Grand Battle Planning and General Discussion Thread

I pretty much agree with NTA here; let's open up battles and not worry about calling it Season 4.

Heck, that's more or less how I imagined a hypothetical forum that was All About Grand Battles. There would be Official Battles, namely the Seasons, which would be organized and structured and generally treated as a Big Project; and there would be Everything Else, where anyone could start a battle and do whatever. They could even start their own unofficial seasons and run them as they see fit.

The main issue I see with that setup is the implication that Official Battles Are Automatically Better; I'm not sure how to avoid that, but arguably we're carrying that implication around as it is with the notion that "Spinoffs always die".

Also, there's one point in that list that I'm not so big on:

- I probably end up choosing (in a consensus/consultation-heavy way as I'm inclined to do) which battles if any are my "Season".

This strikes me as something of a bad idea - it's an incentive for people to seek approval by our Shadowy Onanistic Cabal rather than just start a battle and have fun with it. If anything, it's strengthening the "Official Battles Are Better" implication.
(Although I'm interpreting this as "people start battles and then I pick some of them to be in S4"; if I'm misreading it, then this doesn't necessarily apply.)

I suppose that's arguably an issue with any method of choosing hosts for a season, but at least "pick someone and they start a battle" has less implication that "you, yes YOU, might be the next person to run an Eagle Time Approved Grand Battle ™!" Basically, I think it's better here not to actively solicit interest in hosting; while I'm fine with not having a set hosting list from the very start, personally I'd prefer it was more Season Two-ish, where there was some planning ahead but only when the season was already underway.

I think that basically covers my thoughts on it.

Edit, because Garuru posted before I finished this:

Garuru, you've pretty much illustrated my point that "Official Battles Are Better" is already being implied. That's exactly what I want to downplay, and I think the best thing we can do to counter it is to have some Not Official battles succeed. ("Succeed" does not necessarily mean "finish".) Opening the floodgates without an Official or Quasi-Official season makes that more likely, just because we have more Not Official battles going on to potentially prove the point.