LogFAQs > #948050282

Division 3 Round 2: Vincent, Falco, Scorpion, and Gordon Freeman

Vincent - 52084 [40.05%]
Falco - 21492 [16.53%]
Scorpion - 24631 [18.94%]
Gordon Freeman - 31845 [24.49%]
Total Votes - 130052

<b>We've created a monster!</b> Gordon Freeman Never Wins? Fat chance. Now, all he does is win like DJ Khaled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGXzlRoNtHU

It was a total out-of-left-field shocker, too. Vincent was always going to get first place here. We all know that. This might not be the case if you redid this poll with 2020 voters, but hey. The story was the battle for second place. As you can see by the Oracle numbers off to the right, no one knew what would happen. As you can see by the guru predictions, Scorpion was the massive, massive favorite to advance. And off in the lurch was Falco, who had no other Nintendo characters to deal with and the remnants of BrawlFEAR at his back.

There was also the matter of the round 1 results. Scorpion beat Gordon for first place in round 1, albeit only by 2100 votes. And unless you think Big Daddy siphoned off a percentage of Gordon's votes due to some weird Orange Box/Bioshock overlap (which is actually what did happen there, by the way), Scorpion was set to do it again in round 2. Falco.... we should have seen coming. He had no Nintendo competition in round 1 too and only got 27% of the vote, and that poll had Vincent, GLaDOS, and Wander in it. That is weaker than what Gordon dealt with.

Still, given what we had just seen in round 1, Scorpion felt like the favorite here. If anyone was going to pull the upset, it was most likely to be Falco.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_asNhzXq72w

When the poll started, it was never close. Gordon Freeman -- yes, THAT Gordon Freeman -- the guy who lost so often that he got meme'd, was sitting there pulling off contest upsets and getting into round 3 like it was nothing. He beat the absolute piss out of Scorpion right from the jump, and Falco was never a factor. The poll was never close, and Gordon walked right into round 3 like he was born to be there. Even typing these words out makes no sense, because I still remember how <i>awful</i> this dude looked for so many years. It's like those two random years the Jets made the AFC title game under Rex Ryan.

As for why it happened, a lot of people blamed Scorpion's match picture. And while it was indeed trash, I don't think it was the only factor. Remember, Scorpion only beat Gordon by 2100 votes in round 1. Big Daddy was in that poll, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a lot of overlap between Bioshock and The Orange Box, the latter of which clearly boosted Gordon to the moon in this contest. With Big Daddy out of the way and nothing to really leech Gordon's votes, the turnaround makes sense.

We may never know for sure, because the odds of Gordon and Scorpion ever being against each other again are low. You guys will notice I'm not doing as much picture commentary as usual with this PCA, and it's for two reasons. One is that this was pre-picsmith days for me, and two is 2008 was by FAR the worst year of match pictures these contests will ever have. Starting in round 2, the picsmiths thought it would be funny to get cute with almost all of the match pictures, leading to a series of pure garbage as they kept putting more and more useless trash and bad filters into every single one. I love Zen like a brother, but I include him in all this.

You say Scorpion's picture was bad, but I say pretty much every picture starting in round 2 was bad. I could rant about these match pics being dog shit for half the contest, and part of why I became a picsmith who submitted basic stuff for every match in the first place to prevent this kind of garbage from ever happening again. Pictures are supposed to be a fair representation of the entrants, not a failed high school art project. It's like Gordon sitting there looking like Season 1 Water White had some huge picture advantage; his win goes much deeper than that.

Thankfully Allen realized the error here and stopped allowing idiots to submit dumb stuff outside of matches with rotating images late in contests. Bathtub Geralt versus Peeping Link is okay as a joke when a match has 10 pictures, but half of the 2008 contest match pics had that type of, uh... "quality". Screw that.

I will say that as the years went by, people got much, much better about what they submitted. But it's impossible to talk about 2008 without mentioning just how <i>trash</i> these pictures were overall. It's not why Scorpion lost, but it sure didn't help.

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