LogFAQs > #939562045

Match 117: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs. God of War

Witcher 3 17096
God of War 9418

Well this was a fairly predictable blowout. Over 50% of all brackets had The Witcher 3 here, with Gurus in particular calling it at nearly an 80% clip and almost two thirds of the Gurus that missed it having instead picked The Witcher 3's opponent from the previous round.

...Correction. Predictable result, yes; predictable blowout, maybe not so much. There's no exact data on the Second Chance brackets, which were something vaguely resembling the Oracle except you could only pick whole percentages and there was no option to pick a winner with 50% (which meant that a truly perfect score was impossible because such a pick would've been required to get the maximum 50 points from Xenoblade-P4G), but looking at the Oracle...Witcher 3 was the unanimous choice to win, but 51 out of 53 Gurus went under on the percentage, 44 of them by at least 5% and all of them by enough that the two that went over had the top two predictions. I guess it just seemed obvious to me because I was the highest pick and thusly the second-place finisher in that match. All in all, the Oracle Consensus was 6.30% lower than Witcher 3's actual score. Wait, hold on...

Match #33 - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Consensus: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 76.65%
Result: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 84.07%

Match #81 - Mass Effect 3 vs The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Consensus: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 69.09%
Result: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 78.40%

Match #105 - Super Mario Galaxy 2 vs The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Consensus: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 61.29%
Result: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 60.60%

...Okay, so there was at least one match where Witcher 3 was fairly close to expectation, actually coming up a tad short. Ironically, it's the one where there were the most people picking it to lose outright. But that's still the third time in four rounds where The Witcher 3 vastly outperformed expectations. At this point, it was more or less taken for granted that the Guru Contest would be decided by Dark Souls vs. Skyrim; Witcher 3 making it to the finals and losing was more or less set in stone.

Match 118: Persona 5 vs. Portal 2

Persona 5 15239
Portal 2 11276

This, on the other hand, was predictable no matter how you sliced it. Almost as well predicted by Gurus as the previous match, with Oracle percentages bunched up right around the actual outcome (50 out of 53 Gurus were within 5%, most of them dramatically so), casual prediction percentage...29.22%? Ah, well, it's a Round 4 match, so a high prediction percentage would be odd. Even Skyrim and Witcher 3 barely cracked 50%...Huh. Nope, P5's prediction percentage last round was 63.69%, so this constitutes an upset for the casuals. See, I knew they'd screw this one up! And Portal 2's prediction percentage last round was 23.57%, coming off a 50.55% prediction percentage the round before, so...the true casual favorite in this match was Red Dead Redemption 2? It did have one of the highest R1 prediction percentages, and an R2 prediction percentage nearing 70 entering the match against Portal 2 and its prediction percentage barely above 50. ...Although it'd have to retain a fairly good percentage each round to still have the plurality; P5 and RDR2 had similar R2 prediction percentages but then P5 barely lost anything from R2 to R3. 73.69% to 63.69%. LOL Sonic Mania, almost no one had it (or Super Meat Boy, since it seems like Mania wasn't favored by much) beating Persona 5.

Incidentally, had Persona 5 made it all the way to the finals, we would've had our first two-time Guru champion...by tiebreaker over another past Guru champion. The last point of divergence between the brackets of Rivals Contest Guru winner SuperNiceDog and CBVIII Guru winner Dr Football was the Division 4 final, where Football had the Cookie pick of Three Houses (already eliminated one round earlier) and SND had Xenoblade. Once Xenoblade won, they were guaranteed to finish with identical scores, and would have beaten out everyone else if Persona 5 were to win two more matches. Dr Football appeared to still have the better tiebreaker, though, which is maybe ironic since SND's win came in a gimmicky contest so easy to predict that the Battle Challenge required an Oracle component hastily tacked onto its finale to break all the ties. (Relatively speaking, of course; even that year didn't have a single perfect Guru, though SND wasn't the only one with but a single wrong pick on a 1-point match.) They weren't even the only past champions still alive at this point--Skyrim defeating Witcher 3 in the semifinals (yes, Witcher 3 specifically; a win over P5 would've given it to someone else) would have given the win to Villains Contest winner yoblazer as long as the overall champion wasn't Smash Ultimate. Guru Contests, it seems, are much like the World Series of Poker Main Event--it's really hard to win it twice, but you tend to see the same names making deep runs. But on the other hand, it's still possible to fluke into a deep run, like when I was still alive with a mere 5 matches left in 2013. I'm still mad as hell that it wasn't two matches left--I already knew that my bracket was doomed by then because Vivi's nonsensical upset of Mario meant that a literal second Pokmon character had won Division 8, but come on, we'd seen Mega Man underperform 1v1 against Zero in 2004 and get LFFed into a loss against Weighted Companion Cube in 2008. The Guru stats even back this up; Charizard was heavily favored there. Huh, maybe that wasn't a fluke? My bracket was good enough to still be alive at that point if the cookie pick came through. How'd I manage to put together a bracket that strong, given my usual track record?

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Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.