LogFAQs > #935859914

Losers' Bracket Final - Zelda vs. Cloud Strife

Zelda 13517
Cloud 14101

Next up in the department of totally made-up "common knowledge": all those classic RPGs are weakening because we're the only ones who still like them, but they'll never completely turn into fodder because this site is run by exactly those people, the ones who are still stuck in the 90s.

Yeah, not happening. For the second match in a row, Cloud would lose with the registered voters but still win because of his lead with the unregistered voters. I mean, yeah, antivoting FFVII is nothing new here, but I guess it's because we expect it to win anyway? Or perhaps we're dealing with "outsiders" who had GameFAQs accounts back in the day and still can log into them, or Board 8's tastes aren't representative of GameFAQs as a whole, because supposedly the board should've been pro-Cloud in both of these matches, yet the registered voters alone wouldn't have given him either of these matches.

Zelda's peak lead wasn't all that far behind Mario's, but Cloud caught up much sooner--about halfway through the poll--and cruised to what for this contest probably qualifies as an easy enough victory, nearly winning by 600 votes and breaking 51%. I wanted to try to give an example of a match from our heyday where neither side ever broke 51%, but it turns out that a lot of our classic matches featured one side getting off to a sizable early lead and the other just not letting them go away easily. ...Actually that wouldn't have been the case for this one, either, even if Cloud hadn't gotten up over 51% at the end. I suppose that's a natural effect of every vote being a great portion of the percentage early on. As best as I can tell, it's never happened in a 24-hour match, not that that's a relevant fact since the disqualifying factor is usually that the match starts too uneven, one side getting a little bit of a percentage lead. Yet looking through the list of closest wire-to-wire matches, the only ones I can find where neither side cracked 51% past, um...wait, what should be the cutoff? Well, our list for "loser never took the lead" allows the loser to have the lead at any point before the end of hour one. So the two close matches from GotD definitely qualify--MGS2-SotC was inside of 51-49 at the freeze, an extreme rarity, cresting above it for a single update 10 minutes later, while Team Fortress 2 was at 53.15% on Fable at the freeze but that was the last time either side would even reach 50.6%. The closest 24-hour match I could find to pulling it off wasn't, in fact, Pikachu's victory over Mega Man (Mega Man didn't fall below 51% for good until the five-hour mark), but..uh...huh. I was about to say the Xenoblade Chronicles-DKC2 match, but then I was like "wait, did that ever go beyond 51-49?" because when I was scrolling to the beginning I only found one update listed at 51-49 exactly (and calculating it properly, it was still inside of 51-49, but I mean just barely, it's literally 50.999%-49.001%), but I could've sworn I'd seen it get bigger, and it turns out it was later. But even so, that might be the true closeness record for percentage because that match never, and when I say never I mean not only after the freeze but also at the pre-freeze snapshots for 4, 3, and even 2 minutes, got outside of 51.1%-48.9%. So I'm definitely optimistic that GotD2 will bring more thrilling matches.

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Also known as Cyberchao X.