Results[]
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 1 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 7 |
| Match Date | Saturday, March 28, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Bastion - 41.54% 5 for - 59 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Bastion - 33.76% |
| User Votes |
The Walking Dead - 3987 Bastion - 4054 |
| Anonymous Votes |
The Walking Dead - 2912 Bastion - 3803 |
Let's get the obvious out of the way -- I absolutely detest The Walking Dead. I hate everything about it. The comic blows, the fans are obnoxious, the TV show is overhyped trash that's gone on for far too long, and most importantly given this contest, the video game is gigatrash. Frankly, the entire franchise is gigatrash and I would almost go far enough to say the same about the zombie apocalypse craze. I don't care who defends it or what reason they try to give me. The only good thing to ever happen was the bat scene, because it made those indefensibly obnoxious people suffer. I've made a lot of strides in not being as much of a vindictive jackass anymore, but with certain things I cannot help it and The Walking Dead is absolutely on that list.
Watching The Walking Dead choke all over itself wasn't quite as satisfying as the internet melting down over season 7, but I'll still take it. Bastion is a wonderful video game, but I honestly didn't think anyone had played it. I think in all my time on Board 8, I've seen maybe three people talk about it. It's the entire reason I picked TWD to actually win this match, and I wasn't alone. We all kind of figured people had only heard of one of these poll options, and that TWD would win by default.
As luck would have it, and as Dragon Quest 11 would show us in round 2, it was actually Bastion that won by default. Both of these games are weak, but Bastion was slightly less weak. I also would love to think I'm not alone in wanting this atrocious zombie franchise to just go away, but who really knows. The added bonus was how good this match was for awhile, which makes Bastion winning it all that much better.
When this started, Walking Dead had most of the bracket votes and was well over 60%. It had a lead of 70, and though it lost a few percents and votes by the freeze, that can happen with these low vote totals. We see random cuts all the time that don't mean much. When Walking Dead went back up a little with the first real update, people assumed the match was over.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why they play the games. Bastion erased the entire miniscule lead in a flash, and after a small fight from Walking Dead, Bastion kicked off its quest to take out the trash with a 62 vote swing. Bastion tried building a lead at this point, but the night time is zombie time after all. This thing stayed stuck at 50-100 votes all the way past midnight, but once midnight hit the night vote went to Bastion. Slightly.
After some more stalling, the morning vote came around to bury The Walking Dead for good. And good riddance, too. You won't find many cases where I'm happier to lose a point than this match. Not only that, but Bastion deserved the publicity. It is such a beautiful, well-done video game. Not only did I get to watch it win a close contest match as an underdog, but I got to watch it beat a franchise that I just loathe. Sure it was just one point in the grand scheme, but so what. Some things matter more than contest points, and The Walking Dead losing is one of those things.
Also notable here is the old Day 2 Curse rearing its head once again! It's insanity how often this happens. Look at this list, all Day 2 Curse upsets, and I'm not even counting the ones that were unexpected close matches:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/941-north-division-round-1-spyro-the-dragon-vs-morrigan-aensland
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2067-mushroom-division-round-1-ness-vs-carl-johnson
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2864-division-1-round-1-arthas-diablo-kos-mos-mega-man (remember, we didn't know what the hell "LFF" was at the time)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3245-division-1-round-1-link-luke-shadow-zidane
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4070-north-division-round-1-rock-band-2-vs-deus-ex
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6052-best-game-ever-day-1-dragon-quest-viii-vs-persona-3 (yes I am aware this was actually day 1)
That all led up to this silly result. In division one, in about half of our contests, either the 8/9 match or some match from the second batch has some goofy result in it. It never fails!
Ctes's Analysis[]
Sekiro won the match with relative ease as it was supposed to, but for anyone that picked Sekiro to round 3, this was not what you had hoped for. Ni no Kuni is beyond irrelevant at this point and is probably only remember for being animated by Studio Ghibli. While it is a very pretty game indeed, it’s rather forgettable and I would not have been surprised to see it not make the field at all.
Let’s stay at the pretty animations part for a bit though. While I switched to Monster Hunter > Sekiro after this day of matches, I did not think this was as bad as people thought. Because if you have not played either of the two, Ni no Kuni stands out quite a bit. I can see people thinking “Well, it looks nice and I like Studio Ghibli” here. I could’ve done that in some matters myself if I didn’t care for either game. That’s despite having actually attempted to play Ni no Kuni. I just got bored of it and never got around to finishing it.
Now, although round 2 certainly did not do that line many favors, I’m about ready to pick it up again on the other side of the contest. Because while Sekiro didn’t get close to winning next round, this whole fourpack ends up looking good, all in the better half of the bracket. It’s hard a bit hard to imagine, but I think it makes the above point good after all. You could argue that it just has the right genre for us to care about it, but there are certain games today and yesterday proving it is not necessarily so. I have a hard time imagining Ni no Kuni put up much of a number on anything, but it seems like the kind of game that’s also hard to blowout entirely. I would not pick it above FFXV or Hollow Knight as the stats suggest, but I still think the stats tell us something. The game is forgettable to many, but rarely ever disliked, and we all remember what it is when seeing it in a poll. Sekiro is also a recent game and here on the other side of the contest, being a year old has not looked to do anything any favors anymore, we’re slow on this site. So it’s a good game for Ni no Kuni to perform well on while going out.
Safer777's Analysis[]
An upset on the 2nd day! This contest is good! But in all seriousness this was a big suprise. EVERYONE(on board 8 at least)got this match wrong. And it makes sense. Everyone and their zombie grandmas knows about WD because of the TV series. And when WD Telltale came out it won so many awards that I lost count. It revived the Adventure genre too. As for Bastion it was good when it came out but now it has been surpassed by many games.
So the match. It was close for a few hours actually, but eventually Bastion just kept rising and won. Why did this happen? Well the WD Telltale is very weak. That is. Even though 4 games have come out and the last game came out in the previous year too people just don't care I guess? No way Bastion is that popular. I mean it came out 9 years ago and it had no sequel either. The crew got this match completely wrong too and most of this site got this wrong. Look at the correct prediction rate. Only 1 out of 3 managed to get it right. So yeah. Too bad because WD Telltale has an amazing story.
And as per tradition we had the Day 2 Curse too! What that is? Well on the 2nd day on the contest, like every contest, we always have as board an upset that comes out of nowhere and we always go, well what exactly happened? So this happened here too! Ah tradition!
Tsunami's Analysis[]
While Day 2 of the contest was pretty bad for my bracket, it could've been worse. I took three upsets, and one of them paid off! Sadly it was the one that was facing the obvious winner of the eightpack in R2, so I was still screwed out of points in one R2 match no matter who won, but still, it softened the blow of being so far off base on Sekiro.
The Walking Dead was definitely the "safe" choice, because it was both the top option and had contest experience, sort of, while Bastion had none. I say "sort of" because this was both games' Games Contest debut, but The Walking Dead had managed to get two characters into the 2013 Character Battle. Thing is, they both sucked. Spyro vs. Clementine vs. Reyn had the closest Guru spread between the top two characters of any R1 match (though not the lowest prediction percentage for a favorite because there was one match where all three choices were above 20%), and then Spyro just absolutely dunked on Clem, winding up with close to 57% of the vote in a threeway. Lee Everett, meanwhile, was the Guru favorite over Mr. Game & Watch and Meat Boy, because it was assumed that G&W being basically just another avatar for Smash wouldn't be enough and that Meat Boy's ridiculous design would cancel out G&W's silly design and they'd "joke SFF" even though Meat Boy is literally a main protagonist whose name is in the title of his game. Yes it's still ridiculous, but it's not like the "joke characters" who are largely side characters with memes. Game & Watch won anyway, because even foddery Nintendo is still Nintendo and should never be underestimated. I got both of those right then and I got this one right now. The Walking Dead is not the type of game to be trusted to be worth anything in contests, ever. Kind of makes me wonder why I picked Life is Strange but you can chalk that up to Halo being another thing that should never be trusted in contests.
But here's where things get interesting. Whereas in the other seven matches over the first two days, the loser got nearly half of their raw votes from the unregistered users (only Life is Strange managed to even have a 300-vote disparity between registered and unregistered) and the winner received more than 1000 more votes from the registered than from the unregistered, in this match, that trend was reversed. Bastion's lead with the registered voters wasn't even 100 votes, at 4054-3987, but with unregistered users it was 3803-2912! It was largely the loser that benefited from the extra power of the registered bonus, making it closer than it should have been. Interestingly, this was also the only one of the first eight matches that was an upset, with just under 1 in 3 brackets getting it right. Hmmm...the number of registered votes for the first two days was just barely in the low 8000s. The number of brackets filled out, based on the prediction percentages, appears to be...8703! Holy crap, there are more brackets than there are registered voters! That wasn't the case in 2018; though the decrease in vote total is largely on the unregistered side, there were more registered voters in most of the 2018 matches than there have been so far in 2020, while the total number of brackets was just 7221. That's scary, because the general "line" on this site is that despite being largely millennials, we have the "boomer" mentality and are largely stuck in the 1990s. A contest entirely comprised of games from 2010 or later, it wouldn't at all be surprising if almost every voter had at least a few matches where they really didn't know much about the contestants and cared even less. Add in Allen forcing voters to vote in all four matches if they want to vote in any of them, and you get people voting with their brackets. I may have to go back over my Oracle and change every pick where I'm backing a Guru underdog, even though that would've burned me in this particular match, because it really feels like we might be in a situation where predictions and results have a higher correlation than in years past.
Oh, and I guess there's something else funny to be talked about, too. With 4 and a half hours left in the poll, The Walking Dead went on somewhat of a run, winning six straight updates before losing one by a mere two votes, then the two games alternated update wins for 40 minutes except one of Bastion's wins was actually a tie. Since Bastion had only been up by 927 when the run started, it looked as though we were going to see the match go the full 24 hours with the maximum lead under 1000. It would've been just the 47th 24-hour battle to go wire-to-wire within 1000 votes and just the 11th in which there were no lead changes past the first hour (and just the 17th with no lead changes past the first hour even after throwing the 12-hour matches into the mix). But then Bastion started winning updates again, and it looked inevitable that its lead would reach 4 digits. With an hour and 20 minutes left in the match, Bastion led by 990 votes. The next update rolled in, and Bastion won it...by one vote. Next update, same thing, 1-vote win for Bastion. Then came a 2-vote win for The Walking Dead, wiping out the previous two updates. The next two updates were dead stalls, and then TWD won one by 6. 30 of the 80 minutes stalled out, and TWD had refused to let it happen! Bastion spiked an 11-vote win on the next update, however, and cracked 1000 with 35 minutes to go, en route to a final margin of 1027. In the Golden Age of Contests, I'm sure the stats topic would've been losing their shit about "barriers" and TWD's valiant fight to keep the margin in triple digits when its fate was sealed, but it's hard to muster up any sort of enthusiasm when those dead splits were 12-12 and 14-14 and the 11-vote "spike" was 21-10. If two entrants in a 1v1 each managed to get 2/3 of an update within half an hour of each other in the old days, it'd be a sure sign that one of them was cheating. Now, it's just expected statistical variance because the updates tend to be on par with what the fodderiest of fodder was pulling in in the contest's glory days. Remember how lopsided some of the early matches in 2009 were? Wold you believe that the final update that managed to get Crystalis up to 4% even was only two votes fewer than The Walking Dead got on its final update? Or that in the final update of that ridiculous match where SMB3 pulled down over 75% of the total vote, the second-highest last-update total was exactly equal to Bastion's last update? These votes are awful and this contest is awful.