Hmm… I think what he’s saying is that in that in the Beat Battles General Rules, there is nothing that says anything about limiting the number of submissions (as far as I can tell, am I missing something?).
That being said, I think that we should append those rules with a couple of things.
1: Only one submission per participant.
2: Any submissions that come in past the deadline are disqualified.
These are strict enough to provide good structure and also leave some wiggle room for hosts ( for instance, although this is usually discouraged, a host could extend the deadline if need be before it is up, allowing for additional submissions to be counted that may not have been). It also does indeed make things simple, and I would say fair, especially in regards to the single submission rule.
Regarding “rules” set by the host, I think that these by nature are going to be hard to enforce strictly so as to disqualify someone. An example scenario would be the BB117 that I hosted where I asked people to make a track that had multiple movements. Some things to consider in this scenario may be:
1: Who decides what is considered to be a “movement”? if this is the hosts job, does he or she go through all of the submissions one by one first before adding them to the poll? What if someone thinks they have a movement but it is not movement enough for the host and so the host disqualifies them? Who is right?
2: If all of the submissions are added to the poll without a check like this, how do we expect everyone that may vote to know and understand the rules well enough and in the same way that voting is consistent? We sometimes have people who did not participate in the BB come in and vote for the track they like the best. How are we to enforce how they vote if they are not considering the hosts rules? (Hint, the answer is we cannot).
These are specific examples I know, but the point I’m trying to make is that trying to strictly enforce host rules can become a nightmare for everyone involved. You could go through the same motions above with any rule and end up with a bunch of confusing discourse that would only serve to discourage current and would-be participants from continuing to participate.
If we’re looking for rules to strictly enforce, I think the two I mentions above are our best bets for implementing easily managed and simple structure to the battles. Fuck trying to strictly enforce host rules. If someone wants to be a nit-picky asshole about their random ass shitty rules and tell someone that their submission is disqualified because their snare drum isn’t peaking in the right frequency, they can go for it. We will just think that they’re a simp asshole killing everyone’s vibe and ruining the fun, which as far as I understand is the whole point of doing this. (My composure is beginning to deteriorate at this point, as I’m getting pissed off at this imaginary asshole, I better wrap this up quick)
In the end this is arbitrary, and you could make an argument either way, so I think we should just make it easy on ourselves and put these rules in place, or at least the rule about number of subs.