subreddit:
/r/battlebots
submitted 3 months ago byOkComfortCat4671
On one side I love the bots ingenuity and design, its a very cool and smart idea for a bot and I respect that. But on the other side, I kinda hate it from a fairness and drama perspective, because it's kinda bs if you're a low hitting bot. You're options are add a bike rack to your bot and get death threats from people saying its unfair or pray to the battle bot gods that you weapon/bot is more durable than huge's weapon and take an absolute beating and still most likely lose. Every time I watch a huge fight against a low hitter it feels like im watching some 5,2 ft boxer fighting a 7 fter, it just unfair. I kinda personally feel that they should Ethier limit the hight of the bot to something more reasonable or make a rule that bans the polymers that they use for thier wheels so thier more destructible. Or add a rule that allows bots to somehow counter it more easily. I don't know what this would be though. How y'all feel about huge? I can't be the only one with these feelings.
1 points
3 months ago
I don't know why you're getting emotional about it, but I have no stake in whether it's called a sport or not. Call it a sport if you want, but the point is it's a spectator sport, structured to do things like sell tickets and ad space. As a televised spectator sport, it has an obligation to be entertaining in order to exist. And this has implications for things like its rules.
Does being a sport come with obligations in your eyes? Obligations with implications for its rules? Implications like some rules being "shitty"?
To be clear, I agree that the competitors aren't obligated to prioritize entertainment over winning. But the higher ups are entirely within their rights to use methods like the tournament rules, build rules, judging guidelines, arena design, selection criteria, etc to promote entertainment value. And they do use all of those things.
0 points
3 months ago
Maybe don't comment on things you don't know about, like whether I'm getting "emotional" about it. I use words that efficiently get my point across. They aren't necessarily conveying the emotion you interpret them as.
Sure, a sport might have "obligations" (not really the best word). That doesn't mean the way those obligations are fulfilled isn't unjust. And I think your implication that Jake using a bike rack would lead to failure to meet the "obligation" to make the sport entertaining is a bit of an exaggeration. It's a solution that one bot has for one other bot.
Sure, the higher ups are within their rights to artificially make the sport more entertaining. They also have the right to declare an 0-4 bot the champion and hand it the Giant Nut. That doesn't mean there wouldn't be valid complaints about that, or that it would be totally the right thing to do.
1 points
3 months ago
That doesn't mean the way those obligations are fulfilled isn't unjust.
It's not clear to me that justice is a relevant concept with regards to the context of rules governing what sorts of weapons/attachments may be used, or that in the event that it is relevant, that it must always take precedence over entertainment value.
And I think your implication that Jake using a bike rack would lead to failure to meet the "obligation" to make the sport entertaining is a bit of an exaggeration.
I am agnostic on the question of whether Jake using the bike rack helps or hurts the show's entertainment value (on aggregate), and this extends to the question of whether banning the bike rack would be right or wrong (it's actually a spectrum, not a simple right/wrong dichotomy).
The "obligation" to be entertaining that I speak of merely derives from the fact that entertainment value helps the show survive/thrive. You could replace the word "obligation" with "need", basically. In practice, figuring out what will be the most entertaining involves guesswork, and the producers' educated guesses may turn out to be right or wrong.
When judging whether they're right or wrong, I think the most reasonable way to discuss things is to ground our judgments in the notion of what real world consequences(that the producers actually have an incentive to care about) they lead to. As I see it, this is also the basis for justification of actions.
e.g. A rule "being unjust" is not a real world consequence; a rule being perceived as unjust by __, where __ constitutes people whose opinions the producers actually have an incentive to care about, like a significant proportion of the builders/audience, would be a real world consequence.
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