I have noticed two very large problems that seem to act as the root of most versus debating division and hinder it's ability to serve as an enjoyable hobby. Things that are not fun to debate about but unfortunately a difference of opinion split people.
The first of these is the acceptance and application of wholly different fundamental principles. If you go to Reddit's whowouldwin, spacebattle's versus section, the outskirts battledome or versus battles wiki and you ask what qualifies as "hax" or "combat speed" you're likely to get wholly different responses between them and often within them. Obviously if you start from different premises, then at some point you are going to run into irreconcilable problems. What I find perplexing about it is that these mostly aren't a problem. We speak mostly the same language, and link to respect threads or calcs done on each others' sites all the time with barely an eyebrow raised. This suggests to me that this is not a wholly insurmountable problem, but merely an issue of incorrect opinions about math and science, and occasionally philosophy and language that is driving a wedge between versus debating subcultures. The verses with the most amount of controversy are mostly a case of this problem, specifically argumentation on the principles of "outlier" and more recently of "interpreting game mechanics".
The second problem is a lot easier to solve theoretically but also a lot more tedious and that is the problem of ignoring context. One of the most widespread of these is the "ignoring surface area" problem. Calcing the destruction of the planet at x energy and then having y character survive that and saying y has x durability does not follow because y is taking a fraction of x. This happens all the time. Surface area is what makes a sword more dangerous usually then a club since it's the same energy concentrated on a smaller surface area. This gets a lot more widespread and a lot more embarrasing. I won't use examples I have actually seen because I don't want to throw attacks at people and their arguments, even anonymous people, without them having the chance to defend their arguments. That said in general what I'm talking about is abstracting powers until they are just terms and then applying those terms without actually thinking about that in terms of a combat scenario. There is a pretty easy way to combat this but it is very tedious and that would be explaining every step of your argument bit by bit. As in explaining what character a would due to character b and why they can do it and giving every scaling bit and how that power has been used before that justifies it. It takes a while and is annoying but if you do that you can easily avoid the problem of ignoring context because you are essentially adding in the context for everything. If you don't want to do that, and let's face it who does, then you should at least try and do that in your head. Visualize the fight in your head and what exactly you expect to happen and why. I know that may sound silly, but it would help avoid nonsense where people are claiming they can do things they have never done because they happen to have a power that seems like it could be able to do that.
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