Best OST Contest

Best OST Contest for Video Games was a contest run in late 2011 by azuarc. Following on the heels of the popular VGMC contest's latest edition wrapping up, azuarc thought it would be an ideal chance to showcase games with good overall music while also answering questions like "Is Chrono Cross a two-hit wonder?" (The answer is a definite no.)

Pre-Tournament
Azuarc originally envisioned the bracket as a strict 64-entry tournament, with the participants featuring a different song from their soundtrack each round. As such, he asked for nominations to be included with six songs for six rounds, plus one alternate to play during tiebreakers or in the off-chance he expanded the field to 128. During the inital clamour for the contest, some users contended that single elimination might be unfair to a game that had a weak song in its lineup or that got a bad draw early on. Azuarc conceded to these suggestions and made the tournament double-elimination, which sounded like a great idea at the time, but probably caused the tournament to drag on far longer than it ought to have, especially when the double elimination took away a lof of the impact of surprise upsets.

Nominations were open for one full week. During those seven days, users were allowed to nominate a game once per day, but also had to provide the line-up they wanted to play for rounds 1 thru 6, plus their alternate. The entrants were chosen by "support votes," where users would back a game, but those support votes were strictly that -- only the original nominator had control of the song choices, and anyone who wanted the line-up changed was expected to take it up with the nominator. Many games suffered from song choices that would-be support voters could not get behind, and others lagged significantly in their seeding compared to general expectation.

Exactly sixty-four games received at least five support votes.out of 140 total nominations. The games were ordered by number of votes and then recency. Donkey Kong Country 2 had the highest overall seed, having 17 support votes, along with VVVVVV.

Winner's Bracket
Bracket

The winner's bracket matches started off strong, averaging about 40 votes per match. This dropped to around 30 by the end of the bracket, particularly when the songs in rounds 2 and 3 tended to be the most lackluster choices. Due to accusations and concerns about "front-loading" nominations to help ensure early success, many other games had their order shifted to defend against a front-loaded offense. Notably, Umineko used worldenddominator in its first round.

One of the other curiosities about the bracket was that somehow most of the overall favorites were all on the left side of the bracket. Speculators deemed it inevitable that the bracket would be decided with the first semi-final, where most likely Chrono Cross would meet either NieR or Umineko. This proved to be correct, but the most important upset of the tournament occurred in round 3 when Shatter defeated CC, the prohibitive favorite to crush all comers, particularly from rounds 4 onward. In CC's void, Ar Tonelico 2 carried the banner for the first quadrant, and went on to defeat NieR in the semifinals en route to an easy victory in the finals.

By contrast, the right side of the bracket was a huge crapshoot, with many prospective "east side" winners falling early. The biggest surprise of the tournament was Frozen Synapse, who entered as a 16 seed, and narrowly defeated four straight opponents before finally falling to Guilty Gear X.

Loser's Bracket
Top half of first 7 rounds

Bottom half of first 7 rounds

Remainder of tournament

The loser's bracket was arguably a complete failure. Not that it didn't go the way it was intended, but that was the very problem. Games that lost early in the WB had to make a miraculous trek to try to reach deep into the tournament, and the vast majority of the games losing in the first two rounds had no legitimate claim to the crown, so the first few rounds were not terribly exciting. By contrast, the later rounds were seen as almost inevitable, when games like Chrono Cross and Umineko made their appearance. CC, notably, had three songs at the end of its line-up that were regarded as completely unstoppable on Board8. Most doomsayers predicted that there was almost no chance that Chrono Cross would NOT be the loser's bracket champion, and might very well crush Ar Tonelico II in consecutive matches. The only glimmer that prevented certainty was the bizarre protracted nature of the Loser's Bracket.

The first round of the loser's bracket featured song #2 for each game, since those games had already run song #1 and were defeated with it. But with ten rounds to play before the grand finale, songs would need to be repeated. During every even-numbered round, new games entered the field from the winner's bracket, and so songs were only advanced every other round, instead of with each match. In spite of this, the loser's bracket finals would have seen a game that had used its sixth song twice already against the WB runner-up who had lost with that song. The format for this match, and then the victor's showdown with Ar Tonelico II had not been announced.

Progression Points
Many of the right-side matches were hilarious routs, an unprecedented number of which occured after round 1 due to the changing nature of its participants. Indeed, the finals were a blow-out, and as a result X-stats were horribly meaningless since there was no semblance of transitivity. Instead, azuarc invented a system he called "Progression Points," which he claimed would serve as a sort of reverse X-stats. The idea behind PPs were that each game started with 50 points. Depending on the degree to which they won or lost a round, they gave or took points to their opponent, conceivably surrendering their entire stack if they were shut-out, but there would be no retroactive effects to the games that that soundtrack had already defeated. Although still rather dubious in evaluating the contestants' performances, it at least gave some kind of benchmark.

Just For Fun Bracket
Bracket

To keep things slightly fresh during the loser's bracket, azuarc added a third match each day that was "just for fun." He created a second bracket out of the 32 games that had most narrowly missed making the field, most of which needed a single additional vote to get in. On most days during the initial phases of the LB, several posters would comment on how the JFF match was more interesting than the official matches.