My qualifications on judging a battle for being legendary comes down to a couple things. It can't have any misses, nothing played, and it has to have a variety of punch styles. wordplay, personals, etc. also, it obviously needs to have some real strong haymakers. every bar being a hit doesn't mean shit if it doesn't have several that hit HARD. Also, shorter battles get A LOT less credit in my book. and yes I consider 20 lines short. all the best dudes on the site could write 10 bars that connect, but doing 15 or 20 is a different story and way more impressive.
another thing i take into consideration, although not nearly as much, is the circumstances. if its two dudes who've had a ton of beef, if its a champ match, a season champ match, shit like that. anything that makes the battle mean more than any other random battle.
that 03 shit WAS dope back then, but its 8 years old so of course we see it as wack now. so the only way to compare a 2011 battle and a 2003 battle is by they're effectiveness at the time, not by the actual content. the Token/Arch battle will seem wack 8 years from now too, just how shit works.
we JUST had a topical battle get into legends, we've had several OMs get in recently. since taking over legends i've realized that the reason text battles get voted down isn't because of dudes creating some crazy gold standard. it happens, but thats not the main reason. its cuz the current text heads dont give a fuck. dudes wait til the last day to write, they won't go over 20 lines, they just don't put in any effort.
so was Arch/Token HOF? without a doubt. Was it legendary? maybe yes, maybe no. depends on the person voting. but if it gets voted down, the answer isn't to bitch about it. neither one of those dudes could honestly say that was the absolute best they could do. just put in the effort and drop harder in the next big battle.
Originally Posted by A.T.
