User blog comment:SpaceManiac888/Rusty Spanner and Golden Wrench of the Decade (2010s)/@comment-2118191-20191231161844

No, I'm not in a bad mood today. YOU'RE in a bad mood today!

Rusty Spanners for King of Bots

3: And the Chinese Champion is....not Chinese. King of Bots has really done a lot for robotic combat in China, to the point where we even had two Chinese teams competing in BattleBots and one in BuggleBots. I wouldn't even have been surprised if one had appeared in Robot Wars had it lasted another season or two. It is therefore actually quite disappointing that the Chinese robots nearly always get their robutts handed to them by the international machines. I'm not saying all Chinese robots are inferior, heaven forbid - you have the likes of Snake, Two BBQ and then there's Xiake which has consistently made the finals of the three Chinese tournaments. But then you have a British robot winning Season 1 and TIFR, and then whilst technically we had three Chinese robots that can claim to be champions of Season 2, the robot who actually won it for them was another British machine (oh, and Shrederator existed, I guess). I'm just saying I feel it would be nice if we actually got a Chinese machine win the Chinese tournament, properly.

'''2: This happened. Here's a replay. In super-slow motion. With cartoon effects'''. I won't pretend I understand how the Chinese like their TV. I will assume that the amount of editing they include in KOB2 is completely normal for their other shows and, well, if that's the sort of thing they like, then sure, OK, I can work with it. But I feel that sometimes there's a little bit TOO much and KOB2 probably crosses the line. In some instances it isn't too bad, but in other instances it kinda disrupts the entire flow of the fight, especially as it can sometimes make certain moments feel a lot longer than they actually are. The long will-they-won't-they pause whilst waiting to see if a robot can self-right only for it to happen immediately was maybe funny the first time, doesn't mean it'll be funny for the 15th time.

1: Zhu Zheng Ting Switches off his chance at victory. The format used in TIFR and KOB2 is certainly an interesting one. It does give robots several chances to show what they can do and, if the celebrities use their entire pool fairly, it provides some great potential. But it also has one major flaw, in that some robots are rather brutally punished for things they didn't do...especially if the thing they didn't do is "lose a fight". We already had this in TIFR when Blue was removed from its team before the final despite winning all four of its fight up to that point. Cat King at least lost one of its fights, Blue was removed because noodles. That incident is bad enough, but KOB2 took it a step too far with the story of Zhu Zheng Ting and Switch.

By this point, Ting was one of the heavy favourites to win the competition outright, at least as far as I could see. His team consisted of KOB legends Snake, Tanshe and Two BBQ, the extremely impressive Black Rabbit, and Switch and The Hounds, both of whom had already scored two solid wins. All was going really well...and then, competing in his third team battle, he lost. Tanshe and Two BBQ fell to impressive performances by Iron Scrap and Yesaji, respectively, and he had to pick a robot to remove. Since Two BBQ was the team captain and couldn't be eliminated directly, the most logical choices were Tanshe or Black Rabbit, which had already lost a battle earlier in the season. But instead...he decided to eliminate Switch. A robot that had won both its fights prior and seemed to be in no way the optimal choice to eliminate. It was a choice that clearly didn't go down well with anyone on his team, but luckily we had Gabriel Stroud come to the rescue, willingly offering himself and Tanshe up for elimination to keep Switch from being eliminated for no reason, like Blue had been a half-season prior.

This probably wouldn't have been number one if it ended there, but it was blatantly obvious at this point that Ting had no interest in keeping or even using Switch at this point and instead used Snake and then Two BBQ, his two strongest robots, for his next two fights. And when they both lost to Megabyte in unfortunately fluky fashion (especially the former), Ting still decided that Switch would be the one to go, forcing both Snake and Two BBQ to insist that they be eliminated instead, with the latter deliberately resigning as captain in order to save Switch. By his desperation to remove Switch from the team, Ting ended up losing his three strongest robots, to the point where Kevin Cleasby was even saying "Guys, stop, you can't keep giving yourselves up for me." And yet after ALL this, Gabriel Stroud's sacrifice was ultimately in vain as Switch still wasn't utalised and after Black Rabbit lost its next fight (again on an utter fluke), Ting's entire team was eliminated. Saving Switch proved to be all for nothing. Oh, and he completely forgot The Hounds were present too.

Looking back, I feel that Zhu Zheng Ting was just too determined to win the entire competition. He was sure he had the strongest team, and he probably did, but it almost felt like this had gotten to his head. Just look at the Attrition War. Look at the robots the other celebrities chose to take part alongside their challengers - We had Flaming Wheel, Storm Cut, Rhino, Yesaji and Earth Shovel. These were all robots that weren't strictly the strongest robots in their teams, but they had potential, they hadn't had as much of a chance to shine and the celebrities wanted to give them a chance. Who did Ting pick? Tanshe - one of the strongest robots in the competition at that point. Doesn't that seem a little...well, questionable when you compare it to the others?