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Results[]

Round One

Poll6072
Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Ulti's Analysis[]

Poll 6072
Division Division 3
Match # 22
Match Date Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Oracle
Expectations
Undertale - 29.65%
1 for - 105 against
GameFAQs
Prediction
Undertale - 23.38%

Before getting into anything else, I want to defend Mass Effect 3. It is the second strongest game in this contest after all, so someone around here needs to give it some love.

First and foremost, "it's not Mass Effect 2" is a dumb reason not to like a video game. 2 went above and beyond every call of duty to get you attached to the last, and had some of the best storytelling in gaming history. 3 could never live up to that, especially given how the reapers finally reached the galaxy to invade it. The whole point is 3 doesn't have time to develop anyone or anything new. You're trying not to go fucking extinct. There's no time to sit around doing 3 loyalty missions to solve James Vega's daddy issues. I know the game does technically give you infinite time (we're not exactly playing Majora's Mask here, though a looming clock probably would have improved the plot!), but the point is that you're not meant to get attached to anything new. 3 was not meant to be your first game in the series. You were already supposed to be attached to everything.

The gameplay is the best in the series, outside X having 398 different functions and directly ripping off the awful roll garbage from Gears of War. Not good in a cover shooter when X puts you in cover. Besides that, this game does the best job in all three of making all the jobs feel different. Engineers, Adepts, and Soldiers are NOTHING alike. Story and gameplay are there... for 99% of the game.

I played Mass Effect 3 after the emergency DLC that added content to the ending, so I suppose I can't really understand or respect how dumb the original ending was. I've watched it on youtube, and yeah I can see why people hated the ending itself. But the events leading up to it are not as bad as people make them out to be. Yes, we'd be better off not knowing the motivation for the reapers. Yes, the final character's logic is idiotic and was proven wrong by 3's own events. Yes, we'd be better off if everything were completely ambiguous the second Shepard entered that final elevator. But it's not THAT bad, and certainly not worth crapping on and punishing the entire game. Why punish the final 1% of the final game in a series when you've loved everything leading up to it? Plenty of works of fiction have bad endings, but get respected independent of said ending.

The ending of Return of the King sucks. The ending of Fight Club sucks. The ending of Final Fantasy 7 sucks. The ending of Superman (1978 version) sucks. The ending of Seinfeld REALLY sucks. And on and on and on. It doesn't change all of these things being good leading up to the bad ending. Why does Mass Effect 3 get punished as a whole for a bad ending? My theory is that gamers are whiny entitled brats who will never be happy with anything, though I'm sure other reasons exist -- Mass Effect 2 being a godlike game being among them.

Then there's the multiplayer, which I spent 600 hours on (http://social.bioware.com/n7hq/?name=Ultimaterializer&platform=ps3). It's a buggy, laggy mess, and I still had an absolute blast with it anyway. The shorthand reason why is JOB SYSTEM. The longer reason is that it's unbelievably fun to play. It's horde mode, where you go through 10 waves of increasing difficulty before an 11th "fight for your life and escape after 2 minutes" wave. There are 4 overall difficulties, ranging from bronze to platinum, and as you play more you unlock stronger weapons and characters and such. There are also 4 types of enemies -- Reapers, Geth, Cerberus, and Collectors. The thrill of unlocking everything is great, as is the journey to get good enough to carry platinums. These days I can boot up the Geth Trooper Soldier spec'd for max shields, the Acolyte pistol, and Flamer, and just burn everything to death in seconds. If you go through my page there, you'll see the insane amount of stuff you can unlock and play around with. I've done just about everything in the multiplayer, and it's one of my favorite game experiences of all time. Starting out as a garbage-ass level 1 nobody and becoming one of the best online players in Mass Effect 3 was a blast.

I'll get to my Undertale love in round 2, but in round 1 I was rooting for Mass Effect 3 as I hadn't yet played Undertale or learned how ungodly amazing it was. It's funny to think about how our contest champion wouldn't have won a single match if its opponent managed to avoid 500 anti-votes in the first match, but like I said during the Halo/Minecraft writeup, rallies require a lot of luck. Undertale had a great round 1 opponent, and it just snowballed from there.

For 17 hours, this was a perfectly normal, run-of-the-mill poll. It was a standard 64-36 beating that would have been forgotten 5 minutes after the match ended. But then a lone user named trace excalibur made a post on tumblr that changed the entire direction of this contest. All he did was ask people to vote for Undertale in the match. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a big fan rooting for his game to do well, which is something we'd seen thousands of times before in these contests. I don't know if someone else managed to get anything going before trace did, but his blog post on tumblr is the earliest thing I can find. By all means correct me if this is wrong.

A few minutes later at 5:15, a reddit topic went up on r/undertale. Then twitter got involved. Then 4chan and Facebook got involved. And before long, we were off to the races and watching the beginnings of the greatest contest run in this site's history.

Before getting into the ridiculous numbers of this match, I need to put in perspective just how nuts this was. Our biggest 1v1 comeback was Sonic beating Crono in 2006, with Sonic coming back from being down 2207 votes. Our biggest comeback overall before this match was Draven/Jak/Chie in 2013, in which Draven came back from being down 2483 before catching a rally of his own.

Big numbers to be sure, and very impressive records to set over 11 years of contests. Undertale would render them completely irrelevant. at 4:40 pm, with a mere 7 hours and 20 minutes to go in the entire match, Mass Effect 3 had a peak lead of 9252 votes. I'll say this again. 9252 votes. Even though the rally pieces would get put into place over the next hour or so, it still took some time to get the ball rolling. So while cuts were happening and momentum was building, it wasn't anything overly insane and wasn't remotely close to the pace needed for Undertale to actually win the match. At 6 pm, with 6 hours left, the lead was 8603. The comeback quota at this time was 120 votes per update.

It was at exactly this time where Undertale just went completely berserk. We're talking Undertale getting hundreds of votes per update, while Mass Effect 3 was struggling to even get 80 or 90. There were updates here where Undertale would get in excess of 200, 250, 300, even 350 or more votes, while Mass Effect 3 was pulling in 80 at a time. It was the perfect storm of Undertale being a hyped new game and having a rabid fanbase, and Mass Effect 3 being a game that is unbelievably easy to rally against. Had even one point of the rally faltered, it might have failed. But when all the major players all agree that Mass Effect 3 needed to lose in a display of gaming justice, you have a problem. On top of that, this was genuinely fueled by Undertale's fans wanting the game to do well so it got more exposure.

It would culminate in Undertale erasing a 9252 vote lead in a little over 6 hours, with the bulk of the work being done after 6 pm. It's a number so high, and a push so inexplicably unreal that you just had to be there and see it with your own eyes to actually believe what was going on. Reading this writeup will not do it justice for you. It isn't just the number itself, but the sheer speed of it. Doing it that quickly is insane. There was no resistance once the lead was breached, either, as Undertale would go on to win the poll by 1056 votes. To pull this off, it would pull in these numbers after 6 pm.

(6)Undertale - 14965 [73.82%]
(11)Mass Effect 3 - 5306 [26.18%]
Total Votes - 20271

There was a lot of predictable whining once this happened, with the crux of it being people complaining that we had another Draven on our hands and that another contest was about to be ruined and decided by outside forces. First off, this has literally never been a "GameFAQs only" contest. There has been rallying since 2002, and the entire internet getting involved has been a thing since 2002: latest?cb=20080212045812

Secondly, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with a legal contest rally. Board 8 just likes to complain when such a rally goes against their predetermined and false narratives of what is and is not "morally allowed" in a contest. Did Board 8 complain when Frog rallied against Liquid Snake and Master Chief in 2004? No. Starcraft against Halo in 2004 (before turning on Starcraft the second the almighty Nintendo got beat)? No. Solid Snake when it started beating Final Fantasy 7? No. Pokemon when it started going godmode in the late 2000s? No. Majora's Mask when it did God's work and beat Brawl? No. Melee when it almost beat Undertale in the semifinal of this contest, two rounds after whining nonstop about Melee rallying to beat Chrono Trigger? No. L-Block when it went on its crazy run? No. Chrono Trigger when it came damn close to out-rallying Melee? No. The Trainers beating Cloud and Seph? No.

Only rallies that are deemed outsiders get whined about here, and the incessant whining makes it unbelievably easy for other sites to look at GameFAQs and only see us as whiny crybabies. I've said it before and it bears repeating until people knock it off and learn their lesson: you don't get to pick and choose which rallies are allowed. You either support all of them or none of them. If you support none of them, I respect that opinion. If you pick and choose, you're likely to get screencapped and made to go viral every time this happens from now on. And you should, until you learn your lesson. It's basic logic; you cause a de-push by completely no-selling. Had people not whined so much, it wouldn't have caused the perfect storm of "Undertale is an amazing game!" plus "Look at these turbonerds on the contest board" that kept getting quoted by undertale-shitposts on tumblr every round.

On top of that, there was no guarantee at this time that the contest was over, at least had people been smart and not started complaining so much. By causing such a massive buzz, they fed the beast. Had this been given positive energy instead, you'd be looking at having to beat Fallout 3 right after 4 was released, then Super Mario World, then Pokemon RBYG (tumblr's favorite franchise, and a game that could win any contest it wanted if the fans would ever go full force to rally for it) or Mario 3, then Mario 64, then Melee or FF7 or Chrono Trigger, then Ocarina in the final. That is an insane contest path, though having Mass Effect 3 first to get the ball rolling, followed by a strong-yet-not-Nintendo game in round 2 was the perfect chain of events. But we'll get into future matches as they come, I don't want to give the entire PCA right here and now. The point is, people on this site did every bit as much feeding of the monster as so-called outside forces did. And they made it very, very easy for people to root for Undertale to do well.

Lastly, after this match I went and played Undertale for myself. To say it's deserving of the hype doesn't really put it into proper perspective. Undertale is absolutely one of the best games ever made and deserved every amount of hype generated by this contest. I won't repeat my entire opinion about the game since I wrote a review for it (http://www.gamefaqs.com/PC/180989-undertale/reviews/161494), but I would highly recommend you play the game if you haven't yet. It's a legendary title, and once I played it I was definitely on the bandwagon for it to make a deep run in this contest. Following along and rooting for it is the most fun I've ever had in one of these things, and I'm saying this as a guy that won a contest once. Following along with and rooting for Undertale was better. The game and its community really are that good.

As of this writing, there's a post-contest poll asking if people bought Undertale as a result of the contest. 25% of people are saying they refuse to buy it out of spite, which is just ridiculous. You're refusing to play a great game because of how a poll went? Ridiculous. Someone else's opinion, or someone else acting silly should not be any factor whatsoever in whether or not to play a video game.

In regards to cheating accusations, from Allen himself:

Howdy all. I've reviewed the logs over the past few hours and there's absolutely no funny business going on here. We've seen people rallying in roughly equal numbers from rallies on tumblr, reddit, and 4chan. This isn't a group of hackers trying to mess with our contest, it's a shared love for a new and popular game across multiple fanbases.

Undertale isn't exactly a trivial game, like some seem to believe. It's the 33rd most played Steam game right now. It was higher seeded than ME3 because it had more nominations and higher reviews and traffic. It's a bit of a surprise to most people (I picked ME3 in my bracket), but really maybe it shouldn't have been.

Don't forget, rallies are to be expected, and are even covered in the contest description: "This is not a contest to see which game is your favorite, or even which one is the best rated. It's all a big popularity contest, and visitors who have never visited GameFAQs before will be sure to stop in and vote."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzpTB-QZufc


Ctes's Analysis[]

This match was never doubted by anyone really. ME3 is frowned upon mainly because of the ending. I played it when it came out first and I enjoyed it all the way through until the end. I heard they fixed it a bit with some DLC, but it can't be completely excused. The game is still good overall though, but it seemed obvious it would be the weakest of the three Mass Effect games. It also had the most predictable path. The first game had a debatable first round match but was never escaping round 2. The second game would go against Starcraft and the weakened Metal Gear series in a fun set of matches. The third one was simply gonna cream Undertale before getting creamed by Fallout 3, not really any fun in that path, but they can't all be. Undertale wasn't going to be a big thing here, it was a victory to a good bunch that it even made the bracket, and it's seeding was quite impressive, but it wasn't going to win. Not sure if ME3 failing to double says good things about Undertale or bad things about ME3, but 65-35 is generally a boring match, so let's move on to the next...

Well, considering it was boring match for most of the day and was expected to be so, I don't anyone foresaw that this would be the match that changed the bracket for good. Suddenly Undertale cut 24 votes, nothing remarkable, it had cut before and sure this was a little bigger, but who cares. Next updates it cut 55 votes and people took notice. It was interesting to see Undertale start doing something. We tried to look for the obvious rally without knowing what was about to happen still. Undertale would continue these cuts the next few updates. Remarkable, but not nearly enough if it continued and we all knew it would slow down eventually. It was already slowing down a bit, so that was probably it… only for it to start rolling again. Undertale had in almost one and a half hour shred 800 votes, which is really darn impressive. The board was definitely on the watch now and figured out that the source was tumblr. If you weren't at the board when it happened, you likely missed it all, because there was really no reason to pay attention to any of the matches today outside of the first few udpates, all four were boring. Cutting 40-60 votes an update is no joke, especially with hour low votals, but ME3 despite going a sizable part of it was still 8.6k votes ahead. It was too late. Undertale would go out looking impressive, but you can't flip over 9000 votes in only 7 hours, we knew this. This wasn't Link or Draven. Had these Undertale rallies started earlier, then maybe it could happen, but it was just too late.

We thought that at least. The next update Undertale cut off 200 votes. That was when things screamed out danger. The next update was over 300 votes. Rally power was definitely still a thing. The board exploded with panic mostly but also some people enjoying it. People was already calling Undertale a winner. There were ramblings about Hearthstone > Ocarina of Time out of nowhere, it was crazy. We went from having four boring matches to having a board out of control. Of course the Hearthstone upset were just people overreacting, but the rest really wasn't. Undertale was on its way to winning this match. A few times it slowed down a little bit. Some were predicting that this wouldn't last, but they were not yet aware of how things worked a tumblr. Just another re blog and Undertale would keep rolling. There's also that whenever it started to slow down a little, it would just go big again a few updates later. But it was not over yet. While this was rally power in a league of its own (pun intended), that 9000 lead wouldn't be easy to come. Time was Undertale's biggest opponent here.

It did slow down a bit I guess, but ME3 was still looking to lose. People tried to counter rally, but it was totally ineffective. ME3 is hard enough to rally as it is because the Mass Effect fanbase itself dislikes it, but the main reason is that it was ahead. People see the match, notice the lead and decide things looks fine. You can't expect outside people to realize what it happening here, sadly. The counter rallies never stood a chance. Creative's updater started going crazy here spitting out updates constantly. It was really confusing. You'd often think Undertale wouldn't make it, but then it turned out to be only a one minute update. It couldn'tbe avoided. With only 40 minutes to go, Undertale took the lead. It managed to put the lead up by over 1000 votes in the remaining time. What we just witnessed here was history. The single biggest comeback in history happened out of nowhere. People came the next day totally confused as to what just happened those seven hours. The contest had changed for good. We looked at possible rally potentials in the bracket, but didn't consider Undertale. The timing was perfect. It came out at just the right time and hit big at just the right crowd.

The aftermath deserves mention to. Personally, I was sorta depressed after this match. I was so hyped about having a contest again and this match made major damage on my interest. The next few days I didn't really care. Undertale had far from won the contest yet, but it was looking likely that we were seeing another Draven and I really don't see the fun in that. I mean, if you like Undertale that's cool and all, but I wouldn't enjoy this no matter what game it was, trust me. I don't see why people believe this is fun to watch, it's pretty much just our contests being completely decided by outside forces. This match was interesting because it kicked in later I guess, so let's save this rant for another match.

A bunch of people believed that there had to be ceiling of the Undertale rallying. Fallout 3 was a far stronger game and should be able to overcome this, especially with Fallout 4 having just been released so rally potential was there. Other people realized it depended on tumblr's interests and pointed to RBY being the savior because Pokemon is huge on tumblr too. Some people, mainly Heroic Mario, pointed to OoT as the savior, but it was always gonna be RBY or nothing. If a game like Undertale reached the finale, all would be over. Had OoT met Undertale in round 2 it would've probably stopped this, the same goes for RBY. That was just not the case. Finally, a group of people were saying that if Undertale was able to win this match it would go on to win the contest. And it did. They ended up being right, but it was never really a lock. We get back to this in future rounds, but there were at least two matches that could've gone both ways. It was not for certain that Undertale would win the contest yet, we still needed to see at full force, but I had the fear too.

The worst part about this match was how it affected the other matches going on at the same time as well as the matches following it. I know that no result was actually ever changed because of rally spillover and thank heavens for that, but as a stats nerd, it's really sad to see it just wrecking everything it comes across. One thing is its own path, but I wish other matches would be unaffected. The idea of having several matches at the same time is fantastic, even though SBAllen later took it too far, but outside rallies is a real hole in the format. There's no reason to complain too much about that, since we dodged the bullet of having a match flipped because of it.

Mass Effect 3 was just the perfect opponent for Undertale to get rolling, really. I don't think it could've asked for a better one in fact. If Undertale faced simply an ever so slightly stronger opponent, it would've lose this match. It took Undertale until the last hour to take the lead, you a little big stronger the opponent and it just misses the victory. The first Mass Effect was an #11 seed too, I think maybe that would've been enough to stop it. Had Undertale faced a much weaker game like say The World Ends with You, it likely wouldn't have been the same either, because it probably wouldn't need these insane rallies to beat that and then it would've have gained the traction to beat a #3 seed next round perhaps. But having such a close and intense match that was in doubt until the last two hours made everyone upon their eyes and look at this “underdog” and its potential.

There's also the thing that if Undertale had a really weak opponent, maybe our board wouldn't have made all the stupid backfiring whining we saw. Seriously, they're not completely to blame because they didn't exactly start this, but I'm inclined to think that if BracketEntry, ExTha and MWC hadn't been complete idiots during this and the following Undertale matches, a game like RBY would've stopped this. If is beyond me how they can be so stupid especially when we already saw how it worked with Draven. Outside sources likes seeing board 8 whine and wants those goddamn salty tears from us, because apparently they never grew up. No outside sources appears to be smart enough to realize that every forum has their few loud whiners, but that they don't make up the entire forum. BracketEntry became famous after this match and outside of GameFAQs became the face of board 8. No user could be a worse face of board 8 than him. It's a frickin' alt! This becomes a lot worse later, but it started here. I like Extha and at times MWC too, but man did they deserve to have their heads smacked together after this day.

As someone who didn't enjoy these huge rallies in the slighest, I was far more annoyed by some of our own users today. This is especially because the Undertale community was being pretty nice this first match. It gave them good reputation the whole contest, even though it wasn't entirely true during future matches. They had an image of just being passionate fans after this match. The guy who made the original tumblr post was a main factor in that. He came to board 8, with an account from 2005, and talked a bit with us about it, and he was really nice. When told that board 8 hated their contests becoming jokes, he was legitimately sad about it being seen as a joke. He just wanted Undertale to do well because he really likes the game and would make clear in future rounds that the intention was not to piss us off but to show love for Undertale. I mean, you can't really hate a guy like that even if you hate what he's going right? This just made things even better for Undertale. It was the nice passionate fans against the whiners from GameFAQs. We stood no chance. In later matches, parts of the Undertale community was being just as terrible as our worst users, but the image was there and couldn't be changed.

External Links[]

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2015 Contest Matches

Round One
CT > R&C:UYA
DQVIII > P3
MMX > Batman:AC
FFX > HL1
Melee > Portal
Pokemon GSC > TWEWY
KHII > MGS4
TLoU > Halo 3
FFVI > ACII
TTYD > ToS
KotOR > Xenogears
Zelda:WW > Pokemon X/Y
Smash Wii U > Planescape
ME > SMG2
Halo > Minecraft
FFVII > Journey
SMB3 > AoE2
Pokemon RBY > Tetris
Sonic 2 > Portal 2
Uncharted 2 > Walking Dead
Fallout 3 > Life is Strange
Undertale > ME3
FFVIII > GTA:VC
SMW > AC:NL
Skyrim > PW:AA
GE007 > Diablo II
Metroid Prime > Morrowind
HL2 > Demon's Souls
Mario 64 > MK8
FFT > RE2
Zelda:TP > SoA
Persona 4 > 999

Zelda:OoT > Hearthstone
Suikoden II > MH4U
Okami > Warcraft III
FFIX > KH1
DKC2 > Xenoblade
FE:A > Mario Maker
BK > Baldur's Gate II
SotN > PW:T&T
Zelda:LttP > Cave Story
FFIV > Deus Ex
MGSV > Perfect Dark
Dark Souls > Civ V
Super Metroid > CoD4
Mario Galaxy > DA:O
FFXII > Bloodborne
Zelda:MM > Valkyria
GTAV > Shenmue
SMRPG > Oblivion
GTA:SA > Shovel Knight
CC > WoW
Witcher 3 > Isaac: Rebirth
MGS2 > RE
Fallout:NV > BioShock Inf
RE4 > Paper Mario
MGS > Splatoon
EB > Borderlands 2
SotC > TF2
RDR > Bayonetta 2
MGS3 > Mother 3
BioShock > SH2
Starcraft > Destiny
ME2 > VLR

Round Two
CT > DQVIII
FFX > MMX
Melee > Pokemon GSC
KHII > TLoU
FFVI > TTYD
Zelda:WW > KotOR
Smash Wii U > ME
FFVII > Halo
Pokemon RBY > SMB3
Sonic 2 > Uncharted 2
Undertale > Fallout 3
SMW > FFVIII
Skyrim > GE007
Metroid Prime > HL2
Mario 64 > FFT
Zelda:TP > Persona 4
Zelda:OoT > Suikoden II
FFIX > Okami
DKC2 > FE:A
SotN > BK
Zelda:LttP > FFIV
Dark Souls > MGSV
Super Metroid > SMG
Zelda:MM > FFXII
SMRPG > GTAV
CC > GTA:SA
MGS2 > Witcher 3
RE4 > Fallout:NV
MGS > EB
SotC > RDR
MGS3 > Bioshock
ME2 > Starcraft

R3 and following
CT > FFX
Melee > KHII
FFVI > Zelda:WW
FFVII > Smash Wii U
Pokemon RBY > Sonic 2
Undertale > SMW
Skyrim > Metroid Prime
Mario 64 > Zelda:TP
Zelda:OoT > FFIX
SotN > DKC2
Zelda:LttP > Dark Souls
Zelda:MM > Super Metroid
SMRPG > CC
RE4 > MGS2
MGS > SotC
MGS3 > ME2
Melee > CT
FFVII > FFVI
Undertale > Pokemon RBY
Mario 64 > Skyrim
Zelda:OoT > SotN
Zelda:LttP > Zelda:MM
SMRPG > RE4
MGS3 > MGS
Melee > FFVII
Undertale > Mario 64
Zelda:OoT > Zelda:LttP
SMRPG > MGS3
Undertale > Melee
Zelda:OoT > SMRPG
Undertale > Zelda:OoT



Melee > SMRPG

Grudge Matches
CT > FFVI
Pokemon RBY > Mario 64


Zelda:OoT > FFVII

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