Winter 2010 Contest

Winter 2010 Contest was the eighth GameFAQs character tournament held on GameFAQs. It's more commonly referred to as Character Battle 8 (CB8 for short), since "2010" is slightly confusing (nominations and bracket creation actually took place in 2009, but the opening matchup didn't happen until after the new year).

Ulti's Pre-Contest Analysis

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=3691 – The Missingno poll. He won this thing going away, at the expense of fellow Pokemon Mudkip and Jigglypuff. No one knew at the time how many characters would make the main field from here, but obviously it would end up being Axel, Lightning and The Boss. Lightning was the cutoff line, edging Scorpion by 300 votes. The whining about Missingno during this poll was amazing, and it was great foreshadowing for the main contest. The lesser characters here were interesting enough, I guess. The Boss and Raiden seem independent of one another, Toad looks like he has a decent fanbase thanks to NSMB Wii, and Alex Mercer was the casual bait representative. The main thing here is Dan Hikibi and Yoshimitsu sucking it up. Can we stop the rally pushes for these two in every NRT?

Fun Tidbit: http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/3091/mnvotein2.jpg

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=3692 – This poll had a very clear cutoff point in it. Frog, Rikku, Liquid Snake, Midna and Big Daddy were a cut above everyone else. Even though we didn’t yet know what Bacon’s cutoff line was in these vote-ins, those 5 coming from this poll seemed easy enough. Big Daddy was especially impressive, given he had Andrew Ryan sharing the poll as an albatross. Of all the losers here, very little stands out. It’s hard to believe Diddy and Olimar have made the field in the past, and Archer doing well for a little while made for some great fads for a day. If this match had a picture, Archer probably would have won! He looks just like Dante.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=3693 – Another poll where a clear cutoff line exists between haves and have-nots. Jecht, Sub-Zero, Spy, Proto Man and Ridley all did well. But by this point, people (namely Mega Man fans) were very worried about how many characters from each poll would actually get chosen. Proto Man finished close to Ridley for fourth place, but the number 4 is a much more mathematical number when talking about brackets. Past the top five, there was a jumbled mess of low fodder and true fodder. Bayonetta, Kain Highwind, Etna, Lara Croft and Sho all did about the same. Bayonetta suffered from bad timing, since her game came out just after the bracket was made. At the bottom, Bub failed to catch any momentum at all from the Gamespot contest and Doc Louis actually made the vote-in after HaRRicH’s year-long joke rally. T E A M C H O C O L A T E

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=3694 – Probably the strongest group of any vote-in. Cid and Aeris from FF7 both did very well, and almost LFFd each other out of first and second place. Tails finished just behind Cid after leading him most of the day, and Simon Belmont finished very close to Tails. There’s a gap after this before you get to Prince of Persia, which ended up being the cutoff line for the poll. Morrigan, Chun-Li and Little Mac all finished relatively close to making the main field, and even Godot did fairly well here. Sol Badguy even making the vote-in was a shock for Guilty Gear fans, and past him is the fodder. Maxwell is from an overhyped disaster, and no one likes Emil.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=3695 – One day later, we probably got the weakest group of all the vote-ins. This was the only vote-in where 4 characters were taken instead of 5, and for good reason. Mega Man X obviously dominated this poll, and HK-47 and Vault Boy also did well. Past them, everyone either sucked or got caught up in the weak Nintendo character LFF mess. Falco ended up winning that king of the hill fight over Lucas, Wario and Spyro (I know Spyro isn’t technically Nintendo, but he has the same type of appeal). Beyond them, tons of fodder not worth mentioning.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=3696 – The last vote-in conveniently had a clear cutoff point. Akuma and Meta Knight rolled this thing, and tier 2 was clearly Marth, Peach and Thrall. Tier 3 would have been Isaac Clarke, KOS-MOS and Kerrigan, but they didn’t make the field. You could probably even make a Tier 4 given everyone left over did pretty well. Personally, I like considering these vote-ins a part of the contest itself so we can keep alive the trivia point of CATS making every character field.

When the dust settled and Bacon finally announced the bracket, characters and rules, the final result was amazing. 128 characters, 8 divisions of 16 in an NCAA style format, and 12 hour 1v1s until the final four. Personally, this is the best possible format we could have asked for, because everyone gets their own way. The 1v1 fans get their 1v1s, the random chaos fans get potential hilarious bandwagons from the matches being so short, Bacon gets his 128 entrants, and everyone collectively got to laugh at the crying 4way fans for enjoying their terrible format so much. With any luck, this contest symbolized the permanent death of that god-awful format. They are a bad gimmick, nothing more.

Ulti's Post-Contest Analysis

Personally, this contest ranks #4 for me. People look forward to my annual ranking for whatever reason, and here it is:

Spring 2004 > Summer 2002 > Summer 2003 > Winter 2010 > Summer 2005 > Fall 2009 > Summer 2007 > Summer 2006 > Spring 2006 > Summer 2008 > Summer 2004 > Spring 2005

The only thing Winter 2010 is missing are photo finishes, but those are extremely rare and we can't expect them all the time. But this contest had everything else we like; unpredictability, great matches, good runs by characters we didn't expect, great matches, unexpected matches, the works.

And most important, 1v1s ARE BACK BABY THANK CHRIST. Given all we know about stats and trends, 1v1s under this new format is the best thing we would have ever asked for. Now all we need is removal of Link, this format for a games contest with no generations and slightly better bracket placement. From there, we're gold.

Last but not least...

The Ultimate Loser!™ = Geno!

Link > Cloud > Snake > Sephiroth > Tifa > Big Daddy > Ness > Geno

Poor guy.

2010 Contest - Useful Articles

• Board 8's 2010 Match Pics
• Board 8's 2010 Nominations
• Winter 2010 Total Nominations
• Winter 2010 Vote-In Polls

Coming after the conclusion of the Contest

• 2010 Contest Matches - detailed write-ups on every '10 Contest poll
• Most Surprising Results of 2010
• Most Impressive Performances of 2010
• Winter 2010 Match Trends

Bracket

Trivia

• Dr. Football won the first place prize because Heroic Palmer accidentally filled out a "just-for-fun" entry
• This is the first Character Battle not involving CATS, unless you count vote-ins
• This was the first 1v1 contest to take place in 4 years
• The Noble Nine's historic winning streak was shattered by Missingno, and Snake ended an eight year 1v1 winning streak for Clinkeroth