I think it was a good idea that far-fetched was removed

[Icelerate]

There are two underlying reasons why removing far-fetched was a good thing.

Firstly, IS already focuses on adding popular characters to the game from each game on each new heroes banner. If popular top 100 characters are being added constantly, why do we need another banner that does the same thing especially when the most popular ones have already been added?

The counter argument to this first point I anticipate is that there are some popular characters not already in the game such as Jill and now many Three Houses characters. However, my counter argument is that IS can easily add them in new hero banners this year by giving us multiple Three Houses banners and a couple of Tellius banners among others. By not adding these characters in a farfetched banner, it can allow IS to add in some less popular characters as well for a healthy balance. Otherwise, the obscure characters will have a harder time getting into the game forcing IS to give us alts on new hero banners.

Secondly, as the leaked results show, bots and vote stuffing is a thing which can allow characters no one cares for to get into the top 20. So there is a chance more bots can show up or the same botter ends up stuffing four obscure characters with votes for the lolz. Imagine the scenario where four characters people don't know or care about being on such a banner. That'd be the most disappointing banner ever and hardly anyone will spend orbs on which would be bad for IS and bad for the fanbase.

A counter argument I expect is that IS can easily exclude characters that have been botted. However, this is quite arbitrary and there is no proof IS can ascertain with absolute certainty which characters have been botted or else they'd have already dealt with those votes. Sure they can easily deduce a character has been botted just like the fanbase but this is the same company that doesn't realize that important characters like Lekain are still missing on CYL. Also, some people might not believe that the excluded characters were botted into the game by one individual so they might get upset at such arbitrary exclusions.

[Hilda]

That depends what you consider in the game. For me Bunny Bruno doesnt mean he is in the game. So nope removing Farfetched banner was a mistake from my point of view. Special Heroes never account for in the game for me.

[XRay]

While I personally do not care, I do not think removing it is a good idea in my opinion. Farfetched Heroes/Brave Redux gave players more control over who they want added into the game. In general, I favor giving players more control/influence whenever possible.

As for the bot thing, they can always adjust the rules where only accounts linked with a My Nintendo account have their votes counted.

9 minutes ago, Icelerate said:

However, my counter argument is that IS can easily add them in new hero banners this year by giving us multiple Three Houses banners and a couple of Tellius banners among others. By not adding these characters in a farfetched banner, it can allow IS to add in some less popular characters as well for a healthy balance. Otherwise, the obscure characters will have a harder time getting into the game forcing IS to give us alts on new hero banners.

They can still give us obscure characters in other Foci though. Having Farfetched Heroes/Brave Redux does not prevent them from adding in obscure characters.

[Icelerate]

 

5 minutes ago, Hilda said:

That depends what you consider in the game. For me Bunny Bruno doesnt mean he is in the game. So nope removing Farfetched banner was a mistake from my point of view. Special Heroes never account for in the game for me.

Seasonal only units also have the dilemma of whether they are included in the game or not. Someone who thinks they are already in the game will get annoyed when farfetched has multiple of them. It instead becomes an alts banner which replaced a new heroes banner. 

3 minutes ago, XRay said:

While I personally do not care, I do not think removing it is a good idea in my opinion. Farfetched Heroes/Brave Redux gave players more control over who they want added into the game. In general, I favor giving players more control/influence whenever possible.

As for the bot thing, they can always adjust the rules where only accounts linked with a My Nintendo account have their votes counted.

They can still give us obscure characters in other Foci though. Having Farfetched Heroes/Brave Redux does not prevent them from adding in obscure characters.

That's only a solution if IS were to make it Nintendo account only but they have yet to do such a thing despite this being an issue in CYL3 as well. 

If Farfetched banner gives the most popular characters, the other foci will have less attractive characters which will reduce the revenue of them. This would force IS to add alts to new hero banners which would upset some people. 

[Anacybele]

No, absolutely not.

28 minutes ago, XRay said:

Farfetched Heroes/Brave Redux gave players more control over who they want added into the game. In general, I favor giving players more control/influence whenever possible.

Because of this right here, basically.

I was expecting to see Shinon and Jill and I didn't get them. I was left so disappointed. If Farfetched/Brave Redux was still a thing, Sylvain would now have a shot too (currently, he's the third most popular male not in the game, but it was always possible that Felix or Ashe or both got in at some point before the usual period). But now I don't know when he'll ever get in because even though he's popular, some characters within his own game and even his own HOUSE are more popular still... A Farfetched/Brave Redux type banner would've been my best bet for him.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Anacybele

[Florete]

Is there any proof of bots being used?

I don't really agree or disagree. It's unfortunate if a favorite didn't get added in, but I kept track of the CYL3 high-rankers as the year went and a lot of those characters got in in one way or another. The only character from when the CYL3 results were out who would have been on Farfetched at that moment and didn't get in at all* was Anna (Awakening) (And yes, this does wound me personally). Something like the top 7 male characters who weren't in at the time got in last year, meaning Farfetched would have featured ranks 85 and 86 (Nils and Shinon), assuming it was still going to be an even gender split. Not exactly "fan voted popular character."

At the same time, though, it encourages people to vote for their favorite in CYL even if they don't expect them to take a winning spot, because if they rank high enough it can guarantee getting that character in the game, and a guarantee is better than "I hope they add the character who ranked 5th overall and still isn't in the game yet."

*This is excluding Bruno, because I don't think he would have been on a Farfetched banner anyway, and Louise, because she got a seasonal.

[Othin]

The problem with hypotheticals about which characters would have been on Farfetched 3 is that they presume no changes to the other banners. We can't know how that could have changed if they knew some of the other high-ranking characters could have been set for Farfetched 3, potentially taking some of those spots.

I like Farfetched in theory, but in practice, it's been getting kind of messy. Criteria for who does or doesn't qualify getting more confusing, going lower on the rankings and potentially having big divides between the rankings of the male and female characters on it, a "three 5* exclusives and one free unit" banner not matching up as well against current New Heroes banners... I'd say with how well they've been doing with adding new popular characters, another New Heroes banner in its place is at least as good, if not better.

[trainer_derp]

Leaning towards no. Farfetched banners ending was inevitable, but I think it got axed too soon. They should have kept them around at least until majority of the candidates for Farfetched were out of the top 100. 

[NoirCore]

There is some (citation needed) alarms ringing with that "bots were used" claim. Got any proof?

And in any case, the runner-up banner is good because it allows control to help put wanted units in the banner. IS is very much unpredictable with how they do banners, so I imagine some control would be nice. One "disappointing runner up banner" isn't the end of the world in the (unlikely) scenario all four units are disappointing.

[Anacybele]

Oh yeah, I'm also wondering if there's any proof that bots were used in CYL. 😕

[Ice Dragon]

1 hour ago, Icelerate said:

Secondly, as the leaked results show, bots and vote stuffing is a thing which can allow characters no one cares for to get into the top 20. So there is a chance more bots can show up or the same botter ends up stuffing four obscure characters with votes for the lolz.

I don't think there is any evidence out there that there were bots or vote stuffing making a significant difference. Meming characters up the ranks has always been a thing as is campaigning for less popular characters.

 

As for the Farfetched Heroes banner itself, I think it was fine that they didn't run one this past year because they covered almost all of the characters that they would have covered with a Farfetched Heroes banner anyways over the course of the year.

[Tybrosion]

6 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

Oh yeah, I'm also wondering if there's any proof that bots were used in CYL. 😕

I can't think of any better suggestions as to why

Spoiler

a character like Jorge (not Jeorge) got to 27th overall in CYL4. Keep in mind that puts him in 12th place among all the males when he was nowhere to be found in the midway results.

Unless if someone can prove that a meme campaign was started for this guy, I can't think of any other ideas. 

 

[Anacybele]

6 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:

I can't think of any better suggestions as to why

  Hide contents

a character like Jorge (not Jeorge) got to 27th overall in CYL4. Keep in mind that puts him in 12th place among all the males when he was nowhere to be found in the midway results.

Unless if someone can prove that a meme campaign was started for this guy, I can't think of any other ideas. 

 

It might have been a meme campaign, you never know. Last year some dude campaigned for female Robin and she almost won. I noticed that the gaps between vote counts generally are huge this time. The highest vote counts of the top ten are above 55,000 and the lowest are just over 9,000. That's massive. I think these differences are way bigger than in previous CYLs.

Ike had the highest vote count of roughly 55,000 when combining his votes in the first CYL.

This year's CYL had a much bigger highest vote count of:

Spoiler

Roughly 74,000.

That's insane.

Spoiler

So even if Jorge got 27th, he could've had a pretty low vote count.

 

Edited January 31, 2020 by Anacybele

[Ice Dragon]

16 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:

I can't think of any better suggestions as to why

According to Reddit comments, there was a meme campaign for him in Japan.

I imagine Gatekeeper would've had the same in the West if he were actually an option.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Ice Dragon

[TheNiddo]

16 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:

I can't think of any better suggestions as to why

  Reveal hidden contents

a character like Jorge (not Jeorge) got to 27th overall in CYL4. Keep in mind that puts him in 12th place among all the males when he was nowhere to be found in the midway results.

Unless if someone can prove that a meme campaign was started for this guy, I can't think of any other ideas. 

 

To follow up on this, supposedly the guy on Reddit who was originally pushing for him in the previous CYLs has also made posts over there on how to set up bot voting. If true I think its a fairly reasonable assumption given that he went from 39 > 21 > 1598 > 6728 votes over the 4 CYLs. The meme push for him in Japan was last year, I don't think it has staying power with 3H out let along growing in power by about roughly 4x the amount. 

[Landmaster]

The Jorge guy was absolutely botted since the guy admitted to doing it

Anyway, I never cared about Farfetched one way or the other so it being removed honestly doesn't really affect me~

[Morgan--Grandmaster]

It became a tradition and breaking that tradition without telling us feels kinda like a kick in the face. Trust me, I've been there.

[Diovani Bressan]

I do not miss Farfetched, and I will not see any problems of not having this banner ever again.

[daisy jane]

doesn't phase me one way or another. Farfetched to me just = a banner. and we have a banner at that time anyway so meh. 

[Baldrick]

If Farfetched had been held this year, the candidates would have been Bruno, Lif, Selkie and Louise. All of whom are already in the game, whether one likes it or not.

If people really wanted new characters to be added, that's what CYL is for. We could have recreated a pseudo-Farfetched banner by voting in four characters not in the game. But the fanbase has spoken on that front.

[Fabulously Olivier]

Honestly, CYL influences future banners in general, and high placing units have a very high chance of appearing throughout the year. The loss of Farfetched is not a big deal. 

[TheNiddo]

The main unique thing about Farfetched, and why I'd like it back, is that its one of the only non-brave unit banner that can have a mix of characters from more than one FE game without it being a seasonal banner. The only other one I can think of that's not seasonal or brave is Fallen Heroes. Which means its the only one where they still showed up in their regular outfits without a theme to them.

I kinda liked that. Frankly I wish the new heroes banners would do that normally, mix things up. 

[Florete]

15 minutes ago, Baldrick said:

If Farfetched had been held this year, the candidates would have been Bruno, Lif, Selkie and Louise. All of whom are already in the game, whether one likes it or not.

If people really wanted new characters to be added, that's what CYL is for. We could have recreated a pseudo-Farfetched banner by voting in four characters not in the game. But the fanbase has spoken on that front.

Normal Selkie was in months before Farfetched would have happened and there's no way they would have put Lif on Farfetched instead of having him be a Mythic. You also skipped Anna (Awakening).

This is leaving out the fact that we can't even say for sure if Bruno and Louise would have been on it.

[Sunwoo]

I guess the main thing I didn't like about Farfetched was that this banner never got a demotion. But lately, we seem to get a handful of banners that get no demotion for no good reason so I suppose removing it just means that a banner people actually looked forward to got removed. So I don't really see a beneficial reason to taking it out, tbh.

[NegativeExponents-]

2 hours ago, Icelerate said:

By not adding these characters in a farfetched banner, it can allow IS to add in some less popular characters as well for a healthy balance. Otherwise, the obscure characters will have a harder time getting into the game forcing IS to give us alts on new hero banners.

This

2 hours ago, Icelerate said:

Secondly, as the leaked results show, bots and vote stuffing is a thing which can allow characters no one cares for to get into the top 20. So there is a chance more bots can show up or the same botter ends up stuffing four obscure characters with votes for the lolz. Imagine the scenario where four characters people don't know or care about being on such a banner. That'd be the most disappointing banner ever and hardly anyone will spend orbs on which would be bad for IS and bad for the fanbase.

Contradicts this. Pick one.

How are you gonna say that adding popular characters is a bad thing because it takes the chance away from obscure ones only to say the exact opposite on the following paragraph?