LogFAQs > #940520468

ctesjbuvf posted...

Theres only so much you can bandwagon from beating a Three Houses game, especially when everyone was just trashing Fire Emblem and giving that much of the reason.

I think you reversed these two by accident.

Also, I can't say I agree with your take on the bandwagons in this match. You seem intently focused on B8's perceptions of each game's runs and the likelihood thereof, which I'd argue greatly overstates B8's influence on the process. Case in point: an outright majority of Gurus took Super Mario RPG to the divisional finals in 2015, giving it an over 2-to-1 advantage against second place, and yet no one in their right mind would deny that Mario RPG was on a bandwagon by that point.

Like it or not, Xenoblade reaching this match was almost as big an upset from a sitewide perspective as P4G doing the same was. There were two real differences in the two games' paths to get there: one, that sitewide brackets respected Overwatch and Three Houses less than RDR and GTAV, and two, that P4G squeaked by two matches in a row (which does seem to matter in the bandwagon process, as evidenced by Geralt in 2018). Now, those factors do admittedly favor a stronger P4G bandwagon, but they also suggest that Xenoblade was bandwagoning in its own right. Likewise, the various layers of extrapolation available also imply that the two games were operating under comparable, though perhaps not identical, circumstances. The alternative forces some pretty weird assumptions, like P4G not boosting at all from Persona 5's release and the aftermath thereof, or Twilight Princess and Skies of Arcadia both declining from 2010 to 2015 in lockstep.

As a final side note, I'm not sure what your basis for saying things look totally off in Xenoblade's half of the division if Xenoblade alone was bandwagoning is. It's not like we have any sort of reliable gauge for anything in that half anyways. Now, I'm not trying to argue that Xenoblade had the only bandwagon against P4G - I agree that claim would be highly suspect - but is it really impossible for Xenoblade not to have gained as much as we thought, and for Three Houses to have been SFF'd and/or damaged greatly by Smash backlash relative to its GotY finals result?

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"I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people who do."
azuarc won the 2020 Guru Contest because he avoided picking rashly.