LogFAQs > #936620062

Match 20: Minecraft vs. DotA 2

Minecraft 18100
DotA 2 5806

This was just...why?

The outcome of this match was never going to be in doubt. I'm fairly certain that the Guest picker on the Crew only picked DotA 2 just to make sure there was no Crew Curse, because he, like all but one other Guru, had Minecraft in this match. But I'm going to quote the beginning of it anyway, because before it gets into the crazy logic, it makes a good point.

Neither of these genres are particularly liked by GameFAQs. Its strange though, because both of these games are popular beyond belief.

True, although I wouldn't necessarily call it strange. While in the previous write-up, I defended the overall gamer community as not being a bunch of elitists who don't care about anything non-video game, here I'm going to have to turn around and say that old-school gamers, like the majority of GameFAQs membership, are proud of the fact that they loved gaming before it was "cool" and hate anything with mainstream popularity. In fact I already talked about this exact same phenomenon on a single-fanbase level in my Fire Emblem: Awakening write-up. So while it was obvious that DotA 2 was going to get smashed just for being a MOBA, even if it wasn't the one that spawned the hated 2013 champion, it remained to be seen how high a percentage Minecraft of all things would be able to get. And the answer is...not too high, but pretty high. DotA 2 got a better percentage than Fortnite did, at any rate.

Match 21: Undertale vs. Octopath Traveler

Undertale 12087
Octopath 13790

Oh hey speaking of hated champions.

The vote total for this match was the highest of the contest so far, but not by an overwhelming amount. And I have to say, this was not an outcome I expected! I figured that there was a chance that Undertale got anti-voted into oblivion the way Draven did in 2018 (and Sans himself to a lesser extent), but that if that didn't happen, Undertale probably had the natural strength to win its fourpack. Instead...this happened. The match actually got off to a slightly delayed start, for no apparent reason, and when it did, Undertale got off to a quick start, before fading back to closeness. By the freeze, Undertale was up by 5 votes, and on the next update, it raised that lead to 7. And then, bam, 41 vote swing, Octopath up by 34, and it never looked back.

And it wasn't the registered voters killing it, either, although they were likewise motivated to come out in higher numbers. With the registered voters, Octopath won 4779-4436. On any previous day, 4436 would've easily been a majority of registered voters--hell, Bastion was at 4054! It was the unregistered voters who buried it, 4245-3229. Also the most unregistered voters of the contest so far, but it was enough of a blowout that 3229 would not, in fact, constitute half of any day's unregistered voters. (It would've come close on Day 1, where unregistered voters numbered in the 6500s.) We did get confirmation that all the usual spots from 2015 weren't allowing rally topics, which begs the question, where did these extra votes come from?

Also, the mythical "casuals" didn't see this coming either. 21.29% prediction percentage in Round 1 was the fifth-lowest of all time, trailing only a pair of lolChief results (Yuna in 2013 at #1 and Sub-Zero in 2010 at #4) and a pair of 2009 matches (in)famous for very different reasons: the Oblivion/Symphonia/God of War/GTA:SA fatal fourway at #2, which had the smallest spread between first and fourth of any fourway and is remembered fondly for it, and the Super Mario Bros 3 match that had the largest spread between first and second of any fourway and is laughed about as a result at #3.

Match 22: Shovel Knight vs. Dragon's Dogma

Shovel Knight 16664
Dragon's Dogma 9211

While you'd never know it by my picks this year, I've actually gotten off to some pretty good starts in Guru before, even holding sole possession of first place in the Guru after correctly calling every match in Division 5 (two outright upsets and two others where the favorite had less than 60% of the brackets). That ended with Shovel Knight failing to be the indie darling I'd expected it to be. It's commonly accepted that for a rallied entrant to get moving, they need to have weak early competition to get past, because something too strong will kill it before it starts. L-Block didn't have to get past anyone stronger than Laharl in Round 1 and got a favorable LFF situation in Round 2, and Draven only needed to get past Jak and Chie Satonaka. Hell, L-Block and Draven were both Guru favorites to reach Round 2! But only that far. And Undertale got the polarizing Mass Effect 3, just weak enough for its rallies to work. Shovel Knight, in Round 1 of the 2015 Contest, was set to face Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Betting against GTA is never terribly risky on GameFAQs, so this was certainly a possible upset. And waiting in Round 2? The casuals would no doubt think it to be the massively popular World of Warcraft, as evidenced by prediction percentages in previous contests, but of course we all know that WoW is trash here, and so the Guru consensus (if you can call a roughly 5-3 ratio "consensus") was that it would be Chrono Cross, which is much maligned for being an alleged sequel to Chrono Trigger and not being even remotely as good a game. Either way, seems like a perfect target to start a bandwagon. If I'd really been thinking about it, I probably would've considered that enough time for the bandwagon to be fully rolling and picked more upsets based on the rallyFEAR effect, but mercifully I didn't, because while Shovel Knight did respectably, it never came close to beating GTA:SA. Come 2018, however, it seems that the casuals don't learn, because they must've seen 38.72% on GTA:SA and said "this game's really strong!" Shovel Knight the character was, astonishingly, comfortably favored in Round 1 against Captain Toad; the Gurus weren't so easily fooled.

So when Shovel Knight came out strong against Dragon's Dogma, people were suddenly amazed. It was favored, of course, but it was still considered a strong performance, and the masses who picked Undertale for two rounds were feeling even worse because Shovel Knight to R3 wasn't nearly as unpopular a pick as it would be if Octopath actually got there.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.