good while to wait for more TV Doctor Who, but I thought I’d open this question up to everyone for feedback and suggestions, see how everyone was feeling about it.

Placement matches. In my previous tournaments I’ve had a placement match to determine third and fourth place, and I was thinking for this one, such a big tournament, that the placement matches should also expand beyond third place. Do we want a final top 10? Top 25? I think top 50 would be my absolute upper limit. I’m fine with doing a big final ranking at the top determined by matches rather than vote percentage, but it would essentially create a few sub-tournaments to determine the ranking, and extend the length of the tournament considerably, unless we’re able to do all the placement matches in parallel somehow. No, we will not be doing placement matches for a full 329 story ranking, because this tournament would take years if we did. So again, opening that up to suggestions.

The format of the main bracket is 9 rounds, the top 183 stories have the bye to the second round, the rest battle it out in the first. It’s again based on my rankings, but it’s a different ranking from the ones used in the prior tournament, and there have been some tweaks to the list I posted in the episode ranking thread, accounting for stories moving up and down in my estimations since those tournaments. All Doctors save 8 have stories in both rounds, not necessarily to the same proportion to each, but it’s not like any one Doctor’s era has all byes or no byes. It looks reasonably fair to me in that regard. I’ll probably post a list of the stories with the bye.

Any other ideas or suggestions, go ahead and reply below, I’m thinking we could get this thing going next week.

13 Likes
2

It’d certainly be a hassle putting everything in brackets and groups this way, but would it be fairer spinning a wheel and matching stories against each other like that?

I confess, I’ve next to no understanding of how these things are organised and I don’t envy your job putting it all together, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that there’s no need to rush! We’re all here for Doctor Who and, in lieu of new televised episodes, I think most – if not all – of us are more than willing to be in it for the long haul. Or maybe that’s just me, haha

Either way, I think it’s worth a go!

8 Likes
3

So while there may be some differences to general consensus here and there, I do like The Space Pirates after all, I find my rankings aren’t too terribly different from fan wisdom. I don’t want to just use TG’s rankings because I’m asking the same people to play in this tournament, it would probably just go the same as the site’s rankings, which isn’t particularly interesting. I’d like generally well-regarded stories to be spread out and not encounter each other too early, and with such a random system as spinning a wheel it would be so easy to get something like Heaven Sent vs The Day of the Doctor or Inferno vs Caves of Androzani in a very early round, which I’d think those bigger, tougher kinds of match-ups most would rather see late, build the intensity as it goes.

7 Likes
4

sounds logical. I would say do once a day for each “level”/bracket(I don’t know the right terminolgy, so I hope I am getting my message across) and leave all of the polls open until the end of that stage, where you take a couple of days off to add up votes etc, and plan the next set.

7 Likes
5

I think that a totally random ranking would be the most fun because it would put stories against each other that normally don’t go against each other. Could you start with some groups, like the World Cup, to not have too many favourites lose too early maybe?

Regarding the number of votes per day, I think that you can have up to 5 votes per day in the beginning and then have fewer the deeper we go.

8 Likes
6

Let’s poll it.

How would you like this tournament seeded?

  • By my ranking as with prior tournaments (See my explanation)
  • Random with groups (See Tian’s suggestion)
  • Straight random seeding (See FumblingFoamasi’s suggestion)
0 voters
3 Likes
7

Bracket structures exist for good reason — as you say, if the strongest stories meet too soon (or weak stories for that matter) the ultimate ranking is thrown off. If, for example, City of Death meets Heaven Sent in the first round, then City of Death ends up not even making it into the top 100. Likewise, obviously weak stories might make it much further than they “should.” A ranked bracket is the only way to go, IMO.

4 Likes
8

The groups idea is an interesting one, potentially a good compromise. Because I do see how the tournaments using my own rankings could be seen as having an inherent even if unconscious bias in favor or against other stories. And it’s not something like sports where these episodes have competed before against each other and have a record or score to go off of in terms of placement, any option we go with here will be subjective or even arbitrary.

4 Likes
9

I think that a tournament is not the way to go if you want to create a perfect ranking. That is why I prefer if it has a level of randomness in it.

5 Likes
10

The structure of a ranked bracket ensures that if there are no upsets then the seeding is exactly the same as the results. I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

1 Like
11

As a note, I do have the bracket populated with my usual ranking-based seeding already. If I were to change to a random by group system, I’d take the bracket and use each quadrant or octant, or however many, and shuffle them within that portion of the bracket. Essentially my ranking determining the groups, and the exact positions within the group by RNG.

3 Likes
12

With the lead on that poll making itself obvious, the next question is how many groups. I’m thinking 16 (each group would have roughly 20 stories in it). I think 8 or fewer would be too few, too random, and we’d run into the issues above, and too many more than that would end up hardly being different at all. The more groups, the more similar to the standard ranking-based seeding it will be.

2 Likes
13

Maybe organize it alphabetically? Then we’d potentially get some really weird matches.

7 Likes
14

I’ll throw in the singular vote for straight randomness, it ensures that the early rounds don’t feel perfunctory and more likely spreads out the exciting matchups (and there’ll still be plenty of those towards the end anyway.) It messes up the ranking, but then if we were attempting a ‘legitimate’ ranking we wouldn’t use a knockout tournament format anyway. (Plus, given that we’re all TARDIS Guide users, we kind of already know the ranking.)

8 Likes
15

That’s being saved for the ‘literally everything’ tournament. 10,000 stories ranked alphabetically. Featuring matchups like ‘The Daft Dimension 189 vs The Daft Dimension 190’ and ‘AAAGH! 32 vs AAAGH! 33’

7 Likes
16

My laughing was not to dismiss the alphabetical idea btw, I just thought it was amusing.

3 Likes
17

Fully agree with you here.

2 Likes
18

No problem. It is an amusing idea, I’ll grant that. And I can see PlumPudding’s point about how silly using alphabetical order for determining matches could get. But I still think that when only doing TV stories, it could give us some interesting matches. Take a couple examples from matchups beside each other:

42 vs 73 Yards
Aliens of London/World War 3 vs Amy’s Choice
Arachnids in the UK vs Arc of Infinity
Wild Blue Yonder vs Warriors Gate

Or matching from opposite ends of the alphabet:

42 vs WEAT/TDF
73 Yards vs Wish World/Reality War
Aliens of London/World War 3 vs Wild Blue Yonder
Amy’s Choice vs Warriors Gate

I’ll admit that these particular matchups might not be as interesting as others, but you can see the potential.

4 Likes
19

Another way to do the matchups could be earliest vs latest working towards the middle. So examples would be:

An Unearthly Child vs Wish World/Reality War
The Daleks vs Intergalactic Song Contest
The Edge of Destruction vs The Story & The Engine
Marco Polo vs Lucky Day
The Keys of Marinus vs The Well
The Aztecs vs Lux

Etc, etc, etc…

4 Likes
20

That does sound like a fun idea that someone could do, but I’d like more variety in the eras against each other rather than all of 14 and 15 going up against the first Doctor as the first match for the purposes of this one. For the most part I’m not wanting to deviate too much from the formula I’d been doing, think of this like the grand finale of that series, just with a lot more stories. But it’s because of it being a lot more stories, I’m open to change some things slightly considering the difference in scale.

6 Likes