All posts by Bruce A

I really value your opinion in that regard.

My non-democratic stance is that I really want the wiki to have all the expert information, but be written and formatted in a way that makes things easy to understand for people who have never played fighting games.

I really want zero of those new people to fighting games turned away because our combo lists are acrane fighting game hirogliphics. Though I also want them to be easy to read for experienced players and not super annoying for them. 

We're actually talking about this somewhere else . I'd love to talk about it all here, but people who I want feedback from won't come here, and it's also hard to do some things here. 

That thread is kind of long, so if you want to see our current idea of how to do it, see this post

Still ironing out some cinks (there's actually a lot to consider), but looking at that thread, what do you think of some of what we've proposed? 

Some points

• We're still discussing what to do for links and followups. ">" is the current candidate, and we're trying to figure out whether a "," (comma) is necessary for followups. (I don't know if Rising Thunder has them.) Having two symbols is way more complex than what I think is good. One symbol (">") seems okay, and maybe says enough. Maybe even that's too complex and should just be "(links into)". I don't know. 

• We could write "Heavy," but the plan is to use Ⓗ or a graphic to represent that. I really wanted to do a symbol like a fist with various degrees of fill level, but rising thunder doesn't have punches--it only has attacks. So that's hard to make a symbol for.

• We might be able to get rid of "standing." Maybe, maybe not. Open to feedback on that (and all of this).

• We will hopefully not have a key, and maybe have something where you can mouse over things and get more info about them. But that has to work on mobile. No idea how we're going to do that. CSS and HTML wizards out there, please help.

I am too busy with other (wiki and non-wiki) related things. 

Maybe other people can help. 

Thanks for taking the lead in trying to get something happening.

Hmmm, if what you say is accurate, that's a good point. Though is it really accurate that combos change so often that they get invalidated?

It seems more likely to me that, eventually, there will be a fixed cast of characters (I imagine they'll stop adding new characters eventually), and there will be a few really good, basic combos that are good to use.

Until that time, the combos on the wiki will reflect what we know so far--and I think there's huge benefit having something people can reference to get started with a character, like a life-raft they can crab onto in the sea of endless combo possibility (which isn't endless, but seems that way when you start).

I think that's one of the reasons combo videos are so popular.

You might be right, but let's see how things unfold. I'm okay with some information being inaccurate; that's always going to be the case on a wiki.

"Pretty accurate" is a good benchmark, I think. 

If your point is "combos will change greatly during alpha and beta," then yeah, sure, that's reasonable. Though if people want to add them during that period, I'm not going to stop them. 

We can design some templates that specifcally designate sections of the wiki that have information that's in flux. (I have templates for those already on another wiki. I'll start doing templates at some point in the future. They're not quite needed yet.)

Thanks for sharing the skullgirls wiki example. I really like examples; great for comparison.

Re: skullgirls wikia

I think the Skull Girls wikia method has too much visual weight. The images are nice, but have little practical value. Fighting gamers are a practical bunch, and I really want to honour that.

Re: shoryuken wikia

The Shoryuken wiki, for the most part, displays combos and moves lists pretty well.

For Rising Thunder wiki

I really want to see if we can cut down on the "after some time studying it" part, though. So, shorten the distance between "looking at the moves and combo lists" to "understanding what all those characters mean."

I think the current methods are overly jargon-y. Highly efficient if you understand them, but not very accessible to newer players. I think we can hit a better efficiency to accessibility ratio. (Not unlike Rising Thunder.)

When I get a chance I'll share my current "version 1" of a proposed notation for moves and combos.

I think both are not-great options: one makes the wiki less relevant to advanced players, and the other makes it less relevant to casual players.

An example from Blizzard

Blizzard have a design philosophy they use with their games called the "donut principle."

They say the "hardcore" players represent the small, inner circle of your donut. They are fewer in number, but they have great influence on the success fo the game.

The larger, outer circle represents the masses. They're less picky, and while well-meaning, mostly don't know what they're doing and will generally need lots of help.

Blizzard say design your game for the hardcore players, then make that accessible to the casual players.

That's what I want to do with the wiki. I think it's possible.

Re: making the wiki user-friendly

For the record, I'm very, very cognizant of what it's like for a new player (I just recently I helped someone learn how to block), though I also appreciate the depth that advanced players crave.

I really want the wiki to cater to both of those player groups.

Thanks for your feedback

I appreciate your feedback and input on this. I really want this to be a consultative process, while still doing what we can to "advance the craft" rather than just "doing what we've always done." Convention often has a lot of wisdom behind it (that we should take into account), but often a lot of unneccessary historical baggage that could be jettisoned (which we should improve).

Different ways of doing it:

Rising Thunder wiki current method

100/75(175)

• it means "first hit does 100 damage, next hit does 75 damage, for a total of 175".

Shoryuken wiki method

50x3*30

• which means "3 hits that do 50 damage each, and then another hit for 30".

Bruce's idea

Using this format for Crow:

Uncharged

Charged:

~~Or alternatively:

For moves with different damage:

For Crow:

Charged:

And yes, you can fit a table within a table:

Maybe that isn't good.

Just exploring possibility space.

Right now "M" looks like it might be best for medium in terms of accessibility and efficiency.

Any reason why you don't like an arrow for "Forward"?

E.g. ->

(We'd have a nice arrow graphic that looks better.)

Yep, we should do that.

I'm very much leaning towards a notation that uses graphics.

People don't have to write in that format. We'll edit what people have written later.

The idea is that graphics are nicer to understand. E.g. http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Skullgirls/Squigly

I just created a page listing the notation we need .

Feel free to add any I missed.

Guiding principals for notation

I feel this is a conversation worth having. 

I'd like whatever we use to be:

• Efficient
• Friendly to people who may not have much or any fighting game experience. 

That may seem like it can't be done, but it can be. 

In terms of notation, there's a good post on that here going over the different types. (Kind of important to look at that, since it gives context to the rest of what I say here.) Though that only covers buttons and directional notation and doesn't include cancelling. 

Re: actual notation discussion

Someone on reddit suggested:

cl.H xx S1 xx KADC, cr.H

I think that's good (i.e. it uses actual English, just abbreviations), though I think we can go a step further.  "xx" may be standard, but it's sort of... jargony, and seems a bit redundant (with the KADC, which is in fact a cancel). 

If we do go with something like "xx", I'd want to at least have it so it has dotted underlines under it, and when people mouse-over it, it shows "Cancel" so they know what xx means. 

KADC seems like it should have an image that uses colouring, or something, that somehow reflects what a KADC looks like (like the great joystick motions here )--maybe a clickable image that goes to a "Kinetic advance" page, that explains the mechanic. 

We could use wiki templates for that, which allow us to do things like this  (mouse over the "citation needed" part).  

Note: if we use graphics / templates, people who add things to the wiki don't have to know how to use the graphics/templates I'm proposing. 

But it will be up to someone (or a group or people) to then go through what people have added, and convert it to the format the wiki uses. Which is standard wiki practice: improving things over time.

Yep, all that sounds good.

Did you remove what you wrote before?

If so, no need to do that. Better to have it up there for people to benefit from. You can always re-edit it whenever you get time to (or someone else can help edit it, too). 

We should indeed explore a standard. I made a thread for discussing it.

We can begin adding the info, anyway, and can convert it to whatever standard we decide on. 

Super-cool that you joined. :) 

In terms of what can be improved, these are the only things I can see: 

• Notation. We probably need to work on a notation image set we can use. If we could use something like what Shoryuken wiki use, that'd be great. (Though the way you did it is still nice and clear.)

• Tone. The strategy section could probably be written to be a bit more of a formal (less casual) tone. I tend to write very casually in general, but the tone used for wikis is more descriptive, like you're describing the properties of something. E.g. You wrote:

"While Talos is a beast on the offense, with highly damaging combos and powerful resets, he's severely lacking in defense. He's slow, and his only move that his immediately armored on start-up is his Forward Heavy, so he is very weak if pressure. His only real defense is his naturally high health."

I'd perhaps write it like this:

"Overview

Talos has a high amount of health and strong offensive ability due to his high damage combos and ability to reset.

However, he is fairly slow and has low defensive abilities. Unlike other characters, his Forward Heavy is the only move that provides him with armour during the start-up animation. This lack of armouring makes him more susceptible to attacks from his opponent than the rest of the cast—especially from rushdown characters like [insert character names]."

We could probably clarify what "resets" are better. I don't understand resets well enough to write it any more simply, though in general, it's good if people don't need a glossary or prior fighting game experience to understand what they read. We can still use fighting game terms--just have to use them in a way that is easy understand.

• Referencing (maybe). Though I'm not even sure how or if wikis reference information that comes from inside games. Seems a bit unnecessary to me.

All of that said, I in no way want to make you think that what you did is lacking; it's really good! 

Wikis are a lot about putting something up, seeing how it looks, then making decisions (either yourself, or talking with other people) and iterating from there. It doesn't have to be perfect, and things are always evolving. Also, sometimes you have to put something up to see how it looks.

What you did is a great start that we can continue to build on. 

When you say "100/75(175)" do you mean "first hit is 100, then next is 75, for total of 175?

The type of content that is featured

I think the type of media that should be featured should ideally be:

• good or notable

• relevant to the community

I don't think we should just add something there "because the old content has been there for a while" if we don't have anything that is both new and good or notable to add. 

Defining good and notable

"Good or notable" means that it has to be either well done or helpful, or be something that most people would agree is worth spotlighting (e.g. maybe there's some fan art that isn't "good" by art standards, but is notable for some other reason).

Deciding what content is featured

I don't know how to do this democratically when there aren't many active members.

When there are active members we could do a poll on the main page.

Perhaps the best way is to have a forum thread and let people suggest content in there. Whatever content meets the criteria of "good or notable" and "relevant to the community" can get featured after the old content has been displayed for about a month or so.

Until we get that going (which means we'll need more active members), as one of the wiki admins, I'll just cycle in new or notable content that's relevant to the community and add it to the Featured media page.

We could let anyone do it, and anyone can indeed do it, but I have concern people will misuse the featured media box (e.g. for self promotion, ignoring the good or notable, and relevant criteria).