An Airing of Battleboard Grievances.

[u/CobaltMonkey]

I've got a lot of problems with you people, and now you're going to hear about it. /s
Okay, not really you people specifically. But there are a lot of things we all do at one point or another that are just awful for everyone's enjoyment of our shared hobby.

Let's start with this question: What is the purpose of battleboarding?
The answer is twofold:
1.) Have fun.
2.) Use the board's rules to arrive as close as reasonably possible to a right answer to the question of who would win in a given competition.

What do you not see in there?
"Be right."
You are absolutely not here to personally be right about who is or isn't the victor.
You are here to find what is right, not who. To find the right answer, not simply to be the one who has it.
You are not the appointed champion of a character or franchise. Not even if you were their actual author. But even if you were both of those things, it would still not be your goal to make your characters win. It would be to find out if they could according to our rules.

Your favored character(s) absolutely will lose sometimes. No, this is not a sin. No, the board is not biased against them. No, the rules are not stupid just because you don't like them or can't exploit them to fanwank your character. Either voice your problems with them in the State of the Sub (where you can expect to be rightly shouted down if the latter was your goal), or hit the bricks. If all you do is whine about them, you won't be missed.

Another aspect of this perceived need to be right is choosing to engage with only the highest powered characters you can find. Yes, I'm looking at you, people who won't touch anyone below universal tier.
Let's not get confused here. It's perfectly fine to like and enjoy those characters and the media they are from. Your taste in characters is your own and is entirely above ridicule. You like what you like and there is never anything wrong with that.

However, that doesn't make those characters particularly suitable for enjoyable battleboarding.
If the description of your character or any of their abilities includes any of the following terms, then pretty much no one is going to enjoy engaging with you:
Universal
Multiversal
Omniversal
Conceptual
Abstract
Omnipotent
Omniscient
^{Ki Control/s}

Why? For starters, in choosing these, it looks an awful lot like you're wanting "victory" for as little effort as possible. If this is your goal, you're no better than anyone who tries to NLF Hulk's anger or Batman's prep time. Yes, it's wrong to wank someone up to having no limits, but it's almost as wrong to simply pick characters whose limits are either unknowable or arbitrarily high. You're not looking for debate when you do that, you're looking to "win."

Well, that might not be the case 100% of the time, in fairness. You could genuinely be interested in trying to find a match for a really high powered character. But that's moot since you can't really arrive at a reasonable conclusion because too much of what the characters to whom the above terms apply is vague, undefinable nonsense or a complete mess (see any one of the many omnipotence rants here). It's a "safe" character to back because pretty much nothing can be conclusively proven about it. It will invariably get bogged down into a mess of "does my abstract defense beat your ontological weapon" or something. Nobody can know that sort of thing, not the least reason for which is that such terms were never meant to be applied in a battleboard setting and authors that threw them around to sound cool were never concerned with it anyway (barring Suggs, of course). In short, for everyone around you it's a violation of answer 1 up there, Have fun.

I could go on, but it's actually kind of late. I'm sure I'll have more opportunity to vent/be crucified in the comments in the morning. See you then. I'll even bring the nails. I'm just helpful like that.

[u/Edgy_Robin]

You can't arrive at a correct answer however because constant variables (Unless you're talking top tier reality warper vs street leveler or things in that vain.). You can not definitively prove that character A beats character B unless one character drastically outclasses the other. Right off the bat your entire premise for how these debates happen contradict the definition and is flawed unless it's a matter where a debate can't happen. Just like how you can't have a debate over something like Do humans need water to survive. It's an objective fact just like how it's an objective fact that someone like Lucifer Morningstar would take out Batman with little effort.

​

Two people on opposing sides of an argument are opponents, and that isn't a bad thing like you're presenting it as. By definition an opponent would be someone on the other side of an argument you're opposing. There is no honest answer unless it's a subject that can't be debated.

[u/CobaltMonkey → u/Edgy_Robin]

Go back up to my original post.

2.) Use the board's rules to arrive as close as reasonably possible to a right answer to the question of who would win in a given competition.

To debate fictional characters is to accept that no answer we give--no, not even the really obvious seeming ones--is completely provable. You cannot definitively prove a single thing at all where fiction is concerned, regardless of the apparent power gap between two combatants. We use as much evidence as possible to make the strongest case we can. And that is all we can do. The only dishonest answer is a biased one.

Two people on opposing sides of an argument are opponents,

You are not on opposing sides of an argument here. You are on the same side, both of you trying to sort through possible arguments to do your best to find the correct answer, and absolutely not just the one you've decided to champion. This isn't politics or a team sport. The goal isn't to win over or convince other people so you can rake in the upvotes. It's to find the right answer, or as close as can be found with the evidence you have.

[u/Edgy_Robin → u/CobaltMonkey]

So what? Unless the power gap as I've said before is massive there can be incredibly reasonable answers as to why character a would win and why character b would win which is up to the interpretation of the people in the argument. You can prove things. I can prove in five seconds that a character that can erase things from existence can solo a universe based on reality where superpowers aren't a thing and the strongest characters are peak human at best. It's an objective fact. Reality warper beats street leveler 10/10 in a random encounter.

​

You are not on opposing sides of an argument here. You are on the same side, both of you trying to sort through possible arguments to do your best to find the correct answer, and absolutely not just the one you've decided to champion. This isn't politics or a team sport. The goal isn't to win over or convince other people so you can rake in the upvotes. It's to find the right answer, or as close as can be found with the evidence you have.

​

You're not on the same side. If one person thinks character a wins and another person thinks character b wins they are on separate sides of the argument. Your argument only applies to the idealized battle forum, which does not exist. When I see someone say 'X' character would win and disagree then present my argument as to why I believe character 'Y' I am doing that because I believe that character wins over the other one, just like how if the person in favor of character 'X' replies it's because they disagree. The 'right' answer is up for interpretation of both people just like the feats used to try and find that answer.

[u/CobaltMonkey → u/Edgy_Robin]

If one person thinks character a wins and another person thinks character b wins they are on separate sides of the argument. Your argument only applies to the idealized battle forum, which does not exist.

It does exist when you aren't tyring so hard to fight against it. It's not an ideal if you stop trying to treat it like one and actually work towards it. Finding the right answer instead of just your own.