(1)Link vs (2)Commander Shepard vs (3)Draven 2013

Ulti's Analysis
"I never thought I'd see the day where Link was the shining, glimmering, white knight of hope for our contests. But by god Reddit has done it." -FFDragon

Just a few notes before we get going. For those playing the home game, I took something like a two month break between writing round 2's bonus poll and starting this writeup. I've played a lot of League since then, so people hoping for me to be 100% biased in Link's favor and against Draven are going to be disappointed. As pure characters, Draven is awesome and is vastly better than Link. Both pale in comparison to Shepard, but hey! The other thing to remember is that my tone might not be as fluid or as related to past writeups as in contests past. There were simply too many matches to burn through all at once, and I got burned out. But I'm good now, so let's finish this!

There's a ton to talk about here, but let's start with Commander Shepard. I don't think it's a coincidence that Shepard's best contest run ever also coincided with Shepard finally getting some female pictures, because there is a massive number of Mass Effect players that prefer the female version. And regardless of which gender you play as, most people agree that FemShep's voice work is better. Point being, Shepard even being in this match at all was kind of an honor. When people go back and look up arguably the most nutty 24 hours we've ever had on GameFAQs, Shepard's name will pop up.

This is also as good time as any to discuss Mass Effect 3. I'm in love with the Mass Effect series, and I suppose I lucked out by waiting a bit to play through 3, since the ending I saw was extended cut right off the bat for me. The extended cut ending is decent, and the original is certainly "bad", but I wouldn't consider the entire thing something worth whining so much about. Gamers are seen as entitled crybabies, and things like the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy definitely prove why. Stuff like this along with gaming journalism have more or less removed all the wonder from gaming, and it's why I don't bother looking anything up before playing anything. I like still feeling like a kid and not feeling like I've beaten a game before playing it, you know? Now, you can practically see an entire game play out in videos before it hits shelves. Some people like that, I don't.

To the point. Mass Effect 3 is still really good and I think it's a worthy ending to the trilogy, outside the one new character you get introduced to at the very end and Bioware failing in their implementation of indictrination theory. They were clearly going for the angle of how Shepard gets indoctrinated, but the new writers messed up in getting there because there was no good sense of foreshadowing. I have some issues with the gameplay looking too Call of Duty for my liking, but the heart of things is still there. I have a pretty long rant about multiplayer, but I'm saving it for another day. It's fun and I'm going for Best of the Best, but the massive amount of glitches and Bioware pulling support for something that people like enough to still play is just dumb.

The Mass Effect series is amazing and Shepard being involved in a match like this was good times. She gets her own little spot in history. But the headline here was Link vs Draven being the most hyped match since Mario vs Crono 2003, and it ended up being our best match since Mario vs Crono 2003. There was everything: a massive comeback attempt, controversy abound, and enough whining to open a vineyard.

The whole reason things were so hyped is because for the first time since the early 2000s, GameFAQs felt threatened by an outside source. Reddit, in this case. Draven clearly cheated in round 1 to beat Jak (which was since admitted and proven, more or less), but that's when Reddit caught on to people hating what Draven was doing in our contest and the trolls made it their personal mission to stick it to crybabies like XIII and Black Turtle. Then the legendary round 2 beating of Mega Man X and Ryu happened, and suddenly Link was in trouble. If Link came out and put forth a "normal" performance, like he had done in rounds 1 and 2, he would have no chance and score like 26% in the match. Round 2 Draven is one of the strongest characters we'll ever see in a contest.

The hype was so huge that it took over the entire round 2 narrative. You won't see much discussion of round 2 matches after Draven/Ryu/MMX, because half of the board's discussion was about the big round 3 duel. By the time the match actually happened, this place was ready to burst. This match also helped prove that 24 hours for a big match is WAY better than 12 hours. By far.

When the match finally started, Draven went completely nuts. Link and Shepard fed a double kill in the lane early, and with the new League of Draven passive (http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Draven#League_of_Draven) that can make things snowball out of control at an alarming rate. Draven having all that extra gold early put this match on notice, and overnight he just got masses of kills until he led by 5500 votes.

Now under normal situations, the match would be completely over. Draven's 5500 vote lead came at 6:30 in the morning, right? If you go look up Link's other two legendary losses (Cloud and L-Block), Cloud was winning by 1900 and L-Block was winning by 6600 at the exact time. And those matches were over come morning, too.

But this one was a bit different. For starters, no rally has staying power and Draven's best shot happened overnight. No matter how busy the LoL subreddit gets, most people who care about things like this will have voted early. The other factor at work is that League of Legends is huge in Europe. Come American morning time, the European dudes looking to go pro in League are all starting to go to sleep. Add in Link's day vote dominance, and the theory was that Draven could have built any amount of lead overnight and it would not have mattered. Link had the potential to come back and win.

Draven slowly increased his lead until 6100 or so, and held strong until 9 in the morning, but then the proverbial floodgates opened and all hell broke loose on GameFAQs. Link absolutely began tear-assing through Draven's lead, and just refused to slow down all through the morning and all through lunch. That 6100 votes? It was down to 4000 within hours, and Link was well on pace to finish coming back and pull off the most epic contest win ever.

But then, depenending on who you ask, the impossible happened. GameFAQs virtually froze to a halt, for about an hour, right in the middle of Link cutting 100 votes off of a lead every 5 minutes. It was almost impossible to consider this a coincidence, and the prevailing theory was a perfectly timed DDoS attack on the site. The site did eventually come back online, and Link got a few more big updates to get the lead below 3000, but then out of nowhere Draven started going nuts again. It only took Draven about 3 hours to get the lead from 3000 to 5200, which was just as weird as the site freezing in the first place. It takes a lot of coincidence for a site freeze during such a massive poll, but it takes a hell of a lot more than just a coincidence for Draven voters to be that ready to go once the site came back to full speed. Of all the theories that got thrown around about whether the down time was DDoS or not, that's the one that makes the most sense to me. Trends don't just flip on a dime like that, it takes a little while to shift. But here, the down time happened and then almost immediately upon the site coming back, Draven went berserk again. That isn't normal, and I think there was outside interference involved in some way.

Not that Allen thinks so, mind you.

GameFAQs is served by two proxy servers in rotation, and what we see in the logs is that one of them would go down, shifting traffic to the second, which would then get overloaded and go down, shifting traffic back to the first, repeat. Unlike a DDoS attack, there was no increase in inbound traffic, and the two proxy servers were failing one at a time, not simultaneously. It could have been a DDoS, but it looks a lot more like just a bad coincidence. Since the site was never truly offline, just slow and randomly failing, it took a while for the operations team to get paged out, but once they got online and started investigating all it took was rebooting the proxies to bring everything back to normal, which isn't how you'd normally recover from a DDoS.

tl;dr: Earlier downtime most likely wasn't an attack.

<I>Also since people will probably ask, we are indeed checking into the legitimacy of all incoming votes and so far, everything appears to be legit.</i>

<I>Here's a graph of our two load balancers: http://i.imgur.com/lZi9UcM.png

You can literally see one failing and the other one picking up the load.

All these people claiming admissions of DDoS have shown me nothing but hostility. You're seeing what I'm seeing with the load balancers, so show me what I'm not seeing if you have proof otherwise.</i>

<I><B>RockMFR posted...</b> "To me, this is exactly what you'd see in a connection flood attack. Attack starts, both servers overwhelmed, one server stops responding first, load balancer takes traffic off that server, connections gradually released on first server, traffic shifts back, etc. If you're not defending against this type of attack, the attacker wouldn't necessarily have to keep up what they're doing. A few seconds of traffic could lock your servers up for hours, until you reboot them. It wouldn't take massive amounts of traffic, or even traffic from more than 1 IP address.

Before you rebooted them, did you see any evidence of a SYN flood? Did you check what connections were open?"

Allen: A DDoS typically involves an onrush of incoming traffic, enough traffic to overwhelm a server's ability to handle connections, and an attack against the site would involve both of our proxies at the same time in equal amounts. That's not what happened here. There was no increase in traffic, and the servers failed in series.

No SYN flood was spotted, and simply rebooting a server does not end a DDoS attack, it only lets it recover from internal issues.

Now, what has happened in the past with our particular build of this load balancer is that they do run into memory issues over time, and the symptoms of this are repeated short periods of lag and failures, quickly building in time and severity until the server is just barely responsive. We've seen this on internal proxies, not just external, and the only solution is to bounce the box. Kind of like what we saw happen today. This would've been handled more quickly by our ops team, but it happened on a holiday when our ops team wasn't around.

I'm not saying it wasn't a DDoS attack, just saying that there's no clear evidence of one.

In terms of vote stuffing, here's a look at our incoming traffic to the poll page: http://i.imgur.com/wUulr26.png

I'd love to see Link make the ultimate come from behind win, but if he doesn't, it's not because of cheating. You can attack me all that you want to, but Draven's winning on his own.</i>

I'll just let Lopen and Noob Avenger handle the math on this one.

<I>Then00bAvenger posted...

Downtime was affected from 12:16 to 13:51, a total of 95 minutes, in which there was 1680 votes cast.

Of those 1680 votes, 55.84% were for Link, 27.56% were for Draven.

If you go by the last 20 minutes before the down time, the average votes per 5 minutes is ~335. If you go by that, then if there was no downtime, there would be 6327 votes cast. A difference of 4647. Using the same ratio that they got during the down time, 2595 would go to Link while 1281 would go to Draven. A loss of ~1300 votes for Link against Draven.

If you go further and calculate the 20 minutes after the downtime and add it to the 20 minutes before the down time(but skipping the first update after the downtime was over because the totals are going to be inflated there), you get 375 average votes per 5 minute update. That gives a total of 7125. A difference of 5445, with 3040 for Linkand 1500 for Draven. Here we have a loss of 1500 for Link.

If you wanted to be conservative, Link would have 1000 extra votes compared to Draven here. On the upper scale, it can go as high as 1500. And at the rate Link is currently coming back, Draven's lead may very well end under 1500.</i>

Lopen posted... <I>You do realize the backfire effect applies to your interpretation of the data as well, right? Perhaps moreso, because most people chose to believe your claims that there was no vote stuffing until it was made very very very prominent.

I've looked at the data and actually revised my thoughts that Draven was stuffing in r1, but r2 and r3 the rallied votes just got to Draven at too absurd a rate to ignore.

I'd also like your thoughts on these numbers and why they would pan out like this. It's an analysis of where the approximated rallied votes went for the first 7.5 hours of the poll for each of the three matches, based on Draven's estimated GameFAQs strength and looking at how each of the three entries in the matches were increasing in votes. I could explain the whole process if you want more-- it's nothing that complicated though.

Link vs Shepard vs Draven

Time: Link + Shepard's %, (approximated extra votes) 0:05-0:35: 27.4% (5380 approximated extra votes) 0:35-1:05: 28.1% (3102) 1:05-1:35: 33.1% (3031) 1:35-2:05: 28.5% (2650) 2:05-2:35: 24.3% (2255) 2:35-3:05: 19.7% (1859) 3:05-3:35: 19.3% (1643) 3:35-4:05: 19.3% (1627) 4:05-4:35: 18.3% (1428) 4:35-5:05: 21.5% (1329) 5:05-5:35: 16.1% (1042) 5:35-6:05: 13.4% (977) 6:05-6:35: 6.1% (858) 6:35-7:05: 8.1% (854) 7:05-7:35: 7.0% (775)

Ryu vs MMX vs Draven

Time: MMX + Ryu's %, (approximated extra votes)

0:35-1:05: 10% (4378 approximated extra votes) 1:05-1:35: 10.3% (4878) 1:35-2:05: 11.9% (4106) 2:05-2:35: 12.4% (3620) 2:35-3:05: 7.9% (2838) 3:05-3:35: 12.3% (3259) 3:35-4:05: 8.4% (2481) 4:05-4:35: 5.8% (2221) 4:35-5:05: 9.8% (2265) 5:05-5:35: 5.1% (2173) 5:35-6:05: 5.2% (2029) 6:05-6:35: 8.2% (2126) 6:35-7:05: 6.4% (1946) 7:05-7:35: 2.4% (1864)

Jak vs Chie vs Draven

Time: Jak + Chie%, (approximated extra votes)

(extra votes before here were trace) 3:05-3:35: 4.4% (411) 3:35-4:05: 1% (770) 4:05-4:35: 9.7% (656) 4:35-5:05: 10.4% (888) 5:05-5:35: 11.9% (906) 5:35-6:05: 12.5% (770) 6:05-6:35: 28.9% (944) 6:35-7:05: 35.7% (843) 7:05-7:35: 29.5% (734)</i>

Allen never actually ended up responding to Lopen's post there, since it fully covers just how hard Draven was stuffing the the first two rounds. I'm of the belief that Draven beat Link fairly, but anyone pretending those numbers in the first two rounds are legit is just lying to themselves.

Now once this topic happened and it became clear that Allen was going to allow the down time results to stand, people absolutely lost their goddamn minds. I won't go crazy mentioning names or bringing up quotes and such, mainly because I was so disgusted by how the board was acting that I didn't save anything beyond Allen's explanation, but it was bad. Like, <I>really</i> bad. Bad enough to where if Allen never wanted to run another contest, no one would really blame him. I will say though that XIII and ExThaNemesis were the worst of the bunch that I can remember, and this needs to be put in the archive somewhere, though an argument can also be made that transience and Sir Chris asskissing through the entire thing can be equally bad but from the opposite direction. It was just a complete mess, and one I'm glad is mostly behind us. I say "mostly" because a couple of people still feel the need to ruin any topic where you bring this stuff up, even though everyone that was there remembers what happened. This isn't like Cloud/Mario 2002 where a lot of people claim they were there but weren't; Board 8 is no longer a magnet community after each contest and our memories are pretty solid. And the people who deny how badly they behaved that day are kind of hilarious, in the same way a dog crapping on the floor tries pretending nothing happened.

And this was just the public stuff, apparently people were even worse via PM. The point of me bringing all this up, outside just having it in the archive, is that Allen has tried for years to have a contest where people remembered him alongside CJayC as a contest administrator, rather than simply the guy that took them over once CJayC left. He managed to finally accomplish this, but I don't know if Allen knew going in just how awful that Mario/Crono 2003 match was for CJayC personally. I still remember Ceej bringing that match up years later, and his passion for making contests was never the same. To have that kind of a contest for yourself, you need a controversy somewhere that people remember years later. Link/Draven is that match for Allen.

Allen is obviously a lot more emotionally stable and less of an introvert than CJayC, which is why he didn't go on a banning spree like Ceej would have, but one has to wonder if he'll ever have the fire for a contest again after this stuff. I can't overstate just how <I>badly</i> people treated him over this Link/Draven thing, and I'll be surprised if it isn't the first thing Allen considers when deciding on a new contest. Is GameFAQs, despite most people here being between 17 and 32 years old (http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/5097), mature enough to handle losing? That begs the question of how mature gamers are, and I think everyone knows that answer to that one. Gamers have always had a stigma attached to them for a reason, though that's a separate thesis for a separate topic.

The point here is GameFAQs lost its collective mind once Allen allowed the DDoS thing to go unresolved, and regardless of how anyone feels about Allen I <I>do</i> think it says a lot about the GameFAQs of today that the entire site froze just because of a big contest match. And even then, this match only finished with 122000 votes. The 2007 final had 19530 votes and ran like a machine. I'm not technoloigcally intelligent at all, but I don't get it.

The craziest thing of all is the match still had 5 hours to go, and it just wouldn't be the epic kind if this wasn't always one more story to tell. That 5200 vote lead? Yeah, someone in Link's camp took notice and decided to go nuts in their own right. Between some very obvious vote-stuffing that no one even denies anymore (seriously, there was one update that took off like 260 votes in 5 minutes) and the most hilarious rallies I can think of, Link once again went on the warpath. Oh and those rallies were scraping the bottom of every barrel, by the way, to hilarious levels. You had your basic Facebook and forum rallying, but then there were people getting retweets from WWE superstars and also hoping to get AJ Lee to bail Link out. And weren't people also going for Dusty Rhodes before Cody's arm broke, or something?

All the stops and all the kitchen sinks got thrown as this match for the final push, but Link, the Hero of Time, simply.... ran out of time. Link would end up losing this match by 765 votes and never truly threatening to come back and win, but even still, Link in this match is the most impressive loser we've ever had to date in a contest. Screw all the other numbers. This dude pulled the largest comeback in contest history, <B>TWICE IN THE SAME MATCH,</b> and still lost.

It also makes the down time and Allen's refusal to rerun the poll even worse, because the poll finished close enough to where the gray area caused by the down time was basically the entire reason for the difference. Link got robbed of having a full 24 hours to try and win, and even Draven got robbed in his own right if you use the Rocky analogy. "I won, but I didn't beat him!" -Apollo Creed

And the Rocky 1 ending is basically what this match was (spoilers): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G40ji3nWHi0

Us not getting a restart is what keeps this match from being the absolute greatest even instead of just in the discussion, because the down time really is the black cloud hanging over everything. There was no resolution at all. Not that Allen agrees a restart is needed, mind you.

<I>Rerunning the poll solves nothing. Even if Link won the second poll, there'd be a completely legitimate argument that we should run it a third time to see the "true" winner, and so on. And disregarding that, the shock of seeing Link lose the first poll could sway people to change their vote in the second poll. There are too many variables that could affect the outcome that are significantly worse than the site not running at full capacity for an hour and some change.</i>

<I>'I'm sitting here, on my vacation time, hunting down information and sharing it with everyone. I've been called so many offensive and rude things that I've lost track of them all, and I'm blowing off my visiting relatives from out of town for the privilege. I've posted all of the information I have to prove that nothing's going on, but you are all still calling me a liar/lazy/etc.

I'm done for the day. I'm going to go and spend time with my family who came to see me. I'm not even mad at you guys, just deeply disappointed. Enjoy the rest of the contest. I probably won't.'</i>

SBAllen posted...<I>The results of tonight's contest are final, and here is why:

There was no evidence of a DDoS. According to our network operations team, this morning's outage had none of the hallmarks of a DDoS attack, and they're very familiar with them. There were plenty of claims that someone on Reddit was bragging about DDoSing the site, but people brag about things on reddit all the time, and nobody seems to have actually produced a screenshot showing where this claim was even made. And, even if hypothetically there were a DDoS attack, there's no telling who was actually responsible, it could have just as easily been a Link fan sabotaging the battle to force a do-over.

Anybody who wanted to vote had ample opportunity to vote. While we did have 85 minutes of network trouble in the morning, this happened early in the day, and it's hard to imagine that anybody who wanted to vote in the contest was actually prevented from doing so. They just had to wait a bit longer than normal, or come back later. Even if the slowdown mired Link's rally, you can see from the charts we had an immediate large influx of votes immediately afterwards that negated a good portion of it.

Re-running the contest would be seriously biased towards Link, and throws off the schedule of the entire bracket. Extending the vote time another 85 minutes would be just as seriously biased in favor of Link, no question about it. Reddit's rallies had died down, and Link had been gaining for hours. Like I said earlier, despite the outage, nobody was prevented outright from voting during the rest of the day. Plus, averaging out the last 2 hours, Link was gaining 7.09 votes/minute on Draven. Another 85 minutes of the same pattern, that's 602 more Link votes, not enough to change the outcome. Although to be honest, those last 10 minutes of votes were "interesting".

There was no evidence of massive vote stuffing. Running comparisons of ISP usage, browser usage, and even first pageview time to first vote time, the numbers matched up between Link and Draven (i.e. 40% of German Draven voters on Vodafine, 41% of Link voters; 47% of Draven voters use Chrome, 44% for Link). The percentages matched up, leaving no distinctions between Draven and Link voters that would reveal a pattern of vote stuffing.

Finally, all of the the voting rallies we saw were consistent with traffic from external sites. The Draven rallies from Reddit, the Facebook-driven Link rally, and small boosts from the official LoL boards, Twitter, twitch.tv and even 4chan, it all matched up with the inbound traffic we saw in Google Analytics.

Of course, this probably won't change anybody's minds thanks to the Backfire Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Backfire_effect). I've tried to be as open and honest as I can be about what's going on behind the scenes here, and if you can't take my word for it then there's really nothing else I can do or say to convince you that even though it's all a big meaningless popularity contest, we're trying our hardest to run it as fairly as possible.</i>

So regardless of if anyone agrees, the results of what was basically a 23 hour match stood as final. The aftermath was predictable, and basically the same as what happened when the down time was announced as not a DDoS, so I won't get into all that. The funnier aspect was Reddit invading Board 8 for a few days, which is I would like to expand a bit.

I'm a League player, and I really love the game. I've played a looooooooot of Dota, almost an unhealthy amount, but I can finally and with no apologies admit that League is just.... better. Dota's intentionally hanging on to these archaic systems of doing things, going so far as <I>putting Dota 1's glitches into Dota 2</i> just to appease guys like me. Which I can appreciate, but it makes for stagnant growth. I'll spare the technical details of the nonsense that's still in Dota 2 or why it will probably never be taken out, but the point here is that League never tries to stop growing. They just put in a hero whose ult can only be used on midair enemies, which promotes all kinds of teamwork thinking and strategy in play. Dota flat-out doesn't do things like this.

To the point. League is awesome, and has a really good community despite the reputation. Reddit people are not, and are the kinds of players who get banned for in-game verbal abuse every other month. One knucklehead over there even made accounts mocking Kazbar's suicide, which is about as low as it can get, and this contest ending and taking those people away with them could not happen fast enough. Never has Board 8 been worse to read than the time between Link/Shep/Draven and the contest's aura finally wearing down. Reddit's a decent site, but some of the users over there make LL/4chan types look like saints. It's embarrassing what that site allows to go on unchecked over there.

Regardless, the way Reddit was acting was no better than how GameFAQs acted, and the entire hype + match was really knocked down a bit because of it. There's nothing wrong with being proud of winning, but pretending facts aren't facts (like how the down time decided this match, period, and at the very least both characters were robbed of a potential legendary finish because of it) and rallying for every single Draven vs Link board poll? I really have to wonder how many of the people involved in this nonsense have jobs.

We thankfully have a really humble loser around these parts, though!

GloriousSweater posted...<I>Congrats to the Draven/League of Legends supporters! This is your hour, and while I do think the circumstances surrounding the result are at least a little fishy, the result stands, the day is yours, and it is your right - no, your freakin DUTY - to celebrate like champions. And remember, you may have won this time, but the Hylian Hammer - favorite game character of gamers young and old from every corner of the globe - will be back.

And to me, even on this day, Link still

always wins. =)

http://i.imgur.com/bHZyYWL.jpg

Congrats to the Hero of Time for another incredible contest!</i>

Seems like as good a note to end things on as any, though I do have to question why Board 8 has whined about Link always winning for years, then whined some more when he finally lost. You can't have it both ways and only be okay with Link losing when a character you all like is the one doing it.

And play League of Legends, seriously. It's a fantastic game once you get through the learning curve!