Contest Stats and Discussion - Part 1379

pjbasis posted...

Do you think it would make contests better or worse if the brackets were meticulously crafted based on some kind of public democratic process

Absolutely worse

IIRC most of the changes were bad

This is the list of the Add/Remove changes.

Fallout -> DKC2 (bad choice, DKC2 was not a good fit in a match featuring Goldeneye and Super Mario RPG, but Fallout was never going to win either)
Super Smash Bros. -> Soul Calibur (TERRIBLE choice, we may never know where Smash 1 stands, but it had a better chance of beating Starcraft or even FF8 than Soul Calibur did)
Golden Sun -> Fire Emblem (TERRIBLE choice, let's put Fire Emblem against Melee, the game that introduced Fire Emblem to the west)
TWEWY -> Street Fighter IV (good choice, SFIV ended up laying an egg and nearly lost 3rd place to Persona 4, but it had a much higher ceiling than TWEWY with people thinking it could place against GTA4 and Brawl)
Panzer Dragoon Saga -> Deus Ex (lateral move, replacing fodder with fodder, if anything, I'd be mad if I nominated Panzer Dragoon Saga for it to be replaced like this)
Super Street Fighter II Turbo -> Mortal Kombat II (the best one, we already had Street Fighter II in the bracket against Sonic 1, and Turbo was against Sonic 2, why run the same match twice?)

MK2 was my topic!

I also tried to replace Sonic 3 with Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Allen immediately said it wasn't gonna happen

My other unsuccessful topic was trying to replace Battletoads with Turtles in Time, which almost certainly would've been a stronger game but alas

Leonhart4 posted...

My other unsuccessful topic was trying to replace Battletoads with Turtles in Time, which almost certainly would've been a stronger game but alas

Probably, but it would have been just a lateral move as it's not going to threaten FF1 and Mario World. The idea really should have been moving games around or prioritizing snubbed games to create more debated matches, as opposed to switching which games are in 3rd or 4th place.

Nah, I thought it was worth seeing how strong a Turtles game could be even if it wasn't going to advance

This was back when the all-fictional character contest was something we were debating/hoping could happen.

Totally hated Golden Sun getting removed for Fire Emblem. As I recall it wasn’t even especially popular in the topic but it had one guy arguing for it extremely hard while many others told them it was a terrible idea. This was particularly upsetting because I tried really hard to get Golden Sun in the bracket to begin with. To top it all off, Fire Emblem had been in a contest before while Golden Sun had not.

Even TWEWY for SFIV and Panzer Dragoon Saga for Deus Ex were bad, as neither was ever going to meaningfully change the result and the former was likely weaker than the game it replaced. So they were just a slap in the face to those games’ supporters for no reason. The only good one was SFII Turbo for MKII because SFII was already in, well done Leon.

There is a reason Add/Remove never came back. Awful idea overall. Having said that allowing B8 to move games within the bracket might have been fun.

What you should have done was try to replace the fourth game in that match with Turtles so we could have had Battletoads vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

LightningStrikes posted...

Totally hated Golden Sun getting removed for Fire Emblem. As I recall it wasn’t even especially popular in the topic but it had one guy arguing for it extremely hard while many others told them it was a terrible idea. This was particularly upsetting because I tried really hard to get Golden Sun in the bracket to begin with. To top it all off, Fire Emblem had been in a contest before while Golden Sun had not.

Yeah that one I hadn't forgotten. It was a baffling terrible idea.

At least Golden Sun would have quite the redemption a year later.

WarThaNemesis2 posted...

What you should have done was try to replace the fourth game in that match with Turtles so we could have had Battletoads vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The fourth game was Prince of Persia, right?

*checks*

Yeah, it was. Probably could've gotten away with that one!

Add/Remove was so idiotic. Yes let's have a nomination process and then just override it five times based on feelings.

_SecretSquirrel posted...

This is the list of the Add/Remove changes.

Fallout -> DKC2 (bad choice, DKC2 was not a good fit in a match featuring Goldeneye and Super Mario RPG, but Fallout was never going to win either)
Super Smash Bros. -> Soul Calibur (TERRIBLE choice, we may never know where Smash 1 stands, but it had a better chance of beating Starcraft or even FF8 than Soul Calibur did)
Golden Sun -> Fire Emblem (TERRIBLE choice, let's put Fire Emblem against Melee, the game that introduced Fire Emblem to the west)
TWEWY -> Street Fighter IV (good choice, SFIV ended up laying an egg and nearly lost 3rd place to Persona 4, but it had a much higher ceiling than TWEWY with people thinking it could place against GTA4 and Brawl)
Panzer Dragoon Saga -> Deus Ex (lateral move, replacing fodder with fodder, if anything, I'd be mad if I nominated Panzer Dragoon Saga for it to be replaced like this)
Super Street Fighter II Turbo -> Mortal Kombat II (the best one, we already had Street Fighter II in the bracket against Sonic 1, and Turbo was against Sonic 2, why run the same match twice?)

My mans checked the wiki. Nice.

Not as egregious as Allen's naked disdain for Sonic 3 & Knuckles in 2009 and 2015

The bigger 2015 error was not kicking SMB1 out despite it getting more than enough nominations imhotbh.

Golden Sun would have beaten Fire Emblem in a games contest.

I also think Fire Emblem is a way better game and I was happy it kicked GS out of the bracket, if only for my personal preference.

The big what-if will always be could it have snuck past a badly SFF’d Wind Waker. Probably not but given how badly Wind Waker lost in that match it might have pulled it off. Would have been a great moment for an excellent game. Instead we got Fire Emblem losing easily to Disgaea. Not exactly a great result for Fire Emblem fans to be honest!

Add/ Remove would have been terrible even if it only produced good debatable matches. Why are we taking games that objectively got enough support to be included and trading them out for whatever B8 wants?

Almost every change making for a worse bracket was just the icing on the cake.

Big_Bob posted...

Golden Sun would have beaten Fire Emblem in a games contest.

I also think Fire Emblem is a way better game and I was happy it kicked GS out of the bracket, if only for my personal preference.

This is a bad way to bracket

Well, yes, a contest made exclusively of games I personally enjoy would probably not be very good.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3828-chaos-division-round-3-sonic-vs-ganondorf

Despite knowing that this was a night match and we had a Bacondorf picture, the Oracle average for Sonic was surprisingly low (just under 53%), and there were about a dozen Ganondorf picks, too. Well, Sonic had almost 55% at the freeze and never looked back.

Hard to believe Heroic Mario gave up his account for this loser, but more on that next year in our SC2K6 retrospective...!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3829-chaos-division-round-3-kirby-vs-vivi

After Vivi's performance against Altair, there were some who thought he might be able to keep it close against Kirby, although few gave him a real chance to score the upset.

Instead Kirby put up almost the exact same score on Vivi that he did on Rikku, and we saw very little shifting in the percentages the whole way, perhaps because both characters are B8 darlings.

I wonder how this match would go now, especially if that rumored FFIX remake (that everyone swears has been coming for the last few years) ever sees the light of day.

This led me to search the polls for Vivi and find this absolutely hilarious poll from the year 2000:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/231-do-you-think-that-the-nuon-has-a-chance-of-surviving-against

Man, the Nuon. I vaguely remember that.

Kirby does what Donkan't

LightningStrikes posted...

This led me to search the polls for Vivi and find this absolutely hilarious poll from the year 2000:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/231-do-you-think-that-the-nuon-has-a-chance-of-surviving-against

Man, the Nuon. I vaguely remember that.

I've just had to google wtf this was.

Shout out to the 103 people who thought it was going to do very well!

Also the phrase “the big four” threw me for a loop. I suppose Sega was still a console manufacturer at that time.

I'm more surprised Microsoft would be considered one of the big four a year before the xbox was even released.

I don't recall the Nuon at all

There were still a lot of new entrants at that time and I guess the hype around Microsoft entering the console space was enough. What is really interesting looking at those old polls is seeing that all the antipathy towards Microsoft and Xbox was there from the start. The 360 era was ultimately a blip and we went back to that afterwards. This poll stood out:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/103-who-do-you-think-the-biggest-loser-will-be-in-the-next

More people thought Microsoft would fare worse than Sega after the Dreamcast had released!

Imagine being that 7.5% who thought the PS2 was going to be a flop

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3830-mushroom-division-round-3-mario-vs-ike

For the second time in the contest, a match picture had to be changed. That Ike sprite was fanmade, so it ended up getting thrown out.

And thank goodness that happened because there is nothing else notable about this match. SFF beatdown is boring, next.

We like Ike. But, it's freaking Mario.

Ike has had a rough contest history. That's what happens when you're in the "creates debatable matches" zone while also being subject to Nintendo overlap.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3831-mushroom-division-round-3-mega-man-vs-ryu-hayabusa

When a lot of your appeal is looking like a super cool ninja, the sprite round is not your friend. Hayabusa never won another match after this either, as he went out in round 1 in 2013 and 2018.

Mega Man had easily surpassed expectations in every round so far (the Oracle average was only 63% here, so he cleared the bar by nearly 10%). There might have been reason to get excited about the next round if his opponent wasn't Mario, and we all dreaded the potential for an SFF victory that wouldn't show just how strong Mega Man had looked this contest.

Clearly it just means Ryu got most of his strength from the NES and MM destroys that

There were a tiny bit of Mega Man > Mario hype. None too serious, but it shows that this result was good.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3832-heart-division-round-3-sora-vs-bowser

From the moment the bracket was revealed, this became one of the biggest and most debated matches. Sora had looked great during the 4-way contests, while Bowser's showings had largely been viewed as disappointing, with second round exits in both. He was still Bowser though, and this would be a big test for Sora.

I don't know who the pre-contest favorite was (augh wish I had access to those Guru stats), but by the time the match rolled around, Bowser had a small edge in Oracle picks. The match itself turned out to be a dud. Bowser's percentage at the end of the first hour was only 0.06% off of his final total, so he basically held serve the entire match. Regardless, he had won so convincingly that nobody could use the "Sora would've won a day match" excuse.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3833-heart-division-round-3-l-block-vs-charizard

Only 8.83% of brackets had Charizard reaching the division finals. I don't know how many B8 brackets had it, but I'd guess it was a much higher percentage. But if there's anything these contests have shown us, voters love a Cinderella run, even if it shouldn't really be considered one, especially if you take down a big name (like L-Block) along the way.

I remember initially having Charizard beat Bowser, and then I thought that was a dumb pick. Whoops!

Big_Bob posted...

I remember initially having Charizard beat Bowser, and then I thought that was a dumb pick. Whoops!

I heavily considered betting the farm on Undertale during the 2015 bracket period (I knew its fanbase was very passionate), but chickened out and settled on a more cookie-cutter bracket. Definitely my biggest contest regret.

Let's make that a general question to everyone here: what was your biggest almost-prediction that you really wish you'd pulled the trigger on?

I'm not sure. If I ever wanted to pick an upset, I usually did! My problem was that I took too many big risks!

I've made some huge predictions in the past that didn't work. My main logic was that I'm unlikely to get a perfect bracket, so I'd rather put stock into a shocking finale so that I can make plenty of mistakes the rest of the time.

I still think Melee would have won if Undertale hadn't taken over the contest. I'm mad about that one.

I had R/B/Y in the final in 2015 and I feel like that one would've happened if there had been no outside interference, so that was pretty annoying.

I also had Link > Snake > Cloud in the finals of my 2008 bracket for a long time then switched it out for Link > Cloud > Snake later on. Probably would've won money that year if I kept it.

Leonhart4 posted...

I had R/B/Y in the final in 2015 and I feel like that one would've happened if there had been no outside interference, so that was pretty annoying.

I had RBY winning the contest outright. I think Chrono Trigger would have been the one had the contest stayed rally free, but Ocarina was ripe for the picking that year, and it is kind of funny that I didn't end up losing any real ground betting against OoT anyway.

My real mis-calculation was switching mid-way through predictions from Melee > CT to CT > Melee, but I was wrong from the absolute right reasons.

KamikazePotato posted...

I heavily considered betting the farm on Undertale during the 2015 bracket period (I knew its fanbase was very passionate), but chickened out and settled on a more cookie-cutter bracket. Definitely my biggest contest regret.

Let's make that a general question to everyone here: what was your biggest almost-prediction that you really wish you'd pulled the trigger on?

Cloud winning in 2003. I would have won the contest if I had done that and Aeris > Chief.

Oh right, I forgot R/B/Y and CT were on the same side of the bracket

Probably would've been a heck of a match though

But offsite rallies make things better huh

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3834-varia-division-round-3-samus-aran-vs-sub-zero

Once again, we saw Samus's impressive early vote on display, as she was above 70% for the first 45 minutes of the match. Sub-Zero did a lot of damage with the night vote, of course, but doubling him was no mean feat. There wasn't a lot of Samus > Cloud hype, but after three dominant performances, we were intrigued to see how well she'd do on him and how long she could hold the lead.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3835-varia-division-round-3-jecht-vs-zelda

Jecht had won two matches against lesser competition without looking too impressive, so people didn't think he'd do much against Zelda. Instead he managed 40% on her, although some attributed a potential overperformance to the fact that this match took place on FFXIII's release date in the west (or maybe just a simple Jecht bandwagon because he made it this far as a 14 seed).

we need squall vs jecht so we can use their performances against zelda to gaslight people into picking jecht

pjbasis posted...

we need squall vs jecht so we can use their performances against zelda to gaslight people into picking jecht

"You can't do it, kid!"

"I'm the best!"