LogFAQs > #939859358

Post-Contest Analysis

When the coronavirus turned the world upside-down, the people willing to adapt, overcome, and change got or stayed rich. Rigid Guy went out of business. I understand government executive orders from idiotic blue states played a part in this too, but bear with me.

I could come up with endless examples of Rigid Guy falling off and Adaptable Guy succeeding, but I'll go with just one example. WWE continued putting on wrestling shows, but with no fans in the stands for safety reasons. Sure, makes sense. They put on the same trash they've been putting on for the entire PG era, and they hit new record lows for viewership every week. They're now below peak TNA numbers, just FYI. You guys think Fox is regretting that TV deal yet?

AEW meanwhile did the same type of shows, but they put their wrestlers in the stands as their "fans" and split them up in the arena between faces and heels. Their shows, despite feeling empty, still have a form of crowd noise and actually feel like a good wrestling show. WWE's stuff is sterile, boring, and flat. It might look like a wrestling show, but it's not one.

This might have ''looked'' like a GameFAQs contest, but the lack of vote totals made it look like a wrestling show with no audience and no innovation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT3iaK1w04A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnUj9XhWVl0

Watch those matches on mute. Aren't they trash with no crowd and no announcer?

That's essentially what our contests are without voters. You can set up a good bracket, put all the bells and whistles on it, and all the board contests can fire off, but without voters, without excitement, without the usual new user influx, these contests feel like we're just going through the motions. This contest also had few truly great matches, but that's just bad luck. I can live with that. What I don't enjoy living with is a preventable low voter problem, and I should point out that viewership for everything across the board is way up for the things that are actually good.

There are three main causes for the low turnouts:

1 - The site refused to adapt as the gaming world changed. It stayed text-based for way, way, way too long when it was clear that videos and fan wikis were the new hotness. At this point, it's too late to even fix the problem. The only traffic this site gets now are from Google referrals to the Answers sections, with the guides still getting ''some'' traffic. Trust me here, I have a big contributor page and I can see the page hits. Individual subreddits and message boards for each game or series is still popular, and we have that, but people left the site in favor of better places to offer that service a long time ago. The leads to issue #2.

2 - '''EXTREME''' over-moderation. This site is well-known across the internet for this one, and this junk helped chase off many a user over the years. Lip service has been paid to relaxing things, but it's worse than ever. GameFAQs is as bad as ResetEra or anything other extremist far left site you want to name. When you tell users that only far left garbage is allowed on your web site, people are more than willing to leave. Especially gamers. We are not an easy group of people to please, and we will gladly bail for the latest and greatest if we're not treated properly. It's the entire methodology behind how games sell. The fix here is hilariously easy. Allow for diversity of thought and get rid of the moronic dispute system where mods vote on their own rulings.

If you want people to vote on disputes, leave it entirely up to high level users who ''aren't'' moderators. Too many overturns, and the mod loses their job. It's a good system of checks and balances that would get rid of 95% of the biased deletions that happen on here overnight. People like Team Rocket Elite, Raptor, Centurion, spooky, DetroitDJ, and the mods who are actually really good would be fine under that system. It's the bad mods that would all poof, and this site has been in need of checks for a long, long time. Our moderation system being so bad that it's a meme killed our message boards.

3 - Get rid of most of the anti-rally nonsense. This debate is completely settled and over. I've won the argument. Killing the rallies has all but murdered our vote totals. The experiment has failed; get rid of it. I like registered users getting a bonus and I like the poll starting at 8. ''Everything'' else needs to go. No more forced voting in every match, no more fighting against referral links, and every round after divisional finals needs to be one match per day. Witcher 3 vs Persona 5 and Dark Souls vs Skyrim both happening at the same time was a joke.

I saw people suggesting some truly absurd methods that don't address any of the actual problems. These ideas ranged from complete nonsense like hiding seeding in the bracket to total idiocy like completely changing the scoring system based on prediction percentage. There are people on the forum stupid enough to think calling a round one match in a seeded bracket tournament should have the same weight as calling a semifinal upset. I even saw people calling for banning Zelda from contests, which is absurd to do. Why should Breath of the Wild be excluded from a popularity contest when it hadn't won anything before this contest happened?

These are the sorts of bad ideas that happen when a contest has no vote totals and a predictable winner. We don't need anything ridiculous. We just need good vote totals, excitement for the web site, and a web site that people actually want to be on because they're treated fairly. I'm not even asking for anything greedy like the crazy vote totals from the late 2000s. I'd be happy with the numbers we got in 2015. It shouldn't take a mega-rally in the finals for '''one poll''' to break 30,000 votes. That is asinine. There is a real problem here and some of you are way off with how to fix it.

''Contest Ranking''

Fall 2015 (Games)
Fall 2010 (Game of the Decade)
Spring 2004 (Games)
Summer 2002 (Characters)
Summer 2013 (Characters)
Winter 2010 (Characters)
Summer 2003 (Characters)
Summer 2005 (Characters)
Fall 2009 (4-way Games)
Summer 2007 (4-way Characters)
Summer 2006 (Female Bracket)
'''Spring 2020 (Game of the Decade 2)'''
Spring 2006 (Series)
Summer 2008 (4-way Characters)
Summer 2004 (Characters)
Summer 2008 (4-way Characters)
Spring 2005 (Villains)
Fall 2011 (Rivalry Rumble)
Spring 2017 (Years)

Last, but not least... '''The Ultimate Loser!!''' The big, um.... "winner" this year was....

Terraria! Breath of the Wild > Witcher 3 > Skyrim > Dark Souls > The Last of Us > Batman > Bioshock Infinite > Terraria. It's fitting that one of the many, many overhyped, useless indie games would be the big loser this year.

Thanks as always and see you next time! I'd like to give a special thanks to my readers, and an extra special thanks to the guys you've never heard of behind the scenes who keep the wiki looking nice. Ngamer and I get all the credit, but without those unknown folks also helping out we could never do it all. Igordebraga, Averiah, MetalmindStats, Bwburke94, and anyone I might have missed, thanks guys! I really appreciate the help! Bottom's up, bros.

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