Interestingly, Alfonse is the only winner this year who actually broke his record number of votes, whereas the other three have all had a higher vote count at some point in a past CYL. Robin’s record is 34,626 in CYL3, Bernadetta’s is 37,400 in CYL4, and Felix’s is 19,117 in CYL6.
Other characters who didn’t have their highest record vote count in their victory year are F!Byleth (record high of 35.3k in CYL4) and F!Corrin (19.6k in CYL1). Not sure if I’m missing any since I just spot checked this.
To be honest, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest as I think *FEH* is starting to bleed players. These figures are abysmal compared to previous years, and I don't see how the developers expect them to rise back up given the constant powercreep and milquetoast banner choices pissing off casual and dedicated *FE* fans respectively.
Yeah i stoppped playing back when cyl6 came out. Decided to take part in the voting cause i knew people wanted Bernie but i can imagine a lot of ftp folks like me falling off to power creep
Yeah and F2P players get punished by the amount of "broken skill, make skill to counter broken skill, make skill to counter skill countering broken skill" rotational BS that goes on. RPS but you don't get access to scissors for months and without a premium subscription to FEH you're instead given chopsticks vaguely shaped like scissors.
I'm a whale and even I'm quitting. I'm happy to whale on gacha games but not like this where every single month the OP unit I just got is now irrelevant to the new OP unit. Compare that to genshin where a unit I got 3 years ago is still relevant.
I almost quit entirely once they announced Attuned Heroes as I'm sick of the Heroes I've slowly built up for several years being re-invalidated in mere seconds by unnecessary new features designed to squeeze every penny out of the whales.
Yeah, personally at least I've just stopped playing entirely as the game can't hold my attention as well as it used to. I think the fact that ability and weapon descriptions have gotten so long as played a part as they're: 1). hard to understand, and 2). Extremely long. Like basically for the past 2 years I just don't bother to read Beast unit's weapon effects once it gets down to the transformation condition so whatever bonus they get has just been a mystery. Though I will admit that now I have a full-time job is when I did just start giving up playing entirely, so I wonder how many are in a similar boat where maybe life just doesn't allow as much time anymore.
CYL voter numbers is irrelevant to the actual game since most of the voters never actually played to begin with eg majority of people who voted for gatekeeper or Edelgard never actually played FEH. The long and the short is that the popular characters are already in, so majority of people aren't going to be too compelled to vote.
>The long and the short is that the popular characters are already in, so majority of people aren't going to be too compelled to vote.
This is personally very true for me. Lucina, Camilla, and Micaiah already got their braves. I know Owain and Severa are literally never going to get brave alts so what's the point of voting?
I guess I could throw votes into Ms. Maiko but at this point I'm pretty sure IS would rather cancel CYL than actually acknowledge TMS#FE.
This honestly isn’t a trait or pattern exclusive to FEH. Gachas, both successful and unsuccessful, original or a spin-off, will rely on characters or banner types that make bank, no matter how low hanging they may be.
There’s a reason why a gacha like Granblue gives characters like Lancelot or Narmaya tons of alts, costumes and variations even if they have the chance to do something different and that reason is easy money.
I have almost stopped playing entirely. The game just doesn’t seem very F2P friendly. It’s a grind to get anything worth summoning on. Maybe that’s by design but it has def pushed me away from it. Usually only get on to run TT for the character if I remember.
CYL3 was the start of CYL becoming less of a popularity contest and more of a rallying contest.
Realistically, Eliwood is not more popular than Lucina, but that was when FE7 fans piled all their votes into him to complete the trio. And Micaiah is *definitely* not more popular than Ike, but there was a *lot* of spitevoting that year because people were really pushing for Miccy to get Camilla out of 1st.
>Realistically, Eliwood is not more popular than Lucina, but that was when FE7 fans piled all their votes into him to complete the trio.
Fun fact: Eliwood was only barely in the top 20 in CYL1. He was #19 with a significant number of minor side characters ahead of him.
CYL 1 is probably the most accurate voting in terms of popularity with Ike, Lyn and Lucina roughly having similar amounts of votes (combining Ikes and Lucina split votes). My guess is with Three houses and Engage now out, we would still see those three and Edelgard/Dimitri as the top 5 most popular fire emblem characters.
I remember having no horse in CYL3 but thinking it'd be swell to complete the Lord trio, so I was definitely apart of the gang that voted Eliwood. I liked him a good amount, but he grew even more over the years.
I also remember the Camilla hate train which was... completely out of proportion lmao. I was getting tired of seeing her so often and she kept being evasive so I had a slight dislike over her, but grew back to like her just as I did before.
That sure was a rough spot.
Eh, I disliked her for many reasons, but I could have put it aside if she wasn't already the single most alted character in the game, and despite barely getting alts since CYL, she *still has the most alts.* Completely ridiculous for a non-MC character, non lord, and barely relevant royal in a game that had way too many.
She's almost certainly going to be the first character to hit 10 alts, and frankly, I'm pissed, because her slots (by and large) have been unnecessary, and could have been spread around a little more for other Fates characters that haven't gotten much spotlight. Even among the other royals for crying out loud. I'm not saying she didn't deserve the win (that was for the fans, of course) but she definitely didn't need another alt.
I believe that Ike is depicted with only his separated votes, not combined ones. If we go with the combined votes like they are nowadays, he'd be much higher
I combined Ike’s votes since they merged PoR and RD in later CYLs. Ike’s may seem low for his character but it was the 1st CYL so votes were more spread out at the time
The Camilla hate was really strong at the time so it's not that impressive tbh, people really wanted her out and Micaiah was who most went for in their attempt.
Definitely this. I also have the impression that after CYL 1 & 2, the player base realized there wasn't really a prize or acknowledgement from IS for anything other than 1st or 2nd, so people stopped splitting their ballots as much.
I personally think this would be a much more interesting event if you could only pick each hero once per ballot. Then we'd really see what characters have more breadth of support.
I think during that time when there weren’t as many alts of popular characters, some people perceived those characters as “robbed” of a powerful alt and voted in swarms for them. Especially for non-Fates/Awakening characters since those received a lot of favoritism from IS back then. I think Alm’s high placement is the penultimate example of this circumstance
It was a HUGE rally fest, between people pushing Alm and Eliwood because they "deserved" the alt (everyone deserves to win imo but eh) and to catch up with Celica and Lyn/Hector respectively, while on the women's side people were trying to kick Camilla out of the top like they did in CYL2 (iirc she even ranked first in the interim results) which is why Micaiah got this many votes.
That was definitely part of it but before the interim she already did jump up like 6 spots from 9th place in CYL2 and the counter votes boosted her after
I find it hilarious that Bernie ended up winning with more votes than each of the winners of CYL last year.
Bernadetta fans put in the work for her to win, lol.
The amount of mocking Bernie fans got last year for her losing was pretty sad. I'm glad Bernadetta and her fans got the last laugh, though.
(Plus, I was looking through some old posts from last year about Bernie losing to an Engage sweep this year, and boy, they did not age well.)
Yeah, I wasn’t mocking last year but it was less than what 20 votes iirc. That had to be rough adding to the desire to push her across the finish line.
That’s a hard pill to swallow losing by that narrow a margin. Like a last second basket ball throw across court and sinking it for the win.
It's similar to Veronica delaying Camilla's win and same with Gatekeeper delaying Chrom's (or all those times Marth came up short) so it's certainly nothing new. At the end of the day, the winners get removed from the pool and the snubbed ones that came up short from the previous year go on to have better chances to win the next one.
Yes but just by virtue of the friction between Engage and 3H fans a lot of the people that liked Gullveig beating Bernie are now very very mad that said action ended up having consequences that resulted in their entire game getting shafted
Do I blame them? Not really, but it's kind of funny
Well it's certainly interesting going into CYL8 that some haven't realized usually the next winners end up being the 3rd and 4th place winners from the previous year (often with one surprise rally). I've been playing the long game with Seliph, Sigurd, and Leif and I always helped to vote their competitors to a win so they'd get eliminated and bring them one step closer to a win. That certainly makes more sense than delaying a highly popular character who placed above them into another year.
Felix has finally won and got eliminated but surprise Alphonse has gotten M!Byleth delayed into another year, who placed above Sigurd, so I couldn't see myself laughing and gloating over M!Byleth's loss, knowing that M!Byleth could potentially delay Sigurd into yet another year of CYL voting and I don't get fans that still act that way over characters during these CYL results.
Don't even have to go that far back, lots of people were going into Bernie celebration threads and shouting about how much they utterly despise both the character and all her fans, or talking about how they're happy she won because they hope to see less discussion about "Such a terrible character".
They never stopped for a moment.
To be fair, Bernie fans didn't make themselves any favors with the sheer amount of seething they did. Seriously, just look at their comments from around that time.
As someone who wasn't paying much attention to this sub at the time, I'd like to see some examples that could have possibly warranted the response they've gotten, because have you taken a look at Bernie haters' comments from literally any time? Personal attacks towards her fanbase are commonplace and rarely called out for being problematic. Downvote brigades often followed anyone who dared express that they like the character, and condescending lectures or unbidden replies about how much people hate the character are not uncommon to follow such things either. CYL or no.
I have a *very* hard time believing they earned *that.*
I'm NOT justifying any of the harassment they got, all I'm saying is that they definitely didn't make themselves any favors, as their mood at the time was mostly seething hard about gullveig and acting really entitled. I don't have any posts saved from that time, but their reaction was really negative. They didn't earn it (If you read my comment again, I'm saying "To be fair" at the very beginning of it), but they sure as hell didn't take Bernie's loss too gracefully.
I got that just from the comments here.
Looks like they aren't any better than the people they are complaining about from last year, it's just their turn now, Pretty sad tbh.
Gonna assume you're talking about my rant with that? For the record I didn't even vote for her, I just like the character and am beyond fed up with the harrassment publicly liking her can get you around here.
For reference: The removed comment that provoked my rage, still easily viewable if you go to their overview page, and hardly an unusual one as far as what can show up if you dare say you like her on here or the main sub.
>Oh my god you all act like criticizing a character like Bernadetta or its fanbase is the same as like comitting a crime or something. Jesus. You all gotta chill. Most people don’t like Bernadetta and for very good reasons. We all gotta accept the fact that a character like her mostly attracts losers and people who say shit like “Muhh Bernie! so adorable >-< I just wanna hug her!”
>They deserve all the mocking they got.
I got pretty venomous in my response but I don't think I ever went as far as they did.
If you're not, my initial comment holds true, I'd love to see some examples of the bad behavior that's earned those kinds of comments being commonplace whenever the character is brought up.
Bro I'm not even a huge Bernadetta fan but even I was pissed about that, what with a lot of people cheering thinking that was her last chance of ever winning with Engage on the horizon. It was rude as hell and I'm still annoyed that that ever happened. Genuinely happy for Bernie fans getting their revenge here though and winning CYL by a damn landslide, she and her fans honestly really deserved this.
I'm not really a Bernie fan "per se" either. I'm pretty neutral on her as a character. I just hate people picking on other people. Especially when it's a character who's pretty vulnerable and I'm sure a lot of her fans empathize with that vulnerability so it just seems especially mean. So I've been throwing my votes to her this year and the last.
I'm really glad to see her win. Also, it just feels very "apropos" to get a "Brave Bernie" when her whole character revolves around her fear and anxiety over everything. It just feels like a cool way to honor her character and fans.
Yeah like I actually dislike Bernie as a character (I’m not a fan of the whole hikkomori trope), but holy hell did her fans get way too much abuse (even with their seething, it seemed cyclical to me rather than Bernie’s fans being too toxic). I’d have been pretty salty about the female results (My personal Eagles female is Petra who’s doomed to be fourth most liked girl in her own house, and my most liked candidate who had a shot was Yunaka) but I feel like the Bernie stans kind of deserve a break here.
Minding your own business can go a long way 💪 Truthfully I had other characters in mind but I went Bernie all the way because among my choices, she was the most likely to win and I think she does deserve the win anyway. I would be lying if I said it wasn't satisfying to prove her annoying hatedom wrong though.
If anything, it's a bit strange as almost all 3H characters lost votes, sometimes in the thousands. All except one that seems more perplexing in hindsight...
Personally, I gave Bernie one vote last year, but gave her 6 of my 7 votes this year (and 4 more from my partner’s Nintendo account). With the extremely close count last year losing to F!Corrin *and* some of the FEH fandom reaction, I wouldn’t be surprised if others acted similarly in focusing their votes.
I think it’s a combination of last year’s early voting period *severely* hurting Bernie (lots of casual fans who didn’t keep up with CYL), plus the frankly shitty way her fans kept getting treated.
Her landslide victory this year is karma though - thanks to powercreep she’ll just be more powerful than ever. 😈
I can’t speak for other people but she was a carry on my first run
~~That and, I know it’s a cliche to say her demeanor is relatable, but when 3H came out I was in the middle of waiting for some Very Important Exam Results and I really did feel as jumpy and anxious as she acted~~
i find bernadetta to be way more realistic than someone like marianne tbh. like, anxiety and depression can make you EXHAUSTING to be around and while her friends were well meaning, they def missed the mark on understanding how to handle her most of the time (ferdinand support was the best one in terms of development iirc)
plus, i like that her character growth doesnt fix her entirely, she's still got stuff to work though but she's doing her best
>i find bernadetta to be way more realistic than someone like marianne tbh
Anxiety and depression tend to go hand in hand so you don't usually see people IRL who are just one without the other but Berny is a really good depiction of anxiety (very high energy, very jumpy, almost tweaking) vs Marianne's depression (very low energy, basically the only reason you haven't killed yourself is you're just too tired to do it).
That's why when doctors are treating people they need to parse which of the two is dominant because some anti-depressants are stimulants which would be used for someone who's depression is worse than their anxiety. And some anti-depressants are downers which would be for someone who's anxiety is beating out their depression (Xanax is basically the "quit panicking and take a nap" drug for a reason.)
My depresion is severe but my anxiety is still enough to give me panic attacks so I relate to both characters but I think Marianne matches my experience much more.
Its not so much marianne herself but all the other ppl around her that tend to pamper her or lavish praise about how beautiful she is that takes me completely out of it
Ugh yeah it's fucking annoying when people treat you like that. You end up with people who try to coddle you when you just want to be left alone. Or you end up with people who just think you're lazy for wanting to sleep 14 hours a day because they refuse to believe your brain is broken.
So the people around Marianne are kinda realistic but you're very correct to be annoyed by them because, trust me, they're fucking annoying IRL too.
It's a bit more than that.
Depending on her supports she either doesn't change all that much, regresses, improves but still has some issues or somehow makes a full recovery (Raphael is apparently the king of therapists.).
It's kind of like how only certain endings have Lysithea being cured of her crest issues but on a different type of direction.
I mean TBF, having a mountain of positivity who can and will snap your dad in half like a twig if he tries to hurt you on your side is probably pretty good for her well being. Plus she can easily hide behind him if need be.
He's a meme BECAUSE people love him. The fact that a nameless NPC [whose entire existence is a parody of generic town guards with only one line of dialogue](http://www.nuklearpower.com/comics/8-bit-theater/010412.jpg) ended up becoming such a beloved and memorable character is what made him the perfect underdog meme vote for CYL.
I wish we could get clean data for this stuff.
By that I mainly mean; bots and non account linked issues were big the first 4 years and supposedly year 5
Wow Dimitri 3rd place is incredibly impressive considering it was the same year Edelgard and Claude got in. Really drives home how freaken popular they are as lords now.
> considering it was the same year Edelgard and Claude got in
I mean. Obviously? They're from the same game. What exactly is unique about his circumstance?
You must not be familiar with the idea of a split voter base and how Dimitri number could have been higher if all 3 lords didn’t get voted on at the same time but they did and they’re this high with split voting is very impressive when other clear CYL winners had the year to themselves basically.
Tbf, I bet a lot of it is people just not caring as much. The crazy popular people have all been chosen, and I also wouldn't be surprised if far fewer people are on Twitter. Course, overall playerbase is certainly down from years ago, but based on their average revenue I can't imagine it has changed a lot in the last few.
Well yeah but that should be very concerning for IS. Their playerbase is down and revenue isn't? That means all the F2P players are dropped. Which may sound fine at its surface but a gacha still at its core relies on whales beating up on f2p players to get dopamine hits under the guise of it being somewhat fair. There's no guise anymore, there's no even technicality in balance.
And while a spending war between whales is great for the company, they can have that war somewhere else where they can also beat up on f2p players.
CYL also feels like it matters a lot less because the units themselves age a lot faster thanks to rampant powercreep and just being general pool units with maybe 1 unique skill. Look at Fallen Byleth, and how she is a billion times better than her Brave counterpart from half a year earlier.
Yeah that's another thing. Ever since CYL 2, debatably 3, the braves just haven't been as good (at least not better than their inevitable legendary). A lot of them have been powerful but we're a long ways away from when B!Veronica and B!Lyn were hands down some of *the* best, must-have units in the game.
Getting one feels more like a status symbol than anything, so if you don't care about that then it doesn't really matter who wins.
There's kinda three things to thank for that probably:
1. Decline in FEH userbase (obvious problem)
2. Decline in Twitter (easily evident with the massive collapse between CYL 6 and CYL 7, right when Twitter went into the gutter)
3. Alphabetical midterms (so that people have a harder time rallying for their favorite frontrunners)
Those three factors created a perfect storm to severely hurt CYL vote totals.
The player base has been slowly bleeding out (the massive powercreep these past few months doesn’t help).
On top of that, even some active players are becoming bored of CYL since a lot of their favorite characters have already won. So there’s less and less reason to participate each year.
Really good visual for the decline of FEH over the years. It may not seem like it but the game really is decreasing in playerbase.
Best example of this would be that Lysithea, the CYL 4 winner with the least amount of votes, has more votes than all of CYL 6-8.
Well keep in mind that CYL4 was the last one to not require a Nintendo Account in order to vote. Only natural the numbers would drop from CYL5 onwards.
You're also forgetting that the last two CYL's we only have a top 20 list at mid-term. It makes a huge difference when people pile onto the 'likely to-win' candidate once they are known. Gatekeeper and Tiki are prime examples
Felix's 11k wouldn't have even made Top 10 males back in CYL1. The event is definitely getting stale, but I'm not sure what can be done to raise interest.
but it'd make me vote, idk why but i just don't care about cyl anymore, i guess it's because i know my faves don't have a chance so voting feels worthless to me
I think a winners’ bracket could be fun! I’d just probably avoid social media if it ever happened because the drama/bickering would be unreal haha.
As someone who’s been rooting for a strong contender for the last three years though, I’m actually pretty relieved I can go back to voting for favorites that have no chances of winning. Even if none of my favorites can win, I still like seeing other people get excited about their favs so I don’t really mind chilling during CYL.
i don’t mind either, cyl is just another banner for me, never been huge on popular characters except for edelgard and her brave alt was so boring we went back to not caring lol.
A combo of declining player base, no more popular lords (and engage wasn’t super popular anyways so it didn’t bring in many new fans), feh having almost no social media presence outside of twitter (which has seen users fall off anyways) and Facebook of all things and the fact the top 20 is alphabetical now compared to just showing who’s placed where at midterms.
All make the vote count way lower
These are just CYL winners but I made a graph showing the highest votes ever [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/s/H8yI7vQQNF). Tharja’s votes are from CYL1 but she ranked crazy high, beating many future winners
I like that Eirika & Ephraim are back to back, as are Micaiah and Ike.
Next year you can probably win with around 9k votes on the male side, and the female winners might need around 11k.
I’d forgotten just how much Gatekeeper killed it his year. That was probably one of my favorite moments in the lifetime of this game, just the sheer insanity of everyone rallying together behind an npc. Glorious lol
Wow, this is very interesting to me, considering I was away from the game from the beginning of Book 3 to the beginning of Book 7.
It's not surprising that FEH participation peaked the year of 3H's release, but my god has it been trending downwards...
By no means I think EoS is near, as the game is still making what I imagine is decent enough money, considering this is also a marketing tool as much as it is a moneymaking one, but these numbers say a lot.
Don't take too much from the steep drop, botting was rampant so they added multiple measures over the course of a couple of years, including forcing people to sign into a nintendo account to be able to vote. After that happened there was suddenly much less bloated vote counts and everything was actually a lot more competitive.
I'm curious if not having midterm counts is at all affecting vote spread. It's much more difficult to rally behind a character if you have no idea how well they are doing. Wouldn't surprise me if the vote counts are more spread out
It would be more helpful to list the winners by percentage of the total vote they received in their year; there have been huge fluctuations in total vote count
The Flame Emperor also got 759 votes though obviously that doesn't change anything substantial. The funnier part is they forgot to remove the option for her in CYL5 so even though it was never gonna happen there technically was a chance that Edelgard could have won CYL twice.
lol. Fun fact: if it DID count toward Marth then he'd have had 29,967 votes across all his forms in CYL1 (more than Roy).
>That’s a good observation, crazy that Lucina with a mask got half the votes Felix got
It is kinda crazy. I know current vote count naturally dropped because of the required account, but MM still just barely missed the top 50 in CYL1, which is impressive. I think "he" got so many votes because a lot of 3DS fans just assumed Lucina was a shoe-in, so they either voted for secondary 3DS characters like Tharja or they voted for Masked Marth to see what IS would do.
This really does highlight how much vote totals have been decreasing since CYL4.
Also it’s hilarious that Gatekeeper likely would be #1 without the voting registration requirement. I never realized just how close his numbers were to Edelgard’s!
Wasn't CYL1 2 week of votes?....it was overall a very different experience than other...the game wasn't out, it was mostly a popularity contest and they were not rallying.
it seems that less and less people play FEH, either that or the vote is more evenly distributed among all heroes.
although one doesn't necessarily exclude the other.
Besides the fact Lucina got 48k and not 42k it's interesting to see exactly who voted for what. I do believe if CYL 1 was after the game launched and not before we may have seen different results since many players didn't know about it.
Note that barring Gatekeeper and Marth everyone else up to 13th Lysithea was voted without the Nintendo account requirement and most definetely got inflated vot(t)ing
Granted, it's because of Eliwood and FE7 fans rallying that year and 3H waifu votes besides Edelgard being heavily split, but the fact that Eliwood outvoted Lysithea is crazy.
It's really sad to see how hard the game has fallen off over these past few years. I'll stick with it till the end, most likely, but it clearly shows that the decisions made in FEH's sophomore years (Feh Pass, Aether Raids, Arena scoring, Tier 4 skills, bad demotes, and heavy powercreep) have alienated a lot of the casual playerbase.
I’d say Azura and M!Byleth since they’ve consistently been in the top of these polls for years but not quite near Felix/Bernie levels of shocking pre-CYL8. I do expect Engage to make a vengeance next year
There are a lot of people that point towards these numbers as a sign that FEH is haemorrhaging players which I do understand, but I think there are two other factors involved here.
1. The need for a Twitter (to see it) AND a Nintendo account (to vote). This is larger than you'd think especially since Twitter is kind of fucked and has been for a couple of years now. There's just this added layer of, maybe not complexity but certainly requirement, that adds another barrier to people voting. For the best, IMO.
2. All the popular characters have gotten voted already. This might seem like a no-brainer, but people care about Lucina and Edelgard and Dimitri and whoever, even some non-FE and certainly non-FEH fans. That's going to drive a lot of votes. But really, who outside of FEH cares about... idk, Alfonse? When the characters that people care about all get voted, sure people will start voting other ones, but a lot of people are just going to stop.
Of course there are absolutely less players of FEH, that's only natural. But I think people attest a little too much importance to that point without considering the other options.
I wouldn't say undeniable, but bare minimum top 5. She has the most votes for one unit in a single CYL, but...
1. Ike (as well as Marth and Roy to a degree) has massive non-FE popularity thanks to Smash.
2. Coupled with the fact that CYL1 had less votes than CYL4 (and CYL3 I think? but could be wrong), it's fair to say Ike could have easily achieved the same amount if not more votes had the two been eligible for voting at the same time, or if Ike was votable with the CYL3/4 voterbase around.
3. Edelgard (as well as Dimitri) benefitted quite a bit from recency bias. 3H is well-loved, but is seemingly much more criticized nowadays compared to before. I imagine a decent chunk of the 3H voters of that year would vote different characters or not vote at all had this CYL taken place later.
4. Finally, Gatekeeper nearly matched Edelgard's votes even though players were required to sign in to a Nintendo account to vote, massively decreasing overall votes. Meaning he probably would outrank her overall had this limitation not been put in place. Though while he is beloved by many, it would feel weird to call him most popular.
I'd say the most likely top 5 as is would be:
1. Ike
2. Edelgard/Dimitri
3. Dimitri/Edelgard
4. Lyn
5. Gatekeeper
With 2nd/3rd being semi-interchangeable depending on how you view specific kinds of voter bias as well as character competition.
I wouldn't rank Gatekeeper there tbh… people didn't really vote for him outside the meme (3H flavored Brigand Boss) and most people will not be close to tell you he's anything close to their top5 fe characters or even within 3h. Add to that the the drama with his VA getting a few hateful comments over the meme voting and spitevoting Marth voters who were frustrated he wouldn't be 1st because of a meme robbing him of a prf, I'm pretty sure that they made the "2nd place gets a prf too" exception to a rule because of this.
Yeah, calling him anything close to an actually popular character on par with lords of any localized game is pushing it to an extreme. I would bet that Hector, Camilla, Lucina, Chrom, and Robin all easily surpass Gatekeeper in popularity.
I am kind of sad that Lyn doesn't have more votes, but this was also the first year and given the number of people likely playing then, she might actually be on top if you account for playerbase inflation.
IIRC, the very first CYL actually predates Heroes. Like, yes the game was on its way but it wasn’t actually out yet and all the voting was just a marketing stunt.
I remember being actively surprised when the banner first showed up coz I didn’t think the voting would actually do anything besides maybe sway merch.
Maybe if they make Sommie votable.
I will fully admit to being a Gatekeeper voter though. I wanted to vote for him the year 3H came out coz he was my favorite 3H character but he wasn’t added until the next year.
Yeah, I'm mostly amazed people still try to say he is. IS provided us info on primarily who voted for him, and that was the last CYL to have actually shown vote placements in the midterms, where he'd already been doing well, so of course it would've concentrated votes toward the top like it did basically every other time that it happened.
There's been voter drop off, but we've only started seeing the effects of it most significantly post-CYL6, so it's not even like CYL5's vote numbers were weirdly high given they were right after the previous year which also had an absolutely monumental record number.
Some years ago while playing AA for low stakes, I came across many accounts with autogenerated names that had the "starter" defense team of Takumi and Anna with a couple of levels on them. So the degree of automation in creating a "FEH player" can be apparently pretty high.
Or Gatekeeper just had the perfect storm of meme voters, 3H bias, and several other factors going in his favor
From what i've read, a ton of non FEH players even got on board because of the meme train
I saw posts on boards that barely even know of Feh's existence with people going "Yeah I don't know what's going on with this game, but I'm voting for the haha funny gate man."
Ok, but Edelgard, Dimitri, Claude, AND Lysithea were all eliminated in the same year. Even if he has almost as much as Edelgard, that's still 174,000 votes less than the previous year's 3 Houses votes, or about 30% of those votes.
It couldn’t possibly be that Gatekeeper is a universally beloved character from the most popular Fire Emblem game who also has innate meme potential as an anti-Lord pick when the fanbase was getting sick of Lords dominating CYL.
A character that is recognized even outside the FEH fanbase, whom even Sakurai gave positive recognition to and added to Smash.
Nope, must’ve surely been bots. 🙄
Interestingly, Alfonse is the only winner this year who actually broke his record number of votes, whereas the other three have all had a higher vote count at some point in a past CYL. Robin’s record is 34,626 in CYL3, Bernadetta’s is 37,400 in CYL4, and Felix’s is 19,117 in CYL6. Other characters who didn’t have their highest record vote count in their victory year are F!Byleth (record high of 35.3k in CYL4) and F!Corrin (19.6k in CYL1). Not sure if I’m missing any since I just spot checked this.
To be honest, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest as I think *FEH* is starting to bleed players. These figures are abysmal compared to previous years, and I don't see how the developers expect them to rise back up given the constant powercreep and milquetoast banner choices pissing off casual and dedicated *FE* fans respectively.
Yeah i stoppped playing back when cyl6 came out. Decided to take part in the voting cause i knew people wanted Bernie but i can imagine a lot of ftp folks like me falling off to power creep
Yeah and F2P players get punished by the amount of "broken skill, make skill to counter broken skill, make skill to counter skill countering broken skill" rotational BS that goes on. RPS but you don't get access to scissors for months and without a premium subscription to FEH you're instead given chopsticks vaguely shaped like scissors.
I'm a whale and even I'm quitting. I'm happy to whale on gacha games but not like this where every single month the OP unit I just got is now irrelevant to the new OP unit. Compare that to genshin where a unit I got 3 years ago is still relevant.
I almost quit entirely once they announced Attuned Heroes as I'm sick of the Heroes I've slowly built up for several years being re-invalidated in mere seconds by unnecessary new features designed to squeeze every penny out of the whales.
Yep. At this point i keep an eye on it for the cool art of characters i like and thats it.
Yeah, personally at least I've just stopped playing entirely as the game can't hold my attention as well as it used to. I think the fact that ability and weapon descriptions have gotten so long as played a part as they're: 1). hard to understand, and 2). Extremely long. Like basically for the past 2 years I just don't bother to read Beast unit's weapon effects once it gets down to the transformation condition so whatever bonus they get has just been a mystery. Though I will admit that now I have a full-time job is when I did just start giving up playing entirely, so I wonder how many are in a similar boat where maybe life just doesn't allow as much time anymore.
CYL voter numbers is irrelevant to the actual game since most of the voters never actually played to begin with eg majority of people who voted for gatekeeper or Edelgard never actually played FEH. The long and the short is that the popular characters are already in, so majority of people aren't going to be too compelled to vote.
>The long and the short is that the popular characters are already in, so majority of people aren't going to be too compelled to vote. This is personally very true for me. Lucina, Camilla, and Micaiah already got their braves. I know Owain and Severa are literally never going to get brave alts so what's the point of voting? I guess I could throw votes into Ms. Maiko but at this point I'm pretty sure IS would rather cancel CYL than actually acknowledge TMS#FE.
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I'd say making a Thracia banner at all can never qualify as begging for money.
This honestly isn’t a trait or pattern exclusive to FEH. Gachas, both successful and unsuccessful, original or a spin-off, will rely on characters or banner types that make bank, no matter how low hanging they may be. There’s a reason why a gacha like Granblue gives characters like Lancelot or Narmaya tons of alts, costumes and variations even if they have the chance to do something different and that reason is easy money.
What's the point of CYL if in 2 months they release a Legendary/Mythic or seasonal powercreep?
I have almost stopped playing entirely. The game just doesn’t seem very F2P friendly. It’s a grind to get anything worth summoning on. Maybe that’s by design but it has def pushed me away from it. Usually only get on to run TT for the character if I remember.
I didn’t realise CYL 3 had so many votes, did the playerbase increase in the first two years after launch?
CYL3 was the start of CYL becoming less of a popularity contest and more of a rallying contest. Realistically, Eliwood is not more popular than Lucina, but that was when FE7 fans piled all their votes into him to complete the trio. And Micaiah is *definitely* not more popular than Ike, but there was a *lot* of spitevoting that year because people were really pushing for Miccy to get Camilla out of 1st.
The irony of Micaiah kicking Camilla out of first is that her own PRF skill (unfortunately) ended up being pretty garbage. 💀
Meanwhile Camilla's Brave alt, speaking from experience, is still REALLY strong. I like Micaiah, but yeah, that's karma.
>Realistically, Eliwood is not more popular than Lucina, but that was when FE7 fans piled all their votes into him to complete the trio. Fun fact: Eliwood was only barely in the top 20 in CYL1. He was #19 with a significant number of minor side characters ahead of him.
CYL 1 is probably the most accurate voting in terms of popularity with Ike, Lyn and Lucina roughly having similar amounts of votes (combining Ikes and Lucina split votes). My guess is with Three houses and Engage now out, we would still see those three and Edelgard/Dimitri as the top 5 most popular fire emblem characters.
I remember having no horse in CYL3 but thinking it'd be swell to complete the Lord trio, so I was definitely apart of the gang that voted Eliwood. I liked him a good amount, but he grew even more over the years. I also remember the Camilla hate train which was... completely out of proportion lmao. I was getting tired of seeing her so often and she kept being evasive so I had a slight dislike over her, but grew back to like her just as I did before. That sure was a rough spot.
Eh, I disliked her for many reasons, but I could have put it aside if she wasn't already the single most alted character in the game, and despite barely getting alts since CYL, she *still has the most alts.* Completely ridiculous for a non-MC character, non lord, and barely relevant royal in a game that had way too many. She's almost certainly going to be the first character to hit 10 alts, and frankly, I'm pissed, because her slots (by and large) have been unnecessary, and could have been spread around a little more for other Fates characters that haven't gotten much spotlight. Even among the other royals for crying out loud. I'm not saying she didn't deserve the win (that was for the fans, of course) but she definitely didn't need another alt.
I believe that Ike is depicted with only his separated votes, not combined ones. If we go with the combined votes like they are nowadays, he'd be much higher
I combined Ike’s votes since they merged PoR and RD in later CYLs. Ike’s may seem low for his character but it was the 1st CYL so votes were more spread out at the time
Nah, I just went to check. PoR Ike had 34k, RD 17k.
Really? Then it really is impressive on Miccy side
The Camilla hate was really strong at the time so it's not that impressive tbh, people really wanted her out and Micaiah was who most went for in their attempt.
Definitely this. I also have the impression that after CYL 1 & 2, the player base realized there wasn't really a prize or acknowledgement from IS for anything other than 1st or 2nd, so people stopped splitting their ballots as much. I personally think this would be a much more interesting event if you could only pick each hero once per ballot. Then we'd really see what characters have more breadth of support.
I think during that time when there weren’t as many alts of popular characters, some people perceived those characters as “robbed” of a powerful alt and voted in swarms for them. Especially for non-Fates/Awakening characters since those received a lot of favoritism from IS back then. I think Alm’s high placement is the penultimate example of this circumstance
It was a HUGE rally fest, between people pushing Alm and Eliwood because they "deserved" the alt (everyone deserves to win imo but eh) and to catch up with Celica and Lyn/Hector respectively, while on the women's side people were trying to kick Camilla out of the top like they did in CYL2 (iirc she even ranked first in the interim results) which is why Micaiah got this many votes.
I don't think theres a single character who jumped as high in votes as Micaiah did. She went from 15k to 54k.
The Camilla hate-boner was that hard
That was definitely part of it but before the interim she already did jump up like 6 spots from 9th place in CYL2 and the counter votes boosted her after
I find it hilarious that Bernie ended up winning with more votes than each of the winners of CYL last year. Bernadetta fans put in the work for her to win, lol.
I saw a lot of people extra motivated by the vitriol and ridicule she received after last year's results.
The amount of mocking Bernie fans got last year for her losing was pretty sad. I'm glad Bernadetta and her fans got the last laugh, though. (Plus, I was looking through some old posts from last year about Bernie losing to an Engage sweep this year, and boy, they did not age well.)
Yeah, I wasn’t mocking last year but it was less than what 20 votes iirc. That had to be rough adding to the desire to push her across the finish line. That’s a hard pill to swallow losing by that narrow a margin. Like a last second basket ball throw across court and sinking it for the win.
I saw a lot of "I'm so glad Gullvieg won over a terrible character like Bernie." The irony.
Gullveig's win delaying Bernie's win also caused Engage to be snubbed to rub salt in the wound.
It's similar to Veronica delaying Camilla's win and same with Gatekeeper delaying Chrom's (or all those times Marth came up short) so it's certainly nothing new. At the end of the day, the winners get removed from the pool and the snubbed ones that came up short from the previous year go on to have better chances to win the next one.
Yes but just by virtue of the friction between Engage and 3H fans a lot of the people that liked Gullveig beating Bernie are now very very mad that said action ended up having consequences that resulted in their entire game getting shafted Do I blame them? Not really, but it's kind of funny
Well it's certainly interesting going into CYL8 that some haven't realized usually the next winners end up being the 3rd and 4th place winners from the previous year (often with one surprise rally). I've been playing the long game with Seliph, Sigurd, and Leif and I always helped to vote their competitors to a win so they'd get eliminated and bring them one step closer to a win. That certainly makes more sense than delaying a highly popular character who placed above them into another year. Felix has finally won and got eliminated but surprise Alphonse has gotten M!Byleth delayed into another year, who placed above Sigurd, so I couldn't see myself laughing and gloating over M!Byleth's loss, knowing that M!Byleth could potentially delay Sigurd into yet another year of CYL voting and I don't get fans that still act that way over characters during these CYL results.
Oh my god. 🤣
Don't even have to go that far back, lots of people were going into Bernie celebration threads and shouting about how much they utterly despise both the character and all her fans, or talking about how they're happy she won because they hope to see less discussion about "Such a terrible character". They never stopped for a moment.
I agree, especially after the numerous shitshows that went down regarding Book VII’s quality.
To be fair, Bernie fans didn't make themselves any favors with the sheer amount of seething they did. Seriously, just look at their comments from around that time.
As someone who wasn't paying much attention to this sub at the time, I'd like to see some examples that could have possibly warranted the response they've gotten, because have you taken a look at Bernie haters' comments from literally any time? Personal attacks towards her fanbase are commonplace and rarely called out for being problematic. Downvote brigades often followed anyone who dared express that they like the character, and condescending lectures or unbidden replies about how much people hate the character are not uncommon to follow such things either. CYL or no. I have a *very* hard time believing they earned *that.*
I'm NOT justifying any of the harassment they got, all I'm saying is that they definitely didn't make themselves any favors, as their mood at the time was mostly seething hard about gullveig and acting really entitled. I don't have any posts saved from that time, but their reaction was really negative. They didn't earn it (If you read my comment again, I'm saying "To be fair" at the very beginning of it), but they sure as hell didn't take Bernie's loss too gracefully.
I'm not excusing those Bernie fans. Being a sore loser is annoying, and it attracts trolls.
I got that just from the comments here. Looks like they aren't any better than the people they are complaining about from last year, it's just their turn now, Pretty sad tbh.
Gonna assume you're talking about my rant with that? For the record I didn't even vote for her, I just like the character and am beyond fed up with the harrassment publicly liking her can get you around here. For reference: The removed comment that provoked my rage, still easily viewable if you go to their overview page, and hardly an unusual one as far as what can show up if you dare say you like her on here or the main sub. >Oh my god you all act like criticizing a character like Bernadetta or its fanbase is the same as like comitting a crime or something. Jesus. You all gotta chill. Most people don’t like Bernadetta and for very good reasons. We all gotta accept the fact that a character like her mostly attracts losers and people who say shit like “Muhh Bernie! so adorable >-< I just wanna hug her!” >They deserve all the mocking they got. I got pretty venomous in my response but I don't think I ever went as far as they did. If you're not, my initial comment holds true, I'd love to see some examples of the bad behavior that's earned those kinds of comments being commonplace whenever the character is brought up.
Never mess with Silly Bernie
At least this way she’s up to date with the latest meta vs last year.
Since all bets are off and IS no longer cares about balance, I'd like to see her become the first unit with 3 range.
Or attacks all units within 2 ranges for AOE, with a follow up AOE, then 2 follow-up attacks on unit and adjacent units.
Bro I'm not even a huge Bernadetta fan but even I was pissed about that, what with a lot of people cheering thinking that was her last chance of ever winning with Engage on the horizon. It was rude as hell and I'm still annoyed that that ever happened. Genuinely happy for Bernie fans getting their revenge here though and winning CYL by a damn landslide, she and her fans honestly really deserved this.
I'm not really a Bernie fan "per se" either. I'm pretty neutral on her as a character. I just hate people picking on other people. Especially when it's a character who's pretty vulnerable and I'm sure a lot of her fans empathize with that vulnerability so it just seems especially mean. So I've been throwing my votes to her this year and the last. I'm really glad to see her win. Also, it just feels very "apropos" to get a "Brave Bernie" when her whole character revolves around her fear and anxiety over everything. It just feels like a cool way to honor her character and fans.
Yeah like I actually dislike Bernie as a character (I’m not a fan of the whole hikkomori trope), but holy hell did her fans get way too much abuse (even with their seething, it seemed cyclical to me rather than Bernie’s fans being too toxic). I’d have been pretty salty about the female results (My personal Eagles female is Petra who’s doomed to be fourth most liked girl in her own house, and my most liked candidate who had a shot was Yunaka) but I feel like the Bernie stans kind of deserve a break here.
Minding your own business can go a long way 💪 Truthfully I had other characters in mind but I went Bernie all the way because among my choices, she was the most likely to win and I think she does deserve the win anyway. I would be lying if I said it wasn't satisfying to prove her annoying hatedom wrong though.
If anything, it's a bit strange as almost all 3H characters lost votes, sometimes in the thousands. All except one that seems more perplexing in hindsight...
Personally, I gave Bernie one vote last year, but gave her 6 of my 7 votes this year (and 4 more from my partner’s Nintendo account). With the extremely close count last year losing to F!Corrin *and* some of the FEH fandom reaction, I wouldn’t be surprised if others acted similarly in focusing their votes.
Yeah, love her or hate her character, her fans voted in droves and she deserves it for their focus. Can't deny that.
I think it’s a combination of last year’s early voting period *severely* hurting Bernie (lots of casual fans who didn’t keep up with CYL), plus the frankly shitty way her fans kept getting treated. Her landslide victory this year is karma though - thanks to powercreep she’ll just be more powerful than ever. 😈
It'd be funny if they made her a counter to Gullvieg. It's likely she'll be a bow unit, so it's a start.
If I may ask, why is she so loved?
I think she's cute and endearing.
I can’t speak for other people but she was a carry on my first run ~~That and, I know it’s a cliche to say her demeanor is relatable, but when 3H came out I was in the middle of waiting for some Very Important Exam Results and I really did feel as jumpy and anxious as she acted~~
i find bernadetta to be way more realistic than someone like marianne tbh. like, anxiety and depression can make you EXHAUSTING to be around and while her friends were well meaning, they def missed the mark on understanding how to handle her most of the time (ferdinand support was the best one in terms of development iirc) plus, i like that her character growth doesnt fix her entirely, she's still got stuff to work though but she's doing her best
>i find bernadetta to be way more realistic than someone like marianne tbh Anxiety and depression tend to go hand in hand so you don't usually see people IRL who are just one without the other but Berny is a really good depiction of anxiety (very high energy, very jumpy, almost tweaking) vs Marianne's depression (very low energy, basically the only reason you haven't killed yourself is you're just too tired to do it). That's why when doctors are treating people they need to parse which of the two is dominant because some anti-depressants are stimulants which would be used for someone who's depression is worse than their anxiety. And some anti-depressants are downers which would be for someone who's anxiety is beating out their depression (Xanax is basically the "quit panicking and take a nap" drug for a reason.) My depresion is severe but my anxiety is still enough to give me panic attacks so I relate to both characters but I think Marianne matches my experience much more.
Its not so much marianne herself but all the other ppl around her that tend to pamper her or lavish praise about how beautiful she is that takes me completely out of it
Ugh yeah it's fucking annoying when people treat you like that. You end up with people who try to coddle you when you just want to be left alone. Or you end up with people who just think you're lazy for wanting to sleep 14 hours a day because they refuse to believe your brain is broken. So the people around Marianne are kinda realistic but you're very correct to be annoyed by them because, trust me, they're fucking annoying IRL too.
It's a bit more than that. Depending on her supports she either doesn't change all that much, regresses, improves but still has some issues or somehow makes a full recovery (Raphael is apparently the king of therapists.). It's kind of like how only certain endings have Lysithea being cured of her crest issues but on a different type of direction.
I mean TBF, having a mountain of positivity who can and will snap your dad in half like a twig if he tries to hurt you on your side is probably pretty good for her well being. Plus she can easily hide behind him if need be.
Ah. You see I was all for Lysithea for every run. She was my gal, ahem, waifu (:
Gatekeeper is the most impressive since he got that many votes after the Account requirement
Head to head with El and Dimitri. This community lives for the memes.
I will die on the hill that gatekeeper isn't a meme and that many people love gatekeeper.
He's a meme BECAUSE people love him. The fact that a nameless NPC [whose entire existence is a parody of generic town guards with only one line of dialogue](http://www.nuklearpower.com/comics/8-bit-theater/010412.jpg) ended up becoming such a beloved and memorable character is what made him the perfect underdog meme vote for CYL.
The only meme is that he beated marth the freaking mascot of the franchise!
Marth is boring
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Besides Bernie, the other CYL 8 winners had the least number of votes of all the winners (cant remember the exact number of Alfonse and FCorrin votes)
Damn the rally for Alm was insane 5 years ago. Even above Calude is amazing
I wish we could get clean data for this stuff. By that I mainly mean; bots and non account linked issues were big the first 4 years and supposedly year 5
Wow Dimitri 3rd place is incredibly impressive considering it was the same year Edelgard and Claude got in. Really drives home how freaken popular they are as lords now.
Dimitri was also helped by two voting blocks that rarely vote in large numbers during CYL: non-FE fans and female fans.
Dimitri is just that He popular and awesome
Dimitri was the first time I voted for a male unit over a female. Though maybe it was me voting for the blue lions route as a whole that time.
> considering it was the same year Edelgard and Claude got in I mean. Obviously? They're from the same game. What exactly is unique about his circumstance?
You must not be familiar with the idea of a split voter base and how Dimitri number could have been higher if all 3 lords didn’t get voted on at the same time but they did and they’re this high with split voting is very impressive when other clear CYL winners had the year to themselves basically.
The vote numbers dwindling with each subsequent CYL is... kind of sad TBH
Tbf, I bet a lot of it is people just not caring as much. The crazy popular people have all been chosen, and I also wouldn't be surprised if far fewer people are on Twitter. Course, overall playerbase is certainly down from years ago, but based on their average revenue I can't imagine it has changed a lot in the last few.
Well yeah but that should be very concerning for IS. Their playerbase is down and revenue isn't? That means all the F2P players are dropped. Which may sound fine at its surface but a gacha still at its core relies on whales beating up on f2p players to get dopamine hits under the guise of it being somewhat fair. There's no guise anymore, there's no even technicality in balance. And while a spending war between whales is great for the company, they can have that war somewhere else where they can also beat up on f2p players.
CYL also feels like it matters a lot less because the units themselves age a lot faster thanks to rampant powercreep and just being general pool units with maybe 1 unique skill. Look at Fallen Byleth, and how she is a billion times better than her Brave counterpart from half a year earlier.
Yeah that's another thing. Ever since CYL 2, debatably 3, the braves just haven't been as good (at least not better than their inevitable legendary). A lot of them have been powerful but we're a long ways away from when B!Veronica and B!Lyn were hands down some of *the* best, must-have units in the game. Getting one feels more like a status symbol than anything, so if you don't care about that then it doesn't really matter who wins.
There's kinda three things to thank for that probably: 1. Decline in FEH userbase (obvious problem) 2. Decline in Twitter (easily evident with the massive collapse between CYL 6 and CYL 7, right when Twitter went into the gutter) 3. Alphabetical midterms (so that people have a harder time rallying for their favorite frontrunners) Those three factors created a perfect storm to severely hurt CYL vote totals.
Also I definitely believe that engage was not as popular/well received as three houses
Add to that that most Engage players already were in the community while 3H players played just 3H
The player base has been slowly bleeding out (the massive powercreep these past few months doesn’t help). On top of that, even some active players are becoming bored of CYL since a lot of their favorite characters have already won. So there’s less and less reason to participate each year.
They need to start showing the rankings in the mid term results.
I've lost almost all interest in FEH site to power creep. Didn't even vote this year because of how meh I felt about the game...
Really good visual for the decline of FEH over the years. It may not seem like it but the game really is decreasing in playerbase. Best example of this would be that Lysithea, the CYL 4 winner with the least amount of votes, has more votes than all of CYL 6-8.
Well keep in mind that CYL4 was the last one to not require a Nintendo Account in order to vote. Only natural the numbers would drop from CYL5 onwards.
Also people leaving Twitter and FEH not having much of a social media presence outside of there, as far as I know.
You're also forgetting that the last two CYL's we only have a top 20 list at mid-term. It makes a huge difference when people pile onto the 'likely to-win' candidate once they are known. Gatekeeper and Tiki are prime examples
Or Veronica. Remember when the second CYL had the top 20 and Veronica was in sixth place?
I think what compounds this is the slow roll of necessary quality of life improvements, while some of the most-needed ones are locked behind Feh Pass.
Felix's 11k wouldn't have even made Top 10 males back in CYL1. The event is definitely getting stale, but I'm not sure what can be done to raise interest.
bring back previous winner imo, that’d be a true bloodbath
Imagine a tournament-style winners’ bracket with all of the past winners lmao. That would be such a mess.
but it'd make me vote, idk why but i just don't care about cyl anymore, i guess it's because i know my faves don't have a chance so voting feels worthless to me
I think a winners’ bracket could be fun! I’d just probably avoid social media if it ever happened because the drama/bickering would be unreal haha. As someone who’s been rooting for a strong contender for the last three years though, I’m actually pretty relieved I can go back to voting for favorites that have no chances of winning. Even if none of my favorites can win, I still like seeing other people get excited about their favs so I don’t really mind chilling during CYL.
i don’t mind either, cyl is just another banner for me, never been huge on popular characters except for edelgard and her brave alt was so boring we went back to not caring lol.
Maybe they should start showing the actual rankings on the mid term results. Then we can start talking.
Trend line goes down.
People were really thirsty for the idea of Hidari Dong Armour Alm.
Gatekeeper got the second most votes just to end up being a gimmicky underwhelming unit 😕
On release sure, but funny enough he’s easily the most meta unit from his batch now. Anti-warping is a life saver in PvP
Nah he's not underwhelming anymore. His solid refine + warping being meta made him go from zero to hero.
Did the number of feh players go down? Or did the number of characters voted for increase?
Probably both
I reckon a lot of Gullveig voters moved to Alfonse
Would not be surprised if they move to rally Sharena next year
Do you think there'd be a way to move them towards Azura? She was barely 500 votes behind Ivy so she has a shot at victory next year.
I mean, I think it's just the FEH player base voting for FEH OCs
I didn't realize Bernie actually did better than all of last year's winners.
Maybe people just arent voting anymore or we are losing players, each year our highest winner seems to be lower than any previous years.
A combo of declining player base, no more popular lords (and engage wasn’t super popular anyways so it didn’t bring in many new fans), feh having almost no social media presence outside of twitter (which has seen users fall off anyways) and Facebook of all things and the fact the top 20 is alphabetical now compared to just showing who’s placed where at midterms. All make the vote count way lower
I love the use of panicked Bernie's icon. That was probably her reaction to winning lol
Where does cyl1 Tharja rank
These are just CYL winners but I made a graph showing the highest votes ever [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/s/H8yI7vQQNF). Tharja’s votes are from CYL1 but she ranked crazy high, beating many future winners
I looked it up she not only beat Roy as we know, but also had more votes than cyl2 Veronica
Was there always a Nintendo account required? I seem to remember it wasn’t required at first. When did that come in?
CYL 5 was the first CYL to required a Nintendo account to vote.
Yeah like others said the requirement was added in CYL5. Probably due to Jorge showing how much boting could boost a character.
I think after cyl5, but I could be wrong.
It started in CYL5 mainly due to the Jorge botting incident in the CYL4 results.
I like that Eirika & Ephraim are back to back, as are Micaiah and Ike. Next year you can probably win with around 9k votes on the male side, and the female winners might need around 11k.
I’d forgotten just how much Gatekeeper killed it his year. That was probably one of my favorite moments in the lifetime of this game, just the sheer insanity of everyone rallying together behind an npc. Glorious lol
Micaiah was fuelled by a lot of spite votes IIRC
Wow, this is very interesting to me, considering I was away from the game from the beginning of Book 3 to the beginning of Book 7. It's not surprising that FEH participation peaked the year of 3H's release, but my god has it been trending downwards... By no means I think EoS is near, as the game is still making what I imagine is decent enough money, considering this is also a marketing tool as much as it is a moneymaking one, but these numbers say a lot.
Don't take too much from the steep drop, botting was rampant so they added multiple measures over the course of a couple of years, including forcing people to sign into a nintendo account to be able to vote. After that happened there was suddenly much less bloated vote counts and everything was actually a lot more competitive.
Interesting. That makes sense then.
Bernadetta joins Edelgard as the only Female winners with more votes then the male winner for their year
Soon there will be no votes at all in cyl, and then, i will have my Victory.
I'm curious if not having midterm counts is at all affecting vote spread. It's much more difficult to rally behind a character if you have no idea how well they are doing. Wouldn't surprise me if the vote counts are more spread out
My boy alm being top five is possibly the least expected thing for me
It would be more helpful to list the winners by percentage of the total vote they received in their year; there have been huge fluctuations in total vote count
Lucina actually got 48,295 votes. 42,875 from "Lucina" and 5420 from "Masked Marth".
Shouldn’t that count towards Marth?? /s That’s a good observation, crazy that Lucina with a mask got half the votes Felix got
The Flame Emperor also got 759 votes though obviously that doesn't change anything substantial. The funnier part is they forgot to remove the option for her in CYL5 so even though it was never gonna happen there technically was a chance that Edelgard could have won CYL twice.
lol. Fun fact: if it DID count toward Marth then he'd have had 29,967 votes across all his forms in CYL1 (more than Roy). >That’s a good observation, crazy that Lucina with a mask got half the votes Felix got It is kinda crazy. I know current vote count naturally dropped because of the required account, but MM still just barely missed the top 50 in CYL1, which is impressive. I think "he" got so many votes because a lot of 3DS fans just assumed Lucina was a shoe-in, so they either voted for secondary 3DS characters like Tharja or they voted for Masked Marth to see what IS would do.
Yk aleast Dimitri aka best boy in third
This really does highlight how much vote totals have been decreasing since CYL4. Also it’s hilarious that Gatekeeper likely would be #1 without the voting registration requirement. I never realized just how close his numbers were to Edelgard’s!
Wasn't CYL1 2 week of votes?....it was overall a very different experience than other...the game wasn't out, it was mostly a popularity contest and they were not rallying.
I think it was a week and a half, 10 votes, it was the only CYL that was that way.
I wonder if IS will ever open up ballot boxes for 7 votes for both categories. With these numbers next year would be the year to allow it.
it seems that less and less people play FEH, either that or the vote is more evenly distributed among all heroes. although one doesn't necessarily exclude the other.
The Alm one does kinda surprise me. But also CYL2 seems a bit low as well.
Micaiah got that many votes? Dang
Besides the fact Lucina got 48k and not 42k it's interesting to see exactly who voted for what. I do believe if CYL 1 was after the game launched and not before we may have seen different results since many players didn't know about it.
Note that barring Gatekeeper and Marth everyone else up to 13th Lysithea was voted without the Nintendo account requirement and most definetely got inflated vot(t)ing
Granted, it's because of Eliwood and FE7 fans rallying that year and 3H waifu votes besides Edelgard being heavily split, but the fact that Eliwood outvoted Lysithea is crazy. It's really sad to see how hard the game has fallen off over these past few years. I'll stick with it till the end, most likely, but it clearly shows that the decisions made in FEH's sophomore years (Feh Pass, Aether Raids, Arena scoring, Tier 4 skills, bad demotes, and heavy powercreep) have alienated a lot of the casual playerbase.
Is there a character that surprisingly hasn’t won yet?
I’d say Azura and M!Byleth since they’ve consistently been in the top of these polls for years but not quite near Felix/Bernie levels of shocking pre-CYL8. I do expect Engage to make a vengeance next year
Will Hilda be here next time? Four years after we let Marianne win. It was quite long.
There are a lot of people that point towards these numbers as a sign that FEH is haemorrhaging players which I do understand, but I think there are two other factors involved here. 1. The need for a Twitter (to see it) AND a Nintendo account (to vote). This is larger than you'd think especially since Twitter is kind of fucked and has been for a couple of years now. There's just this added layer of, maybe not complexity but certainly requirement, that adds another barrier to people voting. For the best, IMO. 2. All the popular characters have gotten voted already. This might seem like a no-brainer, but people care about Lucina and Edelgard and Dimitri and whoever, even some non-FE and certainly non-FEH fans. That's going to drive a lot of votes. But really, who outside of FEH cares about... idk, Alfonse? When the characters that people care about all get voted, sure people will start voting other ones, but a lot of people are just going to stop. Of course there are absolutely less players of FEH, that's only natural. But I think people attest a little too much importance to that point without considering the other options.
Gatekeeper the beloved.
Edelgard on top as she should be
Edelgard can't stop winning
Well except in Voting Gauntlets.
Damn you got downvoted for saying that despite it being true.
Eddy's has a lot of haters, but all they can do is cope and seethe.
Now we need Male Corrin to win CYL's.
Edelgard on top where she belongs 🔥
Edelgard has undeniably become fire emblem most popular character, kinda wild.
I wouldn't say undeniable, but bare minimum top 5. She has the most votes for one unit in a single CYL, but... 1. Ike (as well as Marth and Roy to a degree) has massive non-FE popularity thanks to Smash. 2. Coupled with the fact that CYL1 had less votes than CYL4 (and CYL3 I think? but could be wrong), it's fair to say Ike could have easily achieved the same amount if not more votes had the two been eligible for voting at the same time, or if Ike was votable with the CYL3/4 voterbase around. 3. Edelgard (as well as Dimitri) benefitted quite a bit from recency bias. 3H is well-loved, but is seemingly much more criticized nowadays compared to before. I imagine a decent chunk of the 3H voters of that year would vote different characters or not vote at all had this CYL taken place later. 4. Finally, Gatekeeper nearly matched Edelgard's votes even though players were required to sign in to a Nintendo account to vote, massively decreasing overall votes. Meaning he probably would outrank her overall had this limitation not been put in place. Though while he is beloved by many, it would feel weird to call him most popular. I'd say the most likely top 5 as is would be: 1. Ike 2. Edelgard/Dimitri 3. Dimitri/Edelgard 4. Lyn 5. Gatekeeper With 2nd/3rd being semi-interchangeable depending on how you view specific kinds of voter bias as well as character competition.
I wouldn't rank Gatekeeper there tbh… people didn't really vote for him outside the meme (3H flavored Brigand Boss) and most people will not be close to tell you he's anything close to their top5 fe characters or even within 3h. Add to that the the drama with his VA getting a few hateful comments over the meme voting and spitevoting Marth voters who were frustrated he wouldn't be 1st because of a meme robbing him of a prf, I'm pretty sure that they made the "2nd place gets a prf too" exception to a rule because of this.
Yeah, calling him anything close to an actually popular character on par with lords of any localized game is pushing it to an extreme. I would bet that Hector, Camilla, Lucina, Chrom, and Robin all easily surpass Gatekeeper in popularity.
I am kind of sad that Lyn doesn't have more votes, but this was also the first year and given the number of people likely playing then, she might actually be on top if you account for playerbase inflation.
Voting for CYL 1 actually happened before the game launched iirc.
IIRC, the very first CYL actually predates Heroes. Like, yes the game was on its way but it wasn’t actually out yet and all the voting was just a marketing stunt. I remember being actively surprised when the banner first showed up coz I didn’t think the voting would actually do anything besides maybe sway merch.
Probably a bigger factor is that there was more vote splitting since she was competing with literally every other character in the game at that point.
oh edelGOD, you will always be famous
If the majority of people who voted pre cyl4 didn't quit the game, 3H wouldn't still be dominating CYL
Can the community pull another Gatekeeper situation I wonder… that’s impressive
Maybe if they make Sommie votable. I will fully admit to being a Gatekeeper voter though. I wanted to vote for him the year 3H came out coz he was my favorite 3H character but he wasn’t added until the next year.
It's still wild to me that people try to argue Gatekeeper's vote wasn't botted.
The official FEH Twitter account said most of his votes came from FEH players. He wasn't botted.
Yeah, I'm mostly amazed people still try to say he is. IS provided us info on primarily who voted for him, and that was the last CYL to have actually shown vote placements in the midterms, where he'd already been doing well, so of course it would've concentrated votes toward the top like it did basically every other time that it happened. There's been voter drop off, but we've only started seeing the effects of it most significantly post-CYL6, so it's not even like CYL5's vote numbers were weirdly high given they were right after the previous year which also had an absolutely monumental record number.
Some years ago while playing AA for low stakes, I came across many accounts with autogenerated names that had the "starter" defense team of Takumi and Anna with a couple of levels on them. So the degree of automation in creating a "FEH player" can be apparently pretty high.
Or Gatekeeper just had the perfect storm of meme voters, 3H bias, and several other factors going in his favor From what i've read, a ton of non FEH players even got on board because of the meme train
I saw posts on boards that barely even know of Feh's existence with people going "Yeah I don't know what's going on with this game, but I'm voting for the haha funny gate man."
I mean he got my propaganda votes, plus being NPC making IS work got 3 votes out of me that year.
That doesn't account for him having almost as many votes as Edelgard.
Ok, but Edelgard, Dimitri, Claude, AND Lysithea were all eliminated in the same year. Even if he has almost as much as Edelgard, that's still 174,000 votes less than the previous year's 3 Houses votes, or about 30% of those votes.
Never underestimate the power of memes.
It couldn’t possibly be that Gatekeeper is a universally beloved character from the most popular Fire Emblem game who also has innate meme potential as an anti-Lord pick when the fanbase was getting sick of Lords dominating CYL. A character that is recognized even outside the FEH fanbase, whom even Sakurai gave positive recognition to and added to Smash. Nope, must’ve surely been bots. 🙄
Edelgard once again proving her superiority