The Shanna hype is real right now. Team Takumi and Team Shanna alike have been trading salt wondering how it happened. Multipliers? But there were no multipliers for the last nine hours! Enthusiasm? Have you MET Takumi fangirls?

“honestly i’m not sure how she managed to pull it off.” - @bookofholsety, Team Shanna

The answer, I believe, is this: The 1%-activated multiplier gives the underdog in each round slightly better odds than the alleged favorite due to flag allocation.

Here’s why.

1) A lot of people are in the gauntlet for the feathers.

This has two effects: First, it makes people on each army behave selfishly to optimize their own score. Secondly, it makes players relatively indifferent to the gauntlet candidates to gravitate toward underdogs, preventing the likelihood of the underdog losing by a landslide (say, a factor of x7).

2) Unless the underdog is being outvoted by an enoromous margin, this multiplier causes everything to be decided near the end.

If the underdog falls behind early in the gauntlet, they will catch up quickly because of the bonus. This is especially true if the underdog is only behind by a factor of x3 (1:2 odds), considering that the earliest multipliers literally bolster the underdog’s votes by a factor of slightly more than x3. This makes it likely that the underdog and the favorite will enter the last half-day roughly neck to neck.

Recall: Feather mercenaries bolster an underdog’s numbers, making it unlikely that they’ll lose in a gigantic landslide. Might they be pushing the underdog into this optimal x3 ratio? Data from this last round (credit OreoCupcakes?) shows that all underdogs were losing at somewhere between a 1:2 and 1:4 ratio in the first hour.

3) Because the multiplier acts on such a small margin, the underdog team believes it will have late-game bonus rounds and save its flags, whereas the favored team may feel insecure about the likelihood of late bonuses and is likely to spend feathers in earlier bonus rounds.

When I was on Team Soren vs Ryouma and it became apparent we were losing badly, I saved over a thousand of my flags to be spent in the last few hours. Why would I spend my flags on a 3.5x multiplier when I knew I could get 7x or higher?

When I was on Team Takumi vs Shanna, I spent my flags as multipliers came up throughout the day, knowing that he might not have many multipliers near the end. I kept 600 flags in reserve for the likelihood that something crazy would go down in the last few hours. Why would I need any more than that when rounds are often decided by the timing of a huge last-minute bonus round? (You can hear my Soren v Takumi salt in this one.)

But, in reality…

Shanna vs Takumi wouldn’t see any bonus rounds for nearly a half-day before its ending. Nonetheless, Shanna’s feathers had to go somewhere, and they bolstered her scores in the last few rounds much more than Team Takumi could.

Coincidence? Well… look at how Shanna vs Hinoka ended.

The last person to get a bonus was actually Hinoka!

But Hinoka, with its much larger base, garnered only 844m and 819m votes in its last few clutch bonuses while Shanna surged with 1,012m and 970m.

Why?

Team Shanna could save 800 flags for the end and count on still catching bonuses for their own personal scores. Team Hinoka couldn’t, and probably entered the final few hours with less.

4) The flag bonus allows for multiplication of up to 600x (but probably 400x) within the course of a single hour. Meanwhile, the game provides 1510 flags per round.

This means that all the flags in a round could be burned in the course of three or four hours… say, the last handful of hours for the underdog’s team?

The effect of flags are also incredibly powerful. Let’s suppose that Team A has 50k people and Team B has 150k people and there’s no bonus. Let’s say that Team A, for whatever reason, has 6k people drop 400 flags during this hour and another 4k drop 200 flags, while Team B, for whatever reason (flag poverty?) can only have 10k people drop 200 flags. And let’s say that these two teams both vote twice during the hour for 100 points per vote.

Then Team A has scored (30k + (6k * 400 flags) + (4k * 200 flags)) * 100 points = 350m points, with only 30m of those points coming from the non-flag plebians,

And Team B has scored (140k + (10k * 200 flags)) * 100 points = 340m points

In other words, even without the 7x bonus multipliers in the end, by having a fraction of its team spend more flags, Team A can outvote Team B despite having a third of its playerbase.

(Note that while teams in later rounds can potentially have more flags than this number, this is to illustrate that flags are burnt quickly – 400/hr for people who don’t cheese the system – and powerfully. While I haven’t accounted for residual flags, there are probably relatively few (less than 400 per player) in the system due to the incentives to climb within one’s own army for feathers.)

5) Conscious coordination is nearly impossible.

There’s no way to communicate with a large enough portion of the people on your voting team to coordinate meaningfully. For starters, not enough people care deeply enough about the gauntlet results (beyond feathers) to check some certain established twitter tag on the hour or whatever. Secondly, a large portion of each team doesn’t even share a common language with the other team.

Under these circumstances, and with feathers on the line, people aren’t coordinating. They’ll spend on the bonus rounds to maximize their own score and cross their fingers hoping it works out for their character.

6) Enthusiasm apparently doesn’t count for shit.

This is more of a non-factor than a factor, but if you pore through the data, you’ll notice that underdog teams don’t seem to wake up at weird hours or pay attention during final hours any more than the favored team does. (I originally thought I saw this effect, but then realized that it was a combination of 1) more people on both teams tuning in for the final hours, and 2) Japanese people coming home, and 3) people using banked flags during the last few hours despite lack of multipliers.) If enthusiasm has any effect, someone else needs to suggest a way that it can be measured.

Besides, our victor is Shanna. Her fanbase is incredibly small. A significant portion of her voting bloc toward the end was feather mercenaries and spiteful Soren fans.

Conclusion: The setup to the voting gauntlet creates a brutal game where affiliation and flag spending habits are strongly affected by feather greed. The natural result of this is that the underdog is likely to be losing by a non-landslide ratio, meaning that the round will probably be decided in the last few hours, when the underdog team can and will burn many more flags than the victor. This, in sum, gives the underdog team a pretty good chance of winning its round.

(In nerdier terms: For the underdog team, optimizing for the intra-army rank game happens to also be the optimal strategy for having the underdog character win the gauntlet, whereas for the favored team, optimizing for the intra-army rank game happens to weaken the favored character’s gauntlet victory chances.)

But let’s not get carried away here–there’s a lot of other factors at play that are difficult to account for. For example, Soren vs Takumi was Soren’s loss because the numbers worked out to give Takumi a bonus hour that Soren’s lead couldn’t absorb.

However, underdogs have won 4 out of the total 7 gauntlet rounds, which I think is evidence that the forces I’ve outlined above may actually overall favor the underdog.

But we’d need more data to conclude that, and for all we know, IS will change the activation threshold from 1% for the next gauntlet to prevent a repeat Shanna. This may be the only gauntlet of this kind we’ll ever get to study.

In any case, it’s been a fun time, Shanna, New Queen of Memes.