LogFAQs > #936442667

Match 7: The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series vs. Bastion

The Walking Dead 10880
Bastion 11907

While Day 2 of the contest was pretty bad for my bracket, it could've been worse. I took three upsets, and one of them paid off! Sadly it was the one that was facing the obvious winner of the eightpack in R2, so I was still screwed out of points in one R2 match no matter who won, but still, it softened the blow of being so far off base on Sekiro.

The Walking Dead was definitely the "safe" choice, because it was both the top option and had contest experience, sort of, while Bastion had none. I say "sort of" because this was both games' Games Contest debut, but The Walking Dead had managed to get two characters into the 2013 Character Battle. Thing is, they both sucked. Spyro vs. Clementine vs. Reyn had the closest Guru spread between the top two characters of any R1 match (though not the lowest prediction percentage for a favorite because there was one match where all three choices were above 20%), and then Spyro just absolutely dunked on Clem, winding up with close to 57% of the vote in a threeway. Lee Everett, meanwhile, was the Guru favorite over Mr. Game & Watch and Meat Boy, because it was assumed that G&W being basically just another avatar for Smash wouldn't be enough and that Meat Boy's ridiculous design would cancel out G&W's silly design and they'd "joke SFF" even though Meat Boy is literally a main protagonist whose name is in the title of his game. Yes it's still ridiculous, but it's not like the "joke characters" who are largely side characters with memes. Game & Watch won anyway, because even foddery Nintendo is still Nintendo and should never be underestimated. I got both of those right then and I got this one right now. The Walking Dead is not the type of game to be trusted to be worth anything in contests, ever. Kind of makes me wonder why I picked Life is Strange but you can chalk that up to Halo being another thing that should never be trusted in contests.

But here's where things get interesting. Whereas in the other seven matches over the first two days, the loser got nearly half of their raw votes from the unregistered users (only Life is Strange managed to even have a 300-vote disparity between registered and unregistered) and the winner received more than 1000 more votes from the registered than from the unregistered, in this match, that trend was reversed. Bastion's lead with the registered voters wasn't even 100 votes, at 4054-3987, but with unregistered users it was 3803-2912! It was largely the loser that benefited from the extra power of the registered bonus, making it closer than it should have been. Interestingly, this was also the only one of the first eight matches that was an upset, with just under 1 in 3 brackets getting it right. Hmmm...the number of registered votes for the first two days was just barely in the low 8000s. The number of brackets filled out, based on the prediction percentages, appears to be...8703! Holy crap, there are more brackets than there are registered voters! That wasn't the case in 2018; though the decrease in vote total is largely on the unregistered side, there were more registered voters in most of the 2018 matches than there have been so far in 2020, while the total number of brackets was just 7221. That's scary, because the general "line" on this site is that despite being largely millennials, we have the "boomer" mentality and are largely stuck in the 1990s. A contest entirely comprised of games from 2010 or later, it wouldn't at all be surprising if almost every voter had at least a few matches where they really didn't know much about the contestants and cared even less. Add in Allen forcing voters to vote in all four matches if they want to vote in any of them, and you get people voting with their brackets. I may have to go back over my Oracle and change every pick where I'm backing a Guru underdog, even though that would've burned me in this particular match, because it really feels like we might be in a situation where predictions and results have a higher correlation than in years past.

Oh, and I guess there's something else funny to be talked about, too. With 4 and a half hours left in the poll, The Walking Dead went on somewhat of a run, winning six straight updates before losing one by a mere two votes, then the two games alternated update wins for 40 minutes except one of Bastion's wins was actually a tie. Since Bastion had only been up by 927 when the run started, it looked as though we were going to see the match go the full 24 hours with the maximum lead under 1000. It would've been just the 47th 24-hour battle to go wire-to-wire within 1000 votes and just the 11th in which there were no lead changes past the first hour (and just the 17th with no lead changes past the first hour even after throwing the 12-hour matches into the mix). But then Bastion started winning updates again, and it looked inevitable that its lead would reach 4 digits. With an hour and 20 minutes left in the match, Bastion led by 990 votes. The next update rolled in, and Bastion won it...by one vote. Next update, same thing, 1-vote win for Bastion. Then came a 2-vote win for The Walking Dead, wiping out the previous two updates. The next two updates were dead stalls, and then TWD won one by 6. 30 of the 80 minutes stalled out, and TWD had refused to let it happen! Bastion spiked an 11-vote win on the next update, however, and cracked 1000 with 35 minutes to go, en route to a final margin of 1027. In the Golden Age of Contests, I'm sure the stats topic would've been losing their shit about "barriers" and TWD's valiant fight to keep the margin in triple digits when its fate was sealed, but it's hard to muster up any sort of enthusiasm when those dead splits were 12-12 and 14-14 and the 11-vote "spike" was 21-10. If two entrants in a 1v1 each managed to get 2/3 of an update within half an hour of each other in the old days, it'd be a sure sign that one of them was cheating. Now, it's just expected statistical variance because the updates tend to be on par with what the fodderiest of fodder was pulling in in the contest's glory days. Remember how lopsided some of the early matches in 2009 were? Wold you believe that the final update that managed to get Crystalis up to 4% even was only two votes fewer than The Walking Dead got on its final update? Or that in the final update of that ridiculous match where SMB3 pulled down over 75% of the total vote, the second-highest last-update total was exactly equal to Bastion's last update? These votes are awful and this contest is awful.

Match 8: Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age vs. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky - Second Chapter

DQXI: