Results[]
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 7 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 50 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, April 08, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Rocket League - 53.70% 42 for - 19 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Rocket League - 61.47% |
| User Votes |
Rocket League - 4491 Dragon Ball FighterZ - 4134 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Rocket League - 3534 Dragon Ball FighterZ - 3443 |
Oh hey, it only took 50 matches, but we finally got a match that was actually in doubt after an hour! Imagine that! Figures it would be some random one-pointer, but so what? It finally felt like contest time, baby! The best thing about matches like this is there is no true way to know what will win going in -- two fresh contest entrants, both fodder, both with good reasons for backing them, and lots of meme potential.
For Rocket League backers, the game has something like 87 bajillion players and 3 million commercials. I don't care enough to look it up, but I would not be surprised if Rocket League had the highest play rate of any traditional sports game ever made. I get that Rocket League isn't "traditional" in the sense of a Madden or NBA 2K, but I use that term because if you count Mario Kart or Smash Bros in this discussion then it's obviously no contest.
The case for Dragon Ball was even simpler: https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Chrono_Trigger
There was no real way to know, so all we could do was wait for the match. When it finally started, it was exactly like an episode of Dragon Ball Z. 10 minutes to recap the last episode, 2 minutes of action, and 10 minutes to preview the next episode! :D
Actually, it wasn't quite like that. Dragon Ball won the board vote, and then Rocket League made things 50-50. At the freeze there was a very small Rocket League lead, which increased to 29 at the next update. Match over, right?
Nope! Dragon Ball brought it back to even almost immediately, and that's where this thing stayed -- deadlocked -- for well over an hour. That's when Rocket League started making a move, but it was a slow one. When Rocket League pushed for a 100 vote lead, things looked over, but Dragon Ball cut the lead in half before finally falling off. Rocket League built up a small lead late into the evening and into the overnight vote, and though Dragon Ball kept threatening to come back and make this a match, it was not to be. When the morning vote finally hit and decided the match, that morning vote went to Rocket League to seal things up for good. It made for an anticlimactic second half of the match, but the first half was like an old school F5 match. And yes, the Dragon Ball memes were running wild.
The match itself was quite good! All it really needed was higher stakes among stronger competitors, but that was coming in the later rounds. Round 1 of this contest was a series of blowouts, but that would change later on once the mini rallies on Reddit started. For now though, we all enjoyed this latest episode of Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball was never my thing -- anime in general was never my thing, really -- but I won't knock people who like it. The issue here is the American version of that anime was a meme for a reason. They would run these long recaps to get more episodes in, which I hear wasn't done in Japan at all. Maybe that has to do with why Rocket League won, who knows.
I would love to make a grand declaration about this match, but I honestly think Rocket League won it by default. Someone had to win it, right? As a side note, though Allen only plays for fun, this match knocked him off the leaderboard.
Ctes's Analysis[]
This was a very debated match for the 1 point that it’s worth. You could make a good case for each of them here and the match and it was close enough to make each pick a fine choice. Rocket League is clearly the bigger game here, but we never cared for sports games and we never cared for racing games. Even though it’s different, Rocket League is still both of those! We also don’t care for fighting games. This contest already showed the most recent Tekken, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter being complete trash. If we ever did the days are certainly over. Mario Kart and Smash Bros are exceptions to this, but they’re different from their genre and also has well established popular characters in them. People picking Dragon Ball FighterZ were hoping that having such a big franchise name might be enough to give it the win in a debated match.
The match was quite exciting for a while. The very early board vote seemed to favor Dragon Ball, but Rocket League had a super small lead up until the freeze where it led by 10 votes. An update later, Rocket League had extended this to only 29 votes, which should make you worry if you expected Rocket League to have the top option bracket votes. True enough, Dragon Ball took the lead 15 minutes into the match, although only by 5 votes. At that point, it seemed like it could run away with it, but Rocket League took the lead back again, though with a lead of only 2 votes. Fighting over who could have the smaller lead, Dragon Ball took the lead by 1 vote an update later, giving us perhaps the most exciting match of the contest so far.
Dragon Ball would make a small attempt at taking the match from there, but it struggled a bit. It took some bumpy updates for Dragon Ball to get its lead above 30, and it couldn’t keep it. Slowly cutting the lead down again, Rocket League went on to take the lead back and simultaneously show it was also capable of leading with exactly one vote. Then Rocket League would make a better attempt to build its lead, it slowly got up to the same place Dragon Ball was before bursting up to 81, looking like it was done. Dragon Ball had another form and it wasn’t even the final one, so in 5 updates that it all won, the lead was cut back down to the 30s. Rocket League would have none of that and spent two updates putting the lead back up in the 70s. Unfortunately, Dragon Ball revealed its final form and in one beastly update threw the lead back into the 30s, but that would be the closest point of getting the lead back for the rest of the match.
Rocket League defeated the final form and from that point forward it never really looked back again. The match ended close up being close enough and had lots of stalls, but once Dragon Ball got back its good updates, it was far too late, so no one really noticed. The match would ultimately end up below 1000 votes and contend The Walking Dead vs. Bastion for best match of the contest so far, not that it was a hard title to claim in round 1. Eventually, Celeste vs. Rayman Legends got that.
If you look at the prediction percentage and how close this was, it might’ve been decided simply by Rocket League being the top option and in extension to that having more brackets. Rocket League dying next round supports that claim. The weird thing about it is that Dragon Ball was best early on where most bracket votes tend to appear, but it might’ve gone on for longer than usually because we just simply do not care for either game all too much. It’s the best lesson to go for the top option when we care about neither, just like Overwatch vs. Death Stranding and Black Flag vs. Civilization V showed. The hard part is then knowing for sure when we care about neither game.
Safer777's Analysis[]
Now we had the first real match of the contest. This match was pretty close for around 7 hours with lead changed and all that! Just like a real contest! In this match Gurus were split on which game would win as the Crew too. And it makes sense. Both games are really weak. RL has Football which americans don't care about and DBZ is a fighthing game which this site doesn't care about. Plus no info in either on these games too. I went with DBZ myself because of name recognition. But I was wrong.
So for the match. As I said it was realy close for like 7 hours and then RL just passed ahead and never looked back. So why it won? Well I do believe that it is more popular because actually it is a really fun game. It is about Football true BUT you have CARS playing Football! Yeah you use them to ram the ball, you can jump in the air and do a lot of tricks too. Plus you don't really have to know the rules, just ram the ball! As for DBZ it is one of countless DB fighthing games, nothing special. Still we got a good match for like 7 hours at least with back and forths and lead changes and such.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
This match had more total lead changes than the entire contest to date, including the first one to occur outside the opening hour. Rocket League led at the freeze, but FighterZ spiked a big update at the 15 minute mark to go up by 5. Rocket League retook the lead on the next update, but FighterZ was right back in the lead on the next update and was still ahead an hour into the match. It was the last time all match that it led, but still, progress! A match was actually won by the entrant that trailed after an hour! Okay yeah, "vehicular soccer" game vs. licensed fighting game was the definition of a fodder match, but you have to take the little victories. And this was the tightest Guru spread of the first round, 73-69 in favor of Rocket League, so we knew this could be a tough one to call.
But all of this was overshadowed by a hilariously inept troll. About 40 minutes before the start of the match, a topic was posted stating that "Rocket League must win; I'll alert the Discord with 200,000 followers". And the opening post had a picture to prove the follower count, along with the statement "Someone has to stop BotW". He was, of course, laughed at, and when told it wouldn't work, he said "probably not but someone has to try, we don't need a Wii U game winning the whole contest". When it was pointed out that Breath of the Wild is a Switch game, he instead started defending himself against non-existent accusations that he doesn't even play Rocket League with more pictures showing his accomplishments, or someone's accomplishments at any rate since the username in the pics didn't remotely match the one he was using here. When told that it was fine for him to dislike BotW without taking it personally, he responded that he does like BotW, but as you can see he does play Rocket League.
By the way, this was the second straight day that votes declined. Nice rally, bro.