QBKiller94 wrote:To me there is a big difference between a popular character and a Hall of Fame character. Guys like Lockdown, Rung and Drift have a lot of merit and are popular today, but they've only been around for a really short time. The Transformers brand is 30 years old and Hall of Fame inductees should be characters who've had a major impact on the universe over time.
Putting Lockdown or Rung in the Hall of Fame over characters like Prowl or Devastator is like putting Mike Trout in the baseball Hall of Fame before Babe Ruth or Ted Williams. It's like putting Ahsoka Tano in the Star Wars Hall of Fame before R2-D2 or Chewbacca. I'm not saying they're bad characters, just that we need more time to review their importance in the overall universe.
I completely agree with this, but I wouldn't quite call Devastator a "Hall of Fame character" since, well, to be brutally honest, he's not a character.
He is what he's always been: A plot device. He's never been explored as a person, only used as a living weapon. He's as engaging as a Power Rangers Megazord, which are awesome because of how they look and what they do, rather than for who they are. His appeal is on the surface rather than at heart.
QBKiller94 wrote:The Transformers Hall of Fame was great idea when it was born in 2010. It allows Hasbro and Transformers fans the opportunity to celebrate some of the quintessential characters that have dotted the Transformers Universe over the last 30 years.
However, Hasbro has dropped the ball. Hasbro needs to take measures to better regulate the fan voting and make the Transformers Hall of Fame induction into a premier event that will energize and entertain the fan base on a yearly basis.
Currently, Hasbro lets all the fan sites conduct the nominee voting how they see fit. I've been looking at the different Transformers sites and how they're handling the voting. It's a hodge podge with no two places following the same exact course. Hasbro should put some more guidelines in place to help these sites out. If weak candidates get into the HOF, then no one will take it seriously and it won't feel significant or important. There needs to be more direction and oversight by Hasbro to prevent this.
This is what I would do to improve the Transformers Hall of Fame process:
A LOT of what you describe is how it used to be done. For the first two or three years, what you're asking for was the standard (though, Point #1 was never going to happen).
There used to be a wide fan vote on each site with each user posting their top 5 choices, and then once those were tallied, the result of that first round were sent to Hasbro to create a second round of voting, in which Hasbro.com would post the top five nominees of tallied up from the results of every fansite, and let users come to vote on which of those five they wanted to win, every day.
Then at BotCon, there would be a fancy ceremony with speeches, video montages, and other goodies.
It went on like this for three years... then came 2013. By this point, Hasbro had laid off many employees, including Rik Alvarez and his entire department, which was the very group of people who were previous responsible for handling the Hall of Fame. Ever since then, the Hall of Fame has felt like a pale comparison of what it once was. A poorly imitated shadow of the past.
Now the voting process comes so much later, is far less organized in unison between all the sites, and far more time-constrained than it used to be. Gone are the second rounds and the ceremonies as well. Same with the auto-inducted characters and humans. No more human inductees, period.
Now the whole thing has been reduced to an offhanded mention in the larger Hasbro panel, which focuses more on toy reveals and other media.
Needless to say, the glory days of the Transformers Hall of Fame seem to have come and gone before they had a chance to really take off.
