User blog:O Raz3r O/Did Series 7 really have an issue with Flippers?

This is probably my first rant on this wiki about Robot Wars. Something that isn't a list, or a tournament, but rather something that has simply been bugging me for months on end. One complaint I often hear about the Seventh Wars, alongside producer meddling, Cassius Chrome, the active weapon rule and Jayne Middlemiss, (although I personally think she did a good job) is how many flippers there were in the series. Out of the 128 competitors, I counted 47 of them that had what I would call flippers, and that doesn't include lifters like Panic Attack, Storm 2 (when they used it) or Big Nipper. Compare that to 29 out of 96 in Series 6 and 8 out of 40 in Series 8, and the proportion of flippers is certainly higher than other series near to it, but it's not a massive increase from Series 6 considering the extra 32 machines. The fact is that the general quality of machines stepped up in Series 7. Old favourites such as Pussycat simply couldn't keep up with the new breed of flippers, and this probably led to a lot of frustrated fans who watched their favourite bots get beaten into submission by better robots. Perhaps the reason why I don't share this opinion is because Series 7 was my first series. But here's the thing I want to make very clear: just because they are so many flippers doesn't mean they're boring to watch. Almost all of the flippers offered something different. M2, Tsunami, Dantomkia, Gravity and Atomic were all highly aggressive machines that went at a hundred miles an hour for most of the fight, providing great entertainment by simply giving their opponents no room to breathe. Others like Bulldog Breed, St. Agro and Firestorm 5 were more controlled, more patient, and played a different tactic to the extreme intensity of other flippers. Even weaker flippers like Roobarb and Hard had their moments early on. Granted, not all flippers were entertaining. Some, like Constrictor, Colossus and Herbinator, were just bad in general, and probably shouldn't have qualified at the expense of non-flippers like PulverizeR, Slicer or Splinter but neither were all the spinners, or all the axes. Having a certain weapon does not guarantee your robot will be boring or exciting. You won't get a great weapon from every machine, but when you do, you can enjoy it. A lot of the flipping machines that reached at least the heat final provided some panache. Ripper, Lightning and Mute showed off so much style in their fights, and while they weren't necessarily the best fighters, they offered some of that flair that others did not. Some of the very best and most memorable fights of the series contained two flippers: Gravity vs Dantomkia, Iron-Awe 2.1 vs Bigger Brother, Mute vs Judge Shred 3 and M2 vs Atomic all come to mind there. Aside from these fights, there's also M2's comeback, Tsunami vs X-Terminator, Gravity against anyone and everyone, the heat final between Tough As Nails and Robochicken, Bulldog Breed vs Tough As Nails and the opening melees of Heat A. There's just so many great fights from Series 7 involving flippers, and they easily outnumber the bad fights. Watching robots sail through the air is just as fun as watching a robot getting torn to pieces for me.

So let's go back to the original question: Did Series 7 really have an issue with flippers? My personal answer is no. We got great fights with and without flippers in Series 7, and the flippers that didn't provide as much were dispatched quickly. In the end, we didn't even get a flipper in the Grand Final, not to mention that no flipper won any of the heavyweight side competitions either. UK fans of Robot Wars were introduced to the likes of Tsunami, Gravity and Ripper, we saw Bulldog Breed and Atomic fulfill their potential, and we saw some great shocks and OotAs too. So what do you think? Did Series 7 have too many flippers for you?