Then either you've missed my point or I explained myself poorly, my point is how fan polls only ever get trusted when they stay in their respective bubbles, add a bigger bubble on it, then it doesn't count. There was overlap as the people who put Heavy on there are Smash fans, but it simply reflects that the people outside of the Smash bubble have such vastly different voices in general.
TLDR Fan polls are ****
No, I think you (and some others here) are missing the point behind fan polls.
Oh, only the characters popular in the Smash fandom rank high?
Good! That's what they're supposed to measure.
If you "add a bigger bubble to it", of course you're gonna get different voices, because these are people that normally may not care about Smash. Which is the reason why they don't normally vote in polls in the first place.
And even when they do, they might not have the same understanding of Smash as we do - I don't think Goku, Spongebob and Iron Man got votes on the Ballot simply because of trolling, but also because a lot of casuals might genuinely want these characters, who are very popular in the mainstream, despite the fact that one of the very few hard rules we have (perhaps the only one) is "video game characters only".
There is some level of overlap, sure, but it's hard to tell how big or accurate it is. I don't think this means TF2 is more popular than Halo or anything, just that,
because it was shared in the TF2 subreddit, more people came to see it and decided to show their support for the game, regardless of whether they care about Smash or not. Like, if people did the same thing in a gathering place for fans of GTA, or League, or whatever other popular game, you'd likely see something similar happening.
TLDR: Fan polls are only **** if you dislike the core fanbase's picks, really. It's practically impossible to understand the taste of people outside the core fandom, which is why "silent majority" is pretty much a buzzword at this point and lumps other bubbles together for no reason.
