How many profiles have calcs to back up their claims? Any stat that isn't from a blatantly obvious feat or power-scaling needs a calc to back it up. Whatever happened to all that math we're so proud of?
From what I remember of the VSBW audit attempt, the vast majority of profiles have calcs backing up their claims. Sure you can go to profiles made 5 years ago and they're pretty garbage, but I don't think this is a newly expanding issue, quite the opposite.
Meaning: Upgrades are now, more than ever before, accepted due to simply "looking okay" if there's enough statements or second hand information (such as WoG or guidebooks) to pass as acceptable, rather than using objective feats, powerscaling, and calculations to determine stats, and only relying on statements as supportive evidence - statements are used as primary evidence to justify anything that has a modicum of possibility, regardless if it's even consistent or not.
I can't tell what you're arguing against here, so I can't tell if I agree or not. Is a character with a ridiculously casual 6-B feat who's far above the rest of the cast and has two statements of being able to destroy the Earth like they destroyed a shrine worthy of being called 5-B? Or is this talking about statements that contradict feats? Or is this even talking about all statements that have no backing in general?
How many featless characters are treated as OP powerhouses in vs threads or general discussions despite not even fighting another character before?
We're covered with a swarm of characters with 0 feats who have never fought before? Because I've never seen a single one of those. You mentioned
Grand Priest as an example, but the last sentence of his AP seems to be a feat, and quite a few of his abilities seem sourced from feats.
This wouldn't be so bad if we didn't allow anything with a story to be eligible for profit-making status here. Allowing the most obscure verses hardly anyone has ever heard of to be allowed here also creates the gatekeeping effect where only "knowledgeable members" can actually verify the stats with further context.
Doing anything otherwise would be infinitely worse (requiring a certain number of active members on a verse, disallowing verses that aren't in the popular consciousness, etc). At best you're yelling at clouds here.
Obscure high tiered verses need to be banned. Period. Things like the Masadaverse should have nothing more than its translated material accepted for profile creation (Dies irae, not Kajiri Kamui Kagura).
No they don't, they just need to face the same scrutiny as all other verses, and if no-one puts in the time to do that then they don't get a high tier. This is exactly what happened with
Ergenverse, it was sitting at Unknown for ages until people came along to verify it. Also, KKK has fan translations, and the parts we use have been verified by many multilingual members. If you're disqualifying material like that then we'd have to kick off dozens of non-English verses for no good reason (since we have the information and have verified that it's reliable).
Deleting any pages without calculations (unless the feats are straightforward, are incalculable, or are based in powerscaling). Sadly, the staff honestly believe that because "one of the reasons our site is so popular is because of our number of pages" that we should just accept having well over 20k pages despite most being suspicious. Really? Quantity over quality. That's what we care about? Qwynbleidd was right. Matt was right. We need less pages.
Everyone agrees with this part. That's why the audit group was allowed to start and do its thing. People aren't defending these pages because "WE NEED QUANTITY OVER QUALITY!" Any defense of them was just "Maybe someone will come around and fix them up, so don't delete them for a week or two."
With more verses comes more CRTs about those verses.
You're missing a very important part of this equation. More users means more verses means more CRTs about those verses, means there's always a similar ratio of users to deal with those CRTs. I don't think this is an issue.
Some people clearly have abused their ability to calc to get the highest result possible. Of course there's calc-stacking, but this here is done Nito by calc-stacking. But by re-calcing the same feat over and over again.
"But Sera" I hear you say, "if the calc is legit, what can we do about it"? Well...are they legit? Lately, I've been seeing some questionable calcs get passed simply by someone (usually our overworked bureaucrat Antvasima) and maybe one calc member saying it "looks okay". That's it.
These two issues are completely and wholly separate and right around never stack with each other. Obsessive re-calcing makes results more accurate, and that's fine. They don't get random acceptances because they have a huge degree of scrutiny. These sorts of calcs usually get over a dozen comments, while the sorts of calcs that have a random calc member agreeing usually get exactly three comments: Ant telling them to go to the calc evaluations thread, the member saying "this looks fine", and Ant saying it can be used.
I agree that the second thing you mentioned is an issue, but you're putting it right next to the first to create the illusion of an issue that doesn't exist.
Most others who accept the calc are regular users, many of whom are supporters of the verse. Hmm… is there some sort of… connection there ƒæÇ?
Good thing we mostly use regular user comments to discredit calcs, rather than to approve them, I guess?
As for powerscaling, as I've stated before, we've went from powerscaling via feats of consistent comparable prowess to powerscaling via statements of comparable prowess
Funnily enough, I actually prefer the latter here. We shouldn't scale a 7-B to a 7-A if they've never fought just because their feats are close, we should scale if we have actual statements/feats of them being comparable.
We gotta stop being so lazy and additionally stop treating every statement from a fictional character with no agency as reliable just because it makes sense in-universe.
I don't get the points. Aren't statements more reliable since the characters have no agency? It's not like the characters can say things the authors didn't want them to, and therefore, when characters say something the author wanted that thing said. There's other reasons to prefer feats over statements, but this one doesn't make sense.
It pains me to say it, but we have too many staff members (although ironically, we don't have enough at the same time).
You know what that means? We don't have enough staff members, and you're expecting staff members to do more than they will. There is no such thing as too many staff members, as long as they aren't unfit for their positions.
This brings me to my main point as to why we have too many staff members. Unless I miss counted, we have somewhere along the lines of 73 staff members. Of those staff members, how many can you say actually participate in and help bring down the Hammer of Judgment in a CRT? The way the site was supposedly managed was that discussion mods and admins mostly help out with CRTs. Do they?
I cannot believe that your evidence for us having too many staff members, is that staff member duties
aren't happening. And I personally can at least attest to many staff members helping out with CRTs.
The only staff member to actually walk into a CRT regardless of their familiarity on the topic is Antvasima. DarkDragonMedeus and AKM sama do come close. The rest of us mostly handle the verses we are comfortable with/are knowledgeable on. This is unfortunate because as I stated before, the number of upgrades are increasing.
I would like to take this time to point out the many staff members that I know that have helped out with CRTs from verses that they're not familiar on, but you did say that other staff members only "mostly" do otherwise.
Why do we need 70+ staff members, especially discussion moderators, when the three most prominent CRT reviewers are two administrators and one bureaucrat?
Because we need them to review CRTs, even if they aren't the most prominent. If 99.9% of people won't review CRTs outside of their verses, and all of them are already staff, yet we need more CRT reviews, then we should bring people on to review their specific verses.
Regardless, becoming staff is now an inevitability for any long-running member here who participates in enough CRTs and doesn't have a bad record.
Yes. As it should be.
We have too many staff who do what any regular member can do.
I mean, yeah. Our needs in staff aren't all specialized technical stuff, sometimes it really is just having a person we trust to do what anyone could do if they put their mind to it. Any normal person has the technical skill to lock/unlock pages, or lock/unlock threads, or participate in discussions of the direction of the site, but we only want trusted people doing stuff like that.
The staff have lost the ability to assume good faith in their community
I mostly stick to my own on this site, so I can't comment much on this. I haven't seen this in almost all of the staff I speak to, and I'm assuming that you don't think 100% of the staff have lost faith, but the one member I have seen doing this probably just doesn't have the time to evaluate every complex CRT from every verse they're not involved in, so deferring to trusted members is probably mandatory. But if others are distrustful of non-staff when both members are knowledgeable on the verse, that should stop.
Prioritization of the OP, the Philosophical, and the Technical
I don't really know what you're complaining about or what you ideally want here. To start with the most concrete thing, we don't accept platonic concepts as 1-A, so even if a handful of people argue with that it isn't really impactful. The rest is about fawning over hax, and I actually think you might be missing a large part of this. Many people fawn over verses in the 9-B range simply because
that's where the art that they like is. Sure people are interested in high-tier stuff, but the majority of people care about the art they like, so I'm not sure if any culture shift really needs to happen.
What has the new system done except allow for more Tier 0s and put an end to the godawful assumption that any mention of higher dimensions = a larger verse than one that doesn't?
Those two things were kinda the point. Make the higher tiers measurable, and stop the assumption of 12-quintillion dimensional squirrels being 1-B.
The intent behind a new system was all wrong, once again the result of caring too much about the obscure and niche high tiers... Rather than prioritize the more feat-based tiers, you know the ones most often associated with vs debating, the site decided to prioritize Tiers 1 and 0.
Uhh, yeah. There was an issue with tiers 2 to 0, so a revision was made on them. There's different issues with different tiers, and there's a resolution being worked on by different people. The sorts of people that talk about which ordinals should correspond to 1-A are different than the sorts of people that talk about where we should start town level. Prioritization doesn't matter a huge amount here. But you did say you'd go more into it later, so I'll wait for that.
I'm not going to read or respond to the summary since I'm hoping you're not introducing any new points there.