User blog:CrashBash/Top 105 Heat Finals

There is a lot to enjoy about Robot Wars. There's some awesome fights and some great robots that you can't help but cheer on. When you get strong robots in strong fights, that's just icing on the cake. These are the fights that Robot Wars needs...and in an ideal world, they should start occurring right from the get-go, but realistically, as long as the best two robots are in the last battle of the show, I'm happy.

Of all the battles in Robot Wars, the most important is certainly the Grand Final itself, but arguably the next important is the one battle that will determine which one of two robots will make it through to the elite-shortlist, whether that list is six, twelve or sixteen robots long - the heat final. And why wouldn't it be? It's the closing fight of any given standard episode so you'd like to think an episode would go out with a bang. The rest of the heat could drag on really badly, but as long as the final battle is good, it's all worth it, right? Conversely, a bad heat final could potentially put a damper on an otherwise strong heat. Basically, there's a lot of ways a heat final could be good or bad, so much so that simply ranking them from best to worst isn't as simple as just picking favourites - I needed a proper system.

In total, there are 105 heats across the ten series of UK Robot Wars, and I will be ranking the finals of every single one of them. For this, I decided to base my decision across six different criteria.
 * How much damage was caused, relative to the series and what the robots could do.
 * How aggressive the robots were being overall, if they were committing to each other.
 * How well the battle was paced.
 * How well both robots, specifically both, performed. Heat Finals were both robots performed well score better than ones where only one performed well.
 * How close the fight was, since the best fights are arguably the closest ones.
 * How enjoyable overall the fight was overall.

That being said, this alone wasn't enough to separate many fights, so I also distributed bonus ranks. A heat final could score higher if...
 * The winner performed a really solid or otherwise impressive knockout.
 * The eventual winner put on a dominant performance, since sometimes even a one-sided battle could be fun.
 * Something completely unexpected happened during the fight.
 * The fight was overall very dramatic, with the fight going back and forth or a surprise turnabout got pulled off.
 * The battle was over quickly, which I feel is quite impressive really.

Conversely, a heat final could score lower if...
 * The battle felt like a complete formality, with it being blatantly clear one robot was going to win.
 * The losing robot broke down, the earlier the worse it is.
 * The battle was decided by a house robot or an arena hazard, rather than the opponent.
 * The battle was slow and dragged on a bit too long.
 * The outcome of the battle felt dubious.

It may not be a full-proof scoring method, but it worked surprisingly well and has given me some very surprising results. The most important factor here is that everything is relative, in an attempt to put fights on equal footing. But not too equal....after all, someone's got to actually win.