Two Rolls of a One

I know that with a random factor, there would be a chance, however slight, that we would see games in my tournament roll a 1. I just was surprised to see two 1s rolled on the same day.

Around the Tournamemt

Today we have 3 matches to look at, finishing off the last Wild Card fight and 2 seeded contests featuring number 8 versus 9.

The Division started with a strong first-quarter score of 26 based on its roll of 59 against its Metacritic score. EU4, on the other hand, floundered to 22 points based on a bad roll of 18 when it was actually expected to win the quarter. The second quarter had some surprises, though. While The Division was a clear favorite, leading in YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit scores, it threw down the first 1 on the random number generator. That brought their score to 46 at the half. EU4 didn’t fair much better rolling a 7, but they were able to pick up a point and end the half with a 43 to 46 deficit.

With that low-scoring quarter swept aside, Half-Life came into the final quarter of their game down by 1 point. This has been a see-saw battle, and once again, the RNG gods seem to like playing with this match. Half-Life 2 rolled out a 51 to score 25 points in the last quarter, giving them 97 total. Cyberpunk needed 4 points to tie and 5 to win…any rollover 45 would give Cyberpunk the victory…they rolled an 11.

Half-Life 2 wins 97 over 94 and moves on to face number 1 seeded Neverwinter.

The Pre-Game Warmup

The next battle in my Rambling Redshirt Gaming Madness tournament once again features a number 8 and 9 seed. This time around, we head to the Winter bracket to see #8 Legends of Aria face off against #9 Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars looks pretty strong and has quite a few gamers that I follow (through blogs and podcasts) supporting it, while I can’t even find a Metacritic score for Legends of Aria. We’ll see how this goes.

Legends of Aria is the spiritual successor to Ultima Online. It was released in 2020 by a small indie developer and is technically free-to-play.

One thing that is interesting that I’ve heard recently is that there is some kind of NFT/blockchain re-release of this game that I’ll have to take a look into as the match continues, but for now, that’s the original trailer.

Guild Wars 2 is the sequel to Guild Wars, which was a well-received game in its own right. GW2 is a free-to-play MMO that has seen multiple expansions and updates over the years.

Released in 2012, it is still going strong with a large following, and it has even seen its ground-breaking Wolrd-vs-World combat grow over the years along with its Living World seasons. GW2 will make a formidable opponent to any game in the tournament and may be overwhelming for the little indie-developed Legends of Aria.

The First Quarter

With no Metacritic score, I simply assigned Legends of Aria a baseline of 50 for their target. I figure the game would at least rank a 50 even if it were a really bad game, though I’ve seen some games score even worse than that. For its score, Guild Wars 2 comes in at a 90.

The Rolls

With a target RNG of 50, Legends of Aria rolls out a 17, which while respectable is facing a GW2 opponent with a target of 90. GW2 rolls a…1! A second 1 in a single day, and this is a significant blow to the heavily favored GW2.

The Score

GW2 stumbles mightily out of the gate with a paltry score of 20, while Legends of Aria pulls out a 22.

Wrapping it Up

Unbelievably we had two rolls of a 1 today. One that caused The Division to stumble in the 2nd quarter and another that handicapped Guild Wars 2 out of the gate. We’ll see if these highly-rated games can survive such a setback in these close contests, but for now, we’ll just have to see.

Next up, I’ve got #8 Terraria against #9 ArcheAge kicking off tomorrow.

RRGM 8 | Elephant 17 | 2022.102 | Two Rolls of a One