User blog comment:Zolnir/Flaw in Tournament Setup/@comment-189.134.137.179-20160317095605/@comment-11188061-20160317110506

Do you know the concept of Health, Safety and Environment? It is something all entities (companies, people) uphold and practice to protect a person's wellbeing, no matter how secure or improbable a potential risk is. To borrow The Martian's words (2015), a 95% ish probability is not a good enough probability to execute a plan.

While the common people don't execute their life as precisely as an astronaut might do, this concept does not change. Younger people may believe that if X law is good enough, then there isn't a need to implement Y law to reinforce things further, but this very often isn't enough in the adult world (in fact schools should strive to beat that kind of attitude out of any person if they are to have any hope at succeeding in life nowadays). If you can do 80, you should try to do 90. If you can do 100, then you will gun for 100, and explore if there's any way to turn it into 101.

Especially in a dangerous world such as RWBY's where every life is a valuable resource, and every Huntsman equals or exceeds the weight of at least 10 normal people), there is absolutely no reason for people in the RWBY-verse to NOT have a in-field referee (or even more than one, considering 4v4 team battles) in a combat tournament where people INTENTIONALLY HURT each other.

For example, Adam has proven himself that there are powerful techniques that can easily one shot even a moderately well Huntsman. Who's to say there aren't any Huntsman fighting on a global level, even if they are the 'below 21 years old' class or whatever, who can and will perform in order to get a victory?

The referee may or may not able to stop a worst case scenario from happening, but the difference between 'could have' and 'could not have' is good enough to have a referee. If the referee a.k.a a senior Huntsman such as Glynda was there, they could have stopped Yang from attacking Mercury without warning. If they were there, they could have stopped a strange acting Pyrrha from overreacting, or at least potentially save Penny from getting skewered by her own blades. As for 'potentially making a bad move and ruin the whole thing'? We are talking about a life here. Going by your way of thought, you would accept the risk of killing or seriously harming the combatants, just to not 'ruin the whole match'. That is wrong.

They CAN and WILL interfere with a match not only to ensure the integrity of a competition, but also protect the combatants from harm, even if they may incur the risk of being discredited or even fired. That is their burden AND responsibility. If we go by your way of thinking every soccer referee in the world should have their asses fired all the way to the moon.