Apparently many people don’t like him, and that’s fine, However, I am NOT one of those people. TEAM SCIENCE SHARK!!!
The issue with Stanley is that he was literally a background character. A shark scientist is an interesting concept, but one based on a sight gag and not on a story or gameplay mechanic. If he’s a playable character he would “shoot lasers” and “do shark stuff” instead of pushing new tech or showing off bizarre animation. He’s something that you can already imagine instead of something unexpected that might blow your mind.
Stanley was cool as a background character. Like when you’re playing with a friend and then “Oh cool we got the science shark stage!”. His visual concept is unique and fun but I have no desire to play as him.
I agree with what people are saying about Stanley. Outside of him being a shark what’s the draw? He’s not putting any crazy mechanics into play like Isaac or Eliza would.
But on topic I see Annie taking this entire thing free. The other 3 characters in final four will probably be Isaac, Feng and Eliza. As long as Annie doesn’t win I’m fine with anybody to be honest.
Does it really matter if he is a background character? Black Dhalia is a background character. So is Leduc. Being a “background character” means nothing.
Stanley playing any bit like Ironman was a complete turn off. He was lacking in interesting options until Mike included that part about having attacks from below but even that is flawed considering the stages.
His design and origin is great but the gameplay is so lame I had to take him out of my favored picks.
If Roxy’s gameplay was given to Stanley I would be all over him like James Chen.
the final winner? i’m thinking panzerfaust or isaac. panzerfaust has been around a while (in his original art with big band and leduc). but the hype surrounding isaac has caught on.
well those other characters appeared in other story modes and alex had story concepts for them long before the game came out. there’s even some old art of prototype leduc and painwheel looking cool.
stanley didn’t even have a name until people started asking about him.
that said, stanley just looks fun and i decided i’d vote for him in round #1 once i saw someone post some really neat alt.color ideas.
but for the choices the final round the prediction of Issac, Marie, Panzerfaust, Stanley sounds remarkably like my guess. but as always, anything can happen.
Didn’t know Black Dhalia was so popular, didn’t vote for her, but she’d be in my top 10. I’m especially surprised considering how few players enjoy playing against (or with) zoners. Very surprised how popular Feng is, to be honest she comes off as a little boring to me. Interesting to see how many people predict Annie, I really think she’s going to split her vote with Umbrella and Minette which will make it much harder for her to make it to final 4.
I have this silly feeling Stanley is making it, followed by either Isaac or Umbrella or Marie.
The thing is though once Annie makes final four, the people that voted for Umbrella, Minette and Marie are just gonna throw all their votes at Annie. The split vote thing might affect the votes in the first few rounds, but in the final round you watch what happens.
I think this is quite likely, I’m actually surprised how few people are predicting Marie, I think of her as a shoe in for the top 8.
Because Sangan is included with annie. Would you say that Sephiroth doesn’t titillate katana fanatics because he himself is not a sword?
- I broke up my predictions into tiers (because everyone loves tiers). To be honest some characters like Ileum were hard to place because they have buzz surrounding them but there’s a pretty big camp dead set against them being in the game. There’s also some characters that are gaining traction in voting from what I’ve read around the internet. In particular Beatrix, Molly, Feng and Taliesin has a surprising number of people that said they voted for them in the first round even though I didn’t read too many people being enthused about those characters before voting began. So with that being said here’s my take on how things will play out:
Favorites: Isaac, Dhalia, Panzerfist, Umbrella.
Darkhorses: Brain Drain, Beowulf, Eliza, Aeon, Annie, Marie, Molly, Feng.
Polarized Opinions: D. Violet, Ileum, Minette, Adam,
Long shots: Taliesin, Beatrix, Hive, Leduc, Yu Wan, Venus, Regina, Stanly, Roxy
Left for dead: Samson, Heart Hub, Scythana, Ottomo, Andy
This is going to be interesting because a lot of people will see their first, second, third, and fourth choices slowly whittled away and be forced to vote for a character that isn’t of the top of their list and merely “better than the other choices”.
If your top choices are Scythana, Beatrix, Molly and Andy, and none of those get in and the top four are Stanley, Annie, Issac, and Marie, who are you gonna vote for? Predicting someone’s 5th tier choices is far more difficult and intricate than counting merely people’s top choices and extrapolating from there.
It is useful to group choices into categories that are likely to vote for each other. For example, people who like Marie are probably more likely to like Umbrella and Annie, etc. However, even though this “group” may have the plurality of support, if there were two choices from this group in the top 4, then the fact votes would be split could cause another victory to appear. And so on down the voting chain.
I do not believe, though I have not figured it out officially, that the chosen voting system satisfies monotonicity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, or the independence of clones criterion. Then again, no voting system is anywhere near perfect.
I agree with you strongly about the left for dead tier, but I think you are strongly underestimating Stanley and Leduc. Annie and Eliza are MUCH more likely than Brain Drain, so is Marie.
Top tier is probably something like Issac, Black Dhalia, Marie, Panzerfaust, Umbrella, Annie, Eliza
I think the sleeper candidates are Adam, Molly, and maybe Regina.
(This thread will be really fun to look back on a few months from now)
Who I THINK is going to win?
Probably Eliza, Feng, Issac, Beowulf, maybe Taliesin, maybe Aeon.
Who I want to win?
Feng and Beatrix.
*Stanly and Leduc (and Hive) are characters I struggled with placing as well but ultimately decided to place them where I did because a few factors. Stanly I’ve seen more and more people talk about not voting for him when they got their emails and that makes me believe his stock has fallen, probably not enough to call him a “long shot” but I don’t think he’s a strong darkhorse anymore. Leduc and Hive on the other hand have their staunch supporters but I haven’t really seen a big number of them, specially Hive. Another big determining factor for me is the degrading amount of votes we get with each passing round going from 4 to 1. If we still had the 3>3>3>1 system for voting per round it would help these characters more but I think by top 8 we’re going to see characters with no overwelming support drop like flies.
Brain Drain I completely agree I might be overrating but I cannot shake the feeling that he’ll be one of the characters that’ll sneak in because there really isn’t many negative opinions about him either aesthetically or gameplay wise. This point was touched on by crecrac: how people are voting is erratic. There’s people voting because of aesthetic only, gameplay only and both aesthetics & gameplay being their primary reason for casting a vote for one character or the reason NOT to vote for a particular character. In this first round I’m consistently seeing people say “I really want these 2” or these 3 and using the excess vote(s) as a “also ran” character that they don’t mind getting in. I think we’ll see a “also ran” or 2 make top 16/8 and gain momentum into the top 4, specially since it’s a completely blind vote and we don’t how many votes separate one character from the next.
I think that magical 4th vote we got will be a huge deciding factor. After a couple of weeks of finally narrowing down the 3 you want to see most we got a surprise 4th vote. I can’t say I disagree with your version of top tier. I’m also not really in much disagreement with your sleepers except Regina. I’d be very pleasantly surprised if Regina somehow ended up in top 8/4 as I feel she’s a character that many people wouldn’t mind at all having in the game. But when up against 31 other potential choices I think she drowns in the sea of choice but I hope I’m wrong. I’d love to break down character by character where I think they’ll fair but I don’t think you guys want to read that lol.
Funny ancedote: I don’t think Big Band would make it out of round 1 and certainly not round 2 if he was in this voting process. Panzerfist has a monopoly on people who want big masculine characters and his design has appealed even to people who don’t like big characters which is a rarity. What characters did you vote for anyway? *
I voted for Umbrella, Minette, Hive and Adam.
I voted for the first two because I like cute characters, especially ones with smaller hitboxes, I honestly like Annie a lot, but I didn’t want to “waste” a first vote because I’m confident Annie will make it past the first round (for a similar reason I didn’t vote for Marie, even though she’s probably in my top 5). I’m very confident that Umbrella, Minette, or Annie will make it to the final 4. I almost didn’t vote for Hive, in a way I feel like voting for her, was like voting for Andy or something, but I just love Q Bee and Sentinel too much, and I think she has a shot for getting out of the first round. I was surprised how many haters she had when she was revealed. Adam is pretty awesome and one of the few well rounded male characters I feel, I also love Parasoul.
I agree with you that Big Band probably wouldn’t have gotten far, certainly not in the final four. For what it’s worth as much of it may be a tangent, I don’t like Robo Ms Fortune, and I’d rather have one of the 30 choices of characters being an extra character as a pseudo clone (i.e. Fox/Falco) or other various things like more music or taunts. I think Mike Z is a very respected and influential figure in the community and I think that if he didn’t pick winners and losers, Issac would be far less popular while Adam would be more popular. I also think that if that were the case, Leduc wouldn’t have lost as much momentum.
Interesting point about Brain Drain, that he doesn’t have many haters. The only problem is I don’t know if he has enough fans to make it out of the left for dead tier. I haven’t heard any buzz about people excited about him. My Regina theory is based on anecdotal evidence, but I know a few people in person who like her quite a bit. Also Strider is a popular fighting icon, and I’m finding few people hate Regina. Stanley has very popular name ID, and I feel that supports may show a political “Shy Tory” effect (Many supporters love Stanley but are embarrassed that they do because many members of the community have talked him down, because Stanley may have lower public opinion they vote for him silently).
By the way, I’m beginning to think Roxie and Aeon could be left for dead characters, they seem to have zero momentum, it’s a shame about Roxie too, because I like her aesthetically but couldn’t get into her play style at all.
I voted:
Stanley
Taliesin
Feng
Ms. Victoria
I see what you mean about people not wanting to express their love for certain characters because of backlash, and that makes me kind of sad. I’ve always felt that, if you like something, you shouldn’t be ashamed of it. Other people support the characters they want, so why can’t you? I like Stanley. Out of all of the characters that have been revealed so far, he is the one that I want in the game the most. If someone has a problem with that, oh well (and I mean that in the nicest way possible).
Okay, I think this tier list is a good idea so I wanted to add mines as well. This tier list is only a for round one, which means that this is a list of characters that most likely going to end up being 1 of the players 4 picks. The decision is based off of 4 factors, Aesthetics, Game Play, Lore, and Uniqueness. If a character is considered unique, he’ll get double likelihood of being picked, as it overlaps with a vote for gameplay.
Tier1 (80-60% chance): Annie, Marie, B.Dahlia, Brain Drain, Eliza, Isaac, (Top 8 Wild Card1, Wild Card2)
Tier2 (59-40% chance): Umbrella, Stanely, Victoria, Molly, Feng, Scythana, Panzerfaust, (Top 16 Wild Card1, Wild Card2, Wild Card3)
Tier3 (39-20%) chance): Talesin, Leduc, Minette, Venus, Adam, Beowolf
Tier4 (19-10% chance): Violet, Andy, Hive, Regina, Beatrix, Aeon,
Tier5 (9-0% chance): Roxie, Yun-wan, Samson, Hubrecht, Ottomo, Ileum
The characters in Tier 1 will be guaranteed top 8, with 3 wild card spots for tier 2 characters. I wanted to put Panzerfaust in Tier 1, but I think hatred of Panzerfaust in these forums is impressive. I think he’s going to have battle through the Tier 2 people to get his wild card spot. I feel the same way about Umbrella, even with Mike Z’s support, a lot of people really don’t like her, and I believe the lolicon vote will be split between her, Marie, and Annie.
I should also mention that none of the Tier 1 characters are anybody I really wanted. I’m going to push hard for Panzerfaust to get into top 8.