LogFAQs > #948064351

Division 4 Round 2: Alucard, Captain Falcon, Pikachu, and Arthas

Alucard - 39153 [29.26%]
Captain Falcon - 25734 [19.23%]
Pikachu - 40553 [30.3%]
Arthas - 28382 [21.21%]
Total Votes - 133822

If you look at the guru picks for this match, people were all over the place, mainly because people overestimated Diddy Kong and the extrapolations for Nintendo leeching were all over the place. A lot of people expected Ike, Diddy Kong, or some other permutation of triple Nintendo to be in this match, so a lot of people had Alucard > X in their predictions. For those who expected double Nintendo, the pick was Pikachu > Alucard. Conventional wisdom held that this would be a match with two Nintendo characters, with the weaker one unable to hurt Pikachu very much.

Either way, the consensus pick was Alucard and Pikachu advancing in some order. There were spatterings of off-meta picks, but most people had those two advancing here after sorting out the crazy amount of Nintendo in this section of the bracket. The characters who ended up here, Falcon and Arthas, were never going to be strong enough to oppose them. In fact Falcon was so weak that Pikachu managed first place even <i>with</i> the leeching going on, which was some good insight into future Save_Us.RAT performances in this contest.

I would love to get into the ridiculous duel Pikachu and Alucard had for first place, but again, what's even the point? This format blows, and continually stole so many great matches from us that would have been epic had they had actual consequences. For those living under a rock somehow, top two advance regardless of order in this format. I suppose one could go nuts about first place duels given point order in the bracket mattered, but every time I see a match like this I'm reminded that second place duels matter than first. It's just fundamentally dumb on every level.

It <i>was</i> a great duel though. After Pikachu barely won the morning vote, Alucard started destroying him overnight, or at least he was laying wood as best he could. When the morning vote came along and Pikachu started winning it, the reasonable assumption was Pikachu would steamroll the poll and easily take first. But then the unthinkable happened, and <i>Alucard freaking won the morning vote over a Pokemon.</i>

Before getting into what happened next, just think about how absurd that sentence is and marvel at the sheer idiocy of this not being a 1v1 match. Yes, I am well aware Pikachu easily wins 1v1 if Falcon isn't there. Not the point. This format is <i>so</i> bad. Matches like this are why it took me 12 years to do these writeups, because it just annoys me to look back on what could have been, especially with how high these vote totals were.

Anyway, Alucard somehow started going nuts with the morning vote, so much so that by the time the ASV rolled around he had an 1100 vote lead. It was then that Pikachu finally decided to stop dicking around, and that 1100 lead got wiped out in like 2 hours. Apparently we've gone from WAIT UNTIL THE KIDDIES WAKE UP to WAIT UNTIL THE KIDDIES ARE HOME FROM SCHOOL. Pikachu pulled a 2500 vote swing in 9 hours to win by 1400, in a poll that feels like it never should have been that close.

I'd give more passion and a better rundown, but this match I specifically remember as being the one that made me want to quit. That's when it really hit me at the time that we had this great duel going, one year after Alucard's crazy photo finish, and none of it mattered. At least in 2013 we had the decency of only first place meaning anything. Which is frankly how every poll should work.

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