Lurker > ZenOfThunder

Ditto (Pokemon)
The Moon (The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask)
Godot (Ace Attorney)
Angry Sun (Super Mario Bros. 3)

BJ Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein)
King Dedede (Kirby)
M. Bison (Street Fighter)
Conker (Conker)

anything but undertale plz
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Wow I stayed up way later than I was supposed to, I gotta get up early tomorrow

This was fun, i'll try to wrap up this topic within the last two days. I will also be commenting on the bonus matches and maybe I'll spin this topic off into "Zen comments on potential new characters for CBX"
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Anagram posted...

I also made these, which were rejected.
https://imgur.com/tWQjTDY
https://imgur.com/T7XKLGt
https://imgur.com/Tfkoyvl

i actually remember each and every one of these!! they were great, i can't believe allen passed on this goldmine
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here are all the pics I submitted for Round 1, even the rejected ones:



also:


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here's some more:







allen was the one with 100% on hannah montana

also why did we stop censoring pics with tim allen's head that shit was hilarious
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(1)Samus Aran vs (8)L-Block vs (7)Tifa Lockheart




Alright so I logged into my Imgur account for the first time since 2013 to look for the raw versions of the magazine covers from my match pic, and holy shit is it just a treasure trove of weird Board 8 culture and history. This match was really boring anyway, some people thought L-Block could upset Tifa but there was never really a chance for that. For a short time we were just able to breathe... Just breathe.

So instead of more analysis here are pics from the ol' Zen archives, featuring minimized AIM cameos by @KamikazePotato and @Ashethan:

LeonhartFour posted...

so are you saying Vivi > Mario doesn't count

this match is an anomaly we need to assign it an SCP number and contain it for further study
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LeonhartFour posted...

I think KP said Lightning losing to DK was the most embarrassing performance of the contest but I think Sora losing here ranks right up there with it.

I remember feeling like Sora both had the potential to win and never did at the same time. I can't describe how I feel about that match, like I knew logically that Sora should and could win very easily but I also knew there was no way he was going to. Like Schrodinger's Match or something. Sora both could and couldn't win at the same time.

I have no idea what I am saying it makes sense to me tho
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KamikazePotato posted...

Jesus christ, look how much Squirtle stands out in every single one of those pics. It's a bright blue smiling blob directly in the middle of dark colors and 'realistic' characters. Might actually have been important!

I wish Allen would have given us statistics for the amount of votes coming from the results page versus the front page. I'm curious how many people even saw our pics this year.

LeonhartFour posted...

ZenOfThunder posted...

It's weird to say that "Sephiroth pulled an upset here" and even weirder when you expand upon that and say "Sephiroth pulled an upset against Kirby here." Only in 2013!

I mean

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3305-contest-semifinal-cloud-snake-sephiroth-kirby

Bro there was a cloud over that match it don't count
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(6)Pikachu vs (2)Sora vs (12)Pokemon Trainer Blue




jfc



What is the opposite of "fall from grace?" "Rise to dominance?"

Also I made the mistake of googling "PaRappa Kingdom Hearts"



I'm not sure what the most amusing part of the image is, the drawing itself, the "copyright" by Italian Shorty III, or that there were two Italian Shorties before him. They're breeding and soon we will be consumed by the calzone.

Board 8 was so soaked with tears and beaten down by the results of the previous five matches that this was somehow not even a shocker of a result. By this point if you had tried to logically argue that Blue would pull Pikachu down enough to let Sora slip by you'd get laughed at. We all feared the Pokemon and we knew what it would do. Spare_us.RAT.

Sora actually might have been able to win this one if given enough time. The problem is that Sora shares the same fanbase with Pikachu to some extent, so any time he'd start to gain Pikachu would stop him. The same people obsessed with Kingdom Hearts are also way too into IV training their Pokemon. It's some "advanced weeaboo" thing. Managing Pokemon stats is just as difficult as making sense of the Kingdom Hearts plotline.

I want to say this match was entertaining, but it really wasn't. There were occasionally KH fans coming to the board asking how Sora was losing to a big dumb baby like Pikachu as if Sora isn't a big dumb baby himself. You want entertaining? Here's the one time ever Sora was a walkaround character at Disneyland:



Yikes, why didn't Disney just get Haley Joel Osment to dress up as him?



oh

why is he a duck dynasty now

(I'd still take it over whatever Italian Shorty III puts out)
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(1)Cloud Strife vs (5)Squirtle vs (4)Leon Kennedy




Here's the next entry in the "Fuck It I Give Up" Sextology, this time involving a funny blue cartoon turtle beating former contest champion Cloud Strife because reasons

Reason 1) 4chan did not like Cloud and wanted Squirtle to win. Ulti mentions in his writeup that Squirtle didn't need a rally but I really don't think that's the case. You can see the votal increase on this match and 4chan had mentioned in a lot of their previous rallies that they were going to support Pokemon in the matches, and although there was less support it was still there. Again, we also still had a little spillover from the Draven rally posts, which probably benefit the Pokemon more than anyone else.

Reason 2) Ain't nobody give no shits about FF anymore unless it is specifically Sephiroth when he is against Kirby or Gilgamesh I guess

Reason 3) That weird PlayStation All-Star SFF hurt Cloud a bit, Leon is the man

Reason 4) Fuck It I Give Up

We all collectively saw this coming by this point but it hurt to watch it unfold all the same. Ulti mentions in his writeup that the vote trends are very similar to the original Mario / Cloud match from 2002, where Squirtle got a good size lead and even though Cloud made cuts he couldn't gain any momentum and eventually got beaten by this thing



Don't get me wrong, I chose Squirtle as my first ever starter like any sane person would, but I can't believe it's strong enough to beat legendary character Cloud Strife under any circumstances. Maybe I'm just old fashioned. Bring back asbestos, it didn't do anything wrong.

Take Leon out this match and give Cloud the boost from KHIII and Smash Ultimate in 2018, what do you get? Probably a much more boring match where he wins pretty easily. It's just surreal how this contest ended up playing out. We had Vivi beating Mario, Draven beating Link, and now Squirtle beating Cloud. Eventually Sephiroth would get knocked out to Draven and Mewtwo.
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LordoftheMorons posted...

Man, I don't remember those Sonic/Mewtwo/Bowser pics at all

Definitely remember BOX/HATE/CAKE though

Thanks! That was mine. I had become so bored with making match pics after so many years of doing literally hundreds that I started just doing random photoshop tutorials and trying to incorporate them into match pics just to give myself something new to do.

See: My weird Andy Warhol pic for Draven / Snake / Samus
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Shit, sorry, I always forget FF6 was on SNES, I got the crappy PS1 port when I was a kid and associate it with that. Didn't get the SNES cart til years later.

I am probably the only one on the planet who would make that mistake.
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(1)Solid Snake vs (2)GLaDOS vs (7)Kefka




Hot on the heels of "Match That Makes No Fucking Sense" comes "Escape From Beneath the Planet of the Match That Makes No Fucking Sense," which is commonly accepted as the "Dark Knight" to the original's "Batman Begins."

It was good to finally see Kefka get some laughing sprite pics, but because the rally juices were still flowing steadily nobody even got to see them as everyone just voted from the results page.

As a result of the rallies, GLaDOS probably got a huge boost from people who just play PC games. Although shouldn't Kefka have gotten some kind of boost if Sephiroth did? Again, 2013. I still don't get how the fuck this happened.

I incorrectly stated early on that GLaDOS had beaten Kefka handily, but that was my faulty memory and my (admittedly justifiable) impression that Kefka ain't shit. It's so ingrained in me that Kefka is a disappointment that I had a picture painted in my mind that this match wasn't close.

But it was! Probably one of the most entertaining matches of this contest. Once again Kefka gives us an incredibly unpredictable, super fun match. Even if it's 100 years from now and we're knee-deep in Character Battle XV (at this rate we'd be lucky to hit XV) with a field oversaturated with Generation 62 Pokemon, I still want Kefka to get a spot in the bracket because he will always find a way to impress or massively disappoint. Both is good.

At this point everyone had thrown out their brackets so we were just happy to get another good upset in there, although there was a dude so buttdevestated that Kefka lost that they account suicided. I'm not surprised, people get pretty emotional over this big head of lettuce.
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(1)Sephiroth vs (5)Big Boss vs (4)Kirby




It's weird to say that "Sephiroth pulled an upset here" and even weirder when you expand upon that and say "Sephiroth pulled an upset against Kirby here." Only in 2013!

Votals were still pretty high, and for the most part they'd stay around there for a while. There were some wishful thinkers claiming that people brought to the site via rally were genuinely interested in the contest and wanted to see it through

I am here to say that is wrong because, again, most people who aren't us just think "GAMEFAQS DUM CLOUD ALWAYS WIN!!!!"

I guess those weren't the people who showed up for this match though because Sephiroth ended up winning a decently close match against Kirby, despite the supposed "PlayStation LFF" Big Boss was supposed to subject him to. Is there any actual evidence of that? I feel like that's a Nintendo thing. Let's look at the PSASBAR roster:



I guess we'll have to wait for a match with both Emmett Graves and Fat Princess in it before we know for sure, they are definitely deserving of the title of PlayStation All-Star. Can't wait to see how hard Evil Cole LFFs Cole too.

It kind of sucked (lol) to see Kirby give this one up to Sephiroth, he had the lead for a while here iirc. I remember waking up and seeing that Sephiroth had come back and wondering why it took the whole fucking contest for the FF fanbase to actually show up.

I'm wondering how Big Boss is going to look in 2018 given that he's not even in MGSV for more than a few minutes. Is everyone aware of that twist now? I think I mentioned it in a previous post, whoops. Hope I didn't ruin the late Hideo Kojima's masterpiece. Wait, is Kojima dead, or just his career?

Does Big Boss receive a boost from Snake being in Ultimate? Does Big Boss receive equal boosts to Snake whenever he gets one?
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PS if you enjoy the free content of this topic and feel generous donate to my Patreon:



aka nominate Metal Sonic: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/76868408
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https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/76918242

New thread, going to close this one soon unless someone feels like spamming this to get to 500 for some reason
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Archive: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/184626-traffic-jam/76917465
Original Topic: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/76880099

---------------------------

If you are just joining us, this is a part-analysis, part-retrospective, part-rambling mess of a post mortem covering the entirety of the Summer 2013 Character Battle IX. Featuring such wonderful (semi-unwanted) guest stars such as KamikazePotato, UltimaterializerX and LeonhartFour!

This is very much intended to be a topic devoted to stimulating the community into discussion, a lot of what we talk about here is very circlejerk-y but that is by design. The goal is to get people talking about contests and "in the mood" for CBX, as well as refreshing our memories on what the status quo was and speculate on what has changed in the five years since CBIX.

Your commentary is always welcome! As noted in the last topic, I have no idea what I'm talking about, and especially with later rounds my memory is very foggy. I welcome corrections and any factual input. Call me out if you see something wrong! This is supposed to be a fun series where we collectively reminisce as well as forget there was ever a "Best Year In Gaming" contest!

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(1)Sonic the Hedgehog vs (11)Mewtwo vs (7)Bowser




Spilling out of Link vs Draven was a match that had been fairly highly contested until this point. Nobody predicted there would be this much spillage from a rally. Yeah, the rallies had affected votals a little bit, but not to this extent. I don't know if any of us had predicted the Draven rally to be so much bigger in Round 3.

I remember visiting one of the Draven rally threads on Reddit after the match was over, and while most comments were discussing how buttdecimated we all were, there were a few here and there saying "dang, I missed it, oh well, voted for Mewtwo"

I don't know how much crossover there is between LoL and Pokemon but I'm assuming if you're hardcore enough to go to LoL communities you're probably enough of a huge nerd to absolutely love Pokemon. (ok that's a stretch but follow me here)

This is slightly unrelated, but I read some statistics a few months back (that I can't find now, of course) and a lot of the people playing Fortnite have never played another online game before, and there's a chunk where they consider it their first "real game." LoL was huge at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if there were people voting who had never played a Sonic or Mario game but loved the Pokemon anime, but that's just personal conjecture.

Originally people were arguing that Bowser would be strong enough to hold Mewtwo back for Sonic to take a win. After all, Ganondorf held back Mario enough for Vivi to win, so Sonic shouldn't have a problem here, right? Well, there's also the weird Nintendo SFF that includes Sonic on some level, but he's still SONIC, Noble Nine member and contest vet. Mewtwo didn't even double Phoenix Wright.

Unfortunately for us it was 2013 and Mewtwo absolutely embarrassed Sonic thanks to rally spillover. You can champion the righteous cause of "rallies" all you want, but the definite downside is the negative effects it has on other matches. Reddit and tumblr links often stay circulating for days, and, yes, the GameFAQs site views go up, but our morale go down.

Without the rally here, would Sonic have taken this in the year of Pokefear? Probably. Phoenix Wright was either really impressive in 2013 or Mewtwo was on rally roids in R3. Probably more the ladder than anything.

These results did get us hyped up that Mewtwo would be the anti-Draven, though. Pokefear had become our ally, like Magus or that food critic from Ratatouille.
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Black Knight was removed from the background of Castle Siege, replaced by a generic Red Knight:



Possibly confirmed as... something? Maybe he's an AT, maybe a boss, maybe an Echo? Probably not nothing though

also this has been floating around, it has a ton of votes, it's fun to look answer and look at the results:

http://allourideas.org/smashu
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here is a "proof chart" for Isaac and Skull Kid for reference:

https://i.redd.it/gudjvdmi6jg11.png
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Alright I've archived all my posts on this dead board:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/184626-traffic-jam/76917465

I'll do some updates tonight but it will be in a new thread. If you are from the future just search "Zen" or something, it will turn up
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Cool dude, lookin' good. The most I have ever been on the news was when the news came to my middle school and like... part of my torso was in one shot

my mom still has that recorded on a VHS somewhere
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swirIdude posted...

If you have to ask about a Smash leak's validity, there is a 98% chance that it's not true.

Like, I know that, and when I pointed out how nothing this was I just had people jump down my throat because I'm ignoring all this "concrete evidence" and "why would WayForward do all this if it didn't mean anything??"

I don't know if anyone on the Smash boards has heard of the idea of a "coincidence" but
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https://imgur.com/Auzb3BY

Like, I'm not crazy here, isn't this is absolutely reaching and grasping at straws?

This is nothing

But so many people think it is something

I wanted to post it here because people typically tend to be more level than a Smash board
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Thank you!! I'll be more active after tonight hopefully, life happens
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Yeah Ive got family in town

I can comment on all the last matches right now

Draven won it sucked asssssss

Ill do more tonight
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Geno vs Akuma 2018 who wins
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whoa what happened, how did star wars talk start

anyway i worked all day yesterday and I have to go to a family reunion in Queens today, probably won't get an update til sunday
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dude I did a ton of travelling for work and Newark really isn't bad

like yeah it's not great

but it's not awful

I guess in comparison to smaller airports it sucks but when it's that busy there's only so much you can do
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i need to keep this alive at least until noms
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yo @Ashethan remember when we filled up an Allen thread to try to get the bracket and he just modded us

good times
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I am proud to say I had Knuckles over Magus and Pac-Man over Ocelot in my brackets

mainly because I was very young and dumb and didn't participate in any contest discussion, I lurked for my first year or two here because I was afraid I didn't know enough about contests

I still don't know enough about contests but I just don't care anymore I'll analyze every goddamn contest until I die
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I really liked Sunshine but I was very young

I revisit it sometimes and I just think it's ok

Super Mario 64 has aged way better to me ironically
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I think I stopped writing that write-up half way through cuz I couldn't figure out how the hell Vivi beat Mario even with Ganondorf in the match

like I was trying to find some logical explanation and I couldn't other than maybe "cheating" + "ganondorf is way stronger than we thing or at least very resistant to SFF"
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I don't know how I'd feel if we just re-ran 2002 as the gimmick

just a bunch of fighting game characters that are no longer relevant
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it was synced to my icloud apparently here you go:

(1)Mario vs (6)Vivi vs (9)Ganondorf




what the fuck can I say about this match



holy shit

I still think about this match and it gives me absolute chills. Chills. I remember waking up and seeing how close this match was and my jaw fucking dropped. Like in real life, not metaphorically. Vivi going-toe-to-toe with the assumed 4th strongest of the Noble Nine, probably 3rd by this point.

Yes, Ganondorf was LFFing Mario. That shouldn't matter. It's fucking Mario.

I don't know anybody who called this unless they were half-joking. Nobody is going to say "I think Mario is going to lose to Vivi" unless they wanna get laughed off the board.

I am so fucking proud of Vivi to this day. This is one of those matches that makes everything worth it. We put up with so much shit during this contest. Getting buttdevestated was like nothing when you were reminded that Vivi. Beat. Mario.

----------------

I remember I wanted to add more to this but I can't remember now
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I actually have a write up for Mario and Vivi that I did halfway through round 1 and saved in a separate document so I wouldnt post it early by accident, but I guess I forgot to post it at all

I have to dig it out later Im out now
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there was a contest called "Best Year in Gaming?"


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I can't imagine all of this will actually be in the movie. Or half of it. Or... any of it. Or if the movie even happens.

It's like someone who has passing familiarity with the series but doesn't know any of the details was asked to make concept art using only screenshots given to him via the "random" button on the MGS wiki and not being allowed to read any of the articles.
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ZeldaTPLink posted...

I just want more contests. For me the worst thing those rallies ever did was make people not want contests anymore. I wouldn't mind a contest every year, with or without rallies.

I agree with this statement 10000000%

I opened this topic complaining that people had voted in a poll that they didn't want a new contest, and I wondered "why would anyone say that here"

But the Board is still recovering from two rally wins in a row. The wounds really did run deeper than we thought. Allen probably didn't want to put up with it.

Having tons of Board 8ers react so violently to ideas like Monika shows how deep seated the fear is in us
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I wonder how the LoL fanbase would have reacted if Link had won in the end. Would they have just account suicided on the Board and left? Or would they have tried to rally together later to make something else win?

I doubt they have the level of organization to do anything outside of "vote for da league guy" tho
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I'm actually going to ask anyone who is reading this topic to chime in, I think what makes the Draven shit so crazy is that everyone had their own very strong opinions on Draven and the surrounding events

I'd love to hear how you reacted during Link/Draven and how you feel about it now, a writeup for that match isn't complete without everyone shouting about their feelings
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oh yeah how the fuck did I forget this:

But then, depending on who you ask, the impossible happened. GameFAQs virtually froze to a halt, for about an hour, right in the middle of Link cutting 100 votes off of a lead every 5 minutes. It was almost impossible to consider this a coincidence, and the prevailing theory was a perfectly timed DDoS attack on the site. The site did eventually come back online, and Link got a few more big updates to get the lead below 3000, but then out of nowhere Draven started going nuts again. It only took Draven about 3 hours to get the lead from 3000 to 5200, which was just as weird as the site freezing in the first place. It takes a lot of coincidence for a site freeze during such a massive poll, but it takes a hell of a lot more than just a coincidence for Draven voters to be that ready to go once the site came back to full speed. Of all the theories that got thrown around about whether the down time was DDoS or not, that's the one that makes the most sense to me. Trends don't just flip on a dime like that, it takes a little while to shift. But here, the down time happened and then almost immediately upon the site coming back, Draven went berserk again. That isn't normal, and I think there was outside interference involved in some way.

Not that Allen thinks so, mind you.

GameFAQs is served by two proxy servers in rotation, and what we see in the logs is that one of them would go down, shifting traffic to the second, which would then get overloaded and go down, shifting traffic back to the first, repeat. Unlike a DDoS attack, there was no increase in inbound traffic, and the two proxy servers were failing one at a time, not simultaneously. It could have been a DDoS, but it looks a lot more like just a bad coincidence. Since the site was never truly offline, just slow and randomly failing, it took a while for the operations team to get paged out, but once they got online and started investigating all it took was rebooting the proxies to bring everything back to normal, which isn't how you'd normally recover from a DDoS.

tl;dr: Earlier downtime most likely wasn't an attack.

Also since people will probably ask, we are indeed checking into the legitimacy of all incoming votes and so far, everything appears to be legit.

Here's a graph of our two load balancers:



You can literally see one failing and the other one picking up the load.

All these people claiming admissions of DDoS have shown me nothing but hostility. You're seeing what I'm seeing with the load balancers, so show me what I'm not seeing if you have proof otherwise.

I thought this was the last match for some reason

This shit was INSANE, I cannot believe how obvious it was that this was intentional, but everyone on the site's end just kind of shrugged and let it happen

I think I blocked this out of my mind because of how furious it made me
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dude I don't even remember what happened in which match anymore, all Draven matches are kind of lumped together in my mind. Ironically it is the part of the contest I remember the least

I'm trying not to read Ulti's writeups so I don't just parrot his statements

If anyone has any strong memories about Draven matches, please share
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(1)Link vs (2)Commander Shepard vs (3)Draven






This was the one. This match was hyped up and talked about on and off the site days before it even happened.

We knew that this was basically it, ironically all the Snake > Link talk amounted to a bunch of "can the Snake that we believe to be stronger than Link take down Draven if Link fails?"

It's surreal to see people speculating on Snake being the one to save us once a nobody character beat Link in Round 3. I've been following these things since I was 13 and I have never seen a day like this. The toxic LoL community were flooding the board and flooding the votes. 122000 votes exactly, wow. I'm sure Allen enjoyed the traffic, but not everything that came with it.

While the board was drowning, we were counter-flooding Reddit, Twitter and Tumblr trying to rally the votes, and it just wasn't enough. Link couldn't keep up. We couldn't keep up.

It's astounding we accomplished what we did. Getting an anti-rally together big enough to even come close to the size of Draven's rally is next to impossible.

We even got some heavy hitters:



I think Jennifer Hale tweeted about it too but I can't find it.

The repercussions of this will be felt forever. Draven pulled off what was thought to be impossible. Again, L-Block was a different animal entirely. This was almost exclusively an outside push to interfere with the contests. Same with Undertale. We are now past the age of "Nintendo and FF always win!" and are now living in the age of "Rallied characters and games always win!" Neither are good, but I'd take the former any day.

I don't think I can say anything that hasn't been said, but in 2018 I don't think Draven would make it out of Round 2. Just last week news broke that Chinese investor Tencent is really unhappy with Riot, whom they asked to port LoL to mobile. Riot refused, so, Tencent, being a Chinese company, made a blatant ripoff of LoL which is now one of the most popular games in China, eating up LoL's market share there.

Heroes of the Storm, hero shooters, Battle Royales and other games made for streaming have taken over LoL's place, and that's also upsetting Tencent. Riot still assures its fans that numbers are good, just not nearly as good as its golden age. I don't see nearly as many LoL cosplayers and the booths are now much smaller than they used to be. LoL is stale now. Still popular, but stale.

https://cybersport.com/post/riot-games-tencent-butt-heads

And as I mentioned before, Draven really dates this contest, just like in a few years the Undertale win will be dated. Link wins all the time, yeah, but a Link win in 2002 still holds up. As would a Link win in 2018. L-Block's win holds up too, it was just the climate of this site at the time. Link and Cloud deserved to be champions. Draven did not.

-----------------------------------

EDIT: I forgot to mention the one hour freeze where Link's momentum was completely halted. See below for more details on that.

I'm actually going to ask anyone who is reading this topic to chime in, I think what makes the Draven shit so crazy is that everyone had their own very strong opinions on Draven and the surrounding events

I'd love to hear how you reacted during Link/Draven and how you feel about it now, a writeup for that match isn't complete without everyone shouting about their feelings

I'll save some more for next round.
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(16)Zelda vs (15)Donkey Kong vs (7)Charizard







I forgot what I originally wrote here, it wasn't that interesting. POKEFEAR was still at an all time high and surprisingly people attributed Zelda's performance here more to her strength than Charizard's weakness.

I went on The Show a little after this because at the time I was the Guru frontrunner (??) assuming Charizard beat Mega Man and Zero. Apparently I had that but I wasn't feeling so good about it after this, but NG asked me if I was feeling confident and I gave a half-hearted yes because... uh... Well, I did want to win the Guru. I usually don't even take Guru seriously and don't follow the results so when they contacted me I was more shellshocked than anything.

NG and Yo were still pretty supportive of Charizard > Mega Man after this, and I can see why. The general climate of the board was pretty depressing at the time. Everyone had basically resigned the contest to Pokemon and rallies. Probably the worst I've ever seen us. The community wasn't as lively and that was a big reason I took off during the next contest and didn't come back until now. The wounds these Pokemon and rallies have caused were greater than we imagined at the time.

Zelda is an actual character now and a real cutie in Smash so I bet she'd beat the Zard if that match happened today.

DK also looked bad here, he really falls over and dies at the slightest hint of a challenge. He was lucky to even be in round 2.
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I forgot my Zelda / DK / Zard writeup, I think I deleted it from word by accident

I guess I'll rewrite it

shit
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EDIT: I posted my shit out of order, whoops
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(1)Mega Man vs (6)Kratos vs (19)Jill Valentine




Jill loves to give us close, entertaining matches. Mega Man blew these two out pretty hard, and he ended up looking great here despite Jill and Kratos not exactly being pushovers. That left Jill and Kratos to fight for the scraps, and if I remember correctly while Jill was the favorite, Kratos had his share of support as well.

Kratos was getting a lot of hate at the time and the really mediocre reception of Ascension didn't help. There was also that nontroversy about that Ascension achievement being named "bros before hoes." It was patched after people complained to change it to "bros before foes." I can't believe people made a big deal about literally nothing.

Jill seems to stay decently consistent with her strength, and Capcom loves her so much that it's constantly throwing her bones. She didn't get an RE7 cameo or anything but she was in an RE5 DLC (probably the best part of that game) and was a main part of the RE5 story. Revelations was pretty good, too, and it's been re-released several times.

So was this really an "upset" of Kratos? Maybe of classic Kratos, but not 2013 Kratos. The new God of War should boost Kratos quite a bit, it doesn't have the deepest gameplay ever and it gets a little repetitive but there are fresh ideas and a good story in there and I think it will win back a good amount of voters for Kratos. The director says he's planned for six (?!) more God of War games, so we're not going to see Kratos fade away any time soon.

Did you know that David Jaffe's original ending for God of War III was having Kratos meet Egyptian and Norse Kratos, teaming up with them to kill Ra, Odin and Zeus, and then becoming the three wise men? Like, the ones from the bible. Yeah. Sony rejected this pitch, and who could blame them? That's... pretty bad, even by God of War standards.

(2)Zero vs (23)Weighted Companion Cube vs (20)Rikku




Another pretty banal match that, despite being close, wasn't much of a surprise in the end. People who still feared the joke vote were championing WCC here, but I think Missingno tanking really put a stopper in a lot of their arguments.

Zero did well here, he set the stage for a lot more people pushing for Charizard > Mega Man. WCC was a bit closer to Rikku at the beginning of the match, but I can just imagine voters rolling their eyes when they saw it on the front page again. Slowly Rikku pulled away. People were getting tired of all these jokes. It's been 5 years, how will people respond to L-Block in 2018? Has the meme made a comeback?

Rikku looked good in her two appearances here. Is she the strongest non-main, non-villain, non-love interest FF character outside of Auron? Someone needs to tier all FF characters that have ever appeared in a contest.
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Is this Elite Beat Agents 2?