Board 8 > transience presents: the top 75 matches in contest history: part 2, the top 25.

(+) Yeah! (+)

LSD, honestly.
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The more I think about it, the more Pikachu > L-Block is the second most important result in contest history. Only Cloud/Link '03 was more singular in guaranteeing that these contests continue on.
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#10: Link vs. Ganondorf 2004
#9: Snake vs. L-Block vs. Sonic vs. Squall 2007
#8: Draven vs. Snake vs. Samus 2013
#7: Mario vs. Samus 2005
#6: Mario vs. Crono 2003
#5: Link vs. Shepard vs. Draven 2013
#4: Mario vs. Crono 2002
#3: Mario vs. Cloud 2002
#2: Link vs. Cloud vs. L-Block vs. Snake 2007
#1: Link vs. Cloud 2003

This looks decent, I guess?
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Link vs Shepard vs Draven better talk about the downtime.
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Anagram posted...

Link vs Shepard vs Draven better talk about the downtime.

And Allen's wife.

The Mario vote stuffed trilogy.
The it was appropriate Snake let us all down, failure he is.
The one on one battle of the 2 best games ever made (the final casualty of SuckCraft)
Link vs an Admin who let the site get DDOSed!!!
Toon Link vs Cloud
Four ways fail, so does SB Failen (IE Snake fails AGAIN)
The match still talked about 13 years later (shes always been stronger btw, every single year)
The The ultimate failure of our failure Admin was not having a 1 v 1 when EVERY OTHER MATCH THE TOP 2 MOVED ON (which, cheating or not from L Bitch, Link wins!)

I've finally caught up and am greatly enjoying the topic, keep it up.

I do want to add that Pokemon RBY was the NRT winner for 2009's game contest. Its shocking run both had board support and was also arguably the best run for an NRT-winner to date.
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I was wondering where you were!
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The cheater in Starcraft was dumb enough to stuff around 1300 votes in 20ish minutes. Not counting that period, Starcraft cut 2000 votes starting from 3800 down against SSBM, which is actually basically in line with it cutting 2200 against WW starting from 2000 down, which looks like a rally plus Starcraft having an A+ SNV back when the SNV lasted 6 hours and meant something. If the cheater had the sense to gradually stuff over a period of 7 hours, he might have gotten away with it.
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Also, notwithstanding that the people proclaiming the contest over after round 1 with Undertale and Draven are 2/2, that doesn't mean they were right that it was a certainty at that point. And I'm pretty sure some of those people who said Undertale was a lock to win after round 1 threw in the towel about 16 hours into the RBY match when RBY had a lead of 7000, Undertale was not cutting, and Undertale's vote intake was falling. Then it was a lock, and RBY had it won. Until an hour later when the big rally started, then it was a lock for Undertale again.

I find people proclaiming things certainties to be annoying.
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"What do you do when there's an evil you cannot defeat by just means?
Do you stain your hands with evil to destroy evil or do you remain steadfastly just and righteous even if it means surrendering to evil?"

It's possible for a big rally to be taken out by a bigger rally. Like maybe on another world line SSBM starts rallying starting from Round 1, people declare it the winner and Undertale shows up later to take it out. So Undertale wasn't an absolute lock to win. However, it was never going to lose to anything but another super rally. That's just replacing one problem with another if you don't like super rallies overrunning the contest.
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red sox 777 posted...

The cheater in Starcraft was dumb enough to stuff around 1300 votes in 20ish minutes. Not counting that period, Starcraft cut 2000 votes starting from 3800 down against SSBM, which is actually basically in line with it cutting 2200 against WW starting from 2000 down, which looks like a rally plus Starcraft having an A+ SNV back when the SNV lasted 6 hours and meant something. If the cheater had the sense to gradually stuff over a period of 7 hours, he might have gotten away with it.

Funny you think there was only one cheater....

WW wins by thousands if CjayC has a fucking clue

FinaIFantasyV posted...

red sox 777 posted...

The cheater in Starcraft was dumb enough to stuff around 1300 votes in 20ish minutes. Not counting that period, Starcraft cut 2000 votes starting from 3800 down against SSBM, which is actually basically in line with it cutting 2200 against WW starting from 2000 down, which looks like a rally plus Starcraft having an A+ SNV back when the SNV lasted 6 hours and meant something. If the cheater had the sense to gradually stuff over a period of 7 hours, he might have gotten away with it.

Funny you think there was only one cheater....

WW wins by thousands if CjayC has a fucking clue

If there were more, the others were a lot better at hiding it. I will say that CJayC at least tried to catch stuffers. He told us there was stuffing 3 times, and removed votes once. Twice (Mario/Crono 2002 and SSBM/Starcraft) the amount of votes he caught didn't change the result so he left them in. In Kefka/Vercetti he removed votes.

I wasn't here for Mario/Crono 2002 so I don't really have anything to support me thinking Crono was innocent other than fanboyism and the fact that his opponent was Mario, but even if we strike that match, it still leaves 2 matches where there was stuffing and CJayC did something about it. And it's not that easy to prove stuffing - stuff can be suspicious, but how do you get enough evidence to justify removing votes?
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you can look at it that way. let's say Chrono Trigger finds some insane rally spot and blasts Undertale with a match of like 300000 votes. that's not a good solution either.
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If a few of the Undertale ralliers in the late afternoon of RBY are on vacation, or at a party, or otherwise busy, the supercharged portion of the rally might never materialize. And RBY wins, having defeated UT with a combination of its own rallying, natural strength, backfire rate, and the rally failing to grow from the SMW match.

Then RBY either falls to rallied SSBM or loses the SFF battle to OOT. And OOT wins. Or, in a world where Melee's rally doesn't beat CT, RBY might not either.

We have only had 2 super rallies in our history. That's not enough data to just conclude that all super rallies will produce whatever surge in strength necessary, every time.
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red sox 777 posted...

FinaIFantasyV posted...

red sox 777 posted...

The cheater in Starcraft was dumb enough to stuff around 1300 votes in 20ish minutes. Not counting that period, Starcraft cut 2000 votes starting from 3800 down against SSBM, which is actually basically in line with it cutting 2200 against WW starting from 2000 down, which looks like a rally plus Starcraft having an A+ SNV back when the SNV lasted 6 hours and meant something. If the cheater had the sense to gradually stuff over a period of 7 hours, he might have gotten away with it.

Funny you think there was only one cheater....

WW wins by thousands if CjayC has a fucking clue

If there were more, the others were a lot better at hiding it. I will say that CJayC at least tried to catch stuffers. He told us there was stuffing 3 times, and removed votes once. Twice (Mario/Crono 2002 and SSBM/Starcraft) the amount of votes he caught didn't change the result so he left them in. In Kefka/Vercetti he removed votes.

I wasn't here for Mario/Crono 2002 so I don't really have anything to support me thinking Crono was innocent other than fanboyism and the fact that his opponent was Mario, but even if we strike that match, it still leaves 2 matches where there was stuffing and CJayC did something about it. And it's not that easy to prove stuffing - stuff can be suspicious, but how do you get enough evidence to justify removing votes?

You do your fucking job... thats how you know.

ALL you need to know about CJayC, was that he let Samus Sonic go.

Non SuckCraft, non L Bitch, it is the single most obvious case of vote stuffing you can ever see....

And once he did that, instead of doing his fucking job, the dam opened up. Cause if he didnt care about cheating in that.... why would he ever care about others?

That TRE quote sounds familiar, what the hell is it from? *Googles*

Ah.

And I don't think ANYONE was claiming Draven had the contest won after Round 1. Only a few people (me among them!) considered him even a potential threat to Link at that point and most didn't take it too seriously until what Draven pulled in Round 2.
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What a lot of people forget about the Link/Draven match is that it was on a holiday, which likely increased rally strength.
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red sox 777 posted...

If a few of the Undertale ralliers in the late afternoon of RBY are on vacation, or at a party, or otherwise busy, the supercharged portion of the rally might never materialize. And RBY wins, having defeated UT with a combination of its own rallying, natural strength, backfire rate, and the rally failing to grow from the SMW match.

Then RBY either falls to rallied SSBM or loses the SFF battle to OOT. And OOT wins. Or, in a world where Melee's rally doesn't beat CT, RBY might not either.

We have only had 2 super rallies in our history. That's not enough data to just conclude that all super rallies will produce whatever surge in strength necessary, every time.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

bwburke94 posted...

What a lot of people forget about the Link/Draven match is that it was on a holiday, which likely increased rally strength.

League fans (second worst humans on Earth) dont have lives.... any of them. Holiday changed nothing

red sox 777 posted...

Also, notwithstanding that the people proclaiming the contest over after round 1 with Undertale and Draven are 2/2, that doesn't mean they were right that it was a certainty at that point. And I'm pretty sure some of those people who said Undertale was a lock to win after round 1 threw in the towel about 16 hours into the RBY match when RBY had a lead of 7000, Undertale was not cutting, and Undertale's vote intake was falling. Then it was a lock, and RBY had it won. Until an hour later when the big rally started, then it was a lock for Undertale again.

I find people proclaiming things certainties to be annoying.

I can't say about everyone, but I'm quite certain Leon was at least stubborn about Undertale having 2015 won the whole way through after Round 1, and his stubbornness proved a virtue here!
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Yeah, LeonhartFour was one of the ones who were certain that Undertale had the contest won after Round 1.
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I indeed called the contest over after round 1. Might be why I was the Analysis Crew champ for that contest...!

Also I didn't throw in the towel on that opinion at any time, thank you very much.
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FinaIFantasyV posted...

League fans (second worst humans on Earth) dont have lives.... any of them. Holiday changed nothing

Considering what percentage of League fans circa 2013 were in high school, it made an actual difference. Draven would have still won anyway, since that's how rallies work.
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Im pretty sure I had Undertale in every match other than the first as well.

edit: this exercise makes me want to make a spreadsheet with crew picks so its easy to look this stuff up. at this point I cant remember who I picked in the 2018 contest.
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transience posted...

I don't have the words -- or more specifically, the data -- to do this one justice. It was a "you had to be there" moment. The only thing comparable to what Starcraft did was Draven, and we never truly saw Draven in a close match due to, well, we'll get there soon. Starcraft looked like it had met its match and then the most insane rally I've ever seen just springs to life. There was one update (15 minute, of course) that it won by like 900 votes. The vote total spiked by 500.

IIRC "that update" (and it absolutely deserves to be called that was a cut of 1500 or something. I remember immediately afterwards someone made a topic alleging that South Korea had a "Starcraft channel" and it had mentioned the match on air.

and i think a ton of people believed it

Honestly, if this was a topic of memorable updates, I think that one might be #1 for me. You're right, you had to be there.

That was an incredible ride Starcraft took us on. In retrospect it was obviously the beneficiary of some super shady stuff and just wasn't officially caught until Melee when it flew too close to the sun out of necessity but damn what a ride it was.
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One of the best touches George Romero had in his AIM interview after Kefka/Vercetti was claiming to have stuffed *against* Starcraft in all of its matches, but that there had been an even more powerful force stuffing for it instead.

Speaking of Undertale, I side with red sox that it could have lost. I know that the stats Bacon provided said that the Twitter account was the source of most of the rallied votes, but I think that might be a technicality regarding how refferrals are recorded.

I've mentioned this before, but there was one Tumblr account that was key to all of this. I don't remember it's name, but it was a fairly generic looking Tumblr that mostly created user requested Pokemon sprites for people. Its reach was so large, that whenever this Tumblr reposted something about the contest, the amount of overall reposts on Tumblr would surge, and Undertale would start slicing off votes again. Once I figured out how much traffic it was causing, I started monitoring this Tumblr, and Undertale's surges were very much tied to it. Whenever Undertale started lagging, the person would repost about the contest again, and the surges would restart. If this one person went on vacation or something, I'm not sure Undertale could have won. I thought that Pokemon might have had a shot considering the subject of the Tumblr, but I guess not.
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George Romero AIM interview is my new favorite thing
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There were simpler times back then.
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10.



Starcraft was a cute little upset run, but it was predicated on fortuitous bracket placement. That's weird to say about a 16 seed, but Halo was an anti-vote magnet and Kingdom Hearts was such a kiddy game that Soul Calibur almost beat it. Starcraft legitimately beat KH, but despite KH's rep as saving the 2003 contest (and contests in general), it really wasn't that big on the old website, back before 2005 when it came much more kid-focused. GTA would have rocked KH in 04. (I'm a little skeptical of KH being the big difference maker in 03. I think Square was just a powerhouse that year because who knows.)

But now Starcraft was against Zelda. Let's talk about Zelda for a sec. At this point, Zelda was 11-0 and there was a lot of "all Zelda final four" hype. Let's just write out the results.

Zelda 1:

95% on Adventure
87% on Donkey Kong
75% on Tetris

Link to the Past:

91% on Gunstar Heroes
74% on Super Metroid
53% on FF6

Ocarina:

86% on Fallout 2
76% on Mario 64
73% on Goldeneye

Wind Waker:

75% on Skies of Arcadia
55% on Metroid Prime

Some of these are ridiculous. There are so many huge blowouts -- 87% on Donkey Kong, 75% vs. Tetris, 74% on Super Metroid, 76% on Mario 64 -- jeeze. SFF or not, that's crazy, and Tetris was far from obvious SFF. Starcraft had graduated to the big leagues here when it faced Wind Waker. Most people expected an easy win for Zelda.

Starcraft started strong, as bandwagon games do. It dropped the lead by 2am as Starcraft pushed into a 52-48 lead with the whole day vote to go. Wind Waker slowed down but had pushed the lead to 2000 votes by 4pm. The winds were shifting though.

At 6pm, Starcraft started its move and just never stopped. It wasn't an outrageous comeback like Melee, but it was a really big comeback. The 2000 vote lead was cut in half by 9pm and then just got crazy as the day vote ran out. Starcraft made up 500 votes from 9p-10p and took the lead at 11p with a fairly crazy 215 vote update (in 15 minute terms). Starcraft pushed it to 200 votes by 11:30 and it had happened. Carriers had arrived and Zelda had somehow lost.

A lot happened as a result of this match. There were cries of cheating galore, especially from the Zelda faithful which was most of the board, but Ceej came out with one of the greatest posts in board 8 history:

From: CJayC | Posted: 5/29/2004 11:25:45 PM | Message Detail
Checked over voting data, checking IP addresses and the usual stuff. No aberrant data pops up.
No mass proxy voting, no mass votes from a single IP address or a range of addresses that
doesn't have around as many votes for the other side. Voting is fairly 50/50 across the board,
with very few exceptions. The biggest voters, by IP block:
* Comcast subscribers are voting for Starcraft 51%
* Cox Cable users are pro-Zelda, voting 52%
* AOL users are the biggest Zelda fans at 65%
* Just as unsurprisingly, the Korean netblock is voting Starcraft, but again, just at 65%


Shots fired at Zelda fans. There was also the famous "What now, Link?" picture that is probably the greatest contest-related picture in our history.



So was it cheating? I hate answering questions like this, but the trends and the speed of the comeback makes me think this is fairly legit. I'm sure some funny business was tried, but I expect that on both sides of a close match. It wasn't until the Melee match that I suspected anything truly nefarious, and that match made you question every Starcraft match retrospectively.

As for Zelda, it was now 11-1 -- and 4 days later, it would be 11-4 with every Zelda game out of the contest. The Zelda hype was HUGE in 2004 and the first crack in its armor was this crazy match.
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Man I miss these things!
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I think the big predictor of the start of "This rally has gone too far!" reactions is when a classic Nintendo thing gets knocked off. Starcraft is a hero until it beats a Zelda game. I looked at a lot of Undertale reactions across the web and most people didn't care what it was beating until it upended Super Mario World (what's a Fallout 3 again?). Draven...okay Draven sucked from the start, but him beating Link drove people even more insane.
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transience posted...

10.



Starcraft was a cute little upset run, but it was predicated on fortuitous bracket placement. That's weird to say about a 16 seed, but Halo was an anti-vote magnet and Kingdom Hearts was such a kiddy game that Soul Calibur almost beat it. Starcraft legitimately beat KH, but despite KH's rep as saving the 2003 contest (and contests in general), it really wasn't that big on the old website, back before 2005 when it came much more kid-focused. GTA would have rocked KH in 04. (I'm a little skeptical of KH being the big difference maker in 03. I think Square was just a powerhouse that year because who knows.)

But now Starcraft was against Zelda. Let's talk about Zelda for a sec. At this point, Zelda was 11-0 and there was a lot of "all Zelda final four" hype. Let's just write out the results.

Some of these are ridiculous. There are so many huge blowouts -- 87% on Donkey Kong, 75% vs. Tetris, 74% on Super Metroid, 76% on Mario 64 -- jeeze. SFF or not, that's crazy, and Tetris was far from obvious SFF. Starcraft had graduated to the big leagues here when it faced Wind Waker. Most people expected an easy win for Zelda.

Starcraft started strong, as bandwagon games do. It dropped the lead by 2am as Starcraft pushed into a 52-48 lead with the whole day vote to go. Wind Waker slowed down but had pushed the lead to 2000 votes by 4pm. The winds were shifting though.

At 6pm, Starcraft started its move and just never stopped. It wasn't an outrageous comeback like Melee, but it was a really big comeback. The 2000 vote lead was cut in half by 9pm and then just got crazy as the day vote ran out. Starcraft made up 500 votes from 9p-10p and took the lead at 11p with a fairly crazy 215 vote update (in 15 minute terms). Starcraft pushed it to 200 votes by 11:30 and it had happened. Carriers had arrived and Zelda had somehow lost.

A lot happened as a result of this match. There were cries of cheating galore, especially from the Zelda faithful which was most of the board, but Ceej came out with one of the greatest posts in board 8 history:

From: CJayC | Posted: 5/29/2004 11:25:45 PM | Message Detail
Checked over voting data, checking IP addresses and the usual stuff. No aberrant data pops up.
No mass proxy voting, no mass votes from a single IP address or a range of addresses that
doesn't have around as many votes for the other side. Voting is fairly 50/50 across the board,
with very few exceptions. The biggest voters, by IP block:
* Comcast subscribers are voting for Starcraft 51%
* Cox Cable users are pro-Zelda, voting 52%
* AOL users are the biggest Zelda fans at 65%
* Just as unsurprisingly, the Korean netblock is voting Starcraft, but again, just at 65%


Shots fired at Zelda fans. There was also the famous "What now, Link?" picture that is probably the greatest contest-related picture in our history.



So was it cheating? I hate answering questions like this, but the trends and the speed of the comeback makes me think this is fairly legit. I'm sure some funny business was tried, but I expect that on both sides of a close match. It wasn't until the Melee match that I suspected anything truly nefarious, and that match made you question every Starcraft match retrospectively.

As for Zelda, it was now 11-1 -- and 4 days later, it would be 11-4 with every Zelda game out of the contest. The Zelda hype was HUGE in 2004 and the first crack in its armor was this crazy by Christ confirmed cheating!.

CAN SOMEBODY ELSE TAKE OVER THIS FUCKING TOPIC AND GET THIS TRASH THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

Greatest match of all time.
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FinaIFantasyV posted...

CAN SOMEBODY ELSE TAKE OVER THIS FUCKING TOPIC AND GET THIS TRASH THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

lol Trans wouldn't even call out the obvious cheating by Sonic over Samus, compared to that WW/Starcraft was nothing.
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Link versus Cloud posted...

FinaIFantasyV posted...

CAN SOMEBODY ELSE TAKE OVER THIS FUCKING TOPIC AND GET THIS TRASH THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

lol Trans wouldn't even call out the obvious cheating by Sonic over Samus, compared to that WW/Starcraft was nothing.

I mean I know... I made that point when Samus Sonic came up

Paratroopa1 posted...

I still don't really get why Luigi is so weak

Everyone who knows Mario also knows Luigi, and Luigi consistently outperforms Mario in "favorite Mario character" polls, and I feel like Luigi just generally has a reputation as being cooler because... idk, he's Luigi

and yet, not only is Mario stronger, he's WAY stronger. and this is still true, despite the fact that Luigi's stock has ONLY risen over time

well ok Luigi might be a little closer since he was decently close to Tifa but... I don't know, it really feels like Luigi should be closer to a Zelda-like presence than he is. I don't really "get" why he isn't stronger

Because he's a pussy.

I legitimately do not have a better answer. Even rho male type men who play video games tedn to gravitate away from characters like Luigi. The guy has strength but it clearly has a cap on it.
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CaptainOfCrush posted...

I remember a pre-contest AIM convo with Ulti back in 2005 (the days when I was 19 and totally sucking up to him). Actually, it only took three minutes to find thanks to AIM logging all my convos from those days:

yoblazer33 (8:24:26 PM): Must make you happy having Magus a lock in his division? =P
Ultimaterializer (8:24:33 PM): no
Ultimaterializer (8:24:34 PM): not at all
Ultimaterializer (8:24:49 PM): I mean damn, he only gets to beat Knuckles, Squall, and some other idiot with an annoying fanbase
Ultimaterializer (8:25:04 PM): Seeing swirldude's favorite character get his face kicked in by Magus is awesome

Sooooo yeah, it took us by surprise.

And here I was thinking I would escape the self ownage of that match LOL

Good times. Good times.
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CaptainOfCrush posted...

Back in 2002, I had never played a Metroid game and considered it an abomination that Samus would beat an icon like Sonic. By the time we got a rematch in 2004, I had beaten Prime/Super and was then and forever in the Samus camp.

We're in similar boats, except I was in the Samus camp entirely because of Smash 64. Didn't play a Metroid game until like 2004.
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transience posted...

12.



Every match going forward is going to have some level of madness in it. That's just what makes a good match great.

I don't have the words -- or more specifically, the data -- to do this one justice. It was a "you had to be there" moment. The only thing comparable to what Starcraft did was Draven, and we never truly saw Draven in a close match due to, well, we'll get there soon. Starcraft looked like it had met its match and then the most insane rally I've ever seen just springs to life. There was one update (15 minute, of course) that it won by like 900 votes. The vote total spiked by 500.

Starcraft had finally gone too far, and Ceej ended up killing votes that he could find via public proxy lists or some such. Melee was just out of its league. Personally, I think the Wind Waker result was too much for gamefaqs to handle. You know how people liked L-Block in 2007, but then 2008 came and everyone recoiled in terror? That was what happened after the Wind Waker match. Starcraft was cute when it was beating bad games, but when you come at the king and tumble it like that, people take you seriously. Starcraft could never stand up to Melee on traditional grounds so it went dark.

Now, was there cheating in Wind Waker? Honestly, who the hell knows. Starcraft was nuts, a good kind of nuts. A kind of nuts that could eventually lose to a stronger game and with an admin that paid close attention. Things weren't as tight on the security side of the internet in 2004. It was thanks to stuff like Starcraft and George Romero that we've had relatively legit results since. Some may dispute that, but I know Starcraft when I see it, and outside of Draven or Undertale we haven't seen it since.

I want to point out that I don't believe Ceej actually removed votes. He just made a post saying he knew Starcraft was cheating. When that topic was made, the cheating literally immediately stopped and Melee won. I'm like 99% sure that poll result is the one without any results removed.
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KamikazePotato posted...

what's a Fallout 3 again?

HeroicSpiderPig posted...

One of the best touches George Romero had in his AIM interview after Kefka/Vercetti was claiming to have stuffed *against* Starcraft in all of its matches, but that there had been an even more powerful force stuffing for it instead.

Speaking of Undertale, I side with red sox that it could have lost. I know that the stats Bacon provided said that the Twitter account was the source of most of the rallied votes, but I think that might be a technicality regarding how refferrals are recorded.

I've mentioned this before, but there was one Tumblr account that was key to all of this. I don't remember it's name, but it was a fairly generic looking Tumblr that mostly created user requested Pokemon sprites for people. Its reach was so large, that whenever this Tumblr reposted something about the contest, the amount of overall reposts on Tumblr would surge, and Undertale would start slicing off votes again. Once I figured out how much traffic it was causing, I started monitoring this Tumblr, and Undertale's surges were very much tied to it. Whenever Undertale started lagging, the person would repost about the contest again, and the surges would restart. If this one person went on vacation or something, I'm not sure Undertale could have won. I thought that Pokemon might have had a shot considering the subject of the Tumblr, but I guess not.

George Romero was Albion.

Tai was maplejet, just as a random note. I can't believe no one ever figured that one out.
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Can someone ban MWC already and take this trash out of here.
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Ulti_PCA posted...

George Romero was Albion.

Tai was maplejet, just as a random note. I can't believe no one ever figured that one out.

Lmao I fucking love b8 conspiracy theories
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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Ulti_PCA posted...

George Romero was Albion.

Tai was maplejet, just as a random note. I can't believe no one ever figured that one out.

Lmao I fucking love b8 conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theory implies it's not true. Romero = Albion is a very well known fact.

I had already known Tai = maplejet, but when maplejet finally left this site the Tai account was closed on the exact same day. It's the best you can get with public info.
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Top 10 hype tag/

9.



This is one of the greatest matches ever. The difference between L and other rallied entries was that it didn't feel like a true offsite rally. It was more organic than that; a word of mouth that spread across the internet in the pre-twitter days. It wasn't mobilized and weaponized from a concentrated fanbase. The fanbase was everyone because the whole world plays Tetris.

This is the match that really rose awareness. L-Block was naturally strong, as it showed with matches like Kirby, Kratos, etc. But bandwagons generally don't start until something impressive happens. Once L won round 2 with Kratos, everyone eyed up this matchup. It was three really strong characters and one that stood above. The thought was that maybe L could sneak into second. But these guys were strong enough and equally matches that no one could get to 30%, and L had an outside chance at first.

The excitement as L-Block came out strong here was unprecedented in his run. There was an enthusiasm to this match that wasn't there in previous ones. I actually jokingly rallied for L-Block on russia.com which was a real website with forums back then and is the most hilarious thing to think back on 10+ years later. L-Block felt like a gateway drug into the Dravens and Missingnos and Weighted Companion Cubes of the world, but in 2007 it didn't feel quite like that.

Anyway, L started out strong, but not anything crazy compared to previous rounds. What made this match so notable is that L didn't die. It never made it to a 2000 vote lead and L was notorious for just collapsing. L turned a 600 vote lead to a 6000 vote loss vs. Kratos, but here he went up 1800, fell off and somehow hung on. By 1pm it was only up 500 votes but L pulled off one of the greatest HOLD THE WALL performances ever. Of course, it wasn't natural strength -- word of mouth allowed him to hold up. This match had about 10k more votes than the ones around it. The semifinal went up another 10k. L-Block was legit after this absolute thriller of a match, and without it, I don't know that it beats Link.
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Don't forget L-Block recently had a 'homage' topic on /r/todayilearned about its crazy run

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9h85lv/til_in_2007_gamefaqs_had_a_contest_to_determine/
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Starcraft vs Wind Waker is the match that made me come to this board because I was so hyped to see Starcraft beat ZELDA. I think that Carriers Have Arrived picture is probably what made me stay.

What a glorious match. Possibly cheating, sure, but to me it's not suspicious enough on its face that I can just come out and say "yeah that's nonsense" with the data we have-- looks like a fairly organic rally to me.
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8.



Mario/Crono 2003 should probably be the consensus greatest match ever. Have we ever done a contest? We should, and it should win. It's got everything you could possibly want. Mario/Crono is the greatest contest rivalry, even surpassing Link/Cloud. I'm legitimately not sure gamefaqs ever cared about a match more than this one based on the board reaction at the close of the poll. Mario/Crono 2003 was actually my first day on board 8. My main takeaways were 'jesus christ, these people care a lot about internet polls' and 'this Heroic Mario guy seems pretty goddamn popular'.

Of course, it wouldn't be talked about so much today if there wasn't a hint of controversy. Okay, there was a ton of controversy. It comes from both sides: the poll both started early and ended late. Who that helped is a tossup -- probably Crono, if I had to guess based on early votes -- and the same person who was ahead when the poll closed, was ahead at 1am. The problem was that Crono was ahead 24 hours after the poll opened. There are numerous ways to measure out the votes that were cast and none of them are acceptable ways to measure a match. You get different results depending on how you want to cherry pick the results.

It's just a legendary match. I put it in the top 10 based solely on how it hangs over the contest 15 years later. I have no clue what to make of this match and who may or may not have won. This match has a full 25,000 votes more than the matches before or after it; the only one with more votes is Link/Cloud and nothing else is within 9,000 votes. Clearly something happened here. But it's that unknown that really makes this match special.

When you talk about importance, it kind of combines what Mario/Cloud 2002 and Mario/Crono 2002 were. It's got Mario/Cloud's controversy, but not as much, and it's got Mario/Crono's appeal, but a rematch. Things are best the first time around. Mario was probably not great in 2003 based on some of his matches and his miserable loss to Sephiroth which makes his performance here suspect. The single biggest update of this match by FAR was the last 15 minutes, when Mario went from -144 to +59 after losing the last 7 updates by about 100 votes each. So yeah, Mario went and Mario'd the poll again. This match was mega frustrating as a Crono fan, doubly so because of 2002. But it's the pinnacle of what a contest match can be.
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transience posted...

Mario/Crono 2003 should probably be the consensus greatest match ever. Have we ever done a contest? We should, and it should win.

I did a thing: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/77326722
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