User blog:AgentHoxton/Season 4 Is My Final Season - Why This Is/Plans for S4

Yep, you heard me correctly. My time here is going to come to a close after Season 4.

And, well, it may seem like it's a bit of a stupid decision, I do have good reasons, but the skinny of it is this - people take Death Battle and VS Debating too seriously on here, even though being serious has not, is not and never will be Death Battle's purpose. In fact, it's just about as general as any VS show goes, just with the idea of doing some extensive looking at characters and their capabilities. It doubles as both a learning experience for characters you're not familiar with as well as a source of entertainment, be it the fight itself or the witty dialogue in between.

Death Battle passes themselves off as doing research. Doing research =/= being all that serious. To that end, doing research =/= being always right, either. I've never passed myself off as having all my battles having the right result. No-one, and I mean NO-ONE, should adopt that mindset. Having all 100% correct battles - especially if you do a lot of them - is pretty much impossible. There is bound to be at least ONE that has major disagreements. This goes for every battle writer on here, myself included.

I've never taken the serious approach. I've never felt like I've had to always be right. Why? Because I didn't find it necessary. I literally take a standard approach to my research - to just use what I know and what I can find, and work with it. Does that mean I have done wrong outcomes? In some instances, probably. But there's a major reason that offsets that fact - entertainment value. Even if a fight hasn't got a desired or correct outcome, that doesn't rule out the possibility that a fight can be entertaining. Same for fights that seem one-sided on the surface - it can still be entertaining if the writer knows what they're doing and what they're working with.

But now... that whole thing has just gone.

People seem to forget the entertainment side of things and look into this whole shtick too deeply, when really it was never intended nor necessary to be looked at from this angle. People can make judgements all they want, but there's bound to be disagreements. It's unavoidable. Yet people seem to act like this whole gig is serious business and they completely forget that there's also entertainment to consider too. Trust me, I've seen more users fall victim to this kind of mindset than I would like to admit.

I would continue going, but honestly with all of this going on, I don't really feel like I should. People just take a casual entertainment show way too seriously, throwing debates and all that all over the place and, in some instances, belittling people because they may have missed these. And really, that's the type of behaviour I am not willing to support in any way whatsoever. There's just an atmosphere of condescending behaviour and "lol this calc" and all that jazz, and, when you really think about it, the question you should be asking is "Do we NEED to do this? Is it actually that necessary?"

I would love to try and get this message across more and more, but given that I seem to be a little more thrown to the side than other mods/admins here, I don't really think I'd be able to. Trust me, I'd love to help, but apparently me helping in the past has lead to suspicions of me being too harsh. It's sad, but that's just a sign that I can't really gain anyone's trust on the matter. Besides, the folks we do have left to deal with it can do a much better job at it than me, anyway.

So you may be wondering what this is going to mean for Season 4 and the rest of the fights left outstanding. Well, here's the thing. I would like to do a lot of the battles I still have left over. There's also a few ideas that I haven't yet implemented. So... here's the plan.

Season 4 is going to be extended to 25 episodes. 7 of the new 10 will come from the fights I already have, as well as the fights in the poll I had prior. The remaining 3 will come from the new ideas. So I'm gonna need your votes to help decide which should stay and which should be let go. So... here we go.

Poll A for the existing ideas

Poll B for the new ideas