User blog:AgentHoxton/Quality Time w/ Agent - Harsher Measures And Why We Are Enforcing Them: My Personal Thoughts

(Note: Read this blog before reading this one - it will help to put things into context.)

So people may have seen the aforementioned blog above and are wondering why exactly we're doing this. Well... it's mainly for control.

We have a severe lack of control on here as it stands.

Chat goes haywire all the time with the admins and chat-mods virtually powerless to stop it (assuming they aren't involved themselves). Quality control on pages and files on the wiki is all over the place and we have to spend a long time getting it organised and cleaned up. It's a mess. It's strenuous for those who have to do it (mainly the admins) and really, we can't let this kind of behaviour slide any more.

This clamping down on the likes of maturity and behaviour is one such major thing from this, from what I've seen. Death Battle is the source of a load of childish comments about bias and hatred towards SA just because of a character death, from regular users here to even higher-ups. And I'm just gonna be honest... I don't get it. I know people holds characters to heart, but I don't see why we need to be so hateful if they lose from researched fights that, really, are only a What-If? scenario to begin with. ScrewAttack and the DB team don't want to put characters on a "useless" stand because they lost a Death Battle or risk putting favourites under the axe - in fact, that tends to be the case more often than not - but they have to anyway. It's unavoidable. A favourite of ours will have the chance of dying on the series, and if we want to see them on the official show, we need to accept that possibility of them dying.

"Oh, but X dying means they're classed as inferior to Y!" - '''Grade. A. BULLSHIT.''' There is absolutely NO inferiority to be found from popular characters getting killed on the show, like Goku, Red, or Darth Vader. You don't believe me? Then read this quote about what it actually means, from none other than a Death Battle researcher:

''"When a character loses a Death Battle, it does nothing to say "Oh yeah, this character is completely pointless! Brbrbrbrah--" No, no, no, no. It just means in a strict one-on-one fight to the death, this other guy is just physically stronger. It doesn't change someone's personal character, it doesn't invalidate your beliefs or how much you care about a character; they're still just as valuable, just as awesome, just as amazing. There's--there's no reason to be upset. And I know that my words are going to make very, very little difference in the long run but... I just hope you can all understand that." -MaxOfFewTrades''

And do you want to know when he said that? Discussing Goku vs. Superman 2. He knew what it was like to have his favourite character die on the show - we all do, to a greater or lesser extent - but he never let it constantly drag him down. Goku is a prime example of this. He likely loves Goku far more than Superman, but even in a Death Battle he had to put that aside for the facts, and that Superman would win against him in the long run. As he said himself, "Deep down, I knew it was the truth". And do you know what happened after that sad moment when they said the winner was Superman, and he said that prior little quote (not the italics quote, as that was after)?

He got upbeat again, for the reveal of Knuckles.

Goku getting defeated again was something sad for him, sure, but he put it behind him at the drop of a hat to get hyped for the reveal of Knuckles. He was ready to move on, to put what has happened behind him and get ready for what's about to come up. That is the kind of mentality we need to adopt, people. Not "Oh, X died to Y and now DB is ruined forever!". Not "I refuse to watch because of A's death". Just "X died... it's sad, but I can move on". Otherwise, we'll just be stuck in an endless abyss that we can't escape from, and we'll never be able to improve.

There's also the fact... THAT NONE OF US THAT ARE ENFORCING THIS WANTED TO DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE. I am being completely serious. This is something that came from necessity rather than personal preference. We wanted to keep things as open-minded as possible, but recent events have made that impossible. We never wanted to be stricter than what we were, but we had to. Did you know that we have had a lack of control on both the chat and the wiki itself, and that that is what caused this to come about? It was for recent events, but not what happened in the past. Nothing that has happened influencing what is happening now.

Honestly, it says a lot about how far down we've dropped when we need to enforce sticter measures just to keep everything from falling apart.

I can only hope it works.