Board 8 > The Show EP 6 - Winning the Official $500 Oracle Challenge, w/ Nick and TPLink!

(+) Yeah! (+)

LeonhartFour posted...

I guess I'm one of the rare people who still feels pretty good about Skyrim > Dark Souls!

I am keeping onto Skyrim > Dark Souls myself. I just don't have much respect for anything in the Dark Souls division, really. I think pretty much everything around there has had reason to drop, from New Vegas to Batman.

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I've already gotten spoiled on The Last of Us 2 from the freaking Smash Ultimate boards. The leaks are everywhere.

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I guess I'll be the one to say that I thought Skyrim's performance against MK8 was awful. It might beat Dark Souls anyway but that's more because Dark Souls underperformed against MGS5.

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As someone who is going to bite on the Persona 5 upset train, if it can take down Witcher 3, it's not bending to Dark Souls/Skyrim.

If anything, people will rally behind Persona at that point and shoot it comfortably past the semis, and try to get a bandwagon going against Zelda.

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KamikazePotato posted...

I guess I'll be the one to say that I thought Skyrim's performance against MK8 was awful. It might beat Dark Souls anyway but that's more because Dark Souls underperformed against MGS5.

Oh, the performance against MK8 wasn't good, but I still take MK8 over MGSV every day of the week.
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Anyway, I didn't get to comment as much as I normally do, but that was a good episode, everyone!

Thanks for the X-Stats shoutout, TP!
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Nier/Pokemon is the one result this contest that bummed me out. There's been too many contests for me to get properly worked up over which game wins by now, but man did Nier deserve that and come so close to pulling it off.

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it's amazing how often Pokemon is the cause of downer results
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Downloading this episode RIGHT NOW

I'll listen to it shortly after downloading it.
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As of right now, I have started listening to this episode.
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I see Ngamer is still trying for a perfect prediction in the Oracle. I already have my perfect prediction locked down...

more than 13 years ago actually (back in the 2006 Character Battle).
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I think the hentai rallies have been less effective in this contest compared to the last Character Battle. It's a lot easier to get outside voters to come in from a hentai subreddit to support their character. Rallying for the game is harder as the game is only loosely connected to the character depicted in the hentai picture.
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The hentai rallies are far more interesting of a conversation to have than they add to the vote totals, really.

Also, it was timed really nicely that they emerged in the P4G vs. RDR match, where it actually looked like they might have helped an entrant, but was probably just natural trends taking their course.

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How many second chance brackets are we expected to get? Trying to get a sense of how many identical brackets we can get for different permutations.

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squexa posted...

How many second chance brackets are we expected to get? Trying to get a sense of how many identical brackets we can get for different permutations.

There's no way to accurately predict this. The previous contest had fewer Second Chance Brackets than the main bracket contest, but that was to be expected with a shorter entry period.
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You guys made some good points about The Last of Us with the leaks possibly hurting it against Dark Souls. I had Dark Souls with 54% initially, but I think I'm going to bump that up by at least 2% and possibly even more than that.
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52 minutes in:

• To add to TPLink's point 14 minutes in, I feel it's worth noting that the Second Chance contest grants 0 points for incorrectly predicting the winner of any given match, regardless of how close your forecast might be to that game's actual percent. Between that and only whole-percent predictions being allowed, I don't see the oracle aspect as the focus; rather, I prefer to think of it as Allen's way of ensuring one throwaway number won't decide the Second Chance winner.
• As greatone mentioned earlier in this topic, casual bracketmakers' Overwatch respect is the biggest explanation for why Xenoblade's prediction percent was so low last round. In fact, the mere 16.7% of brackets that called Xenoblade's win represent 43% of those with it advancing to the third round, and 41% of brackets didn't predict Three Houses even getting the chance to lose to Xenoblade. Together, those percentages imply Xenoblade/3H was practically a 50-50 match among casual brackets that had the two facing off.
• I think Witcher 3's showing against Galaxy 2 has been unfairly ragged on. The fact is that there's only so high a percentage a Western entrant, any Western entrant, can score on a major Nintendo entrant here on GameFAQs, as many voters will side with Nintendo by default in this type of match. The previous high-water mark for anything Western in such a scenario was Skyrim's 59% on GoldenEye back in 2015; for comparison's sake, Geralt the character could only muster 56% on Rosalina in 2018. It's not the jaw-dropper Witcher 3's first two matches were, sure, but there's very good reasons for that, which KP among others already identified long ago.
• Regarding TPLink's GoW/Souls stat comps, I'm wary of counting on a game that needed the second(?) largest single rally of the contest so far just to get 54% on Dark Souls III to have remained static or even to have fallen in lockstep with MGSV. New Vegas has good reasons to have declined in its own right, and on top of that, the original Dark Souls would score less than 60% on Dark Souls III indirectly if you take the New Vegas/MGSV comp at face value, which looks all kinds of wrong.

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There was a big new vegas rally? I may have missed it.

ZeldaTPLink posted...

There was a big new vegas rally? I may have missed it.

New Vegas/Dark Souls 3 had the highest vote totals of the contest so far, so yeah.

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Ok I'll probably take that into account in my bracket.

Both sides were rallying pretty good, to be fair, so it probably just pushed the result close to what it would have normally been.

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I think Ngamer makes a really good point about TLoU spoilers and peoples reaction to them (dont worry no spoilers here dont ban me NG). A lot of them are represented in the worst way possible, its not the same as playing the game. And thats a take Ive seen more and more. The only thing is, the games not out for another six weeks and I dont think the opinion will improve fast enough to save it in its match (though it wasnt going to win anyway).

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Still BAFFLED by what happened to Celeste? Complete your research by trying out Rayman Legends, it's free until Tuesday on UPlay!

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/rayman-legends/

Child of Light and Assassin's Creed II are also free, this is for Ubi's Play At Home campaign.


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I can vouch for Child of Light. The storytelling's a little gimmicky, but the battles have an interesting mechanic with a meter you can use to drain an opponent's ATB, and the music's fantastic.

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Are the second chance bracket entries closed now, or did Allen just hide the link for it?

edit: NM, I see it further down the front page.

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Ubisoft's best three games in the modern era are available for free at the same time! This is astonishing!

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ZenOfThunder posted...

I did the fanfiction with @Ashethan a few times, it was... bad

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3128374/1/GameFAQs-Fall-Contest-2006-Fanfiction
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5785522/1/Visio-Vestri-Character-Battle-VIII-Fanfiction
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3729820/1/GameFAQs-CBVI-Arx-Veneficus-Oraculum
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9381612/1/Character-Battle-IX-Labyrinth-of-the-Nine

I think I was like 15-18 when I wrote my bits and it shows, I refuse to look past the summaries, you guys feel free to read and enjoy

ExThaNemesis posted...

There were plenty of fanfictions back in the day. I wrote for Vs. Mode, which was like the knock off. I can't remember what the main one was.

You see, this is exactly the kind of thing I was discussing with yo on the post-show a couple weeks ago. Think about all the crazy stuff we got up to as teens on this board- the Stats Topic and Oracle and x-stats just made sense given the circumstances. But I'm talking about having multiple competing, sprawling gaming-wide fanfictions, Mercs, UCA, 2000+ post Mafia games with extensive flavor storylines, huge Top 10s and Top 100s on every subject under the sun, and a wiki site to document all of the above.

Compare that to someone who just turned 13 in 2019. Where are they going to be exposed to even a tenth of that creative output during their teen years? Sure, they're going to post instagram stories and youtube compilations, maybe they'll create a meme image or two. But where are they going to get writing practice, learn how to argue a point or express themselves over multiple paragraphs of text? School book reports just don't cut it compared to what we grew up with on this board, so it's little wonder why their vocabularies continue to shrink year over year.


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Surprised people were so down on Skyrim and up on Persona 5! Sonic Manias big win over SMB always struck me as pure SFF so Personally ns 5 winning big did not shock me really.

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Nah, Meat Boy just sucks. Sonic Mania isn't that great either though. Persona 5's win was just what I expected from it.

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To be fair my Persona stats were either projected from its win on AC or from the GOTY poll.

Nobody has a parameter to say for sure how strong Sonic or SMB are.

I don't feel like Civilization is likely to change, though. That's the kind of the game people don't get mad at?

You could argue there was a new Civ game but then why is that game not in the bracket instead of Civ 5? So yeah.

I'm with you, Yo. RIP RDR. My last two misses were also RDR where Persona 4 ended up.

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Gonna crosspost this from the Crew topic because it sums up my feelings on Smash Bros vs Odyssey well:

More than almost any other game series out there, Smash is a series that relies on spectacle. Characters are announced, trailers are released, hype is built. The mythos surrounding Smash is a bigger deal than Smash's actual gameplay. Melee is the exception to this because it carried the Gamecube on its back and has a lot of nostalgia attached to it, but the rest? They're not going to suddenly become fodder when new Smash games are released, but they're going to be weaker for sure. The moment that Smash 4 came out and brought almost everyone back while adding way more, Brawl's usefulness was outlived. The moment EVERYONE WAS HERE happened, Smash 4 became worth nothing. I mean, look at this shit:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4183-east-division-final-smash-bros-melee-vs-smash-bros-brawl
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6235-which-is-best-all-time-super-smash-bros-game
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7577-what-is-the-best-all-time-super-smash-bros-game

The clean and nearly unbroken transfer of strength from Brawl -> Smash 4 -> Ultimate is absolutely bananas. No other series acts like this.

All of this is one of the biggest reasons why I think Ultimate is in trouble against Odyssey. I question how much people actually enjoy playing modern Smash, at least to the degree that its Game of the Year result and 1 Seed imply. They have fun with it, sure, but do they really love Smash, or just do they love the IDEA of Smash? I say this as someone who continues to play Ultimate to this day. I would bet money that a game as highly-regarded and universally loved as Odyssey was enjoyed more by the people who played it than Smash Ultimate was enjoyed by its own playerbase. Put Ultimate against, say, The Witcher 3, and it lives up to is full indirect strength potential because Nintendo fans will fall in line. But against another legitimately loved Nintendo game that it's not necessarily higher on the hierarchy than? I have serious doubts.

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I'd guess someone who had a great time playing Smash with friends on the couch is likely to have enjoyed Ultimate more than a Mario game. I love Melee for that reason.

But... how many of today's gameFAQs users had the opportunity to do that?

Leonhart4 posted...

Both sides were rallying pretty good, to be fair, so it probably just pushed the result close to what it would have normally been.

Nah, as far as I can tell, Dark Souls III only had hentai rallies to counter the famous Redditor's 480-upvote New Vegas rally.

ZeldaTPLink posted...

You could argue there was a new Civ game but then why is that game not in the bracket instead of Civ 5?

As perhaps the only B8er who's outright part of the Civ fanbase, let me quote part of a post I made in a previous Show topic:

I could see Civ 5 getting some backlash because Civ 6 is not exactly the most well-liked game, both among Civ fans who lament its SimCity aspects, and among casual Civ players liable to complain about its overpriced DLC.

Anyways, more importantly than that, I think Assassin's Creed IV wasn't exactly a transitive entrant this contest - it was able to rake in the apathy votes against Civ 5, but those collapsed versus Persona 5 the next round, making it (and by extension Civ 5) look worse than it 'should' have.

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The New Vegas rally was the counter rally! DS3 definitely started rallying first and that's why the match got close, and then New Vegas rallied to put it away.

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Leonhart4 posted...

The New Vegas rally was the counter rally! DS3 definitely started rallying first and that's why the match got close, and then New Vegas rallied to put it away.

Well, regardless of that match's rallying trajectory, I've tried and failed to find any SFW Dark Souls III rally that had any sort of traction, both in Zen's topic and on Reddit itself. Of course, I shouldn't need to say that NSFW rallies are inherently going to have a much poorer follow-through rate.

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Back to commenting on The Show:

How much Xenoblade beats P4 by (I don't think it loses unless fuckery happens) depends a lot on how much you think Xenoblade SFFd Three Houses. There's this range of 53% to 59% Xenoblade can fall within and I'm not sure where within there it ends up.

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Also, I'll say that I did my own internal number crunching and pretty much all of my conclusions have lined up with what TPLink says on the Show. He did a great job and even considered some angles I didn't think about.

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KamikazePotato posted...

Also, I'll say that I did my own internal number crunching and pretty much all of my conclusions have lined up with what TPLink says on the Show. He did a great job and even considered some angles I didn't think about.

Thanks, man!

There were at least 3 times during the episode that TPL gave a stat and I was like WHA!?

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MetalmindStats posted...

As perhaps the only B8er who's outright part of the Civ fanbase

I like Civ. I'm just not very good at it.

Agree wtih ZTPL and one of the previous hosts who said Fallout was being underestimated.

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TPLink trying to figure out P5/Portal 2 mirrored my personal experiences. "Okay let me just plug in constant 2015 numbers...okay that looks really bad for Portal 2, let me try some game comparisons...okay that just made it worse..."

I think I just set RDR 2015 = RDR2 and kept a constant Civ 5 and called it a day. Persona 5's numbers weird me out because it looks way, way stronger than Persona 4, and while I think P5 will easily be the strongest in the series the gap still seems bigger than I expected. Sets off my Fraud Detection Warning alarm a bit.

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Kingdom Hearts 3 in the Final Four? That's way worse than that one guy who took Sonic Mania over Persona 5.
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I'm not so sure! KH3 at least had the potential to be strong! There was no scenario where Sonic Mania was going to beat Persona 5.

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Also friendly reminder that Portal 2 is directly linked to Undertale and thus all its numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.

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Yeah that's why I based Portal off of RDR2=RDR

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I want to play the GBA version of Skyrim
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OrangeCrush980 posted...

I want to play the GBA version of Skyrim

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

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Did you forget they made an Alexa version of Skyrim?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEW6dX_BmU

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