If this was secretly designed with the express purpose of clearing the way for one person to win 90% of the challenges it succeeded
I was thinking about this. My first reaction was come on, Capone would’ve wiped the floor with Bobfather if he was still around. But then it hits me, that just means Capone would’ve won 90% of the challenges. I dunno though, I feel like top scores were spread among Meyer Paulie and others in their time but not gonna do the research to confirm.
I think the issue is that there are discrete tiers of flash skills. Paulie had some good performances, but it was pretty clear from the premerge that Capone, Meyer and Bobfather were in the flash God Tier. Bob got his shot at Capone in a premerge tribal and took it, and Meyer self-evicted before he could go toe to toe in any individual challenges. But with the way premerge challenges displayed individual scores it was always going to be a known factor who was really strong, which opened it up for some of them to be targeted during swap tribes and only helped clear the road for one to emerge into merge dominance. It isn't such an issue in other games because even though we all expect flash challenges to be part of the mix it's not possible to dominate an entire merge on that skill alone. Urbosa's dominance is different from Bobfather's because of the sheer variety of challenges she won. If you run PvCvW a hundred more times you would never see another challenge dominator like that. If you run Flash Mob over and over I think you get someone who is clearly the favorite for every challenge in the merge more than half the time.
Sure, somebody could have tried to sandbag premerge challenges to come out of nowhere in the individual comps, but there just aren't enough God Tier flash players around to expect that. For the rest of us, we rely on getting very lucky. My somewhat respectable Flappy Bird score was the only run in the entire hour that I made it past 42, it required heavily favorable RNG to give me a lot of relatively straight pathing with the gaps, and it still wasn't even close to Bob's submission. My score in the current challenge likewise required a very good streak of luck where the multipliers kept spawning in the one corner of the board where I was safely keeping my little ragdoll schmuck, but I again spent most of the hour failing in the first five seconds because I don't actually possess the fine motor, instinctive sixth sense twitching skills that separate the merely passable from the Divinely Klickable.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
