MPQ March Madness (structure and nature thread)

Aweberman

As announced in the article about Black Panther's release, Shuri is set to be the (likely) next 4*.  When she releases (likely later this week, based on past history), she will be the 64th 4*.

As anybody who knows tournaments knows, 64 is the perfect number to run a tournament.  (Well, any multiple of 2 is, actually, but 64 is the basic field in the NCAA tournament.)

So that's what I propose to do.

Starting tomorrow, February 19 in the next couple of days soon, and running for about a month, I will post a series of polls.  Each poll will place two 4* characters against each other and ask the following question: Which character is better?  The winner of each poll will advance to the next round, with the ultimate champion crowned in late March.

Obviously "better" is quite a subjective term in this game.  The same character might be a staple of every team for a 3* player, a strong support character for a 4* player, and only moderately useful when boosted for a 5* player -- so each person voting will have a different sense of which character is "better."  (Note: The question is NOT, Which character is your favorite?)

Hopefully this will be a fun exercise for everybody.  And maybe at the end of it we will have a somewhat-useful list of relative strength of 4* characters.

Edit:

Here is the bracket:

challonge.com/mpq


... and here are the seeds:

Cosmic

1. Captain Marvel
2. Medusa
3. Nova
4. Cloak & Dagger
5. Star-Lord
6. Gamora
7. Rocket & Groot
8. Yondu
9. Agent Venom
10. The Thing
11. Miles Morales
12. Spider-Gwen
13. Drax
14. Invisible Woman
15. Mr. Fantastic
16. Lockjaw


SHIELD/Avengers

1. Peggy Carter
2. Riri Williams
3. Mockingbird
4. Agent Coulson
5. Iron Man
6. Kate Bishop
7. Luke Cage
8. Wasp
9. Quake
10. Black Panther
11. Spider-Woman
12. Nick Fury
13. Ant-Man
14. War Machine
15. Sam Wilson
16. The Hulk (Main Event)


Mutants

1. Iceman
2. Rogue
3. Jean Grey
4. Cyclops
5. Iron Fist
6. X-23
7. Nightcrawler
8. Deadpool
9. Professor X
10. Shuri
11. Gwenpool
12. The Hulk (Totally Awesome)
13. Wolverine
14. Elektra
15. Devil Dinosaur
16. Howard the Duck


Villains/Supernatural

1. Vulture
2. America Chavez
3. Red Hulk
4. Blade
5. Thor
6. Mordo
7. Moon Knight
8. The Punisher
9. Carnage
10. Kingpin
11. Ghost Rider
12. Winter Soldier
13. Nico Minoru
14. Venom
15. Sandman
16. Kraven the Hunter

Anon

Sounds really interesting. Some matches seem interesting (Carol vs Rogue) others will be massacres (Vulture vs Professor X).

I'm in.

Aweberman

The method I chose to seed the bracket was order of release.  

Though I agree that some matches won't be close.

kk3thess

That's a great idea. Already waiting to vote against Kraven in any match

Dogface

If you make a topic for each tournament poll, it's really gonna muddy up this board. Is there an an option to do more (or all) at once?

Aweberman

Dogface said:

If you make a topic for each tournament poll, it's really gonna muddy up this board. Is there an an option to do more (or all) at once?

This is a concern.  I do not see a way to do more than one poll per topic.  I am open to suggestions.

One possibility is to post the actual poll over on the Characters board and then just have a post that I update here with new matchups.

JHawkInc

Does the poll have to be on the forums itself?

Like, you could have one continually-updating thread and have a link to a Strawpoll of the current matchup, then you can edit and put the results into the bracket and replace the Strawpoll (or whatever you use) with the one for the next match.

It would let you run it more like the real March Madness. You could have multiple matches going on at a time, and you could run matches on the weekends (or whenever is convenient for you, you could do them daily but skip Tuesday and Wednesday if that's what fits your schedule, you know?)

Aweberman

JHawkInc said:

Does the poll have to be on the forums itself?

Technically, no, it does not. 

I am not familiar with the site you mention, but I would like to retain the ability to have discussion about the matches.

Edit: I checked out the site and it seems very nice and straightforward.  However, I don't know that it addresses my wish to retain easy commenting here on the forum.  Or, rather, while I could link to the external poll, it still seems reasonable to have individual threads for each match.  

My idea is to have 4 matches going at once.  I originally thought that I would put them all in the same thread -- and the external polling site seems like it would allow for that nicely -- but now I wonder whether that will become a difficult-to-read thread.

So I'm trying to balance between unnecessarily cluttering the forum with threads on the same topic and unnecessarily cluttering threads with multiple matches going on at once.

FinnyMPQ

Have you checked with the forum admins to verify they'll let this fly? Wouldn't a poll with only 2 choices violate the poll rules? Seems like a fun idea tho

HoundofShadow

I saw one topic being closed because the threadstarter did not have a neutral poll. If you put a support character against an offensive character, it is quite likely that the offensive character would be more popular. I'm neutral to polls like this and I would participate in it as well.

JHawkInc

Yeah, I was thinking of doing like ONE thread with all the matches, which would work well with any external poll source, but would definitely lead to clutter over the course of the event. Maybe do a topic each day there's a new poll up, and all polls from that day go in the same thread? So like all of the Friday, March 2nd matches go into one thread, however many there are? You'd have some overlap in talk, but I don't think it would be too incredibly cluttered. Might have to just shoot for the middle, and be ready to adjust things on the fly (first thread is too scattered in terms of discussion? put fewer matches in the second thread, see how that works, you know?).

And yeah, it's worth looking at the forum rules. They're a little obtuse (case in point, a simple binary poll like "which is better?" violates the rules), but we might be able to get permission to ignore it to allow this to happen, because it does sound like fun.

DrDevilDinosaur

FinnyMPQ said:

Have you checked with the forum admins to verify they'll let this fly? Wouldn't a poll with only 2 choices violate the poll rules? Seems like a fun idea tho

Yeah, from the forum rules:

13. All polls must be unbiased. They must contain at least one neutral option, and an equal amount of opposing options. (For example: Yes, Neutral, No)

So there will need to be a neutral option for every poll, otherwise they are against forum rules. And those rules have to be upheld even if they are a bit silly.

Pr0spect0r

make the poll options 
Character A
Character B
Obligatory neutral option please don't pick.

Daredevil217

I’ve done a poll asking who had the better crit generating power between. Fury and Hulk with no neutral option, and I never got in trouble. 

I believe others have done “who should I champ?” polls with no neutral as well. 

fight4thedream

This is an awesome idea!! There are some potential problems logistically speaking that need to be worked out but I would definitely love to see this happen. As others have already mentioned, the mod team is primarily concerned with the potential clutter such an endeavor would entail. But I have some ideas on how we can address this particular issue.

As for rule 13, we can ask Brigby to make an exception in this particular case. I know it seems like a rather counter-intuitive rule but it was made in response to a lot of polls that were being created that were rather biased. In the event that Brigby would prefer to stick to the rules, I doubt that having a neutral option would have a significant impact on the results.

With that said, I do think it best we include @Brigby in this undertaking so I would like to ask @Aweberman to hold off on running the event until we iron out the details and come up with a plan where the tournament can be run smoothly on the forum.

My break at work is about to end now but either myself or one of the other mods will send you a PM later to discuss how we can make this happen!

Aweberman

Per @fight4thedream's request, I will hold off on starting the tournament until I've had an opportunity to coordinate with the moderators.

Calnexin

Getting around option 13 - you could just add "tie".  They end up as null votes for advancement but actually mean something story/power-wise.

broll

As noted above I would just do the polls on an external site and then just have a group of links to them.  That would be much cleaner for the forums and for people wanting to participate.  There are plenty of free sites that do polling.

Aweberman

I think either or both of the above options are fine.  My current idea would be to do the following:

• Have a primary thread in the general discussion forum containing links to the match-specific threads.
• Put the match-specific threads in the character discussion forum.
• Each match-specific thread would have a flight of 8 characters (or 4 matches), with polls hosted on an external site.  This will enable multiple polls per thread -- which should reduce the clutter that would result from each poll being in its own thread -- while still allowing commenting and debate on each poll.

(Note: Another way to get around the "multiple polls in one thread" issue would be to have each character be an individual post and then have the voting be the "like" button.)

But since a mod has requested that I hold this in abeyance, I will follow that direction. 

Blindman13

A couple other ideas as you work on this:
You could put each match-up in a post and tell users to click 'Insightful' for option A and 'Like' for option B.
-or- 
You could use a site like Survey Monkey to run your polls and just post the results here.

Instead of posting a handful of match-ups each day, I imagine putting up each round all at once. So to start, you post all 32 match-ups for round 1. When that round completes, then post the next 16 matches for Round 2. To ensure everyone has a chance to vote you may want to leave each round open for a week or so.  Maybe start a new thread for each round, this would not create too much clutter. The Round 1 thread may be hard to follow, but as you proceed through rounds the comments would get easier to follow.

Spudgutter

Don't forget to make up the chart before hand, and post it, so people can fill it out and see if they can guess the winners