ZEJ Statistical Tournament 2013

~ ZEJ Statistical Tournament ~​

Official Tournament Thread - Rules and Regulations

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the first official (and much-anticipated) ZEJ Statistical Tournament. Herein, the many statistical roleplayers of our fair community have, through fire and sheer determination, crafted their characters, sharpening them into war machines suitable for combat against one another. Through the intense tribulation of coming weeks, matches will take place, pitting ZEJ’s finest against one another in the medium of statistical combat. In this way, it will be settle who is truly the ‘best of the best.’ Who will rise? Who will fall? Who will gain the honourary title of ZEJ Statplaying Champion? Only time will tell...

Though the tournament has been long in the making (over two years since @Flimzy first brought up the concept), it is finally time to reveal the combatants. All preparations have been finalized, and now it is time to prove who really is the best. Will it be you? Look forward to questions like this being answered in the very near future!

Without any further fanfare, I welcome you once more to the ZEJ statistical tournament. It should be an exciting display of the statistical metagame that has developed between both ZEJ and Eternal Dream, and I am very much excited to see what is to come of this unique first foray into ‘competitive’ statistical battling.

Rules of the Tournament

As outlined by Flimzy in the Official Interest Check, there are several rules in play. For the sake of entrenching these rules, they will be listed below.

• First and foremost, no changes will be accepted to characters now that the deadline has passed. Some members have submitted profiles without X-Abilities or E-Triggers. While this is perfectly acceptable, I will not allow additions or modifications of any sort to the characters.
• Upgrade Points have been disabled from this Tournament, so I ask that any who applied them to their characters make the appropriate modifications to remove any instance of Upgrade Points. From discussion with Shadow, it has been decided that they should only truly have a place in actual Statistical Roleplays with natural levelling progression.
• As this is a roleplaying community, actual in-character interactions are perfectly allowed, and even encouraged. However, this is entirely optional, and should not interfere with the flow of the tournament as a whole. I must stress that I would like to have the tournament progress in a timely manner, but if you would like to include characterization of your pairing, then by all means do so.
• If there are any disparities in numbers on the part of the GM (myself), please send a PM to both myself and Shadow describing the nature of the disparity. Both of us will deliberate the nature of the error, and we will collectively make a ruling. Our ruling is FINAL after that.

Tournament Format

Bracket

As we enter the tournament, we are begin with an odd number of players at nine (9) total entrants. This means that there is going to need to be one ‘Bye’ through the first round, with a total of four matches being played in Round One. I have used a Random Number Generator to assign this Bye, so as to not give any sort of favouritism. Through this, it has been determined that Masquerade will automatically advance to the next round, and all other entrants will be organized into a bracket, which will be randomized. The outcome is what the tournament will follow, under a single-elimination format. The winners of the semi-finals will proceed on to the Grand Finals, while the losers will play in a Third Place consolation match.

The bracket is as follows:

Spoiler: Bracket

Combat

Obviously as has been reiterated throughout the signup process, the tournament is going to take the form of two versus two statistical combat at Level 7, following Shadow’s system of statistical roleplaying. MP Costs have been assigned according to Shadow’s MP formula, so there is no discrepancy between characters having inconsistent costs from various styles of GMing.

As we are using Shadow’s systems, the X-Gauge is enabled for battles, and each character may make use of an E-Trigger and an X-Ability once each per battle. This means that characters will be unable to simply rush five X-Levels to repeatedly make use of an E-Trigger, and should make an effort to find balance between the two Excess-based processes. For those who do not actively use Shadow’s system, for the purposes of the Tournament, scoring a Basic Attack is worth 0.5 X-Levels, using a skill of any sort is worth 1.0 X-Levels, entering Critical status (temporarily) adds 2.0 X-Levels (until the character exits Critical), and scoring a KO will earn the character that landed the finishing blow 1.0 X-Levels.

X-Gauge will not carry over between battles, so as to give a fair playing field to all.

Additionally, the Cycle Mana special command is in use - remember that using this command consumes an Action Command. If a character Cycles their Mana on the same turn as using a Movement Command, then they will recover 5% of their Max MP. If a character does not use a Movement Command (i.e. Cycle Mana -> Wait), they recover 10% Max MP.

This goes without saying, really, but there is no active inventory, and since no characters can conjure consumables, item use is disabled for the tournament.

In terms of arenas, I will be choosing relatively balanced arenas with no gimmick apart from obstructive terrain. This will probably change from round to round (subject to change), but there will be no disparity in arena for matches of the same round.

Participants

All participants will be expected to submit both of their final profileexactly as PM’d to me to the Profile Thread (link to come). I will be carefully inspecting them to make sure that there are no discrepancies between the final profiles and what is posted in the Profile Thread. I asked three unrelated people in IRC whether or not I should have a Profile Thread, and the vote was 2-1 in favour, so profiles will be revealed publicly for the purposes of the tournament. The Profile Thread will be posted no later than December 1st, so I ask that all combatants prepare their profiles for posting at that time.

In order of final submission, the participants and their respective combatants are:

@Masquerade (Elena Malbraeze / Telvren Nas'thal-ix)
@Silver (Cerys / Elisia Fairchild)
@crazE (Mai / Kimari Sanira)
@Kudamon (Ahriman / Nathair Kigyo)
@gistofeverything (Thage Ehrenphreis / Dharc Johansen)
@Flimzy (Arkai Genium / Ganro Maga)
@"Irouk Inverse" (Rozalin / Rylai)
@"The Kakuzato" (Lance Henrikson / Mirani Flore)
@CerberusLycan (Jay / Ebrethiel)

Conclusion

This concludes the introductory post to the Statistical Tournament. As stated above, the Profile Thread will be posted no later than December 1st in a special temporary Tournament forum in the Roleplay Compendium section, which will be unveiled shortly. The official matches will be posted soon after the final profiles are posted, so be sure to get your profiles up promptly after the thread is posted. I look forward to watching these battles play out, and best of luck to all participants! It should be an exciting few weeks.