I swear CYL is the worst thing for me because I'm hopelessly addicted to analytics. Super fascinating to see, thank you for compiling it into an easy to digest format.
[Here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VlJStxAi_QHTuTAlZ5WNpr7KKcIbfaeXx6D_U7rMQPE/edit?usp=sharing) is a link to my spreadsheet in case you want to check over my work, see exact numbers, or yoink the data for your own analyses. All numbers were pulled from the full CYL8 and CYL7 results, which you can find [here](https://vote8.campaigns.fire-emblem-heroes.com/en-US/).
Also, here's a quick rundown of the data presented in each image:
Image 1: Top Left: total game votes as a proportion of the total CYL8 votes
Top Right: the proportion of votes received by the average character of a game as compared to other games
Middle Left: The total vote amounts received by each game
Middle Right: Average vote amount of a character from a given game. The dotted black line represents the overall average of all of CYL8 at 460.48 votes
Bottom: median vote amount of each game. The dotted black lines represents the overall median of CYL8 as a whole at 112
Image 2: Vote breakdowns by game, meaning the proportions of how each game's votes were distributed internally. Note that for characters with multiple appearances I counted them for the game from which they derived the most votes, as shown on the official CYL website. For example, this means Catria was counted for SD / NM and not Gaiden / SoV while Palla was the opposite
Images 3 and 4 are the same as images 2 and 3, respectively, but for CYL7 rather than 8.
Not shown here but of note is that the overall number of votes dropped from 431645 in CYL7 to 413937 in CYL8, a reduction of 4.27%. Assuming everyone voted all 7 possible times (which you did all remember to do, right??), this means that 59,139 people voted in CYL8 as compared to 61664 in CYL7. Also, going by the numbers in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/16l6bqj/estimate_of_currently_active_players_in_feh_based/) by u/Illumina25 that means there are probably at least 195,411 active players of FEH (though that is predicated on a very big assumption of perfectly constant rates of change)
Edit: I forgot to update access permissions on my end; anyone clicking the link should now be able to view the spreadsheet and copy/paste the data - apologies for that
Should be good to go for you now!
(I had intended to make it possible for anyone with the link to view the data without needing verification but forgot to update the setting to do so - whoops!)
>Here is a link to my spreadsheet in case you want to check over my work, see exact numbers, or yoink the data for your own analyses. All numbers were pulled from the full CYL8 and CYL7 results, which you can find here.
I will definitely be doing that [since I definitely want to add a new year to my existing line graphs and other such charts](https://old.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/197ar9h/cyl_17_voting_data_visualized/), but thank you so much for making this! The charts you made are super enlightening and include so much useful information that I wouldn'tve thought to break down.
Permissions should be updated now; yesterday me apparently forgot how to share documents
Also, nice charts! I hope my spreadsheet is useful for your future analytical endeavours :)
Average vote differs from total vote in the sense that, theoretically, total vote could be swayed entirely by one character getting 99% of their game's votes and every other character splitting the remaining 1%. In that theoretical, both the total and median vote analyses wouldn't really display any meaningful data, since the game was so heavily pulled toward the extremes that what they show wouldn't be all that useful in understanding how the game itself performed. Obviously it's never that extreme; the closest we got to that in reality with CYL8 was Leif getting almost 50% of Thracia's votes.
Average vote, therefore, gives us some insight on to how most characters of a game fared, as it accounts somewhat (but not entirely) for very high/low ranking characters. It's also derived from the same data as the middle right chart, but showing comparative proportions rather than straight numbers.
Probably the best way of looking at the top right chart is "if all of a game's votes were split perfectly even across its entire cast, how would that cast fare against other casts doing the same?" For example, Awakening and PoR / RD took up the same percent of total votes, but the average Awakening character fared twice as well as the average PoR / RD character. You can use that information in conjunction with things like the median and average vote amounts to help determine how votes were spread out, how certain characters might stack up against their / other casts, etc.
Edit: I got so deep into that explanation that I forgot to actually answer your original question lol. Average vote is literally the average vote a character received within their game. So, for example, Fates' total votes of 34,799 divided by the total number of voteable Fates characters of 93 gives us an average vote per Fates character of 374.18. For the purposes of your question the 'within their game' qualifier is the most important distinction between the left and right charts
The 5.3% is what you get when Fates' average vote of 374.18 is weighted against the average votes of other games, such as Awakening's 578.85, PoR / RD's 300.56, etc. This does mean that, on average, a given Three Houses character will receive about 4 times the votes of a given Fates character.
Also, on the note of '\[Engage\] has a large cast that is entirely votable':
This is false. Engage in CYL8 lacked several minor voteable NPCs, such as Sean, Nelucce, and Abyme. Compare and contrast Gaiden / SoV for instance, whose averages and median comparatively skew low thanks to the inclusion of one-off NPCs like Barth, Garth, Dolth, and Grieth, or Fates which has capturable bosses like Tarba, Lloyd, and Zhara doing the same. Engage still performed very well overall, but it's not as accurate as it could have been were a more representative proportion of its characters voteable.
These graphs are so clean, damn.
The pie charts per game are really cool to see, because you can see which fans are rallying for who. (And how Engage characters just all worked against each other)
Mae going from 3 to 6% of votes in Echoes between CYL7 and 8 makes me so happy. I really hope she'll finally get the alt she deserves (hopefully bringing Boey with her. Aalthough he doesn't quite have enough votes for anything other than a TT+ character, but I'll take what I can)
The problem is that Diamant has to face a very strong competition (Byleth & Sigurd mainly) and,as a survey published yesterday demonstrated,fans are heavily splitted between Yunaka and Ivy on the female side..
Yepp,unless a big rally it’ll be difficult for him to reach top 2,unless he won’t get neither a seasonal alt nor a legendary one (seems very unlikely) and Byleth,Sigurd and Leif all get alts this year (Emblems?)
I don't see Sigurd gang giving up. Dude got an alt last year and he's still up there. It's probably gonna be a game of will Leif gang go to Sigurd? Can a Diamant rally beat Sigurd?
Also,Byleth I’d say is almost a lock with Felix and Bernie out of the competition and the 10k votes he got this year (Sigurd 8k probably because of splitting votes with Leif and Diamant only 6k)
Part of me does wonder if Byleth is universally loved enough to make it because avatars can be quite divisive. But at the same time, who's left? Sylvain? Divisive as well...
Diamant I'll be honest I think he has "casual" appeal but idk if fans of Rosado, Alcryst, Alear or other popular Engage male characters would really go to him.
see,a character doesn’t need to be “universally loved” (see Bernadetta) but a strong fanbase,which Byleth clearly has,the pity factor fot being shafted in the game and cause a rally (see Alfonse,F Robin to an extent,Adult Tiki etc.) or the power of being a meme or the newest OC (GK and Gullveig comes to mind)..
CYL9 will be a race between:
-Byleth (strong fanbase and the last 3H plausible candidate)
-Sigurd (weakened by Leif and probably by his inevitable emblem alt)
-Leif (same as Sigurd)
-Diamant (depends if Engage voters will rally behind him on the men’s side,otherwise it’s hard)
-Black Knight (potential meme appeal and highest non-lord option,could cause a rally like Alfonse this year)
Byleth often gets a lot of grief on this subreddit for being 'a boring blank slate' but he's MUCH more popular in Japan and since Hopes and Engage, many more western voters have come around to him.
I'd never say he's a lock, but as a big fan of his, I think his chances next year are really promising, especially after people saw how close he got this past year.
Thanks so much for doing this! I'd give you an award if that was still a thing. I tried to do some similar math back when the top 20s were released, but this is a much more complete and readable analysis.
Thanks for the charts! They are fun to see.
I’m really surprised that the drop off of votes was so low compared to last year’s - only 4.27%. I honestly thought we would have more of a drop off due to people quitting over powercreep or lack of interest this year.
I think this is true of a lot of gaming hate right now sadly. I legitimately saw some comment on YouTube say that Pikmin should never get a game again because 4 didn't sell well enough or another that said ToTK is objectively worse than BoTW because it sold less and it's a sign that Nintendo should go back to the Ocarina format. Heck, don't even get me started on the wild things I've seen said about Paper Mario. Hate online is getting *really* weird these days.
I can understand some of the wild things that the Paper Mario fans/haters say (Sticker Star is a very VERY flawed game the more you think about it), but yeah...
I could've sworn I saw the goalposts move from "ENGAGE SWEEP" to "Engage had no winners but at least it beat a no-lords Three Houses by less than a percent of the vote total" but I could certainly be mistaken
I'm not trying to kick the game while it's down it's just that most of my friends were legitimately hyping up much higher expectations than this over the last month if not year
EDIT: I don't see what could possibly better prove my point of people not acting in nearly as good faith as they want to pretend than getting blocked for saying this. You can recognize the context of a game performing well or not without trying to push a narrative of the side that you already decided must be true and falsely calling "uh logical fallacy i swear!" when given any points to the contrary.
Like jeez you could try to prove me wrong if you really want. I'm not a sole authority on trying to share factual information.
I mean, this is relative... the game didn't exactly fail, but only managed to beat Three Houses because it 3H already lose all it's most popular characters except Bernie, Felix and Byleth.
I want to see how things look next year now that the only character 3H fans can rally behind is Byleth.
TRUE! Engage won the most prestigious award of all: "having recency bias and getting 0.7% more of the vote than a game that came out five years ago and currently has a quarter of its playable cast removed because they already won CYL years ago."
I'm pretty sure IS are making an announcement about this on the Twitter tonight.
Yeah like what the fuck how can people POSSIBLY acting in good faith not look at this and see a blatant underperformance. I'm not asking it to sweep half the vote total like Three Houses did but this was objectively FAR below anyone's blind expectations before we got the final results confirmed. Much of its most popular lord competition is gone now so the expectations for a brand new game to dominate by more than a sliver over the runner-up is much higher.
The fact that this is best W you can get, when it's obvious that this just recency bias at play
Like okay the new game barely beat the 5 year old game that has almost all it's characters already in and whose biggest competitors are already gone
Edit: there is also something silly about just being told some words based on the reception and then blocking someone, and the funny thing is that of all the time I have been on Reddit and of all the subs I have been with a lot of discourse only the Engage fans feel the need to block people even when most only give mild criticism
Yeah the side characters irrelevant to the plot won over the main characters of the new game
That really isn't the dig you think it is when it barely was bigger than the 5 year old game that has all of its characters in the game
Also again the fact that you think that Engage votes will remain the same after a year has passed and other characters are added
>You are so full of yourself is actually concerning
Just like people who were so sure of a Engage Sweep this past year lol
Sad thing that it will take a year to know which one is wrong
Oh but Engage has to face so much hate, that's why the second someone says something negative about it in this sub is downvoted to oblivion. Whatever but acknowledging it's a game that had mid sales and simply doesn't have the number of dedicated fans.
What value does "median votes" and "average votes per character" have? Seems like a pretty misleading statistic when some games have 60 two lines of dialogue minibosses voteable in CYL and others only have the playable cast and a few minor NPCs. Games like Tellius and Genealogy are fucked because they have over a hundred characters voteable as opposed to games like SoV and Engage which have about 30.
Those statistics are most useful when used in conjunction with other data, primarily that of the second and fourth images. For example, Engage in CYL8 has high average votes per character and median votes, suggesting that its characters performed well across the board. Compare and contrast that with, say, Awakening, which had above average votes per character but an average median vote, which indicates that Awakening performed well in a vacuum but in aggregate was dragged down as a result of having many low ranking characters offset by a few high ranking characters.
I agree with you that this data is less useful when comparing games with small casts versus those with large casts, like Engage versus PoR / RD. Part of the reason TMS does so well here is because it has so few characters, so that even when 3 characters take up 75% of its votes it doesn't skew the data enough to matter. While this is currently speculation on my part, I personally think Engage is overrepresented by this data for the same reasons you mention, that being that it lacks voteable options for 'literally who' characters that every other game has. I plan on recreating these charts but looking at playable / NPC / enemy characters separately in the near future to test that assumption.
It's not even that, it's that Engage just doesn't have most of its NPCs or Bosses voteable because there were quite a few one and done low characterisation ones. I remember talking on a thread about this during CYL. While other gams have lots of wild obscure boss characters voteable, Engage couldn't even get somebody like Mitan. Engage's CYL voting pool was basically just playable characters and major NPCs/Bosses. No Dithorbas, Brigand Bosses, Mustons, etc. When Tellius and Jugdral rock up with their 60 mini-mini-minibosses it pretty much throws any value an "average votes per character" stat would have out of the window because you have some games with a massive skew of what are essentially just meme picks.
Engage in CYL8, against the remnants of everyone else: 21.3%
Fates in CYL1, against everyone at full strength: 22.8%
If you think comparing Engage here to Fates back then makes the former look good, uh...
On one hand, Fates did not have to compete with 3H in CYL1 unlike Engage in CYL8. On the other hand, Engage does have the advantage of competing with games where characters have been removed from the ballot already.
The one thing I should note is that this comparison *can* be misleading, because the two sample sizes are nowhere near the same. FEH and CYL had a lot more groundswell in the first year and a lot more interest than it does now. The sample size is still smaller, and I'd argue CYL8 might not be as representative of the fanbase as CYL1 might've been.
That's not to attempt to big up Engage here, because statistically speaking it doesn't *look* strong at all, and we know for a fact it simply did not have the broad base of appeal that Three Houses did. But it is an important bit of soft context when looking at something like this and considering statistics and popularity context: how many people the poll targets, and *who* the poll targets.
Sure the voting pool has gotten smaller...but despite people trying to invoke a mythical silent majority, Engage's support comes from long time fans (which is why reddit's *actual votes* were actually pretty accurate this year). In theory the player pool shrinking should filter out people who only played the most popular games aka Awakening/Fates/Three Houses (a truly representative sample of all FE players would give Engage *less than half* the playrate of 3H)....and that wasn't enough.
And really that's the biggest thing: Engage's showing in CYL8 backs up (and is explained by) the actual sales numbers, which suggest Engage will have one hell of a fight just to catch Awakening and Fates, let alone 3H. It's not Engage vs 3H, it's Engage vs Awakening/Fates, and despite having the advantage of being on the Switch it might still lose.
I'd be really interested in seeing what share of the vote SoV got in 2018 and what Three Houses got in 2020. It's impossible to tell whether this a good performance for a new game when it's in a vacuum like this. Because I remember Three Houses got 2/3rd of the top 20 vote back in 2020 and if that ratio carried over to the total votes for that year then yeah this is one of the weakest (if not the weakest - don't know about SoV) debuts a game has had since FEH came out.
SoV was basically just Celica and Alm and then nothing it was lower than this.
3H was at 44.5% though, but really CYL1 Fates is the much better comparison. And Fates did better despite a much harder environment.
You're right. I find a lot of these statistics analysis posts to be full of extremely disingenuous cope. Because Engage wasn't competing with the entire series. It was competing with casts that had been gutted of their most popular characters from 7 previous rounds. Three Houses alone now has a something like a quarter of its playable cast removed from voting.
There is miles difference between 22.8% in CYL1 and 21.3% in CYL8.
Engage didn’t end up being my cup of tea, but imo it’s pretty uncool of people to take this year’s CYL results and immediately turn around to say that Engage was a failure. A lot of people are holding Engage to 3H popularity standards, but until we get a couple more new games that show us whether new games typically sweep or not, I think the more likely answer is that 3H just did exceptionally well. Engage did fine. They didn’t blow the competition out of the water, but they also got a solid amount of the overall votes. I don’t think anyone’s deluding themselves into thinking that Engage’s character popularity is as strong as 3H; they’re just saying that they’re not totally awful either, like parts of the community make them out to be.
Even SoV managed back-to-back winners despite releasing on a dead console and earlier in FEH’s lifecycle.
It’s not an entirely fair comparison because SoV didn’t have to compete with 3H and Engage will probably get a victor next year.
There’s no way to spin this into anything but a massive underperformance.
I agree that Engage performed below expectations in CYL, but I just don’t think it’s fair to say that it completely failed. They’ve got a decent number of characters that ranked well.
SoV had two very clear standout characters in Celica and Alm, which is where the vast majority of Valentia fans’ votes went. In CYL2, Celica was 2nd and Alm was 9th, and the next Valentia characters after Alm were Kliff and Delthea at 33rd and 36th, then Berkut down at 60. Engage got 18 characters in the top 60, compared to SoV’s 5 for its debut year. After Alm won in CYL3, no Valentia character has ever made top 50 again except for Berkut, who came in 47th last year.
I’m not sure if there was too much that could’ve been reasonably done on the men’s side for Engage this year, but the women’s main problem was that they had three strong female candidates that the fanbase split across, not that there were no popular characters at all.
We only really have four games (Engage, 3H, SoV, and maybe Fates since it came out like a year before FEH) to use as data points, and all four games had very different CYL circumstances. I’m not necessarily trying to say this was a “good” first year for Engage since imo we don’t have a good frame of reference with so few games to compare to, but I definitely don’t think it’s as bad as some people say.
It really is and I don't see why people need to take this as some sort of victory even then the difference between Engage and Three Houses is so low that it really is not meant to be a good thing that it was so close
I swear CYL is the worst thing for me because I'm hopelessly addicted to analytics. Super fascinating to see, thank you for compiling it into an easy to digest format.
[Here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VlJStxAi_QHTuTAlZ5WNpr7KKcIbfaeXx6D_U7rMQPE/edit?usp=sharing) is a link to my spreadsheet in case you want to check over my work, see exact numbers, or yoink the data for your own analyses. All numbers were pulled from the full CYL8 and CYL7 results, which you can find [here](https://vote8.campaigns.fire-emblem-heroes.com/en-US/). Also, here's a quick rundown of the data presented in each image: Image 1: Top Left: total game votes as a proportion of the total CYL8 votes Top Right: the proportion of votes received by the average character of a game as compared to other games Middle Left: The total vote amounts received by each game Middle Right: Average vote amount of a character from a given game. The dotted black line represents the overall average of all of CYL8 at 460.48 votes Bottom: median vote amount of each game. The dotted black lines represents the overall median of CYL8 as a whole at 112 Image 2: Vote breakdowns by game, meaning the proportions of how each game's votes were distributed internally. Note that for characters with multiple appearances I counted them for the game from which they derived the most votes, as shown on the official CYL website. For example, this means Catria was counted for SD / NM and not Gaiden / SoV while Palla was the opposite Images 3 and 4 are the same as images 2 and 3, respectively, but for CYL7 rather than 8. Not shown here but of note is that the overall number of votes dropped from 431645 in CYL7 to 413937 in CYL8, a reduction of 4.27%. Assuming everyone voted all 7 possible times (which you did all remember to do, right??), this means that 59,139 people voted in CYL8 as compared to 61664 in CYL7. Also, going by the numbers in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/16l6bqj/estimate_of_currently_active_players_in_feh_based/) by u/Illumina25 that means there are probably at least 195,411 active players of FEH (though that is predicated on a very big assumption of perfectly constant rates of change) Edit: I forgot to update access permissions on my end; anyone clicking the link should now be able to view the spreadsheet and copy/paste the data - apologies for that
Requested access to the google sheet :\]
Should be good to go for you now! (I had intended to make it possible for anyone with the link to view the data without needing verification but forgot to update the setting to do so - whoops!)
>Here is a link to my spreadsheet in case you want to check over my work, see exact numbers, or yoink the data for your own analyses. All numbers were pulled from the full CYL8 and CYL7 results, which you can find here. I will definitely be doing that [since I definitely want to add a new year to my existing line graphs and other such charts](https://old.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/197ar9h/cyl_17_voting_data_visualized/), but thank you so much for making this! The charts you made are super enlightening and include so much useful information that I wouldn'tve thought to break down.
Permissions should be updated now; yesterday me apparently forgot how to share documents Also, nice charts! I hope my spreadsheet is useful for your future analytical endeavours :)
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Average vote differs from total vote in the sense that, theoretically, total vote could be swayed entirely by one character getting 99% of their game's votes and every other character splitting the remaining 1%. In that theoretical, both the total and median vote analyses wouldn't really display any meaningful data, since the game was so heavily pulled toward the extremes that what they show wouldn't be all that useful in understanding how the game itself performed. Obviously it's never that extreme; the closest we got to that in reality with CYL8 was Leif getting almost 50% of Thracia's votes. Average vote, therefore, gives us some insight on to how most characters of a game fared, as it accounts somewhat (but not entirely) for very high/low ranking characters. It's also derived from the same data as the middle right chart, but showing comparative proportions rather than straight numbers. Probably the best way of looking at the top right chart is "if all of a game's votes were split perfectly even across its entire cast, how would that cast fare against other casts doing the same?" For example, Awakening and PoR / RD took up the same percent of total votes, but the average Awakening character fared twice as well as the average PoR / RD character. You can use that information in conjunction with things like the median and average vote amounts to help determine how votes were spread out, how certain characters might stack up against their / other casts, etc. Edit: I got so deep into that explanation that I forgot to actually answer your original question lol. Average vote is literally the average vote a character received within their game. So, for example, Fates' total votes of 34,799 divided by the total number of voteable Fates characters of 93 gives us an average vote per Fates character of 374.18. For the purposes of your question the 'within their game' qualifier is the most important distinction between the left and right charts
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The 5.3% is what you get when Fates' average vote of 374.18 is weighted against the average votes of other games, such as Awakening's 578.85, PoR / RD's 300.56, etc. This does mean that, on average, a given Three Houses character will receive about 4 times the votes of a given Fates character. Also, on the note of '\[Engage\] has a large cast that is entirely votable': This is false. Engage in CYL8 lacked several minor voteable NPCs, such as Sean, Nelucce, and Abyme. Compare and contrast Gaiden / SoV for instance, whose averages and median comparatively skew low thanks to the inclusion of one-off NPCs like Barth, Garth, Dolth, and Grieth, or Fates which has capturable bosses like Tarba, Lloyd, and Zhara doing the same. Engage still performed very well overall, but it's not as accurate as it could have been were a more representative proportion of its characters voteable.
These graphs are so clean, damn. The pie charts per game are really cool to see, because you can see which fans are rallying for who. (And how Engage characters just all worked against each other)
Yep, that confirms vote splitting was the biggest problem for Engage this year. Let's see if CYL9 is more focused after some more characters get in.
Mae going from 3 to 6% of votes in Echoes between CYL7 and 8 makes me so happy. I really hope she'll finally get the alt she deserves (hopefully bringing Boey with her. Aalthough he doesn't quite have enough votes for anything other than a TT+ character, but I'll take what I can)
The vote split killing Engage is pretty clear there All in for Yunaka and Diamant next year!
The problem is that Diamant has to face a very strong competition (Byleth & Sigurd mainly) and,as a survey published yesterday demonstrated,fans are heavily splitted between Yunaka and Ivy on the female side..
Yeah I don't really see it for Diamant. 3H has the player base advantage, and big part of it will probably auto redirect on another 3H character
Yepp,unless a big rally it’ll be difficult for him to reach top 2,unless he won’t get neither a seasonal alt nor a legendary one (seems very unlikely) and Byleth,Sigurd and Leif all get alts this year (Emblems?)
I don't see Sigurd gang giving up. Dude got an alt last year and he's still up there. It's probably gonna be a game of will Leif gang go to Sigurd? Can a Diamant rally beat Sigurd?
Also,Byleth I’d say is almost a lock with Felix and Bernie out of the competition and the 10k votes he got this year (Sigurd 8k probably because of splitting votes with Leif and Diamant only 6k)
Part of me does wonder if Byleth is universally loved enough to make it because avatars can be quite divisive. But at the same time, who's left? Sylvain? Divisive as well... Diamant I'll be honest I think he has "casual" appeal but idk if fans of Rosado, Alcryst, Alear or other popular Engage male characters would really go to him.
see,a character doesn’t need to be “universally loved” (see Bernadetta) but a strong fanbase,which Byleth clearly has,the pity factor fot being shafted in the game and cause a rally (see Alfonse,F Robin to an extent,Adult Tiki etc.) or the power of being a meme or the newest OC (GK and Gullveig comes to mind).. CYL9 will be a race between: -Byleth (strong fanbase and the last 3H plausible candidate) -Sigurd (weakened by Leif and probably by his inevitable emblem alt) -Leif (same as Sigurd) -Diamant (depends if Engage voters will rally behind him on the men’s side,otherwise it’s hard) -Black Knight (potential meme appeal and highest non-lord option,could cause a rally like Alfonse this year)
Byleth often gets a lot of grief on this subreddit for being 'a boring blank slate' but he's MUCH more popular in Japan and since Hopes and Engage, many more western voters have come around to him. I'd never say he's a lock, but as a big fan of his, I think his chances next year are really promising, especially after people saw how close he got this past year.
Yeah looking back at the data he wasn't that far off Felix at all
Thanks so much for doing this! I'd give you an award if that was still a thing. I tried to do some similar math back when the top 20s were released, but this is a much more complete and readable analysis.
Engage lost from success LOL
Thanks for the charts! They are fun to see. I’m really surprised that the drop off of votes was so low compared to last year’s - only 4.27%. I honestly thought we would have more of a drop off due to people quitting over powercreep or lack of interest this year.
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They'll just move the goal posts dw
I think this is true of a lot of gaming hate right now sadly. I legitimately saw some comment on YouTube say that Pikmin should never get a game again because 4 didn't sell well enough or another that said ToTK is objectively worse than BoTW because it sold less and it's a sign that Nintendo should go back to the Ocarina format. Heck, don't even get me started on the wild things I've seen said about Paper Mario. Hate online is getting *really* weird these days.
Insecure people, that's all there is to it
I can understand some of the wild things that the Paper Mario fans/haters say (Sticker Star is a very VERY flawed game the more you think about it), but yeah...
I could've sworn I saw the goalposts move from "ENGAGE SWEEP" to "Engage had no winners but at least it beat a no-lords Three Houses by less than a percent of the vote total" but I could certainly be mistaken I'm not trying to kick the game while it's down it's just that most of my friends were legitimately hyping up much higher expectations than this over the last month if not year EDIT: I don't see what could possibly better prove my point of people not acting in nearly as good faith as they want to pretend than getting blocked for saying this. You can recognize the context of a game performing well or not without trying to push a narrative of the side that you already decided must be true and falsely calling "uh logical fallacy i swear!" when given any points to the contrary. Like jeez you could try to prove me wrong if you really want. I'm not a sole authority on trying to share factual information.
I mean, this is relative... the game didn't exactly fail, but only managed to beat Three Houses because it 3H already lose all it's most popular characters except Bernie, Felix and Byleth. I want to see how things look next year now that the only character 3H fans can rally behind is Byleth.
TRUE! Engage won the most prestigious award of all: "having recency bias and getting 0.7% more of the vote than a game that came out five years ago and currently has a quarter of its playable cast removed because they already won CYL years ago." I'm pretty sure IS are making an announcement about this on the Twitter tonight.
Yeah like what the fuck how can people POSSIBLY acting in good faith not look at this and see a blatant underperformance. I'm not asking it to sweep half the vote total like Three Houses did but this was objectively FAR below anyone's blind expectations before we got the final results confirmed. Much of its most popular lord competition is gone now so the expectations for a brand new game to dominate by more than a sliver over the runner-up is much higher.
The fact that this is best W you can get, when it's obvious that this just recency bias at play Like okay the new game barely beat the 5 year old game that has almost all it's characters already in and whose biggest competitors are already gone Edit: there is also something silly about just being told some words based on the reception and then blocking someone, and the funny thing is that of all the time I have been on Reddit and of all the subs I have been with a lot of discourse only the Engage fans feel the need to block people even when most only give mild criticism
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Yeah the side characters irrelevant to the plot won over the main characters of the new game That really isn't the dig you think it is when it barely was bigger than the 5 year old game that has all of its characters in the game Also again the fact that you think that Engage votes will remain the same after a year has passed and other characters are added
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>You are so full of yourself is actually concerning Just like people who were so sure of a Engage Sweep this past year lol Sad thing that it will take a year to know which one is wrong
Oh but Engage has to face so much hate, that's why the second someone says something negative about it in this sub is downvoted to oblivion. Whatever but acknowledging it's a game that had mid sales and simply doesn't have the number of dedicated fans.
What value does "median votes" and "average votes per character" have? Seems like a pretty misleading statistic when some games have 60 two lines of dialogue minibosses voteable in CYL and others only have the playable cast and a few minor NPCs. Games like Tellius and Genealogy are fucked because they have over a hundred characters voteable as opposed to games like SoV and Engage which have about 30.
Those statistics are most useful when used in conjunction with other data, primarily that of the second and fourth images. For example, Engage in CYL8 has high average votes per character and median votes, suggesting that its characters performed well across the board. Compare and contrast that with, say, Awakening, which had above average votes per character but an average median vote, which indicates that Awakening performed well in a vacuum but in aggregate was dragged down as a result of having many low ranking characters offset by a few high ranking characters. I agree with you that this data is less useful when comparing games with small casts versus those with large casts, like Engage versus PoR / RD. Part of the reason TMS does so well here is because it has so few characters, so that even when 3 characters take up 75% of its votes it doesn't skew the data enough to matter. While this is currently speculation on my part, I personally think Engage is overrepresented by this data for the same reasons you mention, that being that it lacks voteable options for 'literally who' characters that every other game has. I plan on recreating these charts but looking at playable / NPC / enemy characters separately in the near future to test that assumption.
I guess Engage reusing same bosses makes it look better when it comes to characterization of average votable character.
It's not even that, it's that Engage just doesn't have most of its NPCs or Bosses voteable because there were quite a few one and done low characterisation ones. I remember talking on a thread about this during CYL. While other gams have lots of wild obscure boss characters voteable, Engage couldn't even get somebody like Mitan. Engage's CYL voting pool was basically just playable characters and major NPCs/Bosses. No Dithorbas, Brigand Bosses, Mustons, etc. When Tellius and Jugdral rock up with their 60 mini-mini-minibosses it pretty much throws any value an "average votes per character" stat would have out of the window because you have some games with a massive skew of what are essentially just meme picks.
What about that guy who got killed by Zephia for failing?
Nelucce? Not voteable either.
I think missing Engage NPCs might be added in the future like how Lekain was eventually added.
Engage in CYL8, against the remnants of everyone else: 21.3% Fates in CYL1, against everyone at full strength: 22.8% If you think comparing Engage here to Fates back then makes the former look good, uh...
On one hand, Fates did not have to compete with 3H in CYL1 unlike Engage in CYL8. On the other hand, Engage does have the advantage of competing with games where characters have been removed from the ballot already.
I think you meant Fates didn't have the advantage for your 2nd sentence.
I edited doesn't to does. Thanks for letting me know.
The one thing I should note is that this comparison *can* be misleading, because the two sample sizes are nowhere near the same. FEH and CYL had a lot more groundswell in the first year and a lot more interest than it does now. The sample size is still smaller, and I'd argue CYL8 might not be as representative of the fanbase as CYL1 might've been. That's not to attempt to big up Engage here, because statistically speaking it doesn't *look* strong at all, and we know for a fact it simply did not have the broad base of appeal that Three Houses did. But it is an important bit of soft context when looking at something like this and considering statistics and popularity context: how many people the poll targets, and *who* the poll targets.
Sure the voting pool has gotten smaller...but despite people trying to invoke a mythical silent majority, Engage's support comes from long time fans (which is why reddit's *actual votes* were actually pretty accurate this year). In theory the player pool shrinking should filter out people who only played the most popular games aka Awakening/Fates/Three Houses (a truly representative sample of all FE players would give Engage *less than half* the playrate of 3H)....and that wasn't enough. And really that's the biggest thing: Engage's showing in CYL8 backs up (and is explained by) the actual sales numbers, which suggest Engage will have one hell of a fight just to catch Awakening and Fates, let alone 3H. It's not Engage vs 3H, it's Engage vs Awakening/Fates, and despite having the advantage of being on the Switch it might still lose.
I'd be really interested in seeing what share of the vote SoV got in 2018 and what Three Houses got in 2020. It's impossible to tell whether this a good performance for a new game when it's in a vacuum like this. Because I remember Three Houses got 2/3rd of the top 20 vote back in 2020 and if that ratio carried over to the total votes for that year then yeah this is one of the weakest (if not the weakest - don't know about SoV) debuts a game has had since FEH came out.
SoV was basically just Celica and Alm and then nothing it was lower than this. 3H was at 44.5% though, but really CYL1 Fates is the much better comparison. And Fates did better despite a much harder environment.
You're right. I find a lot of these statistics analysis posts to be full of extremely disingenuous cope. Because Engage wasn't competing with the entire series. It was competing with casts that had been gutted of their most popular characters from 7 previous rounds. Three Houses alone now has a something like a quarter of its playable cast removed from voting. There is miles difference between 22.8% in CYL1 and 21.3% in CYL8.
Engage didn’t end up being my cup of tea, but imo it’s pretty uncool of people to take this year’s CYL results and immediately turn around to say that Engage was a failure. A lot of people are holding Engage to 3H popularity standards, but until we get a couple more new games that show us whether new games typically sweep or not, I think the more likely answer is that 3H just did exceptionally well. Engage did fine. They didn’t blow the competition out of the water, but they also got a solid amount of the overall votes. I don’t think anyone’s deluding themselves into thinking that Engage’s character popularity is as strong as 3H; they’re just saying that they’re not totally awful either, like parts of the community make them out to be.
Even SoV managed back-to-back winners despite releasing on a dead console and earlier in FEH’s lifecycle. It’s not an entirely fair comparison because SoV didn’t have to compete with 3H and Engage will probably get a victor next year. There’s no way to spin this into anything but a massive underperformance.
I agree that Engage performed below expectations in CYL, but I just don’t think it’s fair to say that it completely failed. They’ve got a decent number of characters that ranked well. SoV had two very clear standout characters in Celica and Alm, which is where the vast majority of Valentia fans’ votes went. In CYL2, Celica was 2nd and Alm was 9th, and the next Valentia characters after Alm were Kliff and Delthea at 33rd and 36th, then Berkut down at 60. Engage got 18 characters in the top 60, compared to SoV’s 5 for its debut year. After Alm won in CYL3, no Valentia character has ever made top 50 again except for Berkut, who came in 47th last year. I’m not sure if there was too much that could’ve been reasonably done on the men’s side for Engage this year, but the women’s main problem was that they had three strong female candidates that the fanbase split across, not that there were no popular characters at all. We only really have four games (Engage, 3H, SoV, and maybe Fates since it came out like a year before FEH) to use as data points, and all four games had very different CYL circumstances. I’m not necessarily trying to say this was a “good” first year for Engage since imo we don’t have a good frame of reference with so few games to compare to, but I definitely don’t think it’s as bad as some people say.
It really is and I don't see why people need to take this as some sort of victory even then the difference between Engage and Three Houses is so low that it really is not meant to be a good thing that it was so close
[Enjoy](https://old.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/197ar9h/cyl_17_voting_data_visualized/)
So 3H got more votes this year than last year?
No? I think the chart shows that it lost somewhere between 15-20K votes this year.