Board 8 > Contest Stats and Discussion - Part 1382

(+) Yeah! (+)

New contest or we riot at DToast's house.

No thanks

I don't trust Fandom to do a good job and the pathetic vote totals will just make it even sadder

The PotD somehow excludes a way for someone who has NSO as their only subscription service to vote accurately.

_SecretSquirrel posted...

The PotD somehow excludes a way for someone who has NSO as their only subscription service to vote accurately.

This is me.

I feel like with low vote totals it would just become which character has the biggest rally. Or even more than it already was I guess.

The same could have been said about the last couple contests, but it seems like after Draven and UNDERTALE, a lot of communities don't want the drama that comes with it. A lot of gaming subreddits flat out disallow rallies in their rules about spamming now.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2082-flood-division-round-1-master-chief-vs-cats

This was the right opponent for CATS in this contest, especially fresh off of his Villains Contest showing. He got a closeup picture instead of the weird Eggplant CATS picture he got in 2002-2004, so that probably helps to explain why he did noticeably better this year.

This was also the contest where we started noticing Master Chief's crazy contest trends, now that the poll times had changed from 3 AM starts. It took Chief nearly an hour to stay above 60% and he was at 63.72% when the morning vote hit. From there, he would gain a solid 5% on CATS. Hardly a great performance in terms of the final total, but it was impressive watching his percentage skyrocket.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2083-flood-division-round-1-donkey-kong-vs-sam-fisher

Long before "Mewtwo was a fraud," my original rant was "Magus was a fraud." I questioned all of his results to show why he was going to lose to Squall. Of course, I turned out to be wrong since he didn't even make it to Squall, but still...!

I bring that up to say I actually got another piece of evidence right here with this match. When DK nearly matched Magus's percentage against Sam Fisher, that should've been a big red flag for everyone.

Mental note: We should do a retrospective next year on E3 2006 because that single event may have impacted contests more than any other singular moment.

The Brawl trailer was May 10, 2006, as a reference.

Brawl hype was so funny. To this day, I'm pretty sure the reason Ike is even semi-decent in contests is because he was the first newcomer to be revealed on the Dojo.

It wasn't just the Brawl trailer, although that was the major one. That combined with the MGS4 reveal trailer propelled Snake from the bottom of the Noble Nine to fighting for the strongest non-Clinkeroth (and eventually non-Clink) member.

It's wild how incredibly hyped both MGS4 and Brawl were because of the backlash that ensued toward them both after they came out. I think people have forgotten how good those MGS4 trailers were.

Let's also remember, hype for Brawl and MGS4 are built on the back of Melee and MGS3 being amazing. Followups rarely outdo their predecessors.

Brawl and MGS4 were the end of an era in a way. Two big system seller exclusives right as everything was going multi-platform.

And they're both still exclusives in every sense of the word!

Leonhart4 posted...

It wasn't just the Brawl trailer, although that was the major one. That combined with the MGS4 reveal trailer propelled Snake from the bottom of the Noble Nine to fighting for the strongest non-Clinkeroth (and eventually non-Clink) member.

It's wild how incredibly hyped both MGS4 and Brawl were because of the backlash that ensued toward them both after they came out. I think people have forgotten how good those MGS4 trailers were.

Brawl and MGS4 may have been disappointing, but they permanently boosted Snake, so in the end they were worth it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2084-flood-division-round-1-kefka-vs-tommy-vercetti

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/f/f35ffbbb.png

This might be the ultimate "you had to be there" match because it's hard to convey how a match between two low midcarders could be an all-time great. We went through six Stats Topics (although a lot of it was us just shouting BARRIERS and silly things like that). It marked the end of real-time updates because of the vote stuffing. This was the third (and I believe the final) time CJayC removed votes. It might have been the last time it was done in a situation that altered the result (I recall Allen removing votes in 2013 from the Touhou characters, for instance). It was 1800 votes in total, which explains the absurd spike in that graph, but it's worth posting just to see it.

They also weren't generally viewed as disappointing for a few years. Well Brawl had split opinions but that didn't show in contest strength.

And yes, that's a match where it's hard yo explain why it was that good. You don't in the same sense have to have been there to understand some earlier matches and why they were that good.

I remember going to sleep when it was extremely close and waking up shocked to see Vercetti ahead by several thousand. Peak contest experience.

KamikazePotato posted...

I remember going to sleep when it was extremely close and waking up shocked to see Vercetti ahead by several thousand. Peak contest experience.

This was me in SC2K3 going to bed with Crono ahead by a thousand votes and waking up to find out he lost.

This is one of the few contest matches that had a real world impact on me, as it made me forever distrustful of people appealing to statistics, as I remember people *insisting* that Kefka's obviously suspicious vote trends were actually completely statistically sound.

I hate that I was out of state for this match, and it was well before high-speed internet was a regular amenity in hotels, much less WiFi for cell phones, so I missed all of it.

On the bright side, I did have Vercetti winning.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2085-flood-division-round-1-crono-vs-zidane

Between Cecil, Rikku, Zidane, and Terra (who we'll see next), most of the FF characters making their debuts this contest got some rough draws. Naturally FFVII is the exception like it always is but more on that soon enough...!

The only real question from this match was if Crono SFF'd Zidane, and if so, how much. We used to believe the main character of a game (especially an RPG) was the most likely to be strongest from a given game (for good reason, to be fair), so there were some who thought he could be stronger than Vivi. This line of thought will be important for the next match, too...!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2086-devil-division-round-1-dante-vs-terra

First off, a quick shout-out to the Devil Division, one of the wildest divisions we've ever had. Almost every match was debated to some degree except for two: Squall/Geno and, well, Magus/Knuckles. Even this match was debated a bit. Don't get me wrong. Dante was still the heavy favorite, but there were several people who believed Terra had a legit chance here. The Oracle average was only 61.60% for Dante, who was fresh off of DMC3, to boot.

After Kefka had put up disappointing showings in 2003 and 2004, the search began for what FFVI character could be stronger than him. It seemed hard for many to believe that a game as strong as this couldn't have a character more popular than Kefka, but you also couldn't get people to agree who it would be. I remember creativename arguing hard that it would be Shadow, and that may have been true at this point. It definitely wouldn't be now though.

Anyway, Terra ended up sneaking in as an 8 seed since she was the unofficial main character. There was no drama to be had here though. Dante started off at around a doubling and gradually climbed the rest of the way.

The problem with FFVI is that everyone is the main protagonist, which means no one is the main protagonist.

But Kefka certainly is the main villain. No way Shadow was ever going to be stronger than our favorite piece of cabbage.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/847-who-is-your-favorite-final-fantasy-vi-character

I dunno, Shadow won pretty easily here! And this is back when we liked our mysterious, edgy characters a lot (see: the next match). Not to say he'd have been stronger than Kefka because the match pic would have been a problem, but he could've been the strongest of the playable cast at one point.

Mog in 4th lol

then again, maybe a moogle has a floor that can't be too low

Yeah, I think a mascot character has a higher floor just due to their design.

Heck, even someone like Vivi benefits from having an iconic design.

We never had another poll like that since 02?

Nope, that's the only FFVI character poll we've ever had

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2087-devil-division-round-1-sarah-kerrigan-vs-vincent-valentine

After Starcraft's success in the original Games Contest, the board wanted to get a character into the next Character Battle, and they apparently settled on...carriers. This was such a silly idea that CJayC even made a post about how it obviously wasn't eligible because it's not a character (although I guess maybe Allen would've been fine with it). As such, when the first Nomination Rally Tournament rolled around, Kerrigan got a lot of momentum going and eventually won one of the five slots.

Vincent didn't get one of the five slots, losing out to Tifa for the FFVII spot. However, he still had a great deal of board support and made it in anyway. Opinions on Vincent's strength varied greatly. Some thought he'd be the third most popular FFVII character. Others thought he'd flop because he's optional (for some reason, my mind goes to transience as the main proponent of this theory). The counterargument to that was simple: Vincent was one of the main reasons people came to GameFAQs because they were trying to figure out how to recruit him.

Vincent was the heavy favorite in terms of picks, but the Oracle average was just under 60% for him. He had 72% at the freeze, and we were all willing to chalk it up to Kerrigan just being a huge flop. But then he kept going up, and up, and up, eventually falling just shy of a quadrupling. I even remember someone trying to rally for Kerrigan on battle.net and it backfiring because the people there loved Vincent, too.

To say the board went nuts over this would be an understatement. There were nonstop arguments over how strong Vincent was up until his match with Dante, and that's no exaggeration. Some people thought he was getting proxy strength from Cloud and Seph not being in the field (which was further reinforced by Tifa's performance, which we'll get to soon). Either way, there was no denying that Vincent would be a force to be reckoned with in this division now, even for the presumptive favorite, Magus.

That is, until...

The black wind howls...

I think Vincent/Kerrigan was the first match I got right and felt bad about. The result was so lopsided that I immediately knew the board discussions were going to be brutal, considering how hard some people argued for Kerrigan.

I had Vincent over Kerrigan. I couldn't really tell you how I ended up siding with Vincent.

Maybe it was because of this poll?:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/845-who-is-your-favorite-final-fantasy-vii-character

I guess Kerrigan backers just thought Vincent was a fraud in the poll? He somewhat was since he isn't that much stronger than Tifa. But, not nearly enough to drop the match with Kerrigan.

Well, we had seen those polls fail to correlate to contest strength before (namely Yoshi winning the Mario character poll), so you could justify being skeptical of that result.

I think the best those polls do is indicate which characters are resistant to SFF.

Leonhart4 posted...

This was the third (and I believe the final) time CJayC removed votes.

I know Mario vs. Crono was the first time that happened, but what ws the second match with removed votes? (I probably know it, but I just can't recall it) I do remember CJayC was considering removing votes from Starcraft in Starcraft vs. Melee, but I don't think it happened there.

Huh, I could've sworn he did end up removing votes from Starcraft, but I guess I misremembered. I looked through the archives and at the updater, and apparently he didn't. Whoops!

It's still really unbelievable how much of a flop Kerrigan was, after all the hype around Starcraft.

But hey, when we finally got Vincent vs. Magus, it ended up being the nailbiter that you would expect 2003 Magus to have against 2005 Vincent.

I remember Board 8s very high opinion of Blizzard being one of the things I could never fully get behind when I first joined.

Still to this day none of their IPs have never really landed with me, but I can now appreciate that Overwatch and WoW are insanely popular.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2088-devil-division-round-1-magus-vs-knuckles-the-echidna

This is still one of the most shocking round 1 upsets we've ever had. Many people thought Magus could beat Sonic, and yet here he was, losing to Knuckles. Even someone like me, who thought he was a fraud, didn't think he was this overrated. The Oracle average was a little over 60% for Magus, and nobody in the Oracle, BOP, or Guru picked Knuckles to win this match.

When the match started, things seemed to going according to plan. Magus was at around 58.5% at the freeze, but on the next update, he dropped a full two percent. 20 minutes in, he was under 55% now, and people began to acknowledge he might be in trouble against Squall. As he continued to stall, then we began to think Magus might actually lose this. After all, Sonic had a great day vote, and CT had a terrible one.

The first cut for Knuckles came an hour and a half into the match. The peak lead for Magus was 646 votes two and a half hours in, and then the comeback began. Knuckles had the leak five hours later and left Magus in the dust. The lead actually peaked at around 2700 votes, and then Magus cut off about a thousand votes toward the end to make it look slightly less embarrassing. Regardless, this was a historic upset. Only 35% of the site had Knuckles winning this one. Naturally, the board immediately began rooting for Knuckles to beat Squall next round, but more on that when the time comes.

Magus would only finish in 1st place again one time after this, and that was his round 1 match in 2013.

B8 has never been so blindsided as Magus/Knuckles. We've had other matches that no one in the Oracle/BOP/Guru got right, but that same level of surprise just wasn't there.

In terms of blindsided, Squall > Luigi was close just because of the margin. There were a few people who picked Squall to win, but the Oracle average was Luigi with 60%, and I believe it's still the biggest margin the Oracle average has ever been off from the final result.

KNOCK KNOCK IT'S KNUCKLES

caps

Lol X-Stats

That was the best upset we've ever had.

LeonhartFour posted...

Magus would only finish in 1st place again one time after this, and that was his round 1 match in 2013.

OBJECTION!

https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Bomberman_vs_Crash_Bandicoot_vs_Phoenix_Wright_vs_Magus_2007

Darn, for some reason, I thought he was paired with Mario in round 1 that year.

It was Big Boss that got paired with Mario, and this was the year we saw Big Boss, or rather Naked Snake, upset Magus in round 2 for 2nd place.

Yeah, I remembered the round 2 upset there, but for some reason, I got the order reversed on who was in which match in round 1.