>>> Seems like an invitation for people to flame flame flame.
This is likely to happen when two popular characters meet head-to-head in elimination round. Properly run preliminary round should allow most of the stronger characters to advance and allow us to assign seeds to postpone the flame war to latest possible time.
Here is my version of preliminary rounds. The system assure everyone to hang around for 3 rounds, actually so meganekkos will have good chance of survival.
1st round Candidate Recommendation round:
Every one submits list of 8 characters they like. After about a week of gathering the list, we disgard all characters who were mentioned only once: For this to work, we would need 1000+ people submitting their list of 8 characters. We then choose top half of the characters with multiple votes.
ex: 2000 people has submitted their list. There were 8000 characters that were mentioned. Half were mentioned only once, so out of 4000 remaining characters, top 2000 will advance to next round.
2nd round: 1st cut
Every one submits a list of 4 characters, of which 3 must be ones who passed the 1st round. The 4th character can be anyone. This vote is called wild card vote which can be cast for one of the characters who made the cut in the 1st round or who did not make the cut. Again we disgard any characters with only one vote. We choose the upper half of remaining characters. We also let 1 ~ 2 top vote getters who didn't pass the 1st round to join in for the 3rd round. Tie breakers will be the number of vote they got at the 1st round.
ex: 2000 people submit their votes. Of 2000 remaining characters, half again gets only one vote in this round and thus eliminated. Of 1000 remaining, we choose the upper half so 500 will advance to the 3rd round. Character A and B did not make the cut in the 1st round, but was the top 2 wildcard vote getter for this round and will be added to the list of those who made the cut.
3rd round: 2nd cut
Every one submits a list of 2 characters, of which 1 must have passed the 2nd round, and the other vote is a wild card vote for any character. Single vote getters are eliminated. Upper half of the remaining pass to the tournament phase. At least the top wild card vote getter from characters who didn't make the cut in the 2nd round should advance to tournament phase as well. We will calculate a 'character point' at this point , which basically is sum of all votes they got in this first 3 rounds, for everyone who was mentioned in any of the 3 rounds. If the number who made the cut in 3rd round plus 1 ~ 2 top wild card entry does not add up to 2^N number ideal for a knockout tournament, we will add enough characters, starting with the ones with highest character points, to make the number 2^N. The Character points will be the sole basis for seeding, with tie breaker being the most votes in 3rd round, followed by most votes in 2nd round.
ex: 2000 people bumits their votes. Of 500 remaining, half gets only one vote. Of remaining half, we choose the upper half, which will be about 125 characters. We add 1 wild card entry to the list to make it 126. We need 2 more for 128 = 2^7 so we add the next 2 character point getter for the tournament. If 130 characters passed the cut in this round, we would either need to eliminate 2 from the list, or add next 126 to make it 256 = 2 ^ 8.
tournament
Simple head to head, 1 vote, only one survive knockout round. The matchups will be determined from the seeding from the beginning. In case of tie, the character with highest character point, sum of all votes the character got from previous rounds, will be used as 1st tie breaker followed by the number of votes they got at one round before the current round. This those give higher seeds some advantage, but lower seeds could make up the difference either by winning a round or two with high vote counts. In another word, in case of tie, the character who have been involved in more high profile matchups will have an advantage.
Advantage of this format
1. Preliminary rounds will let many interesting names to be mentioned
2. Seeding will allow high profile characters to advance the tournament without meeting another high profile character until later in the tournament phase.
3. Winning a titanic clashes will have a small merit in case a tie occurs.
4. Most of deserving characters will make it to tournament phase.
5. We would all know the potential matchups ahead of the time.
Disadvantage
1. Need large number of voters to work
2. Very large number of names will need to be handled during preliminary rounds. We may need a system similar to Saimoe to handle this, but we need a system that allows easier access than Saimoe to attract voters.
3. Somebody needs to do lots of work checking the results and handling the announcements.
OK, that is best I can do, but undoubtedly you can suggest something better. It will be interesting if someone sets up a betting scheme based on the results.
