GameFAQs Contests

Inb4 Gordon Freeman in the 1998 match pic.

1998 might be the biggest board favorite since pre-rally Link. Hell, even pre-rally Link might not be up to par since Cloud was competitive back way back then.

Ok so 1998 has:

Ocarina of Time
Pokemon Red/Blue
Half-Life
Banko Kazooie
Spyro the Dragon
Crash Bandicoot
Metal Gear Solid
Fallout 2
Baldur's Gate
RE2
Starcraft
Xenogears
F-Zero X
Sonic Adventure

Good enough?

ZeldaTPLink posted...

Inb4 Gordon Freeman in the 1998 match pic.

Better yet, Sarah Kerrigan!

I mean, there will even be SFF with playstation fans here.

Yeah, there were still plenty of people who picked Cloud to win every year.

Although looking at the 2010 contest, 221 of the 229 Guru entrants had Link as the winner, with 5 for Cloud, one for GFNW, one for Snake, and one for Missingno, so he was about as prohibitive of a favorite that year as we've ever had.

"North American release date" is a match picture restriction. Voters are not obligated to follow that restriction. Last year, the Pokemon company ran a big year long promotion to celebrate Pokemon's 20th anniversary. That could have an effect on 1996.

Sonic Adventure was 1999.

Team Rocket Elite posted...

"North American release date" is a match picture restriction. Voters are not obligated to follow that restriction. Last year, the Pokemon company ran a big year long promotion to celebrate Pokemon's 20th anniversary. That could have an effect on 1996.

Allen said there will be little writeups and blurbs for notable games from each year, too.

I'm following the results Google gave me. There might be some Japanese dates in that list.

Team Rocket Elite posted...

How much of an effect will console releases have on their years? Will 2001 get a boost because the Gamecube came out that year?

2001 didn't just have the GameCube as a console release. The Xbox came out in 2001, with its most well known game being Halo: Combat Evolved.

Other notable years with console releases:

2006 - PS3 and Wii. Notable games include Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Final Fantasy XII, Kingdom Hearts II, Gears of War, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

2013 - PS4 and Xbox One. Notable games include The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Pokemon X/Y, Fire Emblem: Awakening, The Last of Us, Super Mario 3D World, Grand Theft Auto V, and BioShock Infinite.

In 2006, only 3 of those games were available on the newest consoles (Oblivion and Gears of War on Xbox 360, Twilight Princess on Wii). Xbox 360 might have been a 2005 console release, but the first notable Xbox 360 releases didn't arrive until 2006.

As for 2013, none of these games were available on the newest consoles at the time of the GotY polls. GTA V would later be released on PS4 and Xbox One, but it was not available on those consoles when the 2013 GotY polls were in progress. PS4 and Xbox One didn't have anything notable in 2013.

Just put Link, Snake, Charizard and Crash in the match pic. GG.

LeonhartFour posted...

Team Rocket Elite posted...

"North American release date" is a match picture restriction. Voters are not obligated to follow that restriction. Last year, the Pokemon company ran a big year long promotion to celebrate Pokemon's 20th anniversary. That could have an effect on 1996.

Allen said there will be little writeups and blurbs for notable games from each year, too.

That's true. I wonder how often people will read them before voting. I guess it depends on what it looks like.

Myself I'm probably just voting for 2001 since it contains Paper Mario.

LeonhartFour posted...

According to Allen's topic, it's running from 1985 to 2016.

Allen also said the contest would also feature 4 years prior to 1985, to give us a 36 entrant bracket.

Some quick realizations...

While the 90s should easily be the strongest decade, I only see three uber-quality years. 1994, 1997, and 1998. Most other years are carried by one big game (if that) without much breadth. I can see several years from the 2000s challenging the 90s overall.

Also, the half-decade stretch from 2012-2016 might wind up being the weakest of the contest. Seriously, they might get rekt by the NES years.

Its actually Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped that's 1998 but it's near-universally considered a better game than the original anyways so to the extent gamefaqs cares about Crash that only helps 1998.

Also, Final Fantasy Tactics is 1998 in North America. Very likely the fourth strongest game of its year behind OoT, RBY, and MGS1.

Well, if the Games Contests are any indication, more recent years have higher average strength, but their peaks are lower than older games.

I seem to remember the '90s trouncing any other decade in matches in the last Games Contest though. Let me double check.

'90s games that lost to non-90s games:

Half-Life vs. FFX
Xenogears vs. KOTOR
Perfect Dark vs. MGSV
Resident Evil vs. MGS2
Mega Man X vs. FFX
GoldenEye vs. Skyrim
Super Mario World vs. Undertale
Super Metroid vs. Majora's Mask
Chrono Trigger vs. SSBM
Pokemon R/B/Y/G vs. Undertale
Final Fantasy VII vs. SSBM
Super Mario 64 vs. Undertale
Ocarina of Time vs. Undertale

So all of these losses were either via rally or vs. very early '00s games except for FPS games (which are of dubious strength to begin with around here, even 007)

So yeah, I'd imagine the '90s will crush anything outside of their timeframe, but anything within the same decade will probably be more debatable.

I might as well link to these polls, I suppose:

https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/6325-
https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/5505-
https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/4065-

The "2010s" option gained very little percentage in between the 2010 poll and the 2014 poll. However, in the 2016 poll, the "2010s" option gained slightly over 2% compared to the 2014 poll. If we continue getting re-runs of the gaming decade poll, I expect the "2010s" option to slowly gain more percentage over time. Based on how the "2010s" option has fared so far in these polls, I think it will be on track to end up with somewhere in the range of 12-18% when this poll is re-run near the end of 2019 or early 2020. This would put the 2010s decade as being weaker than the 2000s, but probably not by a huge amount.

it's hilarious that the '90s option gets stronger every time that poll is run

we really are a bunch of old farts trying to get kids off of our lawn

Well hardly anything released in the last five years has interested me at all so you're probably right.


FOURPACK OF FUN

1987 vs 2013
1990 vs 2009

I didn't take a single look at what came out in 2009.

1990 > 2013

1987 - The Legend of Zelda, Mega Man
2013 - A Link Between Worlds, The Last of Us, GTA V

1990 - Super Mario Bros. 3, Final Fantasy
2009 - ???

1990 wins the four pack easily. I think 2013 takes second but it might not.

LeonhartFour posted...

1990 > 2013

Same.

80s is gonna be fodder
2009 sucked
1990 and 2013 are probably both high fodder. 1990 takes it due to nostalgia

2009's strongest game is like Arkham Asylum. I think the #2 is Dragon Age. Uncharted 2 got doubled by Sonic 2, Assassin's Creed II got 23% on FFVI, LOL MODERN WARFARE 2, and Demon's Souls didn't impress either. I guess New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Resident Evil 5 are notable and probably not totally pathetic even if they didn't make the last contest; they did make Game of the Decade but they had recency going for them there.

So yeah. Expecting 2009 to be pretty bad!

AxemRedRanger posted...

So yeah. Expecting 2009 to be pretty bad!

Most of the contest will be. I predict record low vote totals.

UltimaterializerX posted...

AxemRedRanger posted...

So yeah. Expecting 2009 to be pretty bad!

Most of the contest will be. I predict record low vote totals.

Well yeah, vote totals keep getting lower and I kinda doubt the general voter cares about this idea as much as we do.

I think the 80s could do well if they get matched up against the last few years.

Like honest question, is anything from 2012 to now a clear favorite against 85 or 87?

I mean you're basically asking if SMB1 or Zelda 1 is enough to win a match on its own

ME3 was #2 in the X-Stats last time though so 2012 would have a chance

LeonhartFour posted...

I mean you're basically asking if SMB1 or Zelda 1 is enough to win a match on its own

Pretty much. It feels like the voting bloc here is disinterested enough with the last half-decade of gaming to make that a real possibility.

Yeah, I don't know how the average voter is going to judge these things. I think these matches could be extremely dependent on the match pic.

I feel like the last two years have been good years for games, but 2012-2014 who knows.

2014 does have SSB4. It has decent strength and is very photogenic.

And we all know match pics will favor the old stuff. The match pic potential is insane, possibly the best we've ever had, especially in older years.

Just look at this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_(video_game)#/media/File:Contra_cover.jpg

And now throw derpy 80s Link and Mega Man in there.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Most of the contest will be. I predict record low vote totals.

I expected lower vote totals, only because our non-contest PotD vote totals have declined even more since our last contest. We were averaging about 20000 votes in the non-contest polls in the weeks leading up to the first match of the previous contest. When factoring out all of the rallied matches (and the spillover matches), the previous contest averaged about 40000 votes in non-rally matches, which is about double (a 100% increase) what our non-contest polls were averaging at the time.

The 2015 BGE contest having double the vote totals of our non-contest polls was much greater than the boost in vote totals that a contest would normally get when compared to non-contest vote totals. This extremely high boost in vote totals for the BGE contest is likely attributed to the contest being promoted as a contest to celebrate the GameFAQs 20th Anniversary, which most likely increased the site's overall interest in the contest.

The 2013 Character Battle had vote totals that were only about 16% higher than the vote totals our polls were getting prior to the start of the contest. This is a far smaller boost in vote totals compared to the 100% boost in vote totals for the 2015 BGE contest. The worst contest in terms of a vote total boost was Rivalry Rumble, which roughly had a 0% boost in vote totals, meaning they were comparable to the non-contest vote totals prior to the start of the contest.

None of this says anything about what kind of vote totals we should expect to see in this upcoming contest. We can't reliably predict what kind of vote totals to expect in this contest until we see the first match of the contest.

Can you imagine if a decade ago, we got announced a new contest and then went nearly 24 hours without a single post in the stats topic? Tepid times man.

the first contest was 15 years ago

contests have been a part of nearly half my life

I went back through all of the previous contests, calculated their average vote totals and then compared them to the non-contest vote totals around the time each contest started. For contests with 12 hour matches, they were adjusted based on what they would likely have received in a full 24 hours. Contests that featured a heavy amount of rallying had the rallied matches filtered out to obtain more accurate estimates of the average vote totals for the contest. For all practical purposes, I was not concerned with providing the exact percentages down to 2 decimal places, so the percentages listed below are all whole numbers.

The full list of every contest so far and how much higher the vote totals were compared to the non-contest vote totals:

Best Game Ever 2015 - 100%
Character Battle 2013 - 16%
Rivalry Rumble - 3%
Game of the Decade - 16%
Character Battle 2010 - 21%
Best Game Ever 2009 - 27%
Character Battle 2008 - 43%
Character Battle 2007 - 51%
Character Battle 2006 - 40%
Best Series Ever - 51%
Character Battle 2005 - 60%
Villains Contest - 37%
Character Battle 2004 - 63%
Best Game Ever 2004 - 47%
Character Batlte 2003 - 105%
Character Battle 2002 - 137%

The first 2 contests were both extremely massive vote draws, bringing in slightly more than twice the vote totals of the non-contest polls prior to the start of their respective contests. From 2004 to 2008, the contests were less effective in bringing in votes (only 35-65% higher than non-contest polls). After 2008, the contests began losing their effectiveness in drawing in votes (less than a 30% boost in vote totals), with the Rivalry Rumble as the worst contest with only 3% higher vote totals compared to non-contest polls.

Out of nowhere, the BGE 2015 contest completely reversed this trend and had a boost in vote totals comparable to the first 2 contests. However, when we were only averaging about 20000 votes in the non-contest polls prior to the start of the contest, the 100% boost in vote totals for the BGE 2015 contest only brought us up to 40000 votes.

I have no idea what to expect for the upcoming contest, but a doubling of the vote totals vs. our current non-contest vote totals is very unlikely to occur. As a reference point, non-contest vote totals are averaging about 15500 votes right now.

CaptainOfCrush posted...

Can you imagine if a decade ago, we got announced a new contest and then went nearly 24 hours without a single post in the stats topic? Tepid times man.

A lot of liberals have me blocked and can't see the topic, which is fine by me. The less crying in here the better.

PotD glitch'd

The poll on the homepage does not match the poll shown on the main boards page. The new poll can only be found on the main boards page (this was fixed shortly after 5 minutes into the poll). A few months ago, we had a similar case of the new poll only being shown on the main boards page. The previous time this happened, the homepage was completely inaccessible, so you had to vote from the main boards page.

Just like what happened a few months ago, a poll receives very few votes from the main boards page. Less than 10% of the votes come from the main boards page. Today's poll had 23 votes after 5 minutes when it's expected that this poll probably should have 230 votes after 5 minutes.

Have we been told when the contest will start?

Although the final round should be predictable, the early rounds might be some of the more unpredictable ones since 2002. Or am I off base and this whole thing will be obvious based on the strength of the top game for that year?

Also, is rallying going to be almost impossible? I mean, who gets excited for a year?
LeonhartFour posted...

Yeah, I don't know how the average voter is going to judge these things. I think these matches could be extremely dependent on the match pic.

I feel like the last two years have been good years for games, but 2012-2014 who knows.

Good point.

creativename posted...

Have we been told when the contest will start?

This post explains what you need to know - https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/75134736/875482851

By the way, GameFAQs switched over to HTTPS for the entire site less than 2 months ago. This could possibly affect your match updater, so you want to make sure you update your site to access GameFAQs through HTTPS when fetching match updates.

creativename posted...

Have we been told when the contest will start?

No exact date yet.

creativename posted...

Also, is rallying going to be almost impossible? I mean, who gets excited for a year?

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Allen is hoping.

1982 could get a joke rally if E.T. is at all mentioned.

Joke votes, definitely. But an actual rally large enough to actually affect things... man that'd be something to see.

Maybe a 2016 rally from hardcore Trump supporters?

ZeldaTPLink posted...

Maybe a 2016 rally from hardcore Trump supporters?

I've seen this posited a couple of times but I'm confused why this would even become a thing

LeonhartFour posted...

I'm confused why this would even become a thing

Doesn't this apply to all rallies

No, I get why people rally for video games in a video game contest.

LeonhartFour posted...

I've seen this posited a couple of times but I'm confused why this would even become a thing

Agreed, but I understand why. Outside rallies have won two contests in a row, so I can see people always entertaining the possibility from now on.

All it takes is for someone to go into 4-chan and convinced them gameFAQs is filled with SJWs.