Board Thread:Debate of The Week/@comment-28112409-20171002232846/@comment-28112409-20171105114200

I am with you on improving the standards, I am by no means disagreeing with you on that part. It gets infuriating to see people come and leave, not take the debate seriously, laze out and hope for a carry. It's just that I need verification on whether a certain issue is insignificant and doesn't need any tuning, or the issue is of an actual problem to a portion of the people and must be fixed. This is the information I'm trying to weed out.

While you did point out the problem, I still need to see a good bunch of people agreeing that it is indeed a problem. I don't need to get a poll for thousands of tos players, I just need the wiki community's opinions and what they think. It's not the thousands of ToS players participating in DoTW after all, it's just certain wiki people. If those 6-7 people are the only people in DoTW, then that's all that matters. I don't see where all the other ToS players come into play.

The thing is, I can't stop subjectivity from coming in. I can make a guide on debating right, I can warn them about it, but it won't stop. There'll always be the lower levelled debaters who'll somehow let subjectivity leak into their argument one way or another. I can't go removing subjective arguments either, because then that's too strict and will start killing the debate for the people involved. The judges already filter out subjectivity, so the issue of subjectivity affecting debate results is eliminated. I can still see where you're coming from, but the maximum I can do without killing the fun of DoTW is verbal warnings and guides, what is there to do to raise standards without heavily damaging the activity?

The issue of people not reading previous arguments is also a recurring problem that I definitely agree with. It was still awful seeing that Team BG has recycled their argument because Team Doc did so too. Instead of propagating such a bad debating habit, you could've went the extra step or so to develop specific counters or replies rather than recycling, then used your way of argument that is not recycling to provide an example to the same people who recycled their points against you to show them how a good, well-formed debate looks like. When someone performs really well and is a well-known debating powerhouse, lower debaters will start looking up to them. The idea of "we recycled because they did too" stifles development of debate skills and prevents demonstration of said better debate skills. If you were doing well and didn't need to bring up new arguments because the other side wasn't bringing up new arguments, then you're not encouraging better debating, you're encouraging stale debating. If you truly want to raise better standards in debating, then do it in all aspects, not just the specific one that bugs you.

This is not world-class debating, it will have issues no matter what. The standards of this activity are not world-class either, which means the smashing majority of the participants don't mind most of said issues, especially small and minor ones. The way I'm still seeing it is that swingy role debating is still a minor issue because I have seen absolutely no proof of it being a significant problem, all I have is your word for it, which I deem not enough evidence. Again, I'm giving you the opportunity to prove it. I will make a poll asking for opinions on this, or I will make a debate with swingy roles and we'll see how it goes (maybe even collect participant feedback after said debate).