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Originally Posted by BBray_T1296
You have to realize that Battlebots is playing the long game here. They only had 1 season to prove themselves, before they get possibly a longer contract. They selected robots with audience appeal to got the ratings up to allow season 2. Once the show is re-established I believe they will migrate towards battle-ready vs crowd appeal.
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You are right on part of this, it is definitely about the Long game. However the only way they will go towards functionality instead of crowd appeal is if the market demands it. As others have said the goal is to make money, and in tv ratings = money. The emphasis is always on crowd appeal, the only hope is that over time it may be the case that a robot like Radioactive that is more form than function will have less appeal to the crowd, that they would rather see a competitive match than watch a horizontal spinner crush a work of art.
While there is a part of me that would love to see the best 16 robots in the country compete, even as an engineer I would rather have
Mark Setrakian come back with a masterpiece of a robot that may not win anything.
I would however be interested in seeing the casting expanded. Two methods that I have seen work well in the past that could work here would be to use a preexisting tournament (Robogames Maybe) and reserve a spot in season 2 for the winner of that tournament. This would allow another top robot to make it. ABC or Battlebots could produce digital content based on the qualifying tournament, and it would offer a good backstory for a bot.
Another alternative in the world of social media would be a peoples choice robot, similar to above, announce 15 seeds(or however many), and leave one spot open too voting by the public. Teams could post bios and make videos, and through multiple rounds of voting a final team would be selected to take the final tournament seed. This method has been used on many reality shows.
Either of these are in my opinion much more feasible than opening it up to a single tournament, as they allow the producers more control, and have the added benefit of offering web content that would expand the reach of the show outside of the season, which is becoming more important to Networks as the entire 18-49 demo is shifting towards alternatives to TV for their video consumption.