Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
Division | 1 |
---|---|
Match # | 2 |
Match Date | Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 |
Oracle Expectations |
Mega Man - 50.83% KOS-MOS - 19.84% Diablo - 19.43% Arthas Menethil - 10.12% |
GameFAQs Expectations |
Mega Man first place (2pts) - 43.16% Mega Man second place (1pt) - 50.43% KOS-MOS second place (2pts) - 18.17% KOS-MOS first place (1pt) - 11.92% |
Advancing Prediction |
Mega Man - 93.59% (34,370) KOS-MOS - 30.09% (11,050) |
Everyone knows about SFF, and most people who follow fourways know what "LFF" means. But before LFF came not knowing what it even was. Then this match happened.
The consensus for first place was easy. Mega Man was going to stomp, as he tends to do in the first round. Past that, almost everyone expected Diablo to get second place. The logic there was how he would hammer Arthas into the ground because of them being from the same company, plus KOS-MOS is weak anyway. The only thing she'd ever done of note in a contest prior to this is prevent Balrog0 from getting a perfect bracket in the summer of 2004.
Then the match started, and it became readily apparent same fanbases in fourways behave very differently than they would in 1 on 1s. If you put Diablo against Arthas heads-up, Diablo probably wins really easily. Don't forget that Diablo beat Kefka while (3 years after this match) Arthas was thoroughly embarrassed by Kefka heads-up, although this here fourway match had everyone picking Arthas which led to some hilarious whining.
Regardless, Diablo and Arthas completely screwed each other out of getting second place, allowing KOS-MOS to advance by default. If you advance in a fourway by only scoring 18%, odds are your competition completely blows or something weird was going on. In this case, it was probably both. KOS-MOS advancing was the biggest upset of the first round, kept that damn second match jinx in tact and got the statheads coming up with a new abbreviation to explain away anything they don't like.
One on one, two characters of the same fanbase leads to stuff like Link getting close to 90% on Ganondorf. In a fourway, no matter how good the stronger character in a fanbase is, the presence of another character in that fanbase will always weaken both characters. It's how you end up with dumb crap like KOS-MOS advancing, and it gets especially fun when you get more than two characters of the same fanbase sharing a poll.
Stats and Analysis[]
- KOS-MOS advancing was the #1 most surprising result of Round One
- It was also the #8 most surprising Round One result of all-time
early in the contest, we weren't yet spoiled by every single result being unexpected, or someone wildly overperforming. as such, this match is better than it seems -- KOS took an early lead and never let it go, staying pretty constant throughout the day. Diablo, for the most part, disappointed - people were expecting him to be neck-and-neck with KOS, but it didn't happen. he came out pretty weak and never really went anywhere.
the surprise of the match was Arthas, a character most expected to do pretty poorly. his opening vote was bad, but after that, he slowly crept up on Diablo, and after a while people stopped paying attention to Diablo whatsoever and focused on Arthas vs. KOS-MOS, even though Arthas was in fourth place. Arthas ended up slowing down come daytime, but managed to hold his slim lead over Diablo, showing that he deserved a place in the next character battle, assuming we have another one. Arthas got next to no discussion at all, so being within 3000 votes of KOS-MOS and beating out a guy who once won three rounds in a contest is fairly impressive.