LogFAQs > #984013412

4. Link vs. Commander Shepard vs. Draven (2013) R3

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1fd6800e.jpg

Link 44.02% 53703
Commander Shepard 11.34% 13829
Draven 44.65% 54468
TOTAL VOTES 122000
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Link_vs_(2)Commander_Shepard_vs_(3)Draven_2013
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5253-character-battle-ix-division-1-final-link-vs-shepard-vs

If Link/Cloud was the match that saved the contests, this match, held almost 10 years to the day afterward, was the match that ended them. Not literally of course, as we would have four more contests after this one, but the cloud that was cast over everything after this match proved impossible to ignore. On some level, ever since L-Blocks rise and fall back in 07/08 we had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and this was the match that finally did it. We had sat by and watched as Gamespot had a series of character contests meant to imitate ours, and as we saw them descend into rallied garbage year after year, we rolled our eyes at the chaos that would never happen to us. The kind of faux superiority we put on when observing them was always, on some level, masking an inner fear. The fear that the same thing would happen to us and the contests that we loved. We had dodged a bullet when L-Block turned out to be a one time only thing, and while several jokes/rallies had pulled off upsets and made runs in subsequent contests, they always burned out before the end. The center had continued to hold, but we could feel it weakening as the sky high votals we had seen for years finally started to drop off during GOTD, and then collapsed completely for the 2011 Rivalry Rumble. We were suddenly seeing the kind of votals that had last been seen in the earliest days of 2002, and while boredom would be the main enemy that year, the clear collapse of the site did not bode well for subsequent contests and for their potential to be overrun by outside forces. For the first time in ten years, 2012 went by without a contest entirely, and then in 2013, after a three and a half year gap, a new Character Battle was announced. Intended as a love letter to the board/contest community, Character Battle IX would end up heralding its demise instead. Devised with a sprawling, convoluted 3-way bracket format, the contest went forward seemingly in defiance of the sites decline and the inherent weaknesses of multi-way matches in an era of lower votals. The votals actually wouldnt be that much lower than 2011, but despite that bit of good news, the danger that lurked within the bracket became apparent almost immediately.

It took only four days for the first sign that we were in trouble to emerge, during an otherwise inauspicious first round match to see who would be the third wheel in the upcoming Round 2 Ryu/Mega Man X match. For the first six hours of the twelve hour match, it looked like that character would be Jak, finally winning a match for the first time in his contest career. However, at some point in the dead of night the League of Legends community caught wind of things, and put their rally abilities to work, leading to a massive ~5,500 vote turnaround for Draven, more than enough for him to safely win the match. What we had just seen was extremely worrying. This was a LoL rally far from full strength, and it had managed to pull off an exponentially larger rally than we had ever seen in a contest before, and the implications were clear. This was not some silly 4chan lark; it was an existential threat. And while we all knew it, there was little we could do in response, so as a survival mechanism, for the next month, we tried to put out of our heads what we had just seen. There was a lot of dissembling that happened, a lot of bargaining with ourselves, saying that maybe 5,500 was all the votes LoL could do. After all, hadnt Draven started slowing down towards the end? That wouldnt be enough to come close to winning, would it? These were all lies and excuses, but for the moment at least, there was nothing else to do. When the Second Round finally commenced, Dravens rally was initially nowhere to be seen, and there was a tentative degree of hope. Maybe Ryu and Mega Man X could build up a big enough lead in the first couple of hours to withstand another late night rally. This hope lasted all of 20 minutes however, before LoL fans discovered the new match, and unleashed a rally whose scale was almost beyond imagination. Draven didnt just get a couple thousand rallied votes, he got *tens of thousands* of rallied votes. Probably around 30,000 rallied votes in 12 hours, assuming my rough calculations based on the start of the match are correct. This was so massive that it didnt generate debate for the next round; in fact, it ended much of the debate. Link could have stood up against 5,000 or even 10,000 rallied votes. But 30,000 votes was just too out of reach with the collapsing votals of the site. He still had a shot at holding off the horde, but the Divisional Finals had become Dravens to lose.

One would think that with the fate of the contests hanging in the balance, the board would have been united in support of Link, but going into the match that wasnt really the case. To some people, Links dominance was just as much of an existential threat as the LoL rally was, and they gladly hyped up Draven and rooted for him to defeat the Nintendo icon. At least one person (Extha) even pretended to support Link and then psyched everyone out by revealing their vote was for Draven in the end. And plenty more just wanted to stay above the fray and vote for Shepard. In other words, if Link was going to take down Draven, hed have to rely on his own strength to do so; he wouldnt be able to count any additional support from the board. The match started, and if anything Draven was even more initially dominant than he had been in the previous rounds. This time the LoL fanbase had come prepared and Draven was in the lead right from the very start, no comebacks or turnarounds needed. Link held up better than Ryu and Mega Man X had in the previous round but that wasnt saying much; as the match went on, he fell thousands and thousands of votes behind. Link had seemed off his game this year, and the first 9 hours of this match were no exception. As dawn broke on the east coast, Dravens lead was well on its way to breaking 6,000, and while his gains were slowing, he was still gaining every update, and Link was falling further behind. And then, around 9:00 AM EST, Link started making cuts. While the cuts started off small, it didnt take long for Link to start taking bigger and bigger bites out of the lead, and it quickly became apparent that the LoL rally was collapsing. 6,000 votes was almost double the largest comeback we had ever seen in a contest before, but this was an entirely artificial lead whose collapse wouldnt be stunted or dulled by vote trends. Once Draven ran out of votes he would run out of votes, and there would be nothing left for Link to do but gobble up the rest. Within two hours, Link had come back by 1,000 votes, and it would take him just over an hour to take off 1,000 more. As the match reached its halfway point, Link was taking off 100 votes every update, a pace which, if he could keep it up, would give him the lead in just over 3 and a half hours. What we had all previously thought was the weakest version of Link we had ever seen was giving us his most impressive performance to date.