User of the Year

Uoty2010 — **UotY '10** Drawing by fr0q. Game cover design put together by Yonex.

User of the Year is a contest held yearly by Smurf (though in more recent years updating duties have been taken over by Ed Bellis, Carvey, and Ngamer). He began the project in 2003 and has continued it with huge success since then. UotY has grown to become the most popular of all B8's many user tournaments.

For more info on the UotY you can visit UotY Awardspace, Smurf's website with previous rankings from the past seven years as well as ALL-TIME rankings.

Previous Users of the Year[]

2003: Amazing Telephone (2nd Kawaiifan)
2004: UltimaterializerX (2nd Steinershocker)
2005: ExThaNemesis (2nd Sir Chris)
2006: FFDragon (2nd transience)
2007: Ed Bellis (2nd Steinershocker)
2008: Ngamer64 (2nd FFDragon)
2009: Shadow Ryoko (2nd Icehawk)
2010: neonreaper (2nd Ed Bellis)
2011: yoblazer33 (2nd Sir Chris)
2012: Sir Chris (2nd WiggumFan267)
2013: MajinZidane (2nd Whiskey Nick)
2014: SHINEGET64 (2nd CommodoreTN)
2015: Whiskey Nick (2nd WiggumFan267)
2016: Steinershocker (2nd Shaduln)
2017: Shaduln (2nd Digi)

Round Format[]

Round 1[]

Total Users: 220

22 Divisions of 10 users. Top 7 Qualify, Bottom 3 are eliminated. Voting format is +3, +2, +1, -1, -2, -3. It's intended to be a generous and quiet opener to weed out the fodder and give people an easy run into it without cutting half the field in the opening stages like most user contests.

Round 2[]

Total Users: 154

Seeded based on Round 1. (1st in Div A v 7th in Div B etc) Vote format is by splitting 5 points between the users (5-0, 4-1 or 3-2) Generally considered as the most boring round as matches rarely go against the seeding and is a far more conventional format than most UOTY rounds.

Round 3[]

Total Users: 77

The 7 users who scored the biggest blowouts in Round 2 don't even have to participate in Round 3, they get a bye. Just as well too as Round 3 is regarded as being the most unforgiving round in UOTY. Voting format is rank all the users from 10 points down to 1.

7 Divisions of 10 users. Top 4 progress. With best 5 of the 5th placers joining them.

Round 4[]

Total Users: 40

The World Cup Round and works EXACTLY like a world cup. 10 groups of 4, every user plays each other once in a round robin situation. Your points in a match is your score with 10 bonus for a win.

Voting format is like Round 2. Split 5 votes. Top 2 advance from each group.

Round 5[]

Total Users: 20

The Boot and Immune round. 2 Groups of 10. Both are halfed.

Round 6[]

Total Users: 10

The Golden Parcel round. The showcase and by far most controversial round of the UOTY. It's one on one but people vote like in Round 3 by ranking all 10. The catch is that this round goes on for an entire week and each day a "Golden Parcel" can be given to a user of your choice which gives them a boost of 5. Not a single year has gone past where there hasn't been last minute controversy in this.

Round 7[]

Total Users: 5

The round that always changes the format. In 2006, it was the disastrous Election Round. In 2007 it was the Marathon, where the 5 users race to reach a set vote total, which grants passage to the next round.
In 2008, it was the Ultimate Round Robin. This was similar to Round 4, except only one vote per match and 5 points for winning. The two with the lowest scores at the end are cut.

Round 8[]

Total Users: 3

The final. 3 users, you + one, you - one. Oddly enough, in all the years of UotY, the final has only been closely contested twice, in 2006 (when FFD beat tranny) and 2009 (when Ryoko edged Icehawk).

Highlights and Past Results[]

UOTY is best known for two things: credible winners and drama. Here are some of the dramatic highlights.

2003[]

View the full 2003 rankings

Blackscar took advantage of the flawed voting rules which allowed a vote every hour. He was pro-Kawaiifan and anti-Amazing Telephone. His domination throughout the contest saw his haters turn out in force for the final. Led by Slowflake they blitzed Amazing Telephone to victory at the expense of the clear favorite Kawaiifan.

2004[]

View the full 2004 rankings

Drama arrived with the newly introduced Golden Parcel round this year, again circling around Kawaiifan. On Day 2 of the GP round (which lasted a week), Kawaiifan took a huge 200 point lead, doubling xXSabin FigaroXx at that point, a feat which everyone assumed had ended the match. But Sabin stopped the bleeding and quietly kept gaining as the days went on. Most of the attention was focused on the neck and neck affair between Steinershocker and Alanna82 so nobody noticed his gains until he was a manageable 80 points behind. Kawaii supporters turned their attention back to helping her, and things got crazy. AIM Rallying and possible board rallying saw piles of Sabin votes pour in on the last day, many sporting the same spelling mistake on Steiner's name . Many were disallowed but most were impossible to dismiss as cheat votes and Sabin went on to win the match 693-692. A one point victory! This round saw close to 200 voters and over 1000 posts.

2005[]

View the full 2005 rankings

Sick of losing in this contest, Sir Chris chose to go full force for 2005. He blitzed his competition (including destroying Steinershocker by over 300 points in the Top Ten after Stein bragged he could "out-rally" him) en route to the later stages. But things got sticky when SC came up against newcomer ExThaNemesis in the Finals. So sticky in fact, that Chris didn't even bother to rally against ExTha, who was actually (and still is) his best friend on the board. Rallying against Steiner was a matter of pride, rallying against Extha was not a part of "The Plan". The end result was another defeat for Chris. 2005 is also famous for being the year that Amazing Telephone shocked the world by miraculously making the Top Three.

2006[]

View the full 2006 rankings

Once again Sir Chris was up to his latter stage tricks, but this time he didn't see beyond the GP round. The real drama was in the final, where FFDragon officially won the match by 1 vote over transience. This was disputed because the final vote (for FFD) cast by Inviso was 3 minutes outside regulation time, which would have left the match in a tie. As with any Smurf contest, the tiebreaker rules are that his vote is removed and whoever would win without that would be crowned champion. Smurf voted for transience so even in a tiebreaker scenario, FFDragon was still the winner.

2007[]

View the full 2007 rankings

Many drama issues were encountered throughout the contest, such as transience refusing to take part, which was rumored to be the result of the previous year's final (note from transience: not true, i just didn't want to be in it), SineNomine rallying, stuffing and flooding because he didn't want to be in it, Applekidjosh whining because his sign up was rejected and XIII_Rocks because rallied against himself. SineNomine and XIII_Rocks were handed first-round disqualifications, a first for UOTY.

In the later stages of the contest Mumei was also handed a DQ for mass rallying to try and help himself defeat ExTha in the last 40.

Once again the Golden Parcel round was where the bulk of the drama took place, mostly because all 5 matches were very evenly matched. Ed and Kleenex brought about Clique SFF jokes and Wiggs against Swift was generally good tempered also. Steiner and FFDragon was competitive but within the rules, the last 2 matches were somewhat questionable. Icehawk lost his match against DSRage despite leading most of the way, for the final update he had a string of highly suspicious votes removed for him which raised serious questions about rallying. The final match was even more dramatic than that with seemingly both Karma Hunter and UltimaterializerX bringing in external support due to the staggeringly huge points cast, the end points total staggering over 1600. In the end Karma Hunter went on the claim he had mass rallied, he would have lost either way. He later admitted that this claim was for drama's sake and didn't hold substance.

Compared to the previous year, the final was quite anti-climactic, with Ed Bellis cruising to victory and Steinershocker outdistancing UltimaterializerX by an even larger margin. Vlado blames The Clique for this "travesty."

2008[]

View the full 2008 rankings

The 2008 signups were held in late December (ironically in 2007) with spaces filling up in hours, for the first time leading to actual overflow in users and no room for filler despite the 220 user capacity. As such the quality of users was intense and higher than ever leading to the situation of a lot of well known users being eliminated in Round 1.

SHINE was quoted as being slender favorite before the contest began, which bodes well as every year bar FFD's upset the favorite has gone on to win the tournament. (Turns out it didn't bode well, SHINE jobbed the big one in Round 1, and ended up being eliminated in Round 3. >_>)

The Clique indicated early that their support would go behind mammerjammer once again. mammerjammer was eliminated on Day 1 of UOTY 2008.

stripey and Albion_Hero succombed to "unexpected" round 1 defeats also, both throwing tantrums in retaliation.

Vlado narrowly lost to Curt in round 1 with l3fty, neon and Shaggy pounding him out. Vlado claims this loss "saddens [him]", and threatens cheap Bulgarian anti-voting tactics for revenge!

After his quick exit, Vlado began awarding the "Deserved win of the day" and the highly coveted "Travesty of the day." In the end, transience was the champion of this award. Others to win this award include Applekidjosh, Ed Bellis, KleenexTissue50, and th3l3fty (note the correlation).

Smurf Bet quoted the championship odds as

6:1 - SHINE
8:1 - Ed Bellis
9:1 - ExThaNemesis
9:1 - transience
12:1 - Ultimaterializer
12:1 - Steiner
15:1 - DSRage
15:1 - FFDragon
25:1 - Ryoko
30:1 - Sir Chris
9001:1 Tai

This should be considered a lesson to everyone. Never trust Smurf odds.

Ngamer64 took over the contest running duties which called attention to his contributions to the board, and amidst previous winners FFD and Bellis in the finale, he took the entire contest. This could be seen as a win for all the guys and girls that put in the effort to keep projects interesting and able to move ahead.

2009[]

View the full 2009 rankings

Sign-ups took place a few days before Christmas 2008. However, as sign-ups were too close to Christmas, it took a whooping two days to gather the 160+ signs and nominations required to fill in the non-automatic spots, a BIG slide from last year's less-than-12-hours record. Furthermore, there were fewer overflows in this period of time compared to last year, and fewer discussions in the discussion topic. (augh, why this is all negative). However the mild decline is relative to the board itself decrease in activity, relative to the UUL, UOTY this year was further ahead in votals than ever. BUT SMURF IS BACK WITH VENGEANCE THIS YEAR AND HE WILL RUN THE UOTY BY STORM.

The contest started on the 28th of December.

As per usual the contest had its fair share of drama along the way. In the early stages XIII rocksreacting to get being nominated by a transparent early rally on CE and RI. yoblazer followed up soon by attempting to eliminated himself in round 1 and 2 (failing both times) before Smurf finally removed him. Lisel performed a similar act conveniently after already being eliminated. In Round 3 Luster followed suit after realizing his fabled "night vote" was unusually weak he chose to take a different route and attempt to rally himself to success, he made it as far as his 2nd rally vote attempt before Stingers sold him in. Luster was DQ'd

Luster's rallying effort -

Official Smurf Bet Odds, 2009

ExThaNemesis - 3/1
FFDragon - 4/1
Ed Bellis - 4/1
neonreaper - 5/1
Icehawk - 5/1
Shadow Ryoko - 5/1
Ngamer64 - 6/1
DSRage - 7/1
SHINE GET 64 - 7/1
transience - 9/1
War13104 - 10/1
th3l3fty - 10/1
Heroic Palmer - 12/1
SuperAngelo128 - 16/1
yazzy14 - 18/1
KleenexTissue50 - 20/1
Sir Chris - 22/1
SteinerShocker - 22/1
nintendogirl1 - 25/1

2010[]

View the full 2010 rankings

Nominations for UotY 2010 kicked off in the middle of March; Smurf delayed the Contest by a couple months in order to allow the 2010 Character Battle to finish first. Smurf then decided he didn't want to run the Contest any longer, allowing Ed Bellis and Carvey to take over. The number one story of the season was overall favorite Icehawk, who survived a tough matchup against Sir Chris in the Golden Parcel round only to suffer a stunning R7 elimination. This opened the door for his podcast co-host neonreaper to easily advance past Boko and former Champ Ed to secure the UotY Crown.

"I have taken a list of everyone that has voted against me in the past 10 weeks, and I will destroy them. Notepad is the devil, and I am his pitchfork." -neon no longer playing the game

2011[]

View the full 2011 rankings

The 2011 contest was won by yoblazer, who defeated Sir Chris by a single vote in onf of the most exciting UotY finals in history.

2012[]

View the full 2012 rankings

With Ed Bellis stepping down, the hosting responsibilities fell to th3l3fty.

The contest was won by Sir Chris, who coasted to victory without ever facing a single serious threat, culminating in a crushing 30 point victory in the finals. Sir Chris would give out a console to a random user that voted in every single match, a feature that likely helped him to victory.

2013[]

View the full 2013 rankings

Lefty stepped down as the host, so the hosting job instead fell to last year's winner, Sir Chris, although Wigs did most of the work. Chris changed the number of participants to 180 instead of the usual 220, and also changes most round formats to keep everything fresh. This was the first year to allow rallying.

With several big names and former winners choosing not to participate, the contest was pretty much dominated by the trio who ran also ran a podcast show dedicated to UotY that season; Whiskey Nick, Boko and WiggumFan267. Only FFD and Ctes managed to even come close to beating them, as they made their way to the top 3. In the end the title went to Boko, who defeated Nick by a single vote in the final.

2014[]

View the full 2014 4rankings

This year, it was hosted by Nick and rallying was once again allowed. This sparked the heat between the two biggest cliques on the board, the Gauntlet Crew and board8chat, also known as the Hivemind. Nick himself was a huge favorite, but ultimately fell to the rallied JONA in the Golden Parcel round. Between the rallies for both cliques, SHINE GET 64, who was part of neither group, snuck through provided by Ctes' rallying and won the contest.

2015[]

View the full 2015 rankings

This UotY attempted an entirely new, revolutionary format. In the style of B8UCA, the tournament was run by three different hosts - XIII_rocks, Tom Bombadil and Dr_Football. The three hosts drafted three fields of 60 competitors.

These then became essentially three separate mini-UotYs, with each host running a tournament in parallel to each other until the Golden Parcel round, which had 12 competitors left and acted as the "semi-final round" for the three mini-tournaments. After this, three one-on-one matches were held for each tournament. In XIII's, Nick beat Steiner, in Tom's, Wigs beat greengravy, and in Football's, Silver_Ermine beat Sir Chris. For the firs time, Team Matches were included. It went back to not allowing rallying, except for a second chance HARDCORE MATCH in XIII's bracket.

Once these three winners were decided they faced off in the traditional UotY final, in which Whiskey_Nick beat Wigs in a very close match.

2016[]

View the full 2016 rankings

After some confusion, it was decided that XIII_rocks would be the grand host of the contest, but on the condition that he wasn't doing it alone. Thus, posting rounds and tallying were mostly done by lefty, Steiner and Wigs. The format mostly resembled the traditional format, but XIII kept the HARDCORE MATCH as a second chance round in return of taking over the hosting job.

Steiner and Wigs were the favorites going into the contest. It was mostly dominated by users active in the new Discord chat, as only a single user in the top 20, Leon, does not use Discord. In the end, Board 8 Discord founder Steiner won the contest as well as fantasy, being the first user to ever win both the same year, by beating Shad and Wigs in the finale.

The Noble Nine[]

Consistency between the years is something that just doesn't happen so having an elite group is just impossible since they'd likely fall off their own throne the following year. However, these nine users all share something: they progressed to at least Round 2 in the first 6 UotY contests.