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Interactive Graphical Tree
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Main Thread
Round 1 Part 1 Poll and Thread
Round 1 Part 2 Poll and Thread
Round 2 Part 1 Poll and Thread
Round 2 Part 2 Poll and Thread
Round 3 Poll and Thread
Round 4 Poll and Thread Unavailable
Round 5 Poll and Thread
Judges' Rullings
-Jewels
Welcome, ladies, gentlemen, and others, to the 2007 Spiderweb Deathmatch Tournament.
In this context, a deathmatch consists of a battle to the death between two people -- however, it is a battle which never actually happens. Deathmatches have more in common with analyzing game mechanics than they do with RPs. On the other hand, analyzing game mechanics is an empirical task, and you can always test your conclusions. Deathmatches are entirely theoretical. Indeed, they are often used to settle rivalries that cannot be empirically tested (e.g., Gandalf vs. Yoda). And that's exactly what they're being used for here. Spidweb members have no hardcoded statistics, and everyone pictures everyone else differently, so the discussion will necessarily be a little bit subjective. Here's how we handle that:
TOURNAMENT PROCEDURE
1. When a round begins, the Judge (Slarty) will post a new thread for that round. The thread will contain a poll with one question for each match-up.
2. Anyone who wants to can vote in the poll. You are also encouraged to post the reasons you think a fight should turn out a certain way, if you have something new to add.
3. After a set period of time, the Judge will count the votes and will issue a statement describing the outcome of each match. The Judge should normally honor the vote count, but he may overturn it if deemed necessary.
4. Surviving participants will advance to the next round. When there is only one survivor, he is crowned the victor.
In order to direct the discussion more towards the battles and less towards exactly what abilities each participant has, I(Slarty) have collated information from numerous sources and have prepared it in the form of Spiderweb trading cards, which will be posted as each member is called to fight. This information presents, probably, most of the powers members are likely to have, but there are surely many that I have missed, and the cards are not intended to restrict use or consideration of such powers. Cards may be viewed by mousing over the pictures in the following chart.
Some of the categories may be more relevant for some members (and some fights) than others, but it's all there, where I could dig it up. Faith obviously does not reflect anyone's RL religion, but field does reflect RL studies, on the off chance that those are relevant to a battle.
The "Born" category deserves special explanation. This category is basically an attempt at describing oldbieness in a more useful way than has been done in the past; so you can think of the numbers as seven different eras, or as degrees of oldbisity. The septpartite division I settled on, after much consultation, is as follows:
0 -- Prehistory. Pre-Ikonboard.
1 -- Ikonboard.
2 -- UBB, while Misc. was around.
3 -- Post-Misc., pre-BoA
4 -- Basically fall 2003 through summer 2004
This tumultuous period encompassed the arguments about BoA's design, the release of BoA, and the ensuing shift in community composition
5 -- Post-BoA
6 -- Post-TM's permaban
This is an arbitrary but useful cutoff as it happens to correspond to a decrease in traffic and content and to a shift in General's character
The era a member fits into is not determined by registration date but by actual incorporation into the message board community; thus I am 5 despite my 2 member number. Similarly, those who wander in immediately before a cutoff will likely be put into the next category.
There are 48 entrants. In order to use a Single Elimination format, the following 16 seeded participants have byes for round 1:
Alec, Aloraeal, Arancaytar, Archmage Alex, Dikiyoba, Dintiridan, Drakefyre, Emperor Tullegolar, Ephesos, Salmon, Schrodinger, Synergy, Stareye, Terror's Martyr, Thuryl, and Tyranicus.
The remaining 32 participants are:
The Almighty Doer of Stuff, Andraste, Ash Lael, Delicious Vlish, Excalibur, Goldenking, Infernal, Internal Flamming Muffin, Jewels, Lazarus, Lord Grimm, the Lurker, MagmaDragoon, Marlenny, Mysterious Man, Nalyd, Nemesis, Nicothodes, Niemand, Nikki, Nioca, Randomizer, Riibu, Saunders, Servant of Trinity, the Silent Assassin, Smoo, Stew Boy, Thralni, WKS, Zephyr Tempest, and Zeviz.
To preserve sanity, round 1 and round 2 will take place in 2 parts each.
-- Slarty