The Pandora's Tale Volume 2 Character Tournament is a planned series of polls which will ask readers to choose their favorite character in Pandora's Tale. Like its predecessor, it will be a completely unofficial event organized by a fan. Until the tournament actually begins, any details about its timing or format are tentative.
The tournament will not begin until all chapters of the main story of Volume 2 are available online to non-Patreon backers. Moreover, the tournament organizer must know that all chapters of Volume 2 are available. The latter requirement is non-vacuous, because the online comic might not indicate "this is the end of the book."
There are at least two plausible ways the tournament organizer could tell we have reached the end of Volume 2.
The tournament could be further delayed if the tournament organizer needs more time to prepare, which might depend on her life circumstances when Volume 2 releases.
All named non-metafictional characters who appear in the main story of Volume 2 are eligible. Characters who only appear in non-story bonus art (if such a thing is included in Volume 2) do not count.
Until Volume 2 is released, no one except Xan knows for sure which characters will be eligible.
The characters page contains a table of all named non-metafictional characters who have appeared so far.
However, some of those characters were introduced in Volume 1 and have not yet appeared in Volume 2.
The tournament will used a modified version of the format from the previous tournament. At the start of each round, the characters will be divided into
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matches, as evenly as possible. Characters who qualify as "major characters" by number of appearances will be split across matches as evenly as possible. Characters who are only "major" by virtue of their placement in the previous tournament are not treated differently from minor characters for seeding purposes, so as to avoid the previous tournament biasing the results of the current one. In each match, each reader could vote for up to
Number of characters in the match
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2and the top
Number of characters in the match
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2advanced to the next round. Prior to the semifinals, matches are determined pseudo-randomly using the round's start date as a seed. Once five or fewer characters remained, matches are decided using the semi-finalists' performance in previous rounds.
The tiebreaking rules are planned to be the same as those for the Rain Character Tournament 2, which are a modified version of the tiebreaking rules from the first Pandora's Tale character tournament. Changes were made in response to Match 11.
A tie only matters if there is a tie for
Number of characters in the match
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2place. When such a tie occurs, the following rules were used for tiebreakers:
If all characters in a match are tied, then the tournament organizer's votes (i.e. my votes) are discarded.
Otherwise, if more than half of the characters are tied for last place, then all of the characters tied for last place are put on probation.
Otherwise, the tie will be resolved by allowing more characters to advance to the next round.
The tiebreaker rules are intended to make it less likely that a popular character is eliminated early purely because of a random match-up. In particular, the intention is that two most popular characters in a match should advance (prior to the semifinals). Hence, less than half of the characters in a match are eliminated, outside of the extremely rare circumstance of Rule (2b). Rule (2b) is intended to prevent infinite loops: insuring at least one character is eliminated every round.
Rules (1) and (3) are unchanged from the previous tournament. However, Rule 2 was changed. In the old tournament, the rules established that there had to be at least one elimination in every match. This made a difference in Match 11, when Pandora and Isabelle tied for second place in a match of three characters. Hence, both were eliminated despite both getting the median number of votes. This meant that the likely second-most-popular character didn't make it to the semi-finals, leading to an anticlimactic final.
Moreover, eliminating Pandora and Isabelle in Match 11 was not necessary to prevent an infinite loop, because Con had been eliminated in Match 10 (which was part of the same round).
The modified Rule 2 is intended to ensure that the median characters in a match are eliminated only when absolutely necessary to avoid infinite loops.
The rules for the semifinals are identical to those in the previous tournament.