Results[]
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 3 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 21 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, April 01, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Octopath Traveler - 43.20% 10 for - 56 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Octopath Traveler - 21.58% |
| User Votes |
Undertale - 4436 Octopath Traveler - 4779 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Undertale - 3229 Octopath Traveler - 4245 |
I tried to warn you.
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(5)Sans_vs_(12)Pac-Man_2018
"Undertale is the new Portal. It had its moment, but it will never have a repeat performance even though it should be strong enough to make contests moving forward."
I never one time had any doubts that Octopath Traveler would lose this match. My only struggle in this fourpack was whether or not Shovel Knight could beat an Octopath Traveler that had just beaten the champ. It's a borderline miracle Undertale resisted getting punished here. Sans and Draven got smoked two years ago. Games that could even be considered rally threats got buried in this contest, yet Undertale managed to hang in there for 10 minutes before suffering a fairly respectable loss.
There were a few reasons for that. One, Undertale has a legitimate fanbase. It wasn't some flash in the pan video game; it may not be the flavor of the month that gets the entire internet's imagination going en route to winning a contest, but it absolutely has a fanbase. There is a reason Kenny Omega used it for an entrance once and grown men were crying when this happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmau-gRMr_U
Two, it was a 3 seed and had the brackets. There were bracket votes keeping this close. Three, the match started ten minutes late, so there wasn't the initial surge of anti-votes. Four, and perhaps most importantly, it has a Switch port and was the defending contest champion in a winnable match. This all combined to allow Undertale to avoid serving penance. I'm convinced that without a Smash character, a Switch port, and the much higher seed in a winnable match, this might have been in the same realm as what Draven had to go through two years ago. Hell if you remove all that and just switch the seeding around in this match, Octopath might have won 70-30. But all of those things converged together to make this a very respectable loss. I legitimately and truly thought Octopath would get 60% here. It's on record and everything! http://oraclechallenge.com/archives.php?contest=SC2k20&type=match&match=21
So for Undertale to lose close actually surprised me, though for some reason it losing shocked the board and turned this place into a sewer for a few days. Hell if there's something filthier than a sewer, I'd love to know what it is. Whatever that is is what the arguments were on Board 8 while this match was happening. Can't we just be happy Octopath Traveler won and call it a day? Do you people still have to argue over whether or not rallying is bad? Not only is there is no argument here, but Undertale happened five years ago. Get over it. Rallies keep these contests interesting, and the anti-fun brigade is just objectively wrong on this. They're also some of the most immature, obnoxious people this forum has ever seen.
Did you know that if you enjoyed Undertale winning the contest five years ago and/or enjoy rallies, you're a victim blamer? No, really, that's an actual quote from a well known Board 8 user on this web site who also happens to be a moderator. Forget burn victims, orphans, the families of addicts, people in poverty, women forced into the sex trade, slaves, victims of domestic violence, the people killed by communism, or anyone else that is a true victim of their circumstance. The real victims in this life are those who don't like rallies during a contest on GameFAQs. That's what actually matters.
This individual asked for his name to be kept off the record, so out of respect and journalistic integrity the usernames in this image are censored:
https://i.imgur.com/1loKXXm.png
Yes folks, if you enjoy rallying you are a victim blamer. That is an honest to goodness real quote. It gets better, too. From the same user:
"I don't see how I can lay it out any more clearly than I did here. If the actually sane "there's no middle ground" people want to actually refute this stuff then great, otherwise it's just thoughtless."
If you disagree with the anti-fun brigade or call out their hypocrisy -- don't think for one second that these people don't love rallies when they agree with the winner -- you are not a sane human being. That is a word for word quote. That is how dumb this mod thinks you are -- this individual, who will remain nameless, thinks you are mentally ill for daring to enjoy yourself in this life. Is it any wonder no one uses our site anymore when these are the types of people in charge of keeping the peace on it? Most mods used to act like DetroitDJ and Team Rocket Elite -- friendly, pleasant, fair, and knowledgeable. Now, a good number of them act like the one quoted here and a lot of users are on board with this type of mentality. People like to throw around the excuse of our site being dated causing the low traffic and collapsing vote totals, but the truth is no one uses our site anymore because of people like this pushing everyone away. Can you imagine the mindset required for thinking everyone who dares to disagree with your position is mentally ill? Couldn't be that you have a point that some might naturally disagree with. Couldn't be that one side of this issue is insufferable. Nope, disagreeing with anti-fun brigade must mean you're mentally ill. If that doesn't sum up why this site is done for, nothing ever will. I could draw some very obvious conclusions here about the political leanings of people who think this way, but I'll leave that one alone. Draw your own conclusions.
Octopath Traveler, largely due to having enough natural strength to get around Undertale's advantages and getting boosted by juuuuust enough anti-votes to put this match away, was in a very interesting spot here. I think in a vacuum without 2015 ever existing, Undertale wins this match. But because Octopath won under some incredible circumstances, it was a wild card moving forward. Could it win this fourpack? Could it catch fire and be given a rallied thank you run? Who knows. But it's a Square JRPG on the Nintendo Switch, so it didn't win this match by default. It had to earn it, and earn it it did.
Ctes's Analysis[]
The biggest upset of round 1, at least if you go by prediction percentage, sees previous Best Game Ever III winner lose to a Switch exclusive RPG that people had mixed feelings about. It has since been released on PC too, but let’s face it, that didn’t matter much. Unlike the other big upsets of round 1, this one also cost a lot of people 3 points. It was bigger in every way. There were even a very few people taking it further than that due to its previous result, but all experts knew Super Mario Odyssey was out of reach. A few people predicted Undertale to lose today, but it was the clear favorite with most people picking rather high percentages for it too. The ones that thought it would be anti-voted picked Shovel Knight to beat it in round 2 instead. What happened here is a mix of a bunch of things that was the perfect cocktail for getting Undertale out early.
The initial reaction was a huge number of anti-votes. Last contest we saw Amerterasu absolutely kill Draven in a contest that saw few blowouts. Draven was naturally weak, we knew that, but that result was out of proportions. Sans himself also looked very bad though not as bad. We have also seen various Poll of the Day questions show that we don’t forget the contest invasions and are bitter ever after. Most people did not expect it to mean Undertale would lose to Octopath Traveler of all things, but that anti-votes came surprised no one.
In truth it’s probably not that bad. I don’t doubt that there were anti-votes for a second, but they probably don’t harm Undertale much worse than however much it’s boosted from the exposure last contest gave it. We’ve seen bandwagons lasting over several contests in the past. L-Block is the key example of this. While using a 4-way match to beat Link was a one-time opportunity, L-Block was significantly stronger in future contests than it started out being in 2007. Undertale is not a joke entry in the same way, but a bunch of our regulars played it because of the attention it got. Undertale is a perfect game to take advantage of such since it’s cheap and short. This result looked extremely weird at the time, but Undertale ends up landing almost right where it’s supposed to. The adjusted x-stats have Shovel Knight barely beating it. Obviously, those have as much uncertainty as you get, but everything is in line here.
It then comes down to the severe underestimation of Octopath Traveler. As someone who expected Undertale to underperform and picked Shovel Knight to beat it, I did not expend Octopath Traveler to take enough advantage of it to win. The game was quite hyped before release. Being revealed at the first true Switch presentation, it had a lot of attention for its traditional RPG elements and graphics. It was aimed at people like us. However, while the game did fine, it wasn’t spectacular by any means. I have not gotten around to play it myself yet, but the eight stories of the game made it repetitive and most characters weren’t very interesting, certainly not enough to compensate. I wonder how big it could’ve been here if that was more popular.
Because Square RPG on a Nintendo console is among the best criteria you can have on this site. Chrono Trigger is the best example obviously, but there are others. Look at how well Bravely Default ends up looking, we didn’t realize it yet, but this match had a lot to do with us just caring about Octopath. It would show next round. Tales of Symphonia is another good comparison. It’s not a Square RPG, but a RPG on a Nintendo console that lacks big RPG’s. Symphonia was almost unanimously liked, but the Gamecube wasn’t too popular. The Switch is however, so Octopath had the perfect console to get exposure.
The part of the reason that people predicted big percentages was the huge indie hype round 1 had. It was thought that Undertale just didn’t get to boost from it due to anti-votes, but it looks decent enough and could’ve won a lot of round 1 matches. Its draw was rather unfortunate, we just hadn’t realized yet. It’s probably still a hindrance being an indie game. Not because of the fact that they’re indie games of course, just that indie games require word of mouth to become big, while something like Octopath is riding high on its developer name.
Finally, I usually don’t express bitterness towards what happened in 2015, I mostly just express nothing. I’m not vengeful and do not judge Undertale differently because of it. I played it because of the contest too! It was quite enjoyable. I will however use this match as an opportunity to laugh at all the many people claiming that their love for Undertale was endless and that they truly did believe it was the greatest game ever made instead of being the hot new flavor of the time. Seriously, it’s one of the biggest moments of “what did we tell you?”. I didn’t mind using a flavor of the month kind of logic to vote in the contest, but the people saying so look so silly looking back. Almost none of them truly believed that, but just couldn’t realize it when confronted about it back then. Undertale is not the phenomenon the internet allowed it to be briefly, it’s not an all time great and it’s not the best game ever made anywhere. It’s just a pretty good and creative indie game with solid replay value. In that regard, it’s a shame it couldn’t get a winnable match when so many indie games could, but it had its fun last time.
Safer777's Analysis[]
The champion is back baby! Or not. We have 2 RPG's that were very well received from both fans and critics. Undertale was EVERYWHERE back in 2015. Seriously it has such an active community and it is a game that was made from 1 guy only! I haven't played it but people that have say that it is excellent. It is not a traditional RPG and this is the biggest thing it has for it. The characters are truly great and memorable, nobody denies that. I mean you can even finish the entire game without killing a single enemy! Seriously, name me one other RPG that this is possible. OT came out of nowhere and it is such an old school game that it is too old school for even people that like this thing! But it did well too and a sequel got announced too.
So for the match. As you see Undertale lost. But why? People say anti votes. I don't believe it. Register users voted more for it than the unregistered ones. We all knew it wouldn't do so well now of course but this bad? Yeah Sans couldn't even score 30% on Pac Man in Character Contest but still. He got into Smash Ultimate! As a costume at least. We all knew that if it was against a stronger game we wouldn't pick it to win, but it is not that OT is a monster. This match also got in the top 5 of the most suprising Round 1 results and it makes sense. We rarely make Round 1 matches wrong except if we have unknown games/characters and we don't have any info on them. Sad part is that there was some kind of flame war on stats topic. Seriously people? After 5 years that barely anybody new is coming to this site? People are still pity about this sort of thing? I should known that after spending 18 years on this site but I thought we would have grown up. Not really.
Also rallied games/characters do really bad without rallies. I mean when they use only their natural strength. We had Draven losing to Round 1 in the previous contest and now Undertale losing to Round 1 too. Plus Sans lost in Round 1 in the previous contest oo So yeah. Unexpected result for sure, expected stupid bickering between some regulars on this board. So there you go. I guess congrats to people that got this match right?
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Oh hey speaking of hated champions.
The vote total for this match was the highest of the contest so far, but not by an overwhelming amount. And I have to say, this was not an outcome I expected! I figured that there was a chance that Undertale got anti-voted into oblivion the way Draven did in 2018 (and Sans himself to a lesser extent), but that if that didn't happen, Undertale probably had the natural strength to win its fourpack. Instead...this happened. The match actually got off to a slightly delayed start, for no apparent reason, and when it did, Undertale got off to a quick start, before fading back to closeness. By the freeze, Undertale was up by 5 votes, and on the next update, it raised that lead to 7. And then, bam, 41 vote swing, Octopath up by 34, and it never looked back.
And it wasn't the registered voters killing it, either, although they were likewise motivated to come out in higher numbers. With the registered voters, Octopath won 4779-4436. On any previous day, 4436 would've easily been a majority of registered voters--hell, Bastion was at 4054! It was the unregistered voters who buried it, 4245-3229. Also the most unregistered voters of the contest so far, but it was enough of a blowout that 3229 would not, in fact, constitute half of any day's unregistered voters. (It would've come close on Day 1, where unregistered voters numbered in the 6500s.) We did get confirmation that all the usual spots from 2015 weren't allowing rally topics, which begs the question, where did these extra votes come from?
Also, the mythical "casuals" didn't see this coming either. 21.29% prediction percentage in Round 1 was the fifth-lowest of all time, trailing only a pair of lolChief results (Yuna in 2013 at #1 and Sub-Zero in 2010 at #4) and a pair of 2009 matches (in)famous for very different reasons: the Oblivion/Symphonia/God of War/GTA:SA fatal fourway at #2, which had the smallest spread between first and fourth of any fourway and is remembered fondly for it, and the Super Mario Bros 3 match that had the largest spread between first and second of any fourway and is laughed about as a result at #3.