Lowballing and Highballing

This is a general blog to explain the 6 levels of interpretation you can have for a character. Obviously these levels are subjective between people but it can help explain what level an interpretation is on, eithers yours or someone elses. For examples I'm going to be using Superman because he's one of my favorite characters and he's fairly well known. Examples are for Post-Crisis

Massive Downplay:

This is when a person just outright ignores the feats or context of the character showings and use really fallacious logic to try and ignore their actual showings. This is almost never done by actual versus debaters when talking about a character that is actually commonly debated but is commonly done by casuals and by versus debaters when talking about characters that simply aren't analyzed for anything about their actual feats to be known.

Example: "Superman struggles to fight Batman whose just a normal guy so any really strong superhuman should beat him!"

Downplay/Massive Lowball:

This is when a person is using standard versus terms and logic, using feats and showings and the like however they take every possible interpretation against a character even when such is not the reasonable interpretation. However they still have to actually account for feats. Usually this is done in a way that makes it sound more rational by presenting feats at a certain level as difficult or a limit for the character and just ignoring any higher feats

Example: "Superman struggled to move the Earth and was KOed by hitting and destroying the Shadow Moon showing he's roughly planetary, maybe a bit less. He also said he can't move faster then light and so is probably, at most, relativistic."

Mild Lowball/Conservative Interpretation:

This is an interpretation that you think you could make a very strong, hard to argue, case for. This is where a character has maybe a lot of showings at, consistent showings at, and it's all supported. A mild lowball is where you are saying "the character should be at least this strong". I personally tend to go for this, unless I think the mild Highball is really consistent.

Example: "Superman should be at least above solar system level because there are numerous star to solar system level feats including feats from an earlier post-crisis superman that he scale signifigantly above . He should also clearly be at least billions to quadrillions times lightspeed as he has numerous feats and scaling of moving inter-galactic to universal distances in short times. "

Mild Highball/Generous Interpretation:

This is an interpretation where you basically give the character a general benefit of the doubt and give them things you think are likely but are a bit less solid. It's the realm of "the character can likely/potentially do this". It's not less objective then a Mild Lowball and can arguably be moreso at times as it's really a matter of preponderance of evidence vs taking something you feel is very grounded.

Example: "Superman has 1-2 low galaxy to galaxy level feats as does Wonder Woman and the Green Lanterns also have 2-3 feats at this range plus a lot of the star to solar system feats were casual or early Superman, so it makes sense that he would be at galaxy level. Superman should also be extremely fast as he equaled Jay Garrick in speed and was implied to be faster showing he should scale somewhat to the speed of speedforce users scaling to some of the better speedforce feats."

Wank/Massive Highball:

A massive highball is when a person is using standard versus logic but is interpreting every single thing in favor of the character regardless of how probable it is. Now they still need to do things like account for outliers and need evidence of scaling, but it can be very easily handwaved with even a token explanation. A massive highball is taking a mild highball on every single thing about a character so they are strong as you could possibly have them without just comitting fallacies.

Example: "Superman has numerous feats of fighting extra-dimensional entities which clearly qualifies him for being universal+ as well as speeds far greater then infinity consistent with back during Zero Hour him contributing a not insigifigant amount of energy towards recreating reality and being able to cross the universe which is infinite in size in finite time."

Massive Wank: 

Massive wank is ignoring feats or context and making clearly fallacious arguments. Most vs debaters don't actually do this, outside of not knowing how an ability works and making unintentional NLFs. There are certain characters that are unfortunately known for this tendency.

Example: "Superman is not MEANT to lose. His character is to always win. He has infinite power and is as strong as he needs to be."



Obviously anyone reasonable would agree that you should be shooting for somewhere in the range of mild lowball to mild highball. It's up to consistency and also just personality where in that range. Some people are more prone to giving benefit of the doubt or going with preponderance of evidence and saying "well it's more likely this is the case so I'll give it". Others, myself included want a very strong grounding before we say a character can do something. It really is a matter of taste.

There is a purpose to massive lowballs and massive highballs that is sometimes helpful which is when you want to say that character x vs character y is such a stomp that even if you massively lowball character x and massively highball character y, it's still a stomp for character x. But for the most part you obviously want to avoid wank and downplay.