LogFAQs > #938139452

Match 100: Resident Evil 2 vs. Bloodborne

RE2 13421
Bloodborne 13333

What the...

It wouldn't be a contest without at least one completely batshit match--the more controversial, the better. In this contest, matches had been starting at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific. When 8 PM rolled around to close out the previous day and put a merciful end to Breath of the Wild's beating of Final Fantasy XV, we got...nothing. Nothing at all. The match didn't start. And didn't start. And didn't start. Finally, a little bit over two hours past the scheduled start time, Allen and crew noticed the issue and fixed it. At 10:11 PM, Bloodborne jumped out to a 10-0 lead, but by the freeze, RE2 had bled the percentage quite a bit, and it would take the lead on the second update. It would stumble a few times during the first hour, but closed out the delayed hour one with a massive win, over half of what its lead already was, to wind up at 152 votes ahead after an hour. It would get that lead to 231 in just another 20 minutes, and by half past midnight, it was up by over 300 and continuing to be the one that would spike a big update every so often. Its lead would peak at 390 at 2:25 AM, but it was still 372 at 4:10, at which point the roof began to fall in. Over the next hour, Bloodborne cut double digits on ten of the twelve updates, with one of the remaining two also being a single-digit cut and the last being only a single-digit win for RE2. The following hour wasn't any better, and it ended with the match being tied at 8 hours in. The momentum would continue, as it took Bloodborne just 40 minutes to build a 179-vote lead of its own, but then support tailed off; that was as high as that lead went. RE2 retook the lead at 5 minutes to 11, by a single vote, then pushed the lead to 21 on the next update, but Bloodborne forced a stop after that, then took most of it back and was back in the lead by 11:20. This didn't last long, with RE2 retaking the lead at 11:30, then seeing the second tie of the match on the 11:50 update.

RE2 didn't allow Bloodborne to turn that tie into a lead change, however, winning the next update and pushing its lead out to 55 at 12:25 PM. Bloodborne would halve that lead over the next 45 minutes, but RE2 laughed it off and spiked a 25-vote win at 1:25 to push its lead back to 60. They'd trade some big swings after that, but it was never enough to get Bloodborne into the lead. Until it was; at 5 after 5, with just under 3 hours left in the match (because, yes, Allen had already told us that the delayed start wouldn't affect the end time), Bloodborne retook the lead, by just 4 votes. The next update would be another stall before RE2 retook the lead. This lead would last an hour; at 6:15 PM, the percentages sat at 50-50, but the votes showed a 2-vote lead for Bloodborne. Half an hour passed, and the lead was up to 30; another half hour, and it was down to just 3. The next update went decidedly in Bloodborne's favor, however, expanding the lead to 24, and it would tack on two more on the next one before RE2 turned it around, winning the next two updates by 16 and...10. With just 25 minutes left in the match it was once again tied. But there was no let up from Resident Evil 2; it won all five of those remaining updates, four of them by double digits, to win by 88 votes. Outside rallies? Well, yes, probably, but the other reason why the shortened match time was such an issue was that for the first time this contest, and just the fourth time since we started having the registered user bonus, the loser of the raw votes won. Bloodborne had a 568-vote advantage with unregistered users but a 325-vote disadvantage with the registered, and while the math still doesn't come out right (28 RE2 votes and 34 Bloodborne votes were not properly doubled, which again tells me that the "registered votes" column is being done automatically and that Allen is manually adjusting to make sure only accounts that were created in the proper time frame get the benefit of doubled votes), it's enough to flip the match. And no, raw votes weren't higher from unregistered voters than registered, either. If there were rallies, the rallied voters were, at the very least, GameFAQs members.

Match 101: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. Marvel's Spiderman

SSBU 16611
Spidey 9504

After the madness of RE2-Bloodborne, Division 3's pair of obvious outcomes were somewhat of a breather. Both of these matches had over 50% prediction rates, and the fact that they were as low as they were was, quite frankly, pure anti-favoritism at work; just six Gurus out of 142 picked wither one of these games to lose, and none picked both. There was a case to be made that Odyssey had once again outperformed Ultimate, but Shovel Knight, mainstream as it may be, is still an indie game, and Spider-Man is, well, easily one of the three most mainstream superheroes out there. Yes, the recent proliferation of superhero movies and TV shows has brought a number of other heroes into the limelight, but let's be honest, Spidey still probably only trails Batman and Superman for recognizability. Also, as a PS4 exclusive, it's a good candidate for antivoting the Nintendo dominance--and at this point, Nintendo still was perceived as absolutely dominating this bracket, even when it was really just a handful of games (these two plus BotW) and the other Nintendo games still in it largely had soft paths thus far. So it's tough to say which game had the better outing.

This was absolutely a good showing by Spider-Man, though. Allow characters originating from other media into CBXI, Allen!

Match 102: Shovel Knight vs. Super Mario Odyssey

Shovel Knight 7104
Odyssey 19021

After the madness of RE2-Bloodborne, Division 3's pair of obvious outcomes were somewhat of a breather. Both of these matches had over 50% prediction rates, and the fact that they were as low as they were was, quite frankly, pure anti-favoritism at work; just six Gurus out of 142 picked wither one of these games to lose, and none picked both. There was a case to be made that Odyssey had once again outperformed Ultimate, but Shovel Knight, mainstream as it may be, is still an indie game, and Spider-Man is, well, easily one of the three most mainstream superheroes out there.

And make no mistake: Shovel Knight is mainstream. ZenOfThunder has been keeping a topic screencapping various posts, be they on this board, our associated Discord, or on Reddit (or anywhere else people might talk about the contest, but there haven't been that many of those), and Shovel Knight was a name that came up in replies to rally topics involving completely different games. It's got a hell of a lot of respect.

All in all, though, it was tough to tell which game would have the advantage next round, which was really the