LogFAQs > #983650633

12. Link vs. Cloud Strife vs. L-Block vs. Solid Snake (2007) R6

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/705bed9c.jpg

Link 29.74% 58100
Cloud Strife 24.49% 47834
L-Block 33.51% 65462
Solid Snake 12.27% 23964
TOTAL VOTES 195360
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Link_vs_Cloud_Strife_vs_L-Block_vs_Solid_Snake_2007
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2925-tournament-final-link-cloud-l-block-snake

GameFAQS, for many years, was an island unto itself. It wasnt that the site didnt mirror greater trends in both gaming culture and the Internet at large, or that we werent evolving the same as the rest of the world was. We just went at things at our own pace, with our own built in biases affecting the speed at which things moved. This was a site whose definitive gaming rivalry was Mario Vs. Crono after all. We were just built different. People talk about how old-fashioned GameFAQS is and how that drives people away, but what that conversation misses is that GameFAQS has *always* been old-fashioned. I joined the site in 2002, and I dont think there was ever a point at which people werent complaining that the message board system was horribly out of date. But for many users, thats what they liked about the site. Or at the very least they didnt mind it enough to leave. And this created a large, resident, userbase with unusual tastes that operated at a large enough scale to push back against some of the excesses of the rest of the Internet. On the rest of the Internet, the process of holding polls, or even running an entire contest oftentimes ran into problems. Griefers or trolls would frequently overwhelm voting, pushing some offensive or humorous option to the top, just for the lulz if nothing else. Time Magazine opened their Person of the Year decision to a public vote on multiple occasions, and on multiple occasions 4chan or some other group would sabotage the process, voting for someone like moot, and causing Time to just dismiss the results altogether. And then there were Gamespots own attempts at Character Battles, which almost immediately descended into rallying, trolling, and company promotion. While rallying has been a topic of contention, and has influenced matches from the very first contest, GameFAQS had managed to avoid being overwhelmed by it entirely, never suffering the descent into chaos that almost every other online popularity poll seemed to undergo. Why was that? Im not entirely sure, but it was at least partly due to the size of the site and the number of users regularly voting in our polls. The site might have been quirky, but it was also fairly massive, and for a while, that worked. The proudly old-fashioned users of the site were a buffer against some of the Internets trends, both toxic and otherwise, and the prospect of a contest being taken over by some kind of joke rally was out of mind. That just wasnt something that we did.

That is, until L-Block. Sure we had seen epic, non-joke runs like Crono in 02 or Starcraft in 04, but they always ran out of steam before the end, the proper order of the site always snapping back into place. These kinds of runs mattered at the margins; they didnt dictate contest winners. Even by 07 there was still a school of thought that characters didnt gain all that much strength from momentum. Maybe a little bit; a 55/45 match can be brought down to 50/50, but that was it. The idea that someone could go from being 60/40d by Kirby to challenging Link, based primarily on momentum and bandwagoning, would have gotten you laughed out of any discussion topic you brought it up in. Even a potential offsite rally would be limited in the amount it could swing, especially with the kind of votals we were seeing in 2007. But, previously unbelievable or not, this was the situation we had found ourselves in going into the Final Match of 2007.

L-Block had busted things up entirely, both in terms of brackets as well as in what we thought contest entrants were capable of. It had seemingly increased in popularity, not just once by a small amount, but by dramatic amounts each and every round. There was a theory at the time that said the issue was not so much that L-Block was increasing in strength but that there was 29% of the site that would vote for it no matter what, and so as its opponents got stronger, L-Block would appear stronger and stronger as well. I dont think anyone believes this anymore, but L-Block did get 29% every single round, so this made a kind of sense at the time. In any case, the end result was that L was getting stronger and stronger and stronger with seemingly no end in sight. And this increase in strength was only compounded by the outside attention that our contest was now receiving. We were used to various fansites posting a link to a GameFAQS match every now and then, but what we were seeing now went beyond all that. Major news sites like Kotaku were writing articles about the Tetris Block that was tearing through the bracket, one more story about an increasingly absurdist Internet that played by its own rules and enjoyed thumbing its nose at anyone who thought it could take things seriously. Like it or not, the lulz had finally come for us too.