Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What is Death Tourney?
A. Death Tourney was designed to parse pop culture characters into discrete one-on-one match-ups to determine which of the two is superior.

Q. How are tournament combatants selected?
A. Tournament combatants are selected based on the overall theme of a tournament.

Q. How are tournament themes selected?
A. Tournament themes are selected based on subjects that hold some significance in mainstream media and pop culture.

Q. How are characters selected for tournaments based on franchises or verses?
A. Tournaments based on franchises or verses typically involve eliminating characters from a larger roster or group. Generally the more significant or relevant characters earn a position in the tourney.

Q. Why was my favorite character not selected to participate in a tournament?
A. Your character’s popularity may not appeal to enough viewers. We base much of our fight blog analysis on official character wiki’s and your character may not have a corresponding wiki. Your character may have participated in a previous tournament or is scheduled to participate in a future tournament.

Q. Do featured characters ever show up in more then one tournament?
A. Yes. A character can be featured in multiple tournaments for several qualifying reasons. A character may qualify under multiple themes. Example: Yusuke Urameshi may be featured in a tournament featuring teen superheroes and show up later in a tourney theme based on Shōnen Jump characters. A character may qualify under multiple franchises. Example: Cloud Strife is a member of the Final Fantasy franchise yet he is associated with the Super Smash Bros and Kingdom of Hearts franchises.

Q. May I submit a suggested tournament theme or character for consideration?
A. Currently we are accepting tournament ideas through email. Please email suggestions[AT]deathtourney.com.

Q. What research is Death Tourney based on?
A. Death Tourney has explored every aspect of every character, and every battle in nearly every story-line in comics, novels, games, movies, television, cartoons, and books.

Q. Comics have made a significant contribution to Pop Culture. Their presence is represented in novels, games, movies, television, cartoons, and books. What statistics are available concerning comics in Death Tourney research?
A. We have catalogued and documented somewhere in the range of 1.5+ million comic book issues and 2.75+ million stories. Our collective scientific logical viewpoint is to assess the collective assimilation of data as a Bayesian estimation problem. This perception presents the analysis step as an application of Bayes’ theorem and the global assimilation process is a model of recursive Bayesian estimation. We then simplify the probabilistic analysis to a computationally practical form.

Q. Is Death Tourney research based on canonical data?
A. Great care was taken in preserving continuity and the question of what is and what is not canonical.

Q. How long did it take to develop Death Tourney?
A. Death Tourney is the result of a four-year long research project.

Q. Does the Death Tourney propriety game engine have a name?
A. The Death Tourney proprietary game engine is known as the V9-INEstine™ (patent pending) simulation engine.

Q. How are computer match-ups evaluated?
A. Death Tourney utilizes four components to properly evaluate the outcome of a computer match-up: (1) data, (2) interpretation of that data, (3) a replay structure, and (4) a significant statistical sampling.

Q. How are fight outcomes predicted at Death Tourney?
A. Our patent pending proprietary V9-INEstine™ simulation engine performs a statistical analysis to predict the outcome of a contest. Based on Theory of Probability it uses advanced combination logic. Death Tourney uses proprietary methods and algorithms for generating fight outcomes. Our math modeling automatically determines the best decision model.

Q. How many lines of code is our commercial simulation engine comprised of?
A. ~374k lines of code.

Q. Are there any plans to upgrade our simulation engine?
A.  Yes. The next incarnation of our simulation engine will include a neural network analysis component. [UPDATE: The neural network component was included in our last simulation engine upgrade implemented in April 2019.]

Q. Can I participate in Death Tourney research?
A. The best way you can assist us is by updating character wikis. Wikis can be found by searching either for a character or series. If you are not able to locate a wiki concerning a specific character, you can create one on the main wikia site http://www.wikia.com/fandom. Please let us know if you have created a new wiki or have provided significant updates to an official character wiki and we will mention you in our blog or social media outlets.

Q. What do the stars (*) on the tournament results page indicate?
A. An asterisk (*) appears next to a fighter’s score whenever the simulation engine was able to predict the outcome of a battle before 50% of the fights were completed. This indicates that the winner of the battle was able to exploit a vulnerability or weakness in the opponent. You may see us at times refer to this event as a “Plus 100” (+100) bonus. When a +100 bonus (an extra percentage point) is awarded to the winner the total fight percentage will exceed 100%. (Example: Ageha Yoshina 78% vs. Blue Beetle 23% = 101%).

Q. Does Death Tourney have plans to implement a discussion forum in the future?
A. Yes. We plan to install a site discussion forum at some point in the future. If you are interested in becoming a forum moderator please email us at support[AT]deathtourney.com and provide us with your qualifications for consideration as a moderator.

Q. Could you tell me a little about the Death Tourney staff?
A. Sure! The staff is comprised of the following members: Darthatheri, “the creator”. Alakazamn, senior staff analyst. PaperTitan, senior staff analyst. Rajesh, staff game programmer. Zia, staff programmer. Deepro, designer/graphic artist. Fimbulvetr, contributor. Animator, TBA. Sound designer, TBA. Sound Mix Engineer, TBA. Quality Control Technician, TBA. Research Assistants, TBA. Interns, TBA. Forum Moderators, TBA. If you are interested in joining our team, and you believe you possess the qualifications to fill any vacate positions, email us at support[AT]deathtourney.com and provide us with your qualifications for consideration as a team member.

Q. What is the process whereby Death Tourney uses to produce accurate simulated fight outcomes?
A. At Death Tourney we use a prediction cluster deployed with AWS Cloud Formation. Our data collection is provided by import.io (web data extraction platform). Our data interpretation is performed by PredictionIO. The core replay structure is our patent pending proprietary V9-INEstine™ simulation engine. We use Prosuite by Provalis Research as a management tool for statistical sampling.

Q. Why does the Death Tourney website seem to not load properly in my web browser?
A. DeathTourney.com is an ad-free site. We do not display advertisements on our domain to maintain a better experience for our visitors. We do run code on our site that generates a false positive in ad-block software. Exempting our domain in your ad-blocking software will provide you the best experience while viewing our site and provide you with the all the functionality we intended. See our Ad-blocker page.

Q. I do not see all the tournament participant images listed on the website. What’s up with that?
A. They are all there. Trust us. Locate the character images at the top of the screen or in the “Meet the Combatants” section. Use your mouse, trackball, roller-ball, joystick, touch-pad, touch screen, head control, eye control, voice access, switch access, or keyboard access input to select the character images and drag them left or right to reveal the entire list.

Q. Why do some of the YouTube video’s on your channel seem to playback at a low resolution?
A. Our video’s are recorded and encoded at 1920 x 1080.

By default, YouTube is set to change video resolution automatically, depending on your Internet connection speed, whenever you watch a video. Automatic resolution settings can cause problems, if you have an unstable Internet connection that’s constantly speeding up or slowing down. Luckily, you can change the resolution of YouTube videos manually and disable the automatic setting.

Change the resolution of the video you’re watching by clicking the gear icon and selecting a setting. Choose 1080p. The video will stay in the resolution you select for its entire duration, unless you manually change it. See how here > 1080p

Q. Does Death Tourney have an RSS content feed?
A. We certainly do! Our content feed URL is https://www.deathtourney.com/home/feed/

Q. What is the URL to Death Tourney’s sitemap?
A. Our sitemap URL is https://www.deathtourney.com/home/sitemap.xml

Q. How are the tournament brackets populated?
A. We seed combatants in our tournaments by assigning them a preliminary ranking for the purposes of positioning them in the tournament brackets. Combatants are “planted” into the bracket in a manner that is typically intended so that the best combatants do not meet until later in the competition.

Q. How often are tournaments scheduled for release?
A. A new tournament was released on a monthly cycle during the period August 2018 thru December 2018. The tournaments featured four weekly elimination rounds with the championship culminating in the final week. The schedule was revised beginning January 2019 whereby tournaments were no longer associated with a calendar month release date. The new schedule still features four elimination rounds, although each round is released on a biweekly (every two weeks) basis.

Q. How does Death Tourney differ from Death Battle?
A. Death Battle pits two or more fictional characters against each other in a simulated “death battle” (a virtual “fight to the death”). Whereby, Death Tourney engages 16 characters from all media genres (fictional and nonfictional) in a single elimination tournament designed to crown one champion.

Q. What is the current stable release of your simulation engine?
A. The current stable release of our V9-INEstine™ simulation engine is v3.1.18

Q. What release of the simulation engine was used to process each of the tournaments?
A. The V9-INEstine™ simulation engine v2.2.13 was used in processing tournaments 1 (August 2018) – 6 (January 2019). The engine was updated to v3.1.18 (April 2019) and tournament #7 was the first tournament using the updated engine.

Q. What issues did the updated engine address?
A. A neural network analysis component was implemented in engine v3.1.18 to increase accuracy of predictions.

Q. Could you provide more details concerning the engine update?
A. The behavior of battle outcomes is governed by theories which can be expressed as mathematical equations. These equations represent how combatant properties such as agility, combat skills, defense (armor), durability, endurance, energy projection, healing, intelligence, magic, mental powers, range of attack, regeneration, speed, strength, and uncommon power, etc., will change from their initial current values (now). If we can solve these equations, we have a prediction. We can do this by sub-dividing the battle outcomes into a 3D network of points and solving these equations at each point. These models have three key foundations of error:

1) A deficient description of how the battle is progressing, due to lack of data. When the model begins, it is having an incorrect picture of the initial state of the battle, so will always generate a forecast that is imperfect.

2) Models run on 3D networks that cover the entire spectrum of properties. Each network node represents a property. Thus, processes smaller than that (such as a single fight) are not handled well and must be “parameterized”. This means we make up parameters (fudge factors) that do a good job providing the right prediction a high percentage of the time.

3) Our basic understanding of the theories governing the battle outcomes is imperfect, so the equations we’re using aren’t 100% right.

So, in other words, stronger characters may loose some fights to weaker characters according to the math models – but the stronger character ultimately wins the overall battle. The engine update was designed to address the key foundations of error listed above in order to increase the accuracy of the fights won/lost during the course of the battle (multiple fights).

Q. Will a character perform the same when featured in multiple tournaments?
A. A character may or may not advance in the elimination brackets equally in different tournaments. The fights initiated by the simulation engine are dynamic real world fight simulations. Fighters have “good days” and “bad days“. They can and do make mistakes. Different tournaments may feature different forms of the same character. The character may face weaker or stronger opponents in each tournament. The power ratings of a character may change due to an update in the character’s story-line in their perspective series. Our simulation engine or database may have experienced an update since the character’s last battle.