On Debate.org debates, there is, on balance, a net Contender advantage.

Thank you, Ore_Ele, for your response. I) General Trends I admit, I did mistakenly regard Debate 3563 as an Instigator victory instead of a Contender victory. I also realize that I made the same error on 7875. This would mean the Instigator won 7 of 20 debates, which still leaves a p-value of 0.090, rather low, and supports my arguments in conjunction with other tests to demonstrate a statistically significant Contender advantage. Regarding the partial forfeit, recall that one of the qualifiers for this debate is a complete lack of forfeits, not just ones that my opponent would consider significant, so we must still disqualify 4095. Debate 14417 was won only because of the single forfeited round, by a single conduct vote. As for vote-bombing, the only two debates that were vote-bombed to Instigator victories were those by untitled_entity, who actually has an apparent pattern of winning via rather undeniable vote-bomb (8543, 8421) and was identified by my opponent as a vote-bomber, making her debates easy to remove. My two removals were clearly justified, and my opponent has no ground to dispute them. Looking at only post-tab debates leaves too small of a sample size. My opponent then analyzes other random sets of debates, but every time, the Instigator wins statistically significantly less often than the Contender. He justifies this with the difference in ELO scores, but this still relies on trusting the ELO scores to be reasonably accurate in this case, which is circular reasoning. My opponent is correct in ELO's success in various fields, but DDO's debates are fundamentally different because the Instigator is not selected randomly, and some people have a greater inclination to instigate a debate than others, so any Contender bias would not be evenly distributed among the population. In chess, for example, there is an advantage to moving first [1], but because in tournaments, everyone goes first as often as they go last thanks to random determination, this is no problem. If, however, some people play as White more often and others play as Black more often (which wouldn't reasonably happen in chess, but does in DDO, hence why my opponent's comparison is invalid), those who play White more often will also win more often, and thus have higher ELO scores, even if everyone in the chess league was at the exact same level of chess skill - my opponent would tell you, however, that this is because those who play a White more often are also inherently more skilled, even though this is false by premise. Essentially, the ELO system will almost tautologically be somewhat accurate in predicting win and loss percentages in any case, whether there is bias or not, making its presence in this debate irrelevant. To conclude this point, once one removes the circular reasoning involved, one sees that my opponent's statistics supports the concept of a Contender advantage very strongly. II. Specific examples My opponent claims that Debate 19025 is an example of a Contender advantage pushed too far, but I see nothing in the RFDs or Comments section concerning any last-round abuse. He claims to have four debates that demonstrate Instigator advantage: 10982: The Contender stated in the Comments section, "I think I truly messed it up by not defining 'Easter Bunny' more concretely in the first round." This was not an advantage from being Instigator, but from having an opponent that failed to define things, which happens to the Contender just as often as, if not more often than, the Instigator. I have quite a few semantics debates of my own, Contender in all of them, and my opponent acknowledges their plentitude of existence, so I see no need to point them out. 15819: I don't see the inherent advantage here. The Contender challenged the Instigator's definition as being "entirely inconsistent," and turned the debate into one about the acceptability of the Instigator's definition. It became the center of the entire debate. The Contender controlled the course of the debate in his acceptance round; he only went wrong in that he subsequently lost the argument that he thought he would win, and therefore had to debate with the Instigator's definition, which cost him the debate. A debate in which the Contender may identify which points will be debated and with what priority before even having to accept cannot possibly be interpreted as having an Instigator advantage. 17753: The Instigator never defined "God," despite my opponent's false claim. He did, however, define "omnipotence" in the second round. However, had the Contender disagreed with the definitions, he could easily have challenged them. There was no Instigator advantage; the two debaters were on equal footing in that regard. 17901: The Instigator defined "God," yes, but the Contender accepted the definition completely. Had the debate been reversed, the Contender would have chosen the same definition. If he had any problem with the definition, he would have proposed a change beforehand. There was no advantage here. Sadly, my opponent took no time to clarify in any real depth how these debates show an Instigator advantage as I did for my examples of Contender advantage, so it's considerably likely that he will point out that he meant something completely different to what I refuted. He would then clarify, and I would be powerless to respond. If such an event should occur, it would be a Trailing Argument Contender Advantage. My opponent then claims that every Instigator could be identified as naive for instigating a debate in which the Contender has an inherent advantage. However, any Contender advantage cannot be prevented by the Instigator, as it takes place in the last round without forewarning, so it is essentially impossible to prepare for the Contender advantage except by not instigating debates at all, in which case no one wins. My opponent did not explain how it could be prevented; I could try to predict all of the ways in which he claims they could be prevented, as he will probably explain at my request during the next round, but it would be character-wise, putting me at a new disadvantage as it draws space from my other arguments to refute points that may never be brought up anyway, and even then, I could miss the mark completely, making the entire attempt a waste and giving my opponent a huge Contender advantage. The two scenarios of advantage are also completely different. It's the difference between buying an average house that is later bombed by an invading army, and buying a house that is clearly marked and scheduled for a demolition tomorrow. One instance is unpreventable except by complete avoidance of ever buying a house; the other can easily be foreseen and thus avoided by either cancelling the demolition before purchase or not buying that particular house. Of course, even with a broad interpretation of naivety, there is an exception: tournament debates. Neither debater chooses to be Instigator, and thus neither debater can be considered naive for that; however, we still end up with an Instigator and a Contender, and thus a Contender advantage such as those I outlined with five examples. My opponent then adds that naivety does not eliminate an Instigator advantage. This is true, but since a qualifier for this debate was a lack of naivety, all advantage by naivety, which seems to be all true Instigator advantage, is irrelevant to this debate. To conclude this point, I have five clear examples of undeniable Contender advantage, but my opponent offers only vague descriptions of theoretical examples or misinterpretations of reality. In conclusion, as proven by both statistical tests of significance and specific analysis, the Contender advantage clearly exists. Thank you, Ore_Ele, for this entertaining meta-debate. Good luck in your final round; try not to stretch your advantage too much. ;) 1. http://en.wikipedia.org...