Board 8 > ~*~Zen Anal-yzes the Summer 2013 Contest - 5 Years Too Late Edition~*~

(+) Yeah! (+)

oh right I forgot to post that with this account
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You know, even if x-stats were not used, Knuckles over Magus still would have been an upset. The problem was not so much x-stats as it was faulty match results. X-stats actually did the opposite... Magus vs. Knuckles didn't expose the problem of x-stats; the use of x-stats (such as through Magus/Luca Blight, as well as TIdus's performance in 2004) provided advance warning of the upset. Magus' 35% on Link vs. Sonic's 34% of Cloud clearly suggests Magus > Knuckles, though. No need to use x-stats to come up with that conclusion.
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I did some pretty thorough research to argue for Squall > Magus in 2005 and came to the conclusion that the dude had been overrated all along, although even I didn't anticipate him being that overrated.

Yeah, it was the 35% on Link that was hard to overlook, but we didn't totally understand the bandwagon effect back then either. It's pretty clear that when the site perceives that a character/game has pulled a big upset or two (even when we as a board actually expected it to happen), the site gets behind the underdog.

A couple of other things fooled us, too. Ganondorf probably boosted between 2003 and 2004 due to Twilight Princess hype, and Tidus/Shadow seemed to validate their 2003 numbers by having the 50/50 match the stats predicted, somehow pulling off the unlikely coincidence of both of them being equally overrated.
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I'm pretty sure people considered Magus' floor to be other Ganondorf's performance in 2004 against Alucard (suggesting about 32% on Base Link), OR 2002 Tidus' x-stat when assuming Mega Man 2002 = Mega Man 2003, which again, suggested about 32% on BL. Indeed, a boost and an overperformance obscured things. Yet people were so sure that Tidus must have dropped between 2003 and 2004!
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Well, Mega Man's 2004 performance obscured things, too, when he underperformed drastically against Link. The sheer amount of SFF and weird overperformances in SC2K4 in general threw us off. People also thought Frog's 2004 run validated Magus's strength.
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KNUCKLES BEAT MAGUS!!!

yay
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WiggumFan267 posted...

KNUCKLES BEAT MAGUS!!!

yay

Fuck yeaaaaahhh
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swirIdude posted...

LeonhartFour posted...

Sunshine has looked bad in just about every poll it's ever been in, so it definitely leans more toward just plain disliked. Heck, even in the year it came out, it got utterly obliterated by Metroid Prime in GotY polls.

That's because Metroid Prime is great and Super Mario Sunshine is only fine.

No Sunshine is great and Metroid Prime is GOAT material.

But if Leon was going over the game's popularity on GameFAQs...yeah it was universally considered the worst 3D Mario game for a long while, now it still generally is but it's just that it isn't as much of a consensus. I remember once the game was mentioned in a ProtonJon stream and the chat devolved into civil war over the game.

Personally, I see it as a flawed but ultimately very enjoyable experience. Or else, why the heck did I 100% it in only two months when I take so much longer to beat most games?
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I am proud to say I had Knuckles over Magus and Pac-Man over Ocelot in my brackets

mainly because I was very young and dumb and didn't participate in any contest discussion, I lurked for my first year or two here because I was afraid I didn't know enough about contests

I still don't know enough about contests but I just don't care anymore I'll analyze every goddamn contest until I die
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ZeldaTPLink posted...

But if they release a bad Zelda? It's fucking war, man.

Eh, I feel Zelda fans are way too forgiving of Zelda games. Everyone loved Breath of the Wild, treated it like it was the best thing since Mario jumping on Goomba's, but honestly I was entirely underwhelmed. I feel like fans were just happy to have a Zelda that didn't hold their hand that they gave it a pass on so many bad decisions.
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Ashethan posted...

ZeldaTPLink posted...

But if they release a bad Zelda? It's fucking war, man.

Eh, I feel Zelda fans are way too forgiving of Zelda games. Everyone loved Breath of the Wild, treated it like it was the best thing since Mario jumping on Goomba's, but honestly I was entirely underwhelmed. I feel like fans were just happy to have a Zelda that didn't hold their hand that they gave it a pass on so many bad decisions.

That's not an example of what I'm saying. That's you having the minority opinion.

I mean the kind of backlash Skyward Sword and Wind Waker had.

I mean Breath of the Wild is the best Zelda game

I'm not generally a Zelda fan though so I'm not the demographic you're talking about
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Sorry if I'm being rude, I didn't play BotW tbh. Just saying what you said doesn't match what I meant.

LeonhartFour posted...

I did some pretty thorough research to argue for Squall > Magus in 2005 and came to the conclusion that the dude had been overrated all along, although even I didn't anticipate him being that overrated.

Yeah, it was the 35% on Link that was hard to overlook, but we didn't totally understand the bandwagon effect back then either. It's pretty clear that when the site perceives that a character/game has pulled a big upset or two (even when we as a board actually expected it to happen), the site gets behind the underdog.

A couple of other things fooled us, too. Ganondorf probably boosted between 2003 and 2004 due to Twilight Princess hype, and Tidus/Shadow seemed to validate their 2003 numbers by having the 50/50 match the stats predicted, somehow pulling off the unlikely coincidence of both of them being equally overrated.

And there's the match pic factor as it was sprite round, and I really do think Chrono Trigger performs better when sprites are used, whether it be because they are most recognizable in this form, or it brings out some level of nostalgia that the anime-style art just doesn't.
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Ashethan posted...

ZeldaTPLink posted...

But if they release a bad Zelda? It's fucking war, man.

Eh, I feel Zelda fans are way too forgiving of Zelda games. Everyone loved Breath of the Wild, treated it like it was the best thing since Mario jumping on Goomba's, but honestly I was entirely underwhelmed. I feel like fans were just happy to have a Zelda that didn't hold their hand that they gave it a pass on so many bad decisions.

No it's the same thing with Final Fantasy or Elder Scrolls games. Or Star Wars movies evidently. Opinions vary wildly on what's the best and what's the worst, and oftentimes the newest movie gets the lion's share of the hate.
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The Last Jedi was an abomination.
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The Force Awakens was pretty lame so I didn't bother seeing TLJ.
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The Last Jedi is the third best Star Wars movie.
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whoa what happened, how did star wars talk start

anyway i worked all day yesterday and I have to go to a family reunion in Queens today, probably won't get an update til sunday
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Ah, I see Zen is smart enough to have LMS on ignore.

...That was LMS, right? I don't feel like actually checking, it just seems like the sort of thing he'd post.
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LMS finds a way to turn every conversation into Star Wars talk.
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Link/Draven was board 8's belated integration into the social media era.

Twitter was involved, Reddit was involved. Easily the most fun match we will ever have since the contest was "only ours" 12+ years ago.
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Leonhart4 posted...

LMS finds a way to turn every conversation into Star Wars talk.

I literally just mentioned it in passing. It could have easily turned into Final Fantasy or Elder Scrolls talk but no.

This is all on you guys.
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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Link/Draven was board 8's belated integration into the social media era.

Twitter was involved, Reddit was involved. Easily the most fun match we will ever have since the contest was "only ours" 12+ years ago.

Being told by an army of teenagers that you are buttdevastated isn't what I'd call "integration".

The contests are ours because they happen here. They are not part of social media like Reddit and Twitter because they don't happen in Reddit or Twitter.

If you want contests to be part of social media, might as well shut this site down and start hosting them in social media.

Because yes, this forum is outdated. In fact, all forums are outdated. Gen Z people don't use forums. But as long as it exists, we have the right to do our things here, not on Reddit

GameFAQs: another thing millennials are killing
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Millennials are killing the printed word!
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_SecretSquirrel posted...

Are you going to talk about the last place bonus match?

Going to bring this one up again since it seems like @ZenOfThunder clearly missed that message. There were 4 bonus matches in the contest and they are:

Last Place Match - Chester vs. Caim vs. Spring Breeze Dancin'
Revenge Match - Mario vs. Crono vs. Mega Man X
Runners-Up Battle - Mewtwo vs. Pikachu vs. Mega Man
Link vs. Solid Snake

For reference, here's the links to their poll results pages:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5224-character-battle-ix-bonus-battle-last-place
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5252-character-battle-ix-bonus-battle-2-revenge-match
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5265-character-battle-ix-bonus-battle-3-runners-up-battle
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5267-character-battle-ix-bonus-battle-4-link-vs-solid-snake
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Mario vs Crono V, make it happen.
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Link v Draven was 100% a DDoS. Even if it wasn't, the match should have been extended. That said that doesn't mean it's okay to abuse Allen about it, though I know most B8ers wouldn't do such a thing.

Vivi > Mario is the most bonkers match in history I think. With Draven there was that resigned inevitability the he was going to be memed into a win, but you'd have to be a time traveler to call Vivi's win.

There were just no words that could properly describe that day.
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ZenOfThunder posted...

oh yeah how the fuck did I forget this:

But then, depending on who you ask, the impossible happened. GameFAQs virtually froze to a halt, for about an hour, right in the middle of Link cutting 100 votes off of a lead every 5 minutes. It was almost impossible to consider this a coincidence, and the prevailing theory was a perfectly timed DDoS attack on the site. The site did eventually come back online, and Link got a few more big updates to get the lead below 3000, but then out of nowhere Draven started going nuts again. It only took Draven about 3 hours to get the lead from 3000 to 5200, which was just as weird as the site freezing in the first place. It takes a lot of coincidence for a site freeze during such a massive poll, but it takes a hell of a lot more than just a coincidence for Draven voters to be that ready to go once the site came back to full speed. Of all the theories that got thrown around about whether the down time was DDoS or not, that's the one that makes the most sense to me. Trends don't just flip on a dime like that, it takes a little while to shift. But here, the down time happened and then almost immediately upon the site coming back, Draven went berserk again. That isn't normal, and I think there was outside interference involved in some way.

Not that Allen thinks so, mind you.

GameFAQs is served by two proxy servers in rotation, and what we see in the logs is that one of them would go down, shifting traffic to the second, which would then get overloaded and go down, shifting traffic back to the first, repeat. Unlike a DDoS attack, there was no increase in inbound traffic, and the two proxy servers were failing one at a time, not simultaneously. It could have been a DDoS, but it looks a lot more like just a bad coincidence. Since the site was never truly offline, just slow and randomly failing, it took a while for the operations team to get paged out, but once they got online and started investigating all it took was rebooting the proxies to bring everything back to normal, which isn't how you'd normally recover from a DDoS.

tl;dr: Earlier downtime most likely wasn't an attack.

Also since people will probably ask, we are indeed checking into the legitimacy of all incoming votes and so far, everything appears to be legit.

Here's a graph of our two load balancers:



You can literally see one failing and the other one picking up the load.

All these people claiming admissions of DDoS have shown me nothing but hostility. You're seeing what I'm seeing with the load balancers, so show me what I'm not seeing if you have proof otherwise.

I thought this was the last match for some reason

This shit was INSANE, I cannot believe how obvious it was that this was intentional, but everyone on the site's end just kind of shrugged and let it happen

I think I blocked this out of my mind because of how furious it made me

This was the moment I fully flipped to Link

I was in support of Draven overthrowing Link after the Chie match, but the toxic LoL crowd were starting to turn me and then the downtime and subsequent inaction was so egregious I couldn't help myself. Also Link's comeback was poetry in motion and it being stopped so shittily is...well, shitty.

I regret a couple (literally a couple) of the things I said to or about Allen, but the unwarranted abuse he received shouldn't mask how poorly he handled the whole Draven situation (including asking them to stop the rallies and blaming his wife when he was rumbled). They're separate issues entirely imo.
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Wait did this thread stop at the Link v Draven match?

Yeah Ive got family in town

I can comment on all the last matches right now

Draven won it sucked asssssss

Ill do more tonight
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No problem, I was just wondering if you had thought "this contest doesn't matter anymore after that match" or something like that.

Alright I've archived all my posts on this dead board:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/184626-traffic-jam/76917465

I'll do some updates tonight but it will be in a new thread. If you are from the future just search "Zen" or something, it will turn up
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What does DDoS mean?
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Distributed Denial of Service

it's basically trying to shut down a website temporarily by flooding it with traffic from multiple sources
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https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/76918242

New thread, going to close this one soon unless someone feels like spamming this to get to 500 for some reason
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don't let it die this close to 500

that would be too sad
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sad

so sad

nominate The Sorrow
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The pain the pain the pain the pain

PAIN
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FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAR

*repeatedly eats rotten food*
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This

is The End
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I went up into space and do you know what I saw there

FURY
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The Joy?
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There's only room for one Boss and one Snake
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE356U2wLFI" data-time="
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