Contest Stats and Discussion - Part 1372 - The Last Hurrah?

ctesjbuvf posted...

Expecting TotK to absolutely stomp and then FFXVI to look slightly better by end of year since almost no one has finished it yet.

Honestly beating FFXVI made me even less likely to vote for it.

TeamRocketElite posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1322-south-division-round-1-wario-vs-shadow-the-hedgehog

So why was Shadow this strong in 2003 anyways?

LeonhartFour posted...

Yeah, I think this was back when we liked edgy characters because we were mostly a site of edgy teenagers, and it was before the Sonic Cycle began in earnest.

Makes me wonder how strong Vincent would have been in 2003.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1323-south-division-round-1-pac-man-vs-kefka

Kefka has come a long way since 2003. He really should have been allowed to use sprite pictures for his matches but I guess we wouldn't have known that was a problem in 2003.

TeamRocketElite posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1323-south-division-round-1-pac-man-vs-kefka

Kefka has come a long way since 2003. He really should have been allowed to use sprite pictures for his matches but I guess we wouldn't have known that was a problem in 2003.

I mean, even back then, we knew looking like a big piece of cabbage was not very flattering.

Of course, this match still might be intriguing today with Pac-Man in Smash and Kefka still being Kefka, just with art that actually looks like Kefka.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1324-south-division-round-1-crono-vs-tom-nook

At the time of this poll, there was only one Animal Crossing game. Wild World wouldn't show up until 2005. Tom Nook should do quite a bit better now.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5203-character-battle-ix-division-7-round-1-dragonborn-vs-tom

He's come so far

Only to no longer be the most popular Animal Crossing character anymore...?

Tom Nook for Smash

I mean, Isabelle didn't exactly set the world on fire against X in 2018 with Smash's release imminent.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1325-south-division-round-1-alucard-vs-bomberman

I guess Alucard wins this by a fair bit more if it happens again. All part of the plan.

It's actually fairly easy to extrapolate since both of them faced Kefka in 2018!

Based on those two results, Alucard would win with 67.41% of the vote, so a modest improvement from back then.

That's closer than I expected. I guess Bomberman has just kept trucking along over the years.

I think Bomberman is in the same vein as characters like Crash and Spyro, who also performed quite decently in the 2010s character battles.

The fact that Alucard only beats him by a few percent more is really good news since it means Act Zero didn't completely murder his appeal.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1326-south-division-round-1-kirby-vs-ramza-beoulve

kirby es dum

Ramza getting +40% on Kirby sure is a thing that's unimaginable now.

I wonder if that's as close to getting 100,000 votes on the dot as we've gotten in a match

Also that was a super debated match back in 2003, how times have changed

what ever

My favorite match is probably the one I predicted correctly with the worst bracket support

Sub-Zero over Chief

Sub-Zero/Chief was one of those matches where I didn't understand why Chief was such a heavy favorite, even on B8.

Mortal Kombat had been kind of out-of-sight, out-of-mind in the contests, with Scorpion not being in 2005 and having not won a match since 2002. Whereas say what you want about Master Chief, but he had yet to lose in the first round at that point.

It's one of those matches that should have been obvious given that Subby was a given to be much stronger than Scorpion, but both the casuals and B8 took a beating on that match for a reason.

So many people assumed Scorpion and Sub-Zero would basically be equal in strength or that Subby might be even weaker because "if he was so strong, why hasn't he been in yet?"

But if you knew anything about MK, you felt pretty strongly that Sub-Zero was the more popular of the two. It's probably not even as close as it was if Chief wasn't a 2 seed with 80% bracket support.

Sub-Zero was always more popular (blue is the most popular favorite color, the reason truly is that simple) and Master Chief was never going to win any close match. I never thought twice on that one.

I PMd an admin. Allen is in charge of contests even with new ownership, so when he says it’s up to new site owners it’s not the full truth. We aren’t getting contests because they don’t generate new traffic anymore.

The anti rally measures genuinely did kill contests.

No they didn't, the site has just spiraled in the last 5+ years and "rallying" wasn't keeping people here, they were just hit and run voters

If Allen thought that allowing rallying would generate real traffic, he'd just run a new contest without the measures

_SecretSquirrel posted...

The fact that Alucard only beats him by a few percent more is really good news since it means Act Zero didn't completely murder his appeal.

We saw Bomberman in 2007, when Act Zero was still fresh, and he fared just fine! Now it's old enough to legally drive in the US...

Anyways I'd say holding most of his ground against a much improved Alucard is mighty impressive. I think Bomberman's right up there with Pac-Man among the biggest beneficiaries of forced apathy votes.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/961-south-division-round-1-jill-valentine-vs-kirby

Kirby also had a match on this same date in 2002, and Bomberman, too. Weird how those two ended up with the exact same bracket placement two years in a row.

Wonder how Kirby/Jill goes these days. Could Kirby push 60% there?

I just straight up thought that Scorpion was more popular than Sub-Zero which caused that match to blow up in my face.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7275-division-5-round-1-jill-vs-fox

Post-Forgotten Land Kirby vs Jill probably gets pretty ugly these days.

Fox got 47.30% on Aerith, meaning Jill would get 43.42% on Aerith. I guess it would depend on how badly we think Kirby beats Aerith.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1327-south-division-round-1-gordon-freeman-vs-max-payne

GFNW

He isn't even drawing strong opposition here and he still can't pull it off. His 2018 match with Bowser wasn't great but he should be able to put Max Payne away these days.

Max Payne finished lower than f***ing Guybrush in 2013. There's no way Gordon would lose to Max now.

What made GFNW such an epic thing was that he lost to such weaklings the first three years

Ironically he'd probably lose to Phoenix these days

Leonhart4 posted...

What made GFNW such an epic thing was that he lost to such weaklings the first three years

Ironically he'd probably lose to Phoenix these days

And then he ran into Leon Kennedy the next year and made people think he was weak because Gordon got the same 45% he always gets. Imagine if HL2 Gordon had a better draw in 2005 and got Kerrigan or even a rematch with Sam Fisher.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1328-south-division-round-1-sephiroth-vs-raziel

Raziel's strength should be garbage but Sephiroth would probably have difficulty doing this again due to anti-votes. Although, maybe SSBU helps with that a bit.

Got to love those even percentages, if nothing else.

The birth of the Oracle Challenge, thanks to Slowflake

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1329-west-division-round-1-solid-snake-vs-raiden

What the hell kind of bracket making was this match?

Raiden was leading that match until it reach 3 votes and Snake never looked back. (I think I didn't really know who Snake was at the time).

It was an SC2K4 sneak preview

Raiden would get at least a fifth of the vote today.

pjbasis posted...

Raiden would get at least a fifth of the vote today.

That would only be around a three percent difference, but I suppose that is reasonable.

SFF is way less brutal than it used to be. I wonder why that is.

Leonhart4 posted...

SFF is way less brutal than it used to be. I wonder why that is.

Less casual voters, plus multiple matches a day.

One thing about SFF matches is that they used to always get less votes than they should. Take Link/Fox which had some of the lowest votals of 2003. This was presumably because a certain percentage of non-fans of Nintendo saw the match, went "Not interested" and moved on without voting. This made the pool of voters more Nintendo heavy than normal, skewing the SFF even more. I don't think it would be a stretch to guess that this kind of person is more likely to be a casual voter, and thus as their numbers dried up, this kind of avoidance of SFF matches did as well. Multiple matches a day also makes it more likely that people will vote in a SFF match who have no interest in the fanbase in question.

Yeah, it's at least safe to say the reduced potency of SFF correlates to the lower voting pool, with Link vs. Ganondorf being pretty much the best case study you could ever ask for, with Mario vs. Samus being right up there too.

I feel like that logic should mean that we get the same amount or more SFF.

I think when you ask hardcore Nintendo fans, they are more likely to have a personal favorite among secondary characters. It's the casual fans that will just vote for Mario and Link because their Nintendo pool appreciation isn't that deep.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1330-west-division-round-1-knuckles-the-echidna-vs-yuna

Knuckles probably still wins this today?

Edit: I forgot about his movie boost so he should win today.

2018 has these two really close to each other, but yeah, the movie probably ensures a Knux victory. It would probably end up with a similar percentage too.

Think Knuckles wins, but I wouldn't feel good about it. Female leads have held up way better than male leads.

That was another hotly debated match, and I think it's still the closest we've ever gotten to a 50/50 split in prediction percentage.

Leonhart4 posted...

That was another hotly debated match, and I think it's still the closest we've ever gotten to a 50/50 split in prediction percentage.

In a first round match, I believe so.

In the Years contest, 1998 winning the semi-finals was predicted by 50.05% of brackets, but that's 1998 vs. half the field.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1331-west-division-round-1-ryu-vs-duke-nukem

I wonder how well SF6 Ryu would do. We only saw a little of SF5 era Ryu.

Duke would have to hope the nostalgia overcomes the mediocrity of Forever to have a shot at improving on Ryu.

Duke's 2008 contest run still feels like a fever dream when you look at literally every other contest he's been in.