Board 8 > Where will this one rank in the annals of contest history?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Personally, I think it has all the makings of being the best we have seen since '02 (assuming that is the gold standard).

Yes, it doesn't have the unpredictability of the first couple, but it has been set up in a near-perfect way to create some great matchups.

Here are some unique features I believe will place this contest in the top-tier:
- The large gap between this and the last contest means there are a lot of unknowns in terms of how character strength has changed
- Taking the Noble 9 out (and giving Sephy an easy bracket) to stop mid-tiers being fed to them
- Creating a loser bracket to setup even more matches between the Noble 9, rather than have them be fed sequentially to Link/Cloud
- The potential for a number of rallies, seemingly without any Draven-esque potential contest-breaking ones

I know there have been criticisms of how the loser bracket has been organised, but it has been done that way to avoid the last two Loser battles before the finals being a repeat of the Semis.

Don't want to jinx it, but I'm damn excited!

The bracket itself is excellent, and full of difficult matches. My main concern is that a lot of those potential matches will never be realized because of another huge contest-ending rally that replaces them with blindingly obvious blowouts.

this seems like an all time classic because we have like, 2 weeks of matches between elites rather than a couple of days

I voted low tier as in my opinion the bracket structure is alright but many of the character selections are questionable. Too many interesting and relevant characters have been left out of the contest (e.g. Trevor Philips) for the contest to rank as one of the greats, unless a number of incredible things happen.
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Joelypoely posted...

Too many interesting and relevant characters have been left out of the contest (e.g. Trevor Philips)

yeah i was thinking that

It looks good on paper but we'll have to see how it goes with rallies and such. (and it would probably depend on how you feel about said rallies or lack thereof)
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Mid tier at least. It has a chance of being really good and has the potential to change contests from this point onward with its registered voters are worth 2 votes.
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I thought the Series contest was considered pretty meh. Anyway we have a ton of good matches so this contest should be fun.
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We'll see if it gets ruined with rallies or not.
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spooky96 posted...

I thought the Series contest was considered pretty meh. Anyway we have a ton of good matches so this contest should be fun.

Yeah you are right, it's probably low-tier. I think I hold it to a different standard because it was a Spring 'Interim' Contest - but it was worse than the games contests for sure.

Actually the more and more I think about this contest, the more and more I think it will ruin all future contests - we will see pretty much every battle we want to see and there will be very little mystery left. I am not sure how a contest will ever be able to take place after this and grab my attention!