Contest Stats and Discussion - Part 1370

Last question about rallies. I promise.

Is it okay when a top tier or second tier entrant does it? Like Link in 2003 or 2013, or Melee in 2015. Those were hard rallies for very strong things.

Melee is the worst type of rally. 2013 Link was a counter-rally. That rally doesn't exist if Draven isn't rallying in the first place (and the Draven rally had a huge backfire rate to begin with).

I don't remember talk of a Link rally in 2003, but the Planet GameCube rally in 2002 was also lame.

Melee is the best type of rally because it's the only rally I correctly called in my bracket.

*grumble*I could've won*grumble*

I had Mario 64 beating SSBM in the semifinals of my bracket. The Undertale and SSBM rallies bailed me out so hard I made Top 50 that year despite not having a clue what I was doing.

That's similar to how I (and a few others) ended up on the final leaderboard in 2007 because we had Cloud > Link and having Link in 2nd in your bracket was more valuable.

Our first new age poll since 2019:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8857-

Time to see how much it's increased in 3 years.

25-28 and still so low.

I do think PotD would show us being significantly older than the whole site actually is though.

We've got more voters over 46 than under 25

I guess it's the same demographics voting in contests. Man at one point we used to have this "after school vote" thing...we don't have to worry about that any longer hahaha

on a more serious note, GameFAQs/SBAllen have failed horribly. How do you let this site get so old? why aren't we adding new users? there are more gamers now than ever, yet the 13-25 age group doesn't even know this website exist. They're all on reddit and Twitch !
Maybe we should start allowing people to stream games right here..

Don't most kids have smartphones anyways? It would be much easier for them to vote during a break in school unlike back when it was big.

Rallies are bad when they help things I dislike and are good when they help things I like.

L-Block was funny as a one-off thing and it was kinda cool to see its natural strength change based on that performance. I'm fine with the Undertale rally because the fanbase was actually pretty cool about it, they were just passionate for the game and weren't really mean-spirited about it. It was f***ing awesome watching Vivi of all characters get rallied to beat Mario. And of course Pokemon wrecking stuff is always hilarious to me.

The Draven stuff was very mean-spirited on the other hand, which took a bit of fun out of his meteoric rise, though Link/Draven/Shepard is still a god damn all-time classic for the insanity and drama it had. Likewise, I didn't really like Melee > CT mostly because it was the best CT looked in ages and it was probably the one chance it had to actually give OoT a good fight, but again, the actual match between the two was a fun one itself.

I don't think it's an either/or situation. You can like some rallies and dislike others. At the end of the day it's a dumb little popularity contest that only weird nerds like us are really passionate about. The people who voted for L-Block, Draven, and Undertale probably don't even remember them winning these contests like we still do.

At the end of the day, it's all moot because we're all going to die and our planet and history will be absorbed by the sun, and thus future civilizations will never get to witness the time Kuja lost to a giant hand, and in a way that's both depressing and comforting.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Don't most kids have smartphones anyways? It would be much easier for them to vote during a break in school unlike back when it was big.

Yeah, the advent of smartphones basically killed contest trends because now people can just vote anytime and don't have to wait until they get home.

abdou posted...

I guess it's the same demographics voting in contests. Man at one point we used to have this "after school vote" thing...we don't have to worry about that any longer hahaha

on a more serious note, GameFAQs/SBAllen have failed horribly. How do you let this site get so old? why aren't we adding new users? there are more gamers now than ever, yet the 13-25 age group doesn't even know this website exist. They're all on reddit and Twitch !
Maybe we should start allowing people to stream games right here..

GameFAQs missed the boat on transitioning to the social media era and it's too late now. I think the main issue is that GameFAQs only operates as a host of other people's content, which means they have little control over how people write their walkthroughs. This means inconsistent levels of quality (there are still walkthroughs using ASCII in 2022) and lots of gaps in content. I tried to find a walkthrough for Halo Infinite a while ago and found out we had none. Like... I get Halo's not what it used to be, but not having any guide at all for a mainline Halo is pretty bad.

Also, forums are dying as a whole and GameFAQs is conservative even by forum standards. Gen Z communicates in pictures, videos, memes and emojis. GameFAQs forums are still almost entirely text based. And even if we do start appealing to Gen Z, how many of them would want to join a community of 30-40 year olds that know each other for decades?

Of course, if we ended up adding a more contemporary audience to the site, that would have implications on which entrants would be elite level and which entrants wouldn't be.

Games like Chrono Trigger pretty much thrive on the site being in a time warp, whereas some of the most popular games in the world like Minecraft are in the mud.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6065-best-game-ever-day-4-minecraft-vs-halo-combat-evolved
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7988-division-3-round-2-marvels-spider-man-vs-minecraft

Minecraft does okay, all things considered.

Yeah, for being a casual game, Minecraft does okay. Certainly way better than something like Fortnite.

JRPGs in general are held up by this site having picked up no new users in the last decade. Basically every other site that runs character contests results in Cloud and Sephiroth getting completely smoked.

Yeah, but imagine Minecraft if GameFAQs had the same demographics it had in 2003.

It feels like basically any big blockbuster game that doesn't have much contest strength is "casual". Minecraft is not really something that comes to mind when it comes to "casual" games, especially considering how notoriously intimidating the game was to newcomers before tutorials were added. So even if it is "casual", it sure isn't in the same vein as something like Call of Duty or GTA. To say nothing of mobile games!

I guess you're talking more contest strength but boy is it strange.

squexa posted...

GameFAQs missed the boat on transitioning to the social media era and it's too late now. I think the main issue is that GameFAQs only operates as a host of other people's content, which means they have little control over how people write their walkthroughs. This means inconsistent levels of quality (there are still walkthroughs using ASCII in 2022) and lots of gaps in content. I tried to find a walkthrough for Halo Infinite a while ago and found out we had none. Like... I get Halo's not what it used to be, but not having any guide at all for a mainline Halo is pretty bad.

Also, forums are dying as a whole and GameFAQs is conservative even by forum standards. Gen Z communicates in pictures, videos, memes and emojis. GameFAQs forums are still almost entirely text based. And even if we do start appealing to Gen Z, how many of them would want to join a community of 30-40 year olds that know each other for decades?

I think it's only natural that a site known for old ass ASCII guides would still have people writing ASCII guides for it. And that it's forums would reflect that as well.

Lets be honest, I think we're kind of lucky GameFAQs is still around. I imagine it gets enough traffic/ad revenue to keep running but not enough to actively develop and promote. I know SBAllen does some work on the site but I got the impression that he has other responsibilities as well within Red Ventures. I wouldn't think it's like the CJayC years where it sounded this site alone was a 40 hour a week job.

Yeah, GameFAQs being "low tech" is a big reason why it is still around. In its current form, it is relatively low cost to run despite its size.

Just the cost of storage for pictures or videos would probably render the site unprofitable at its current state.

Seanchan posted...

I think it's only natural that a site known for old ass ASCII guides would still have people writing ASCII guides for it. And that it's forums would reflect that as well.

Yeah, but it'll definitely alienate anyone who didn't grow up under ASCII guides and scare away young people from the site. I just searched "Elden Ring Godskin Duo" on Google as a test and I get a ton of detailed guides with pictures + videos from Polygon, vg247, IGN and a bunch of random sites. GameFAQs doesn't appear at all and I had to manually go to the Elden Ring page on GameFAQs to find the one walkthrough for it and it's all text.

Now that we've gone almost 3 years in between age polls, I hope Allen re-runs other demographic polls such as the continent poll (last run in 2013) and the Male/Female poll (last run in 2014).

The continent poll could be interesting to see again as Europe had already shown signs of trending upwards in the 2013 poll. The Male/Female poll was showing a trend of "Female" slowly increasing in the years prior to 2014, though this is likely from the increase in people identifying as trans (along with the site's static userbase).

With another age poll completed, the average age of the userbase has increased from 32.55 in the 2019 poll to 35.49 in yesterday's poll. The average date of birth has gone backwards by 36 days from 1/25/1987 to 12/20/1986. This is the first time since the 2006 age poll the average date of birth has gone backwards into the year 1986.

Updated the wiki page on this subject:

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

I'll be honest, I appreciate still having a remnant of the early internet up and at least resembling what it did years ago. Not many of these sites are left, and if they are, they've been slaughtered with sponsored posts, "we think you'll like this," out of chronological order posts (designed to maximize "engagement"), loads of tracking nonsense, content farming, and all that other stupid bulls*** nobody enjoys but it still gets pushed on us because it makes giant companies money and they don't give a s*** about user experiences anymore.

It might not be great for attracting new people, but I'd rather the site go out this way than the alternatives we've seen happen over the years to other sites.

looks like Wordle wouldn't be a powerhouse in a contest

Round 1: Wordle is a LOSER

abdou posted...

I guess it's the same demographics voting in contests. Man at one point we used to have this "after school vote" thing...we don't have to worry about that any longer hahaha

on a more serious note, GameFAQs/SBAllen have failed horribly. How do you let this site get so old? why aren't we adding new users? there are more gamers now than ever, yet the 13-25 age group doesn't even know this website exist. They're all on reddit and Twitch !
Maybe we should start allowing people to stream games right here..

Trying to chase the GenZ crowd would instantly ruin this site. I think pretty much everyone that regularly, or even just periodically uses GameFAQs is happy with things just as they are. Trying to "copy" the style of Youtube video walk through is a losing battle, as that format inherently sucks for 95% of the situations you would need a guide for. Gen Z kids for the most part aren't playing the type of game you need a walk through for anyways, as most of them are tied up in F2P multiplayer games like Fortnite/Apex/Rocket League/etc. or garbage mobile games.

Whether it's intentional or not, I appreciate Sailor Bacon not messing with the formula of the site too much, as we've seen other longstanding websites utterly ruined by chasing younger audiences that will never engage with them anyways (see the recent f***tastrophe that is Giant Bomb).

Archiving the game, and then special interest boards, while still locking them was a mistake. Yes, I know that plenty of other communities don't purge message board topics, but as a general rule you can still post in their topics indefinitely. The combination of archiving/locking completely stifled communication, which then led to a collapse in the userbase/community. Yes it eliminated "repetitive conversations" but contributing to those repetitive conversations was probably the reason 90% of people made their accounts in the first place.

Ya, I can agree with that. It's similar to how a lot of popular Reddit communities just outright "ban" discussion or certain types of posts (r/Music being a FANTASTIC example of this where they pretty much ban any post involving pretty much every popular band from the last 70 years) which makes it literally impossible for a new user to engage with the community. Communities should be free to have discussions without interference from moderation/admin telling people what they can and can't post about

Yep, I've said for years that archiving topics led to the slow death of the message boards.

But those topics would have just purged before? What did this change?

Archiving topics, like many things, is really cool when used well.

When an archive is used to keep cool information or especially amusing topics (example: an archive of Contest Stats topics), that's great.

When it's used to stifle discussion, that's not so great.

redrocket posted...

But those topics would have just purged before? What did this change?

Yeah, they just purged.

re-running this poll with all the exact same options huh

the blatant disrespect to Mario Kart 64 and Star Fox 64 to include Pokemon Snap instead not once but twice

I will not stand for this Jet Force Gemini erasure

wtf removing Conker and Perfect Dark for DK64 and Pokemon Snap TWICE

they could at least add MK64 and SF64 instead yeah

KamikazePotato posted...

I will not stand for this Jet Force Gemini erasure

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/31-the-best-of-1999-nintendo-64

well, I guess it beat Pokemon Snap...

Remove Banjo, DK64 and Pokemon Snap, add in Perfect Dark, MK64 and Star Fox

Wow, opinions on DK64 have really soured over time.

KamikazePotato posted...

Wow, opinions on DK64 have really soured over time.

Eh, I think that GotY poll was recency bias since the game had just come out.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/263-what-do-you-think-is-the-best-nintendo-64-game-of-all-time

It finished dead last in this poll half a year later.

And Banjo actually rose a lot since then nice

OoT slowly boosting every time they rerun the poll

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8868-what-is-your-pick-for-game-of-the-year-for-2022-so-far

Kirby was keeping up with Elden Ring for like 30 seconds but has fallen off a bit now.

still a very solid showing for Kirby regardless, his games usually don't do well here

Kirby's now fallen like 15% since the freeze.

Yeah. I expected a fall but it's unfortunate it was that big. The Nintendo Power Hour isn't even over yet..

I thought Arceus was really well-liked? I know Kirby is, but I figured the pokemon fanbase would be bigger.

Even mainline modern Pokemon games aren't that strong here. Pokemon is all about RBY and to a lesser extent GSC here. Sun/Moon going toe to toe with FF15 was actually a really bad sign for FF15. Arceus also has a problem where people like the game a lot at first but tend to get tired of the formula by the end of it all. So many of the strong positive opinions become a bit less positive over time.

Man what a good year it has been.

pjbasis posted...

I thought Arceus was really well-liked? I know Kirby is, but I figured the pokemon fanbase would be bigger.

Most games past the year 2000 don't do anything on this website. Pokemon especially doesn't do anything past Gen 2, and I think that will apply doubly so for any game involving Dexit. Throw in the fact that Arceus looks like complete ass even if it gets praise for doing something different with Pokemon...