I was able to listen to this episode already.
Ngamer: And I guess it was little surprising that only 37% of the site ended up picking Link for the championship.
That's not surprising at all. In almost every contest that Link wins, he usually has a prediction percentage in the 30-40% range. Let's take a look at the contests in which this is true:
2004 - 35.39%
2006 - 36.05% (Battle Royale match)
2007 - 9.00% / 32.47% (the 32.47% was for first place)
2010 - 36.55%
2011 - 37.49%
Ngamer: Pros for Bacon, the vote-in polls
I agree with you. They are good because they keep a lot of the bad trash from getting into the bracket. Still, it can't keep Guybrush from making the bracket as he manages to bypass the vote-in polls. If Guybrush ever did make it into a vote-in poll, it would likely keep him from getting into the bracket.
Ngamer: That was way more pros than anyone probably we've had.
My pro, which no one mentioned: 12-hour matches for round 1. Since we knew this contest would probably suck, the 12-hour matches would result in a 48 day contest instead of 64 days. So if this contest really did suck, we only had to endure 48 days of suckiness instead of 64 days.
Ngamer: The first 5 or 6 hours that nominations opened, he was adding when a big rally started, he'd add it in there. And then never touched again and nominations went on for like a really long time.
That sounds about correct. No new suggestions were added to the database after the first day of nominations.
Ngamer: If the seedings had gone a little bit differently, we would have had more competitive matches.
I agree that the seedings were really messed up, and I would blame that on our poor nomination totals. It's hard to get accurate seeds with only 14800 nominations. The poor nomination totals also affect who gets into the bracket without being part of the vote-ins. And being in the vote-ins pretty much guarantees that you will end up being a 7 or 8 seed, even if you are stronger than some of the stuff that got a 6 seed (or better than that). Crono was particularly screwed by the vote-in polls as Crono/Magus was not in the suggestion database and Crono/Lavos is a bad rivalry. So Crono suffered in this contest because he had a harder time getting nominations, which are very important to being able to avoid those vote-ins. And who knows, Crono might have even avoided the vote-ins with as little as 10 or 15 extra nominations, given our poor nomination totals.
Ngamer: Let's talk just briefly about that poll that SB ran right after the contest. Would you like to see Link removed from future character battles?
http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=4574
http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=1596
Ngamer brought up that poll, which is similar to a poll that CJayC ran after the 2004 Character Battle. I linked to that 2004 poll above. If you compare that 2004 poll to the poll we got after the end of this year's contest, the results are similar. From the 2004 poll:
Yes, it's too predictable 47.61%
From the poll after the end of this contest:
Yes, it ruins the whole contest if he wins every time 12.49%
While you're at it, get rid of Cloud, and maybe even Mario 35.98%
The last 2 options add up to 48.47%, which is only about 1% better than percentage from the 2004 poll. So the contest haters have been around on this site for over 7 years now. The results from 2004 are almost identical to the results today.
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Luster Soldier --- ~Shield Bearer~ | ~Data Analyst~
Popular at school, but not as cool as SuperNiceDog, Guru Champ!