Starfleet Jedi

I mean, we all know that the Decanonization of the EU was a HUGE game-changer... but at least with that, Warsies could still claim at least kiloton feats. Granted, The Clone Wars had kind of made those the high ends, but the Warsies could always dismiss them as "kids cartoons". And sure, The Force Awakens and Rogue One both had their low-ends, but nothing SW hadn't seen before.

Then The Last Jedi came.

As we all know, that movie nerfed SW so hard that low-tier settings like Babylon 5, nuBSG, Mass Effect, Firefly, and maybe even The Expanse can go toe-to-toe with it in ship-to-ship battles, while ST has become nightmarishly powerful in comparison. And it was around TLJ's release that Versus sites seemed to really become ghost towns, even more than they had been.

So I ask you all - did TLJ kill the Versus Debate?

No, no. It might be a final nail in the ST vs SW and franchise coffin, but the Debates have been dying noticeably since 2010 when after a couple years of Cartoon Network's The Clone Wars TV series we were seeing unimpressive ship-to-ship battles or ships against natural objects in SW that were fairly pathetic showings for SW tech. Also about that time, disappearance of major leaders of the pro-Wars side, like Mike Wong and Wayne Poe, left that faction rudderless and divided. Some declared victory and retired as early as 2005.

But in summary, this particular chapter of the Debates has been dying for about 10 years now, made especially worse because the TCW series nerfing of SW firepower carried through to Disney's tenure of the franchise while Star Trek has been making a bigger effort to ramp up casual canon firepower.
-Mike

Hmm. I just remember that as late as 2017, some Warsies were claiming that TIE Defenders had megaton-level firepower, and were using the "oh, TCW and Rebels are just kids' cartoons" method of arguing against low yields. Then TLJ came, and completely demolished any attempt to ignore the low yields of SW weapons.

On another note, doesn't it feel like the recent nerfing of Wars and boosting of Trek are both karma for the rabid Warsies' past behavior?

Khas wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 29, 2020 2:03 am

Hmm. I just remember that as late as 2017, some Warsies were claiming that TIE Defenders had megaton-level firepower, and were using the "oh, TCW and Rebels are just kids' cartoons" method of arguing against low yields. Then TLJ came, and completely demolished any attempt to ignore the low yields of SW weapons.

Of course there were those who continued to champion the Warsie cause. Thanks to former SFJ debaters, I've been given heads up of trolls going around cutting and pasting Wong's Five Minutes page contents in various YouTube comments threads. But unlike in the past, they're no longer the highly organized efforts that TrollKingdom hacked and made public over ten years ago. Just diehards who refuse to let go or who just do it to troll.

Khas wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 29, 2020 2:03 am

On another note, doesn't it feel like the recent nerfing of Wars and boosting of Trek are both karma for the rabid Warsies' past behavior?

Not really, it came at a price and I wish we were getting quality SW stories like TCW, Rebels, Rogue One and now The Mandalorian than the hot dumpster fire of a trilogy that started off with great promise and then went to hell these past five years.
-Mike

I don't think it did. I see still "Saxtonite"-style argument mentioned, at least on places like Reddit. So I don't think its really dead. Maybe a little dormant but these things do seem to come cycles of popularity. Far more than any low showings it might have unveiled I'd argue, if "The Last Jedi" did anything, it was more the general souring of the fans and the lost of interest by the public since the start of the Sequel Trilogy that's more to blame. Causing people to tune out or not get interested in Star Wars in the first place.

Through as Mike mentions interest had been dying for years before hand so at best it was just another added nail to the coffin.

I haven't had time to write the big giant response in my head (and who'd wanna read it anyway, amirite?), but in just saying that I encapsulate some of the broader issue, so forgive me if I end up responding in fat-tweet-size chunks.

The main issues fall into a few areas where we have to ponder specific elements. For instance, just asking what killed the debate presupposes that the debate is dead . . . and that brings with it the question of what that even means.

To most of the folks here, the Vs. Debate means epic Usenet or web forum combat over tech specs and feats stretching across pages and pages, with kilobyte-yield posts launched to and fro crashing into screenshots as each side empties its video clips at the other. This often features barely (if at all) contained mutual hostility and loathing.

There's not a whole lot of that these days, true. But then, like Usenet, the very concept of isolated web forums has started to resemble the latter days of big-web-portal-branded instant messenger services. Remember Yahoo! Messenger or the one from MSN? If so, you're old.

The way people access and use the internet has changed. There are more web users than ever, but most are on mobile and aren't going to compose a huge post with screenshots and research unless they're insane (says the guy writing this on a phone).

So there's an element of larger issues to it . . . most web devices are for consumption of content, not its generation.

Next we have to ponder the nature of fandom these days . . . which will have to wait until the next installment.

2046 wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 01, 2020 6:05 am

So there's an element of larger issues to it . . . most web devices are for consumption of content, not its generation.

So in other words, debate has died because technology has turned new generations into brainless zombies. :-P