http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/gallery/albums/cb9/5262-02.jpg
Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
Even Draven was unable to stand up to the Nintendo Power Hour this time around, as people had targeted Mewtwo as the counter-rally the second Draven upset Ryu and MMX back in round 2. But what truly caused Mewtwo to do so well was the r/LoL mods seemingly putting an end to the rally on Reddit.
"Hello! After discussing this topic internally, we've decided to remove this and other Draven CBIX threads for the following reasons. First, simply put, they aren't fully relevant to League of Legends. However, even if they were considered to be extremely relevant, there's another reason for their removal: the moderators of /r/LeagueofLegends received a request from a verified staff member at GameFAQs, asking us to remove the thread rallying behind Draven, as it was manipulating the voting on their contest.
As many of you know, reddit has long taken a hard stance against vote manipulation, and it would be incredibly unfair of us to tolerate this sort of activity just because it affects another site and not ourselves. This is why the post has been removed. It isn't fair of us to ask other sites not to game reddit, if we allow reddit to game other sites. Posts on reddit should only be voted on by redditors, not bots or spammers. Polls on other sites should be voted on by their communities, not ours. Thanks."
It all added up to Mewtwo building up a 2300 vote lead two and a half hours in, and assuming things stayed pat, this match was more or less over. Reddit was the entire reason Draven's rallies had gone so well, and without them he was sunk.
Everyone knows the rest. First and foremost, the so-called "verified staff member at GameFAQs" was just some guy pretending to be a GameFAQs staff member. That Reddit even believed that crap at all shows what kind of an outfit those people are running in the first place, and I really hope people are smart enough to separate League of Legends fans from Reddit posters. We all know Reddit is awful, but League honestly does a good job building a good community, and most people who play take good sportsmanship very seriously. They do in my experience, anyway. Riot has a whole tribunal system built around being good sports, and I can vouch how seriously those guys take the mentality of playing nice. They've even banned a professional or two for being mean, so there's no hidden buddy systems where enforcement doesn't happen. Of all the differences between League and Dota, that one might be my favorite.
But to the point. Reddit sucks, yeah, but try not to assume League people suck too. As for the match, once the rally went back online it only took Draven 30 minutes to erase the entire lead and put the match away for good. It kind of sucks since I'm a huge Mewtwo fan and would have loved him in the final, but knowing he would have gotten there had Reddit bothered enforcing their own rules is good enough for me I suppose. But this does all lead one to wonder why GameFAQs, Allen specifically, would go over and correct them at all. Him being in bed with Reddit for this entire contest was no surprise to anyone, especially given he himself pre-contest was busy telling Reddit about us, but why he would do that and never bother answering for it is something that is always going to remain a mystery to the people that follow these things.
Let's say Allen owns a house. We'll call it A. Next door is another house, B. For Christmas one year, A decides to run a neighborhood decorating contest and tells others about it, including B. The night before the decorating contest starts getting judged, B starts egging A's house and the police show up. Rather than let the police do their job, A's owner tells the police that B's actions are perfectly acceptable. That's basically analogous to what Allen did in this contest and everyone knows it. He had the perfect out to tell Reddit to knock it off, and chose not to take it because anyone with an IQ above room temperature could see which site he was allying himself with.
And no, the Link/Snake bonus poll "as decided by the users of GameFAQs" is not enough to make up for it. This nonsense needed to be sorted out during the contest, not afterwards with a pittance poll. A lot of people said a lot of very cruel things to Allen and I will not defend them, but he brought it upon himself by making some questionable (to say the least), oft boneheaded decisions during almost all of Draven's matches. I actually think the worst of them was this match and telling Reddit that rallies were okay, because it showed that Allen cares more about site hits and traffic (which in turn lead to more ad hits and more dollars) than he does what the users of the site think. I would also add that without this site's users giving him free time and free content, this site doesn't exist. So yeah, while I was mostly okay with the Link match, I'm not forgiving him for this one for quite awhile. This was nothing more than pandering to Reddit at the expense of GameFAQs, which really bothers me as someone who has spent untold time writing for this site.
Also let's not forget just how bad this match is for Sephiroth. You think Cloud's match was bad? Sephiroth losing to Mewtwo by almost 9000 votes is worse. That dude is never going to sniff a contest title ever again. He's done. Losing to Snake by a few thousand in 2010 was acceptable, but this is just an outright tank in popularity.
Zen's (Late) Contest[]
I visited Draven's bio on the LoL site and it looks exactly the same as it did in 2013 when I went there to get pics of him and write his bio. Like, literally nothing has changed. It's been 5 years but I remember all the art there and the shallow backstory he was given.
Either Draven really ain't shit and the LoL fanbase will upvote anything not named "Teemo" or LoL is incredibly stale. You know what else is incredibly stale? Talking about Draven matches.
Draven had beaten Link, so at this point if you took anything over him you were crazy. We all knew he had this shit locked down, but you still had some people pushing for either Mewtwo based on POKEFEAR (fat chance arguing that point after Charizard bombed) or hoping Snake somehow had actually grown stronger than Link and that he'd beat Draven in the finals.
Uh, were those people not paying attention to the extra 50,000 or so votes Draven brought in from rallies alone in his last match? Most matches were lucky to hit 50,000 total. In 2013, the year the voters had forsaken us, Draven was free to walk up, kick Link in the dick, buttdevestate our asses and pry first place right from Bacon's open hands.
But then this happened:
"Hello! After discussing this topic internally, we've decided to remove this and other Draven CBIX threads for the following reasons. First, simply put, they aren't fully relevant to League of Legends. However, even if they were considered to be extremely relevant, there's another reason for their removal: the moderators of /r/LeagueofLegends received a request from a verified staff member at GameFAQs, asking us to remove the thread rallying behind Draven, as it was manipulating the voting on their contest.
As many of you know, reddit has long taken a hard stance against vote manipulation, and it would be incredibly unfair of us to tolerate this sort of activity just because it affects another site and not ourselves. This is why the post has been removed. It isn't fair of us to ask other sites not to game reddit, if we allow reddit to game other sites. Posts on reddit should only be voted on by redditors, not bots or spammers. Polls on other sites should be voted on by their communities, not ours. Thanks."
Bacon you are our one true God, all hands to the sky, praise this man:
But just as lord Bacon giveth, he also taketh away.
Turns out that the person who contacted r/LoL wasn't actually Bacon or something. Did anyone ever own up to that? I can't believe the r/LoL mods even fell for it, did they not ask for verification? Guess their mod staff is as much of a joke as the community.
I think at some point Bacon asked r/LoL to let the rallies back so he could make an extra $3.50 off of the ad revenue, and whatever lead and momentum Mewtwo was gone within a few minutes. No exaggeration, Mewtwo was done after less than an hour of rallying.
I kind of get why Bacon turned the rally switch back on. Rallies had already fucked up the results of this contest and if some jabroni was going to mess with the status quo by removing rallies to give himself some extra points in his Expert Bracket then it was super unfair to the rest of us who had already accepted Draven as our new lord and master.
Talking about all the craziness surrounding this contest is making me really appreciate it, holy shit. I had buried a lot of this in the back of my mind but you can't find drama better than this, even on Bravo!. There needs to be a Real Housewives of CBS Interactive.
Speaking of housewives, we'll get to that soon. Can't believe I'm even saying that. What a fucking nutso contest that I have to devote a paragraph to Bacon's wife.