Gauging interest - "Mystery" Character Battle

I saw this done many, many years ago and people seemed to really like it. I think during the 2003 or 2004 Character Battle and it used the characters from that bracket. Basically, it would be a character battle but you never know exactly who you're voting for (you can, of course, make educated guesses). Based on that, I would probably use an existing bracket but could decide to do some sort of nominations. Seeding would be randomized, as would the order of matches in each round, and I simply give hints for the characters in each match. Based on those hints, you can either vote for a character by the hint, OR you can take a stab at it and vote for a character by name, which doubles your vote if you're right, but doesn't count at all if you're wrong.

So for example, let's say we were doing the 2003 Character Battle bracket in this format. On round 1, day 1, I draw up the match Luigi vs. Kefka (this is not necessarily the first match in the bracket, and I'll explain why in a bit). I post the match as such:

Wears a green hat
vs.
A Final Fantasy villain

The first few votes go like this...

Vote 1: Final Fantasy villain (counts as 1 vote for Kefka)
Vote 2: Luigi (counts as 2 votes for Luigi)
Vote 3: Link (doesn't count)

And so on and so forth.

Although the bracket would remain stationary throughout the contest, the order of the matches would be randomized to make it harder to pinpoint exactly which character you are voting for. Let's say Luigi wins that first round match, and the clue for his second match is "Has a mustache." That could be a great number of characters from that bracket (Mario, Wario, Gordon Freeman, Auron, etc) but the only overlap with "green hat" is Luigi, so if matches were done in order, it's a known fact that Luigi is in the first match of every round until he loses (furthermore, anyone could just easily do the math based on the voting). Randomizing the matches allows me to use the clue "protagonist of a Game Cube game" for him in the third round, which could again refer to a decent number of characters that could still be left. I know the "green hat" clue is a bit reductive but some of the clues will have to be at a certain point.

Wondering if this is something people would like to see in 2023. I know the board is a very different place than it was 20 years ago, but I think it'd be nice to see some old stuff come back in the new age, even if just for a quick visit.

Ive never heard of this before. It seems silly but really fun. Id be interested.

I'd be down

Would definitely be down for this

Sounds fun!

Haha holy shit, I remember this. That's an old memory

Sounds neat!

I think I remember liking this a lot

i'd vote

I vaguely remember this

bro this forum has been around since 2002 and you came up with an original idea. hell yeah

you could also do a rigged character contest

but i suppose this is a form of that

I would be interested

Let's-a-go!

Yeah!

Would you be revealing where the selection pool of characters was coming from?

Would definitely be up for this

azuarc posted...

Would you be revealing where the selection pool of characters was coming from?

Yes. You would know ahead of time which characters are somewhere in the bracket.

ZenOfThunder posted...

bro this forum has been around since 2002 and you came up with an original idea. hell yeah

I literally said in the OP that it was done here long ago and others have said that they remember it haha

This was a great contest back in the day.

Looks like there's interest! Would you rather I use a pre-existing bracket or do noms? A nomination-based bracket would likely be 4 noms to get in, first 64 locked are in, same basic eligibility as a main page bracket.

Nominations

Snake5555555555 posted...

Nominations

Nominations, we're starving for a new character battle anyway.

What is the criteria for the clues? Like, what if Clue for Character #1 applies to 20 characters and Clue of Character #2 only applies to 2 characters? Or will there be some sort of rule to make it relatively balanced?

I'll try to make it as balanced as possible. For example I won't use "playable in Smash" in round 1 if that applies to like 25 characters in the bracket. But there might be a difference of like, say, 7 and 3 or something like that depending on what I can do.