Board Thread:Debate of The Week/@comment-28112409-20171025060017/@comment-28112409-20171101112646

My vote goes to Team BG... wow, no one saw that vote coming =P

However, I need to seriously do some criticism for both sides of this debate. I was heavily hit by guilt when most BG members told me this was so one-sided, implying it was unfair to Team Doc and that they'd get an easy win. But now, with hindsight and completion of judgment, I find it ironic that Team BG members were telling me this.

They won, but not by a massive margin. Their win wasn't impressive or dominating, they won by just an extra couple of points, that's it. I am actually astonished Team Doc hasn't won, let alone attempting to at least flip the tables of the debate. Team BG's weak point was so tantalizingly obvious, it was hanging right in front of Team Doc and they didn't grasp it.

The immense repitition of Team BG's points could've been the very downfall of them, they're very lucky Team Doc's points weren't good enough. I'm not talking new members coming in and being oblivious to the previous points, I'm talking members who were already in the debate that just started lingering on previous points as the debate progressed, the best debaters in the team were doing it, more than the others even.

I'm surprised that DuckGamer, who nuked the last debate using mathematics, made an underwhelming appearance here by just repeating what has already been said. The major dispute regarding how many heals Doc could do in a game could've had probability and probability distribution supporting it since there were no solid numbers, but nobody went for it, sadly. Sure, it may have taken you all week to calculate, but it could've turned the BG win into a Doc win.

The off-topic posts were also a lot more than usual here, because some people can't take it to the message walls or make a random post for shitposting, nope, gotta put it amidst a debate.

These are not the main issues though, I can tolerate all that, BG Team won fair and square. All that was minor and I don't care much for it. I still admit that I'm at fault for choosing a bad topic, I'm not gonna deny that.

What really annoyed me about this debate was the extreme lack of perseverance on Team Doc's side. We've reached the point where Team Doc's top debater gave up because she couldn't handle the opposition and hid behind the excuse of "bad debate topic", and we had another one trying to switch sides. Both had the freedom to pick a side from the start, mind you.

I've also noticed this in pretty much all the previous debates, we've had lots of people who were just making one-liners, contributing nothing and then just giving up completely or leaving in hope that they'd be carried. I might have to go and do some filtering for all the debates made so far, I forgot I had a rule against trivial contributions.

Back to the main point, I barely saw any perseverance in Team Doc. So I'd like to encourage it from now, have some endurance people. Let's ignore the fact that you can pick whatever side you want, let's just say you ended up having the bad or worse side of the debate. The one with the lower hand, the one with less chance of winning, the one that has less valid points to be argued for. Why do you give up? Why do you ragequit? Why do you neglect and abandon your team just because the other team has a reply to everything you say?

If you can debate well in a fair debate, then you're at least average if not good. If you can debate well against the odds, you are an excellent debater. I dunno about you, but if there was a debate about countries and their death penalties being too harsh, I would be much more amazed if the guy who won was representing China, Iran or Saudi Arabia rather than if the guy represented Canada, the UK, or Sweden.

If you can practice and develop your perseverance, bad positions won't even matter to you anymore. You can dominate even when in the worst conditions if you can have perseverance on your side. It was the biggest disappointment in all of DoTW seeing how easy people give up, especially in this debate.

I don't want to bash anyone or hate on them, I simply want to encourage people to be more endurant in their argument, to be able to think out of the box and improve their debating skills. I'm gonna end my criticism here, but I truly hope some debaters can just work on that aspect of debating, as it would help them a lot. It will make for much more quality debates that both debaters and judges can enjoy.

After all, the core value being judged here is how well you can debate, not how good your position is and certainly not constantly regurgitating good points. Because if that was the case, debates would become stale much quicker, and repitition would be a heck load more than what was witnessed here.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm not a good judge, maybe I should just host debates and let someone else judge instead of me, but I still believe  that people should at least consider what I'm saying here. I want to improve DoTW as much as I can, not just through rules and topics, but through the participants and judges too.

 If you actually read all of this and didn't roll your eyes, thanks...I guess =P