StrategyWiki:Staff lounge/2012/November

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Scope

Does wp:Marvel: Avengers Alliance fall within our scope? -- Prod (talk) 05:38, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

We explicitly denied such games in StrategyWiki:Guide/Scope: "Not covered here are online virtual communities or social networking sites (e.g. Second Life or Habbo Hotel)" but this was not specific to 3rd party app-based games available inside of such sites (compare that to Neo Pets that contains many of its own mini-games, which we have also excluded). I think it would be okay to allow them and re-define the scope a bit. We don't want to detail how to use sites, but I assume Avengers Alliance is fairly simple. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:06, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Neopets is within scope. Those are virtual communities where there isn't really any gameplay, just "existence" and communication. Marvel: Avengers Alliance appears to be an actual game. Has anyone played it, would it be possible to write a guide for it, and should we include games like that in our scope? -- Prod (talk) 01:31, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Fighting game layout/scope changes

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series naming, etc.

Hey NMH. I saw all the work you did with JBA, but I'm not sure (PlayStation) was the correct disambuiguation. Essentially, the Arcade, PSX and DC versions are all based on the same game, with a few extra features thrown in on the console version. I think either (Arcade) or (Capcom) would be more appropriate choices. Technically speaking, that guide could have the "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure" title all to itself since the SNES version only game out in Japan, so technically that guide should be listed as Jojo no Kimyou na Bouken because it was never released with the translated title. I know I'm splitting hairs and stuff, just trying to be accurate. Procyon 03:25, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

On second thought, I would prefer to make JoJo's Bizarre Adventure a disambiguation page. Given the cross-over features of the PS and Dreamcast versions, I felt that they may need their own, separate pages, but without playing them I have no way of criticizing or explaining the differences.

But... that's completely different from how we do any other disambiguations on the site. We don't have disambiguation pages like Wikipedia does. We use the Category pages for that. Are you proposing that we change policies? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Procyon (talk • contribs) .

We have individual disambigs, see Category:Disambiguation and as an example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (disambiguation), so why can't we have JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (disambiguation)?. I don't mind linking to the category and moving the info there if that's what we tend to do. I hadn't thought of doing that. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 15:56, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah, cool, thanks for bringing that to my attention, I was unaware of that. I'm cool with that approach, but that still leaves the issue of the correct name for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (PlayStation). I still contend that PlayStation isn't the correct disambiguation for it, and that a majority of the content will apply to the arcade, PSX, and DC versions of the game (I am somewhat familiar with the series), so the choices are:

1. Change (PlayStation) to (Arcade) since both the PSX and DC versions are based on the arcade version, although this can be misleading.
2. Change (PlayStation) to (Capcom) to give it some kind of disambiguation. Capcom produced a lot of games using the JoJo license, but that is the only one with that specific title.
3. Remove the disambiguation and refer to the SNES/SFC version by it's Japanese title since it was never officially released as "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure" (with a disambiguation notice at the top of the Capcom version page). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Procyon (talk • contribs) .

Proc, using (Capcom) does not seem effective. If you look at the series template, how would you distinguish the games? Replacing the PlayStation link with "Capcom" is just confusing, because we never do it that way and no one remembers who made their game. Rather than being a useful link, it requires people to have more prior knowledge than they normally would (people know what console they own a game for; they probably don't remember who coded or published it).

I agree, the SNES game should be moved to its Japanese name (I will do that now). The arcade games, however, have English titles, so they can't use the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure title. I guess the PlayStation game should be moved back to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure since it was the first game to officially use the English title. As far as I know, the PS and DreamCast versions are based on the two Arcade games. The DreamCast game may be a compilation of the two arcade games, but the info on Wikipedia isn't detailed enough. I would prefer to keep them all separate before trying to combine them. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:21, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Layout/scope changes

Off topic: I am also not a fan of combined fighting game series pages, as most games vary in their move timing and interfaces, which drastically alter the strategies for combos. Not to mention moves may change or be removed. I have gotten frustrated a few times with editing games with combined ToCs and movelists, mostly because I would rather a fully unique page for each character for each game, to explain not just a movelist, but also how to use them in combos. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 15:33, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

That's a whole other can of worms. The reason behind that is to reduce the repetition of content. The character bios and 90% of the "Getting Started" and "Walkthrough" content is identical for every version. If they were split up, much of the content in those guides would be copied across every guide (unless we use transclusion...) Any thoughts on how to get around that issue? Procyon 03:55, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

I understand why we're attempting to do this, but it is ineffective and very difficult to manage. We should have duplicate information, like we would in any other game series (e.g. Super Mario Bros.' Getting Started pages could all be effectively combined, but we don't because it would be convoluted because of all of the differences). Combined pages, like Dragon Warrior III/Enemies are 100x harder to build than multiple "duplicates", but in some cases we push for it. In this case, DWIII has three significantly different ports, but they are the same game. With our fighting games, we are combining significantly different games, not ports.

Since the games we are trying to combine are usually not at stage 4 or featured, their content is essentially unconfirmed. If I look up a version of Street Fighter, I don't care about any other game in the series, especially Arcade games if I'm on a console. The controller itself, and the computer's hardware, changes the gameplay considerably. With each port, hit boxes may change, which goes hand in hand with timing nuances for potential combo strategies. One reason we need actual individual character pages on a per-game basis is because of these unknown strategies. Like, if I go to the Street Fighter II guide and I'm playing on a SNES, I want to be told how to kick some butt and win every time. I don't care what the names of the moves are or how to do them, I want to know which is the best and when to use them. How am I supposed to beat Dhalsim with E. Honda when he outranges me in every way? We don't have character matchup strategies or any of the sort. The current E. Honda description lets me know in a general way some good nuances to timings for the HD version, but not the original, nor any of the moves. It lets me know what each move does and maybe how many times it could hit a guy, but it doesn't tell me how much damage it does or what can combo after it without being countered. I mean, what we have is nice. What I want is awesome. Our character pages should let editors expand the details of how to fight - our pages could be at least four times as long as they are now (in a finished state).

Here's what we do well:

1. Move lists (all characters in a game on one page; great for Ctrl F)
2. Cross-series move lists (e.g. all E. Honda move lists on one page; great for analyzing how a series has changed, useless for strategies)
3. Set up character pages.

Here's what we don't do well:

1. Set up character pages for each game.
2. Individual character timing analyses (there's no good place to put this for games that have had their character link combined with a previous game).
3. Character A vs. Character B strategy sections non-existent/no good place.

Here's how to fix it:

1. Attempt to detail one game's getting started page, expanding on the current combined one. If expanding the details goes out of the bounds of the common Getting Started info, then create a separate Getting Started page for that game.
2. For each game, make their own character list that doesn't link to other character pages in the series. On these pages, the individual movelist should be transcluded. Additional room for details is now available for expansion.
3. Make a combined move list page (all characters in the game) in the ToC under Appendices (e.g. /Move list).
4. Make a separate combined move list page for each character beside their name in the ToC (e.g. E. Honda (Move list)). Again the transcludable move list for E. Honda for a specific game would appear on three pages: /E. Honda, /Move list, and SeriesTitle/Characters/E. Honda.
5. Create a combined ToC with collapsible lists for similar games (e.g. SFII games), like Diablo II and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, if significant info exists. Alternately: don't combine them, separate them.

What I really don't like is forcing combined pages when there could be differences that you or I haven't confirmed or cared to look for. I'm not asking for a complete overhaul, but something less restrictive. The worst thing right now is the combined character pages for the series - this is a terrible idea. The only thing that's the same is the background info and maybe the intro, which can be transcluded. The character sprite on the page should be the one from each specific game or version, so that needs to be able to change.

We also have a mess with pages like Street Fighter II/Walkthrough that have a header nav enclosed in <noinclude> tags. So many pages link to it, how are we supposed to figure out what is transcluding it or why? Transcluding whole /Walkthrough pages makes no sense to me. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 15:56, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

OK, before I say anything else, I really want to thank you for your thoughtful and thorough analysis of this issue. I agree with you on a majority of your points, and I do agree that the state of some of our fighting guides is a bit confusing. So please understand that I hear you, and I appreciate your input on this. That being said, I think some (not all) of what you suggested you'd like to see falls under the question of scope. I will go out on a limb here and assume you're familiar with the shoryuken.com wiki. They definitely have the kind of details you're talking about. But sometimes when I'm on there looking for simple information, my eyes kind of glaze over because of how complicated their pages are, and the tremendous amount of data they are trying to present. When I personally think about what SW's purpose should be, I think about three types of manuals; instruction manuals, strategy guides, and technical manuals. To me, instruction manuals present way too little information for SW, and technical manuals way too much. Naturally, I think strategy guides are the perfect amount, and I tailored a lot of the content for fighting games on existing strategy guides that I have (not to mention most online FAQs.) What you proposed up above sounds like a technical manual to me. I'm not opposed to that content (and it isn't even up to me anyway), but then it becomes a question of time and effort vs. results. First, someone has to be willing to put in the time and effort to generate those kinds of character vs. character fight analysis, and second, enough people need to want to come here to find that kind of analysis. I think as you go from less complicated (instruction manual) to more complicated (technical manuals), the amount of people looking for that quantity and quality of information drops off considerably. It's not to say that no one is interested because clearly you are, but that's a lot of effort to put into a guide that fewer people will read. Having said all that, I would be happy to work with you on finding a more user-friendly presentation for those guides. I need to review some of your suggestions to get a better idea of what you mean, but if you'd like to prototype a design in your user space, I'd love to see what you have in mind. Thanks again. Procyon 04:59, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

I can imagine these technical guides being on SW because when I was playing a bunch of Naruto fighting games, I found a guide on GameFAQs that really helped me figure out some useful combos, but there's no place for this info on our current setup, so I abandoned my efforts to improve our guide. We can also make technical subpages for people like me who try to play games to their most accurate, efficient, and fluid way (e.g. wave dashing in Super Smash Bros. Melee opens up an entirely different way to play the game).

The problem is that we have scope, and we have opinions. Since you and I vary, it is clear that the rest of the world is also going to vary, and probably with more disparities. SW is a framework for the content we want. I don't think we should be stopping people from publishing helpful information because there's too much of it. That said, I wouldn't want to make "technical" pages our focus, as they are usually unnecessary to complete the game. Also, character match up strategies are way different than timing and hitbox breakdowns. Also, I'm a tech guy, so it makes sense that everything I do tends to get reduced to its components. We could expand ToCs to have the character listings with special subpages in parentheses next to them, like "E. Honda (Matchups  · Technical)" or something like that.

Also, for Getting Started pages, redundancy is better than missing parts.

My goal here isn't to re-do the current setup at this time, but to revise our framework so that future guides won't have the same problems. I'll try and work on a sandbox example soon. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 20:55, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Proc, see the mockup here: User:Notmyhandle/Sandbox. Notice that in this ToC we retain each version and links to their movelists. The character pages are still combined, with movelists from each game on it. I think we could leave that. I changed "How to Play" to Walkthrough. The content on /Walkthrough should be subpaged to /Getting Started and /Controls. We don't use "How to play" on any of other games except the ones whose ToC you set up. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:52, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

One problem I can see about going for a more in-depth guide is that earlier games in a series a usually less documented, like MSFvSF or SFII:CE, so it is much harder to find information about it than...say, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. That said, I think the idea is great and I will certainly try to contribute. Just my two cents. T.testLP(talk) 07:58, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Depends on the marketing. Like Capcom vs. SNK had little visibility (the decline of people going to Arcades and we all know the Dreamcast wasn't a smash hit) has barely been played compared to Capcom vs. SNK 2, which debuted on all major consoles at the time and appeared in every store I went to four a few years (from Box Store electronics departments to Cost Co). Side note: the PS2 version of Capcom vs. SNK 2 is way better than the GameCube version because of the controls. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 16:34, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Also, Proc, I don't think these should be completion stage four, as they clearly don't meet the criteria: "These are completed guides in the sense that these are quality guides that can accurately lead readers through the game; these guides include as many screenshots as is necessary to properly illustrate situations. Also offered in these guides are appendices, maps, and other highly relevant information." --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 16:36, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree. When I saw Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo in the completion stage 4 section, my first impression was "Oh, boy! Now I can learn how and when to use which moves to hopefully be able to defeat the CPU consistently!". Then I viewed the guide and only saw movelists. It is actually quite misleading.

For that matter, Pocket Fighter shouldn't be considered a Featured Guide. Sure it describes the basics and all the flash combos well with accompanying pictures, they don't actually help with making players better at the game. There's no section about which flash combo is best at which situation, or which gem colour should be prioritized to upgrade a certain move. T.testLP(talk) 06:00, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

I think it all depends on how you play fighting games, honestly. Strategy makes sense to me since it can not only help the player get better with a certain character, but also helps you see if the character is right for you in the long-run (with all the ranked online battles and whatnot being added to fighting games nowadays, I'd say finding a character you're comfortable with can be important to the replay value of games in the genre). But technical analysis is just not something I can agree with as a gamer, nor is it something I would even care to see. That would be a ton of work which begs the question: Is it really necessary? Reading up on step-by-step walkthroughs of how to defeat every single character as every single character would kind of detract from the whole fighting game experience. I mean, isn't that what fighting games are all about? As someone who has actually used the move lists on this site, I have to say that they are really all I ever needed.--Wario^Talk 09:56, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm fine with conceding on the technical point. No one has pursued that sort of information here. It is a dream of mine, but let's keep things simple for the most part. Perhaps we should find a fighting game wiki to partner with for that aspect. That would also simplify the ToCs and significantly reduce the number of links. I've updated the sandbox example accordingly. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 16:01, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Hey NMH, I just want you to know, I'm not ignoring this post, I've just been insanely busy with work. I'll do my best to examine what you've done when I truly have time to reflect on it. In addition, I'm obviously inclined to agree with Wario. Again, I came at these guides from the standpoint of what you'd find in a classic printed guide for a fighting game. I believe that listing combos is of particular benefit to players, and would encourage their inclusion. However, character vs character analysis is a lot more subjective, and starts to trend down the "this is what personally works for me." They can range anywhere from incredibly useful to unbelievably complex, and that depends largely on the audience's level of familiarity with the game and the character in question. I'm not saying that content doesn't belong on SW, but I would disagree that their inclusion, or lack thereof, would determine a guide's level of completion. Just my $0.02 Procyon 05:29, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Character matchups aren't necessarily going to be merely subjective reasoning. We could warn the player about what the other character can use and how to counter it. I don't mean going as in-depth as "if they use c.mk you can punish with Fireballdouken or if your footsies are good use c.hk or Downward Puncher, the latter is more effective since you can combo into Spinning Hurricane...". It could be something simpler, like "watch out for Shotoman's Fireballdouken! He can spam it constantly, and it could interrupt your Charger Wave, so be patient and don't throw out moves blindly". I think if we are going to do matchups, we need to determine at what level of detail will benefit the most amount of people, whether they are semi-competitive or absolute casual (don't think we should worry about tourney-going people since there are actually way better resource sites than here). T.testLP(talk) 07:02, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

In my gaming experience as of late, I've found that I don't have time to invest fully into a single fighting game, where the norm is to expect that after a lot of play time, especially with one character, you will have discovered and perfected combos that would help you win. Well, I can't figure that stuff out! The timing on these things are hidden, so anything people can come up with is definitely a benefit. If people want to add lots of detail, why are we stopping them? It's easy to put ==In depth== or ==Combos== to separate information. It's not like we have to manage all of this information; we just keep it standardized, clean, and organized to some extent. I see the conflict of interest here. Your comfort level while playing fighting games, at least ones you know, help you realize that all you need to know are the specials. Well, most specials suck! The pros rarely use charge bar specials, and projectile moves are only used at long range to wear down a guarding enemy (pros can counter/block/dodge or jump over projectiles). So if you take away all of the specials, you're down to a complex fist fight that we don't discuss here! It's like all we do is tell people the controls, which in most games they can find by pressing start. I don't think our fighting game "guides" are useful. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 15:06, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I do agree on what you said. You can't consider a page complete when all there is on the page is useless backstory and stuff you can find in the pause menu. I assume the thing about the comfort level is referring to Wario, because I personally do not believe that fighters are as shallow as their specials. I have had some exposure myself to competitive Brawl (never attended tournaments, though I did try to play with a similar mindset to pros) and even though the guide for Super Smash Bros. Brawl is much more comprehensive, it is no more helpful to players looking to improve their game than just listing moves. Just look at Ike's page for example: you shouldn't be spamming Quick Draw when using him, you should be abusing his great jab and long range. What I'm getting at is that all of our fighting game guides need improvement, including strategies that work on a competitive level. If it works against pros, it works against novices.

Also, should we move this to the staff lounge? It is a pretty important discussion on the wiki's scope and policies and the title on this page might be misleading. T.testLP(talk) 08:40, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

OK, I've taken way too long to respond to this now. NMH, I like the Sandbox, but think the TOC can be way simplified if we're not trying to merge every game in one single ToC, like we don't need the parenthesis links at all, they just become a normal entry. I could try to mock it up a bit as well at some point. But with regard to scope, here's the way I see it. No one has stopped anyone from adding content to those guides. They have been as open for anyone to edit as everything else has. The reason those guides don't contain character breakdowns, or player vs player analysis is simply because no one has bothered to include any. And I'm afraid that unless one of us REALLY takes the time required to commit to one of those games and fully grasp any of those characters, it's unlikely that we'll manage to attract an editor who will. Simply put, content like that is going to be more often found in game-specific wikis (or SRK's wiki) or forums. It's the same way we don't get a lot of World of Warcraft or similar MMO content. People who focus solely on those games tend to gravitate to game-specific sites since it's easier for them to home in on what they're looking for. It's regrettable, because frankly I believe SW could be as much a home for that info as any place else, but until SW becomes a huge buzz word, and a household name, it's unlikely that people who possess that kind of knowledge are going to offer it up here. So, being a bit more realistic on what kinds of contributions we're likely to receive here, should we grade the completion of the guide accordingly, or should be hold it to a higher standard that we are unlikely to ever achieve? Again, I'm not against the inclusion of deeper content in fighting guides or ANY of our guides. I'm just trying to set expectations at a reasonable level. Procyon 00:12, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Proc, should we just expect the character pages to hold that game-specific detailed information? I'm just a little confused as to the layout. It would be simple if we just fused it all together and made giant pages that eventually get subpaged if they start to become hard to read (or the ToC gets too big). --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:10, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Off-topic: Regrettably, I find myself thinking about the MMO situation a lot. It breaks down Wiki's into two types based on the type of content they are trying to cover: things that can be covered in one page, and things that can't. We are by far the best single page/retro guide repository on the internet. Like the fighting game wikis, we cannot compete against MMO wikis because of our standardization policies. Each game-specific wiki is able to tailor their wiki to match the game/series' style. Honestly, since I think I'm the only one capable of observing this (since I've been playing it so much), MapleStory is on its way out (most GMS servers are fairly empty; only about 7 are played on and only the first channel gets filled) and so its hits are diminishing. It would be great if we could see more detailed stats. What once got us hundreds of thousands of views may no longer be our primary source of hits, ever (notice MS is number five on the most wanted). Oh, I also think our banners on pages regarding "Outdated information related to Big Bang patch" causes a backlash against us. If someone sees an official "our info sucks" they won't stick around to fix it. If we claim that we are up to date and we are wrong, people may scoff, but some will help out. That said, unfortunately we do not have a paid staff, so we can't shift resources around. Luckily, we'll continue to grow organically as we have. After I'm satisfied with playing MapleStory till my gf hates me, I'll go back to working on the retro console guide completion project. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:10, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

The Lylat Wiki

Hello, StrategyWiki! I'm RingtailedFox, assistant administrator of The Lylat Wiki, and I just wanted to let you guys know that we're back up, but our address has changed to starfoxwiki.info . You might wish to check and update any links you have currently pointing towards our old address. :) RingtailedFox (talk) 07:56, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Prod, can you update the interwiki link URL in the database for us? --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:29, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Done. -- Prod (talk) 00:46, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Key word redirects

I don't know if this would work, but I was looking at MapleStory/Item Pot and Google search results. I noticed that if you use "maplestory item pot" as a search string, the article comes up. If you use "maplestory imp" or "maplestory imp guide" it does not. If we could get those key words to match the page it would be great. I was thinking of redirecting MapleStory/Imp and MapleStory/Imp guide to /Item Pot. Would it work? If so, will we allow it? To take some pressure off of the "no subpage redirects" policy we have, perhaps we can require that subpage redirects have a justification on their talk page. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:40, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I can't say with any certainty whether it would have a positive effect or not, but based on what I know about how wikis work, and how Google works (which isn't immense, just based on experience,) I would be doubtful that your proposal would have a big impact on search results. Part of the problem is that even if a web crawler came upon the redirect, it would never see the header of the pre-redirect page, it would only see the header of the ultimate destination. They're not going to crawl with the request to redirect set to false. So that's one problem. The other aspect of SEO is inbound links. Unless someone took the time to point to the redirect page in question, it would earn an incredibly low score, ironically because we would hardly link to it, let alone the outside world. I could be wrong about some of this, and I would be happy to learn that I am, but I'm not sure who would be more knowledgeable about the subject. Procyon 00:17, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know much about mediawiki, but can you add keywords as metadata to the page, that Google might pick up and use? --Pelago (talk) 09:48, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know much about metatags, nor mediawiki, but would this help? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MetaTags --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 16:44, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

The In-depth Fighter Analysis Project Proposal

So, as everyone can see from the discussion about the scope of fighting game guides, I have a new idea. One of the things that is holding us back from adding gameplay strategies for each character is because of the sheer amount of work that needs to be done, from researching to writing down what works for each character. So why not make it a group effort?

And thus I propose the "In-depth Fighter Analysis Project", to give all fighting games specific character strategies, matchup informations and other in-depth info that will improve the quality of each guide. The concept is that we choose a fighting game, or even a specific character, and focus on that FG/character. This includes researching strategies for that character or creating them if there aren't any that can be found. Ideally, each character page should have a gameplay overview of the character, certain techniques and how to perform them, notable moves analysis, character matchups and a short combo list.

So what do you all think of the concept? Is it something that could work, or does it sound way too ambitious? T.testLP(talk) 09:39, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

It's not a bad idea. However, I think it should be scrapped for the time being, since only one person has been regularly working on the fighting game guides, and in limited capacity. If more fighting game editors appear, it would make sense to collaborate and focus efforts as you suggest. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 17:09, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

In truth test, there's nothing stopping anyone from doing any of that right now. If that's what you'd like to add to the character pages, by all means, please go ahead and do it. There's no "restrictions" on what can be placed there, it's just a question of whether anyone has the motivation to write it all up. Procyon 03:00, 8 November 2012 (UTC)