Board 8 > Today might be the day I finally block someone.

(+) Yeah! (+)

LeonhartFour posted...

Al Pacino has been a caricature of himself for like 15 years now

This is honestly the film that made it cool for a very brief period!
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LeonhartFour posted...

Al Pacino has been a caricature of himself for like 15 years now

So has the subject of this topic
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Damn, Jakyl just closed my own topic.
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hey now it's only been like 13

once he started LOL X-Stats in SC2K5 it was all downhill from there
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That probably was the first point where he started to really become ridiculous come to think of it

Gloating that much about calling a match right when he was like 8 off on the percentages. Literally dozens of people on the board called the match better than he did.

That was my gloat to have, dammit.
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Mario vs. Samus?

To be fair the amount of people who were so 100% sure Samus would win that match was absurd.
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but in retrospect Mario beating Samus wasn't even really about X-Stats being wrong or unreliable

like even if you called Mario over Samus it wasn't because you predicted the massive boost he got in 2005
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Goku would beat Superman in every one of his forms since SSJ on Namek
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I remember going to bed that night having Samus > Mario, but then I got up last minute and switched to Mario > Samus and then Mario > Crono coz I always pick with my heart.

It worked for me there.

It burned me on Snake > Sephiroth.
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I usually pick with my heart, too, despite how much I defend X-Stats. If a character/game I really like has even a chance to win, I'll usually pick it.

Sonic > Crono 2006 was so satisfying because I finally got the Sonic upset right that I picked in literally every contest up to that point.
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ExThaNemesis posted...

Goku would beat Superman in every one of his forms since SSJ on Namek

Not at a crossword puzzle!
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How massive his boost was is debatable tbh. Lots of moving parts there, and not a lot of reliable data on Mario for a long time after that. Still getting stomped by Seph 57-43 makes me dubious of how much boost he really had. If you assume Chrono Trigger was in the process of dropping a lot less of those numbers seem out of place from what you'd expect Mario to get.

I'm not saying he didn't boost but being sure of a massive one definitely smells more of trying to apologize for the stats than evaluating what actually happened.
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Lopen posted...

Still getting stomped by Seph 57-43 makes me dubious of how much boost he really had.

Sephiroth does ridiculously well specifically against Mario for some reason.
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B8 became a much better place once I decided to start blocking all alts of certain people on sight.

Only regret was taking so long to start doing it.
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I can't imagine getting so upset at literal words on a message board from someone that it would affect my enjoyment of the board over all.

Like it's so easy for me to just glaze over anything icon says and I guarantee I hate him more/he's done more to me personally than anyone on your block lists.
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I'm just saying. People think Mario boosted mostly because of two things

1. Beating Crono by more than expected
2. Beating Snake by more than expected

But really, Snake's only truly impressive win that year was over Frog. He was pretty underwhelming against the others. There's a common bond there. You can't really be sure Mario boosted at all. Not really.
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I was going to start arguing with you Lopen but I can't remember what happened well enough.

I thought Snake hella underperformed against Frog because of the Solid S*** picture.
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Yeah that was the narrative given at the time. And it's one I do believe tells part of the story.

But Solid S*** didn't get bodied as hard in later contests, and you really have to wonder if people overhyped it just a bit to help explain X-Stat failings.

I mean we've had more contests now-- the amount of adjustments and such people have needed from year to year becomes more glaring over time. I'm not saying for sure Mario didn't boost at all, just that there is a lot of evidence there that you could spin in a lot of other ways and it's hard to know for sure what the right one is.
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Sephiroth won with 56% after beating him with 61.6% just two years before. That's a pretty sizable boost over two years (and it definitely didn't happen in 2004, where he got just 46.75% against Crono). 2005 Mario gets 56.30% on 2003 Mario through Sephiroth. I guess you could argue Sephiroth was weaker in 2005 than 2003 or something, but he got 45% on Link the next match, which is pretty darn good. The difference between the two years for Sephy couldn't have been THAT much.

Also, 2005 Snake was pretty clearly stronger than 2004 Snake, if nothing else. He got 65% on Sora, who beat Alucard pretty easily the round before. He beat probably the strongest Bowser we've ever seen with a terrible sprite (not as bad as the one he got against Frog, but still, bad).
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Also, I think people began to really fear that Mario might beat Samus when he utterly wiped the floor with Zero the round before. That's the first match to point to in 2005 for evidence of a boost.
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Scarlet, you said dont take the bait. Then you took the bait :(
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FT is the only person Ive ever blocked. I have no idea if hes still around.
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LeonhartFour posted...

Sephiroth won with 56% after beating him with 61.6% just two years before

Two years ago when FFVII won the contest? Yeah, safe to say Seph probably dropped between then.

LeonhartFour posted...

Also, 2005 Snake was pretty clearly stronger than 2004 Snake, if nothing else. He got 65% on Sora, who beat Alucard pretty easily the round before.

Or you could say Snake only got 55% on Zelda when Ganondorf only got 57% on Alucard the year before and say there's gotta be something weird going on somewhere there.

Like I said there are just a lot of ways to take the data. X-Stats people when they try to adjust things just brute force whichever adjustments fits their preconceptions best. Which I mean, yeah, great, but when you're making adjustments based on adjustments that were already brute forced the last time something unexpected happened who knows really.
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Lopen posted...

Two years ago when FFVII won the contest? Yeah, safe to say Seph probably dropped between then.

One year after FFVII won the Games Contest (and it finished first in that ten-year anniversary contest, too). Cloud and Sephiroth were still pretty strong in 2005. Link is probably the one who got stronger in 2004 and 2005 thanks to TP hype. Heck, FFVII had Advent Children come out in the middle of the contest, which some people credit for Vincent's success (which is silly, but HaRR maintained that theory for like a decade). Even so, Sephy still got 45% on Link when Cloud got 47.5%, so I don't think you can just handwave "Oh Sephy must have dropped" to explain the disparity between 2003 and 2005. It's way too big for that to be the only reason Mario did over 5% better.

Lopen posted...

Or you could say Snake only got 55% on Zelda

The Zelda who 60/40'd Vivi and got 40% on Mega Man in 2003, and Snake also had a terrible Metal Gear Acid pic in that match where he looked more like the Undertaker than Snake. Zelda isn't a pushover in these things. That's a solid win for pre-Brawl Snake compared to 2004.

Lopen posted...

Trying to definitively claim Mario beat her because he increased and that he would have lost had he not boosted

I'm pretty sure I never claimed he'd have lost had he not boosted. I'm just saying he DID boost, which was something nobody banked on or could have predicted beforehand. If Mario had beaten Samus in 2004, he'd have needed rSFF (which is what many people who picked Mario > Samus claimed; Mario could be weaker than Samus indirectly but still win because he's friggin' MARIO) because he was pretty clearly weaker than Samus in 2004 just by looking at their opponents. If you compare their performances in 2005, Mario measures up pretty favorably. Mario went from 55% on Shadow in 2003 to 63% on Zero in 2005. The only measurable you can really take from 2004 is how pitifully he performed against Crono because there was so much SFF in that contest as a whole, but he did worse against Crono than Samus did against Cloud.

I mean if you want to claim Mario rSFF'd Samus in 2005, that's fine. Lots of people think that. I'm not one of them though. I think he was just stronger.
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scarletspeed7 posted...

Damn, Jakyl just closed my own topic.

The guy that has to buy escorts with welfare money because he can't get girls to fuck him otherwise (I can't possibly figure out why) is calling someone else a caricature. Honestly, if Jak doesn't like me I consider it a win in life. I don't want radical leftists liking me. If anyone can look at how those people have acted since 2015 and want anything to do with them, they're beyond help. Triage them culturally and move on.
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UltiWasRight posted...

scarletspeed7 posted...

Damn, Jakyl just closed my own topic.

The guy that has to buy escorts with welfare money

WTF, is this true?
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Not the welfare money part
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I don't plan to keep him on block forever; I just need a break from someone who is confronted with factual information from a site he explicitly referred to as reputable and refuses to accept it. It's not cute or funny "trolling". It's actually lying. And I guess that doesn't matter to a person like Ulti, but I find lying to be morally repugnant.
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LeonhartFour posted...

I mean if you want to claim Mario rSFF'd Samus in 2005, that's fine. Lots of people think that. I'm not one of them though. I think he was just stronger.

I think he was always stronger in the sense that he would never lose a 1v1 between the two, no matter what stat value the two ever got in any given year

If you wanna call that rSFF or whatever go ahead
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the main thing i took away from this topic is that there's a person on earth who doesn't like the shawshank redemption.

(also i thought ocean's 12 was fine)
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I will clarify that while I respect the quality of filmmaking in Shawshank Redemption, it's just not my type of movie.
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Pulp Fiction > Forrest Gump > Shawshank Redemption

All great films
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Also, I greatly respect Schindler's List but I would never watch it again. It's a similar situation to Shawshank. I try to separate my personal biases from my perception of aesthetic or writing qualities of a film. Maybe that's a fool's errand and it doesn't matter.
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Lopen posted...

I think he was always stronger in the sense that he would never lose a 1v1 between the two, no matter what stat value the two ever got in any given year

If you wanna call that rSFF or whatever go ahead

Yeah, a lot of people think that. I don't think it's necessarily a given, but it doesn't matter anymore because Mario hasn't been clearly weaker than Samus since 2004.
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Nobody tell him
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LeonhartFour posted...

Yeah, a lot of people think that. I don't think it's necessarily a given, but it doesn't matter anymore because Mario hasn't been clearly weaker than Samus since 2004.

I'll just say I think you have to twist more of the data to get to the conclusion that "Mario boosted so much that he 60-40'd a match that should have been debatable at a point" than to just say "it was always a stupid pick." It just looks like you're twisting less because a lot of the initial data interpretation that led to that conclusion was speculation to begin with and likely inaccurate. There are warning signs-- many things that look incorrect on paper and correct themselves in later years. 2003 stats having all these sore thumbs like Magus and Shadow the Hedgehog extends further to 2004 stats with guys like Sam Fisher being bloated.

I'm not saying throw em all out-- they are a good guideline, but I'm saying that you will always be able to rationalize ways the stats have failed when you're repeatedly adjusting them arbitrarily for things like SFF because it makes the numbers look prettier. And it's always hard to pinpoint which adjustment exactly was wrong. I mean it could very well be that Samus just overperformed vs Cloud or whatever in 2004 and no adjustment was made because the stat curator was a Samus fanboy-- most of Samus's opponents did look worse than expected in later years.
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Jesus, not everybody has to be good at Dark Souls, man. No need to block him for sucking.
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UltimaterializerX posted...

scarletspeed7 posted...

Did we ever conclusively determine if that was a real ertyu?

I marked it for impersonation and it got banned, so it was definitely a fake account. The real ertyu still has an account here.

So... how do the mods determine it isn't the real ertyu? Or do they just take the marker's word for it? I legitimately have no idea.
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Yes, the data is open to various interpretations because there will always be factors we can't account for. I don't think it requires too much twisting for 2005 Mario to be noticeably stronger than 2003 or 2004 Mario. I don't really think it's "twisting" at all because they're pretty valid interpretations of the data. Like I've said, the Zero match is pretty much all I need there for me to convince me 2005 Mario is stronger. Zero got 47.6% on Sonic in 2003 and 44% on Mega Man in 2004, but he only got 37% on Mario. Sure, you can just argue that it's a weaker Zero in 2005 than the other two years, but he's always been a pretty strong performer. He did really well against Crono in 2007, too.

Like maybe Samus did overperform on Cloud (no adjustment was made because there was no reason to believe an adjustment needed to be made. Samus put up some really good performances that year. Like, if you just make an adjustment based on "Samus's performance on Cloud looks too good to me," that's arbitrary. You can put it in the back of your head and make future predictions based off of it, but you can't make adjustments off of it) or Mario underperformed against Seph in 2003 and Crono in 2004 because of Mario/Crono II backlash or whatever, but we have no way of knowing that for sure. That would be a guess based on nothing other than Mario 60/40'd Samus so maybe we were wrong somewhere before that. That would be more akin to twisting data to make it fit a result than just saying Mario was stronger in 2005 than he was the two years before.

Lopen posted...

There are warning signs-- many things that look incorrect on paper and correct themselves in later years. 2003 stats having all these sore thumbs like Magus and Shadow the Hedgehog extends further to 2004 stats with guys like Sam Fisher being bloated.

Of course. I've used those warning signs to my advantage like when I made my Squall > Magus prediction in 2005 because Magus's opponents didn't really hold up when you looked at their other matches. 2004 Sam Fisher isn't the one that's bloated though. It's 2003 Sam Fisher that faced Magus. Samus putting up 80% on him was pretty shocking because of the Magus result, but 2004 Sam Fisher pretty much falls in line with all the other years for him.

It's better to compare data year over year than just a single year because anomalies happen for various reasons (Pictures, bracket voting, rallies, etc.). Things eventually have a way of sorting themselves out. HaRR for years insisted that Advent Children caused Vincent to overperform on Crono and that threw the Devil Division numbers out of whack in 2005. It seems more likely now that Knuckles just overperformed on Squall after his huge upset of Magus because those two dropped off big time after that while Squall, Crono, and Vincent stayed pretty strong.

Samus > Mario may have always been a stupid pick, sure. I'm not denying that possibility. There was a pretty clear demographic shift in 2005 though. Things that used to be strong suddenly weren't strong anymore (GTA is probably the biggest example). Things that were weaker were suddenly stronger (Luigi is an even better example of that than Mario).
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LeonhartFour posted...

Like, if you just make an adjustment based on "Samus's performance on Cloud looks too good to me," that's arbitrary

I guess what I'm saying is I think SFF adjustments are just as arbitrary in terms of the actual value adjusted. And I'm not even saying that SFF doesn't exist, but there are other reasons for different results than you'd expect that aren't adjusted, so there's always going to be a lot of inaccuracy.

And because you end up with that factor in so many matches it domino effects into a lot of the other stats.

Like you can say "well Nintendo had a boost across the board in 2005" Based on? Almost all the Nintendo powerhouses in 2004 were all locked in one division. What if 2004 Squall = 2005 Squall and he just got SFFed by Cloud but was incorrectly adjusted to a 2003 level, then Kirby looks awesome and you think well maybe Nintendo boosted in 2004 instead-- but then Crono beats Mario in 2004. Why did that happen? Maybe Crono and Magus really were that strong in 2003 and 2004 and rather than Nintendo increasing they fell.

I generally don't agree with saying a character or franchise boosted unless you have a reason other than fudging numbers to do it. And with X-Stats it's usually numbers first, then just BS some arbitrary reason that explains the numbers changing. I'll accept they're a good ballpark when you're trying to sell that a match that ended 60-40 was a justified pick a year ago that means you're probably not looking hard enough at potential pitfalls in the numbers and just trying to create stories that make the stats look as accurate as possible. It's just too far down that road.
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Lopen posted...

Maybe Crono and Magus really were that strong in 2003 and 2004 and rather than Nintendo increasing they fell.

Sam Fisher and Luca Blight both argue against that in Magus's case specifically (Ganondorf does, too, actually, based off of his performance on Alucard in 2004 and what we know of Tidus now, but 2005 muddies those waters a bit because he and Bowser were on steroids that year). Magus may have been weaker in 2005 than even in 2003 and 2004 because even with all my examining of his numbers, I didn't see Knuckles > Magus coming.

Lopen posted...

when you're trying to sell that a match that ended 60-40 was a justified pick a year ago that means you're probably not looking hard enough at potential pitfalls in the numbers and just trying to create stories that make the stats look as accurate as possible. It's just too far down that road.

I'm not trying to argue the X-Stats are infallible. They're pretty clearly not. I'm trying to come up with explanations for changes in the numbers across years, not trying to defend the sanctity of the numbers. You're pretty willing to throw out "this character must have been stronger or weaker" for everyone except for 2005 Mario to explain everything else away though, which is kind of weird. He's the guy who didn't change for some reason. Everyone else did.
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LeonhartFour posted...

He's the guy who didn't change for some reason. Everyone else did.

That's not what I'm doing at all. I'm throwing out alternate theories (many of which have better reasons than Nintendo randomly boosting-- like CT and FFVII constantly declining makes a lot of sense, particularly seeing ahead to more recent contests) to illustrate there are a ton of reasons that Mario could exceed expectations, including the expectations themselves being wrong.

X-Stats adjustments are basically an egregious misuse of Occam's Razor because you have to assume the previous year was correct when you make them, which inherently has a ton of assumption baggage despite only appearing to be one on paper.

All I'm saying that trying to argue a 60-40 flips between years based entirely on explanations given post-contest is as lol x-stats as it gets. I'm not seriously arguing that Mario didn't boost or whatever. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. I am arguing there is a 0% chance Mario loses to Samus in 2004 because you aren't going to flip a 60-40 in one year unless you have a very specific reason for it-- ideally one given before the contest and not after.
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the most disturbing thing is this implies new Preston is real, because I can't believe that guy hasn't been marked for impersonation dozens of times by now
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Preston has a lot of random insanity to him and isn't just reading off a battered script of 10 years ago Preston. I buy it.

Like I seriously thought ertyu was a gmun bot for a while there the way he was posting.
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Eh, I don't think FFVII really started to decline in a noticeable way until 2008. Cloud and Sephiroth were still pretty dominant even in 2007. Vincent beat Crono that year, too.

Lopen posted...

All I'm saying that trying to argue a 60-40 flips between years based entirely on explanations given post-contest is as lol x-stats as it gets.

I mean even SFF has proven to be pretty fickle in when it shows up. Cloud/Seph is 51/49 in 2003 and 56/44 one year later. Mega Man can't SFF Zero in 2004, but he can in 2013 when he beats Charizard.
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