(8)Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos vs (9)The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind 2010

Ulti's Analysis
Did you ever think you'd see the day where something related to Blizzard lost a close match? This match was weird, for a multitude of reasons.

Obviously, Board 8 massively favored Warcraft due to past success. The battle stats had it as a tossup, while brackets favored Warcraft. Everything went according to plan at the first freeze, too, what with Warcraft having 57% of the votes. It's almost impossible to come back from so low a percentage when you're losing by that much, but then Morrowind went and increased by 5% during the next update.

Warcraft 3 was hanging on by a tenuous thread from there, after about an hour it just snapped. It stayed there up by 100 for ages, and then Morrowind finally made a move. The games stayed deadlocked for awhile from there, but then Morrowind won the ASV to take the match. Sure the final margin was close, but it was clear Warcraft 3 wasn't going to do anything by the time the match was half over.

It was weird seeing a PC vs PC match go like this, and weirder still to see Morrowind pull the upset. But the weirdest thing of all was Blizzard, the supposed king of the rally, losing a close match like this. Warcraft 3 basically laid over and died after the first 5 minutes, which is just strange. This was another match in a growing trend of people closely missing 1-point matches, and the first round would have many more of them before we were finished.

It almost makes you disappointed. Close matches are the best thing about contests, but soooo many of them were these meaningless 1 point affairs. Some of these needed to happen in later rounds, even 2. Round 2 was mostly bad, which I think most people would agree on.