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Attack Potency, Problems and Clarifications (Staff only)

Andytrenom

She/Her
VS Battles
Administrator
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This is something we touched on briefly a while back. Our Attack Potency page currently has issues such as: not sourcing where most of the numbers for tiers below 5 came from and apparently using arbitrarily selected borders for defining certain tier ranges. This needs to be fixed eventually so this thread will be a place where any discussions regarding a potential revision can happen.

Issues
There are two problems right now:

1.Lack of sources and/or explanations regarding multiple tier ranges

In the Attack Potency page, there are links to be found for all destruction levels that are tier 5 or higher. It's made visible what method of destruction was taken into consideration when deriving the energy output needed to land in a certain tier (GBE and Explosion+Inverse Square Law) and what specific Celestial Body/Arrangement of celestial bodies were taken as the standards for deciding the baseline of a tier (Earth, Sun, Milky way etc).

But the same treatment isn't given to most of the remaining list. Nowhere is it specified what kind of building and destroyed in what manner gives the 8-C baseline energy output, what gives the High 8-C baseline output, what countries and continents the tier 6 borders are based on etc. This is especially problematic considering that most people can guess which planet would be used as a standard when we say "Planet level" but far fewer people can guess which large building would be used as a standard when we say "Large Building Level". This doesn't do the members any favors when they come across a building destruction feat and have to judge what tier 8/non tier 8 rating it qualifies for, for instance.

Obviously if we are featuring information about something we should also feature links to where that information originates from, so that visitors and members can verify everything for themselves. This is all this particular problem comes down to in the end. Now, where do all the values currently left unexplained come from? According to DontTalk, they were mostly taken from this page. If this is true, then it should be linked in the Attack Potency page. But it would probably be better to verify first if the numbers in that page and the numbers in our Attack Potency chart line up or not.

Now then, onto the next and much more serious issue

2.Arbitary Borders for certain tiers

If you go over the Attack Potency Chart, you'll notice that a lot of the borders for tiers are strangely round figures. Low 7-C is 1 Kiloton, Low 7-B is 1 Megaton, 7-A is 100 megaton, High 7-A is 1-Gigaton, High 6-C is 100 gigaton, Low 6-B is 1 Teraton. At first I didn't think much of this, but as I learned from the previous threads discussing this issue, this was the result of many of the borders being chosen arbitrarily.

I don't think I am in the wrong to say that tier baselines should have some actual basis for their values, like a hypothetical calc for destroying the corresponding object or the yield of a weapon/event deemed to fit the tier description. This is what I want to get a discussion started about the most, how should more accurate baselines be established for tiers that are currently based on nothing. For example 7-A could be based on the energy needed to destroy an average mountain and Low 6-B could be the explosion yield for a blast that wipes out a specific country which would fit the "small country" description. Of course when deciding the new baseline it should also be taken care that the current system isn't screwed up badly, such as the baseline for Mountain level falling below the baseline for City level or something like that. It is also possible that not all tier borders require revisions like this, if that's deemed to be the case then deciding the tiers to be left out would be another part of the discussion.

Everyone please share your thoughts on this.

Note: This thread isn't made to immediately bring changes to the wiki, it is to only serve as a planning stage for revisions that will come at a later time, if they are needed. The second half of the revisions is a huge endeavour and can only be implemented when enough support from the members is possible and all necessary preparation have been made.
 
I would also like to raise that there is the value for mountain level seems rather Arbitrary and a bit too high as well, since it has come to my attention that many mountain shattering feats don't even reach that range, and the energy required to destroy a mountain isn't even mountain level now.
 
@Lap From what I know, fragmenting a small mountain reaches Low 7-B. An average sized mountain might give usable results tho.
 
I think it's fine for the feats to be relatively arbitrary. They should try to cover "What energy do we usually get for destroying this thing" without having overlap between tiers. As Lapitus said, mountain level may need to be adjusted for this, but I don't think we could find a good calculable standard for the bottoms/tops of these tiers.
 
I asked DontTalkDT to overview the energy borders in private some time ago, but he has not had enough time to do so yet.
 
Anyway, as you say, revising all of tier 9-A to High 6-A would be an enormous project that would require massive active participation from most of our staff members, so this could take a long time to apply.
 
@Ant it isn't revising all of them. The mass revisions would only apply for tiers that have arbitrary borders.

The rest only need their sources linked.
 
Okay. I asked Kavpeny about it before I asked DontTalkDT, and he unfortunately no longer remembered how he calculated the borders. I do vaguely recall that there was some later revision that defined the difference between continent and multi-continent level though.
 
I think Mr. Bambu was also involved by making a blog of sorts, but I don't remember.
 
Assaltwaffle might have been involved in defining some of the lower tier borders as well.
 
There is a difference between a mountain and a hill; the former is bigger in which 300 meters is the height required to be called a mountain iirc. But yeah, there should be more calculated values for some of the tierings yes.
 
9-A might be kind of harder to figure out. Bambu told me that 5kg of TNT is the minimum to be 9-A, and he said that it was the amount required to blow up the average house.
 
5 kg is the baseline, but that's far from the average house; that's more like the size of a shed or a small one room cabin.
 
@Czer Japan gives Low 6-B but I'm not sure if Low 6-B was actually based off it.
 
I would appreciate if somebody could ask Assaltwaffle to comment here.
 
A Continent busting feat probably involves destroying the entire crust, so that nothing but oceans are left and not just the surface iirc.
 
@DDM Did you hear that from somewhere? I always assumed it was just a simple explosion calc using the continent's area.
 
I believe it would be necessary to start mentioning in parenthesis and links to calculations what each tier implies, as MANY don't seem to get the point: "X character destroyed 3 mountains... why is he labeled as tier Low 7-B?! Downplay!"

For example, using Mountain level:

"7-A - Mountain level (The energy required to completely destroy an average sized mountain such as [link to calculation of x mountain being violently fragmented]) - 5.23e+17 Joules to X amount of Joules".

The cut off would then be High 7-A, which would calculate the destructive energy requires to take out a large mountain... such as the Alps or Mount Fuji (Everest would be way too much, and it is larger than average sized islands)

We should be using average sizes of buildings, city blocks, towns, etc and calculating them to get a base for what each tier requires (using 69j/cc, since we're talking about "destroying"). Phoenix Arizona (not incredibly large for a city) for example has 517 Square Miles. Would effectively require a force of 220.819 Kilotons of Tnt to violently fragment the square area (wiping out the surface ignoring the buildings)--vastly more if there is a gaping crater left behind--up to dozens of megatons if we're talking 200+ meters deep.
 
That seems like a huge unnecessary revamp. From what I can tell other battleboards don't bother with that sort of thing either. The tier's meant to be a shorthand, with an expanded explanation in the AP section.
 
@Agnaa - adding simple notes and calculations to clarify what each tier implies seems necessary regardless. Not everyone will be reading the top explanation of the page, and will most certainly be scrolling down to see values, or what each label means "wondering what exactly "7-A or 2-C means... scroll scroll scroll"
 
The sorts of notes you gave as an example seem extremely unwieldy, especially for pages with many keys.

They can find out what those tiers mean by clicking the hyperlink for tier, it's pretty simple.
 
And just to clarify, I only mean the base tiers "8-C, 7-B, 7-A", and so on. Not the "Low/High" tiers, with few exception.
 
That seems even more confusing, a Low 6-B character wouldn't get a note but a 6-B character would?
 
We can't spend massive time and effort to clutter most of our profile pages with those kind of links, no, but the attack potency page could get linked clarifications if we eventually perform this kind of revision.

However, this thread is mainly supposed to be for the staff, unless you have important information to help us out.
 
That's what I mean, the Attack Potency page. Not each and every profile.

Like, clipped under the "7-A - Mountain level" section in parenthesis. I thought that was clear.
 
Continent level starts at destroying something with the area of russia with a nuclear explosion. (Russia, cause continent level > all countries individually)

Multi-Continent level starts at destroying something with the area of Eurasia with a nuclear explosion.
 
Well then Mio Takamiya is High 6-B possibly 6-A via destroying the Entire Soviet Union, China and Mongolia in one explosion, the calcul in her page has a High 6-B result with the current Yield Explosion calculator, I think that there is a small problem with the Continent Tier
 
The Causality said:
Well then Mio Takamiya is High 6-B possibly 6-A via destroying the Entire Soviet Union, China and Mongolia in one explosion, the calcul in her page has a High 6-B result with the current Yield Explosion calculator, I think that there is a small problem with the Continent Tier
This clac was also highballed because it uses their entire lenght from north to south, not just their area
 
I could ask Catalyst75 to reply, but he's been inactive for 7 years, from late 2011 to late 2018, so I don't know if he checked the wiki all this time. Remember that he joined the wiki at mid 2011, when Galaxian Pyron was still here. (I myself have been visiting VSBW since late 2015 before I registered and joined in early 2018)

I'll look at the older forum posts, I still remember some of the Attack Potency revisions, maybe I can find some sources to link to.
 
It is extremely unlikely that he replies. Also, Kavpeny revised the tiering system energy borders.

Thank you for the help in any case.
 
The Causality said:
Well then Mio Takamiya is High 6-B possibly 6-A via destroying the Entire Soviet Union, China and Mongolia in one explosion, the calcul in her page has a High 6-B result with the current Yield Explosion calculator, I think that there is a small problem with the Continent Tier
pi*r^2 = 33400000 km^2 <=> pi*r^2 = sqrt(33400000/pi) = r => r = 3260.6 km

Explosion Yield: ((x/0.28)^3)/1000 = ((3260.6/0.28)^3)/1000 = 1579132161.125 megatons of TNT = 1.579132161125e15 tons of TNT

Almost continent level+ via nuclear explosion.


The problem isn't the border.
 
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