User blog:CrashBash/Top Five Robots that would have, yet wouldn't have, done better

To say Robot Wars is unpredictable would be putting it lightly. Nothing was ever set in stone with the many many fights we had, and whilst we often think we know what will happen, it's never always guaranteed. Yes, we think we know that Chaos 2 will throw this generic robot around and out of the arena. Yes, most of the time, that does actually happen. But there's always that one time where we think it'll happen and then it drives into the pit. When you're dealing with essentially giant remote controlled cars with all sorts of complex gizmos on them, there's always the chance that something will go wrong, which often ends up involving robots winning a battle it arguably should not have done.

Of course, that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes you think a battle result is unfair and then you realise what comes next and think that maybe it's a good thing the fight ended as it did. Say what you want about Firestorm's victory over The Morgue in Series 4, but you can't deny that what we got was a far better and exciting outcome than what we could have gotten, which would have been just Dominator 2 poking holes in The Morgue for five minutes - The Morgue simply wouldn't have done better than Firestorm. Conversely, we could have gotten Suicidal Tendencies going through over Wheely Big Cheese had it not broken down and who knows...it may have even beaten Tornado. It's happened in live events and Andrew Marchant outright stated that he was wary of facing Suicidal Tendencies - basically, Suicidal Tendencies would have done better than Wheely Big Cheese. Or for an even more extreme example, if Fluffy hadn't broken down against Pussycat. Whether or not it beat Panic Attack, everything would have changed.

But it's not always that straight forward. Sometimes you may find yourself watching a robot getting its robutt handed to it and you find yourself thinking "Man, I really wish that the robot it beat in the previous battle was fighting instead. It would have made that fight so much more interesting". And yes, there is highly likely that it would have performed better. But that doesn't strictly mean it would have won the battle. All that would have changed in the long run was that a few names would have been swapped around on our results tables and, ultimately, little else. It's a robot that would have done better objectively, but wouldn't have done better technically. It's a subtle difference, but an important one to consider.