hey guys this is your king speaking lookin for feedback here

[Integrity]

what up

 

after ya boi vicious sal pointed out the general massive lack of posting in the analysis board (nothing since june jeez) i started thinking about maybe a little reorganization of this corner of the site and nobody knows what the people want (separate from what the people need) more than the people

 

my very vague vision for this is to have a general discussion board (this one) and an advice board (the war room). is that the right amount of space? is there anything gained by having a third discrete section? heroes analysis kind of sat in this weird liminal space between discussion and advice, with a lot of very outdated information up front thanks to slow posting, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a design space for a third section. how would you see content diverted between the sections?

 

how about the pinned threads? there's a shitload (17 as of this post) between the two forums and that feels excessive to me. is it actually just right? could we stand to see some consolidation? are some threads pinned that shouldn't be?

 

staff presence? are you finding yourself frustrated by directories (man i did not update the war room like i thought i would) that haven't been updated by the mods? do you feel like more people or more attention would be helpful to keep things flowing?

 

miscellaneous thoughts are welcome, too, you don't have to respond to all of my questions in bullet-point fashion. i just want to get my finger on the pulse of this forum while i squander my time mostly on the discord. speaking of that, feel free to dm me there too if you want to chat about your thoughts rather than dumping them here.

 

'ta

[SoulWeaver]

Heroes Analysis makes me a little sad, because it was such a great idea that ultimately suffered from the fact that the game receives ongoing updates, meaning that all threads are technically forever WIP because they can just keep releasing powercreep that will keep updating the optimal sets. This would be great if everyone who ever created an analysis was consistent about updating their threads, but as the creator of the OG Roy thread I can definitely attest to the problems of this.

I do greatly appreciate the GHB/BHB clear threads, though - @Zeo alone has really inspired me to put effort into some of the weirdest Units for creative build ideas, and I have to admire @mampfoid's dedication to beauty. Definitely keep those and not just because I finally had a clear I could take a good video of and be relatively proud of my achievement SUCK IT PETRINE.

[Integrity]

oh yeah, me, i think the core concept of the war room is very solid, especially with content recurring (e.g. literally right now, ghb revivals) and i'm very proud of having led development of the idea, unless parrhesia did. i can't keep us separate.

 

i'm hella glad to hear you're finding it useful!

 

[XRay]

For the main Heroes subforum's pinned threads, I would merge "Not sure what skill to inherit..." thread and "Ask Fire Emblem Heroes Questions..." thread together since they essentially fill the same purpose.

Advance Wars being my first true love in terms of videogames, I like the War Room reference. And yeah, having a dedicated subforum for recurring modes helps cut down on searching. I think it is fine to have a lot of pinned threads in War Room since a lot of modes are weekly and monthly events, and it makes posting on these frequent modes easier. For GHB and BHB reruns and stuff like that, they are not run very often, so I think it is fine to make people search for them.

For the Analysis subforum, I think the main issue is that threads are tied to the first poster, and people sometimes get lazy (like me) or are just not here anymore. I am not sure if it is possible with the current forum software, but making the first (and/or second post) editable by anyone (not literally anyone, but anyone who is a forum member for over 6 months or something like that) might be a better idea. That way, the most up-to-date builds can be kept at the top and anyone can update it.

[Integrity]

22 minutes ago, XRay said:

Advance Wars being my first true love in terms of videogames, I like the War Room reference.

it wasn't an advance wars reference. the only good advance wars is days of ruin. get at me.

EDIT: i'll clarify to not be a dick: we called it the war room because there's no fighting in the war room, which scans perfectly to the 'help me' forum

 

22 minutes ago, XRay said:

I am not sure if it is possible with the current forum software, but

yeah this is why i retired the analysis subforum - it's an amazing idea for a community wiki, but what you propose (a wiki-style op) is literally impossible to implement with any accountability on these forum software. i could make posts editable by users, but there's no way to restore previous edits or even to see what's been edited, even on the admin side of things, without excessive effort - let alone the mods, who would be completely fucking clueless about all of it. given as i'm the only admin who plays feh regularly, it's completely impossible, and unfortunately completely invalidates the idea of the analysis subforum

EDIT: a thought could be if it was deemed sufficiently useful by the folks here, inspired by you, to create a Fire Emblem Heroes Curator role and distribute it fairly liberally with the only elevated privilege being they can edit all posts in the Fire Emblem Analysis subforum. with a rolling squad of ten or so of you, including all mods and admins, the concept could work. please provide thoughts

EDIT2: my aesthetic is me saying 'literally impossible' and then proposing a workaround that makes it possible. that's such a fucking mood.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Integrity

[XRay]

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

EDIT: a thought could be if it was deemed sufficiently useful by the folks here, inspired by you, to create a Fire Emblem Heroes Curator role and distribute it fairly liberally with the only elevated privilege being they can edit all posts in the Fire Emblem Analysis subforum. with a rolling squad of ten or so of you, including all mods and admins, the concept could work. please provide thoughts

That could work. It feels like a lot of responsibility though, but if there are a dozen of us doing it and spreading the work, then I guess it is not too bad.

Whether it is useful though, I am not actually sure. 90% of the performance builds are just cookie cutter builds (at least for the player phase side of things), so I am not sure if it is necessary to make a build page for every unit. The primary benefit is to offer an alternative view to Gamepress, but I am not sure if that is even necessary since I am not sure how many people even read those anymore. Veterans already have a good grasp of how to build things. Seems like new players generally ask questions first, and it seems like by the time they discover the build section of websites, they already have a good idea of what to do.

Edited September 25, 2020 by XRay

[Othin]

If the intent is to provide a community-sourced alternative to Gamepress here, could the Serenes wiki be an easier place for it?

[XRay]

3 minutes ago, Othin said:

If the intent is to provide a community-sourced alternative to Gamepress here, could the Serenes wiki be an easier place for it?

That sounds like a good idea.

[Icelerate]

If you want to grant the community the ability to edit the OP of other people's threads, I think those edits should only be passed once the OP or a mod allows them. 

[Integrity]

2 hours ago, XRay said:

hether it is useful though, I am not actually sure

this is my issue. is someone really gonna tune into the sf subforum about ways to build roy instead of just looking up the shitload of other resources that tell them to give him fury 4? no

 

1 hour ago, Othin said:

If the intent is to provide a community-sourced alternative to Gamepress here, could the Serenes wiki be an easier place for it?

the community alternative to gamepress is the war room.that's the entire point of the war room. the wiki is a horrible place to leave ghb strats compared to the war room.

 

1 hour ago, Icelerate said:

If you want to grant the community the ability to edit the OP of other people's threads, I think those edits should only be passed once the OP or a mod allows them. 

this is literally impossible in the forums software

[Fire Emblem Fan]

I've never really had much issue with the organization here. I can find everything okay. The only page I wish was updated more is the 5-star level 40 +10 page. It doesn't see many updates to the main OP page, so a lot of peoples' +10 accomplishments go unnoticed.

[Othin]

4 hours ago, Integrity said:

the community alternative to gamepress is the war room.that's the entire point of the war room. the wiki is a horrible place to leave ghb strats compared to the war room.

I mean for builds, not for GHB strats. The War Room is functioning fine as-is, the issue was the Analysis section.

[Vicious Sal]

:Analysis is a fun idea, but it has no place here. It should have, but it doesn't because we don't have enough people that have the time and skill to update these pages for units on the daily. Xray said that 90% of player phase build probablyt will be the same, but that's the exact kind of stuff that pulled down the previous analysis. Yeah, for PVE you can use any standard fury Desp build but who cares about PVE since that's not where the interesting stuff happens and it's not the content that people that read this stuff usually struggle with. 

Those things can be a nice mention and don't need updating all the much, neither does Arena since that's just listing the best Legendaries per season and having high scoring units. The actual interesting builds are within a smal part of Arena Assault, for specific counterpicks against common legendaries such as Boey vs Leif and Chrom. But most of it is in AR, and we don't have enough people here that rank consistently high and have the time or energy to have a good grasp on the meta and knowing how the meta works. Those are the builds that actually matter and require strategy and we just lack the people to make that an active hub.

 

 

Regarding the other parts of the Feh forum:

 

The 5* + 10 topic needs someone that can actively update it, all the love to Raven, but it's clear he just isn't having the time for it.
A general topic with "Must reads" seems better than multiple, the skill inheritance topic seems rather outdated and is it really necessary nowadays? Just merge it with the general questions thread imo.

In the war room a pinned topic for every important mode seems fine. Things like frontline Phalanx and voting gauntlet don't seem big enough to warrrant a continuous topic. Maybe just an explanation of the mode in the general directory and rules topic. Other than that, it's pretty much fine as is. Stuff quickly gets relegated to the depths of the 2nd and third pages because of the nature of the game. 

[Othin]

I wonder if a pinned War Room thread meant to function as a directory linking to other threads could work? Like, I've gotten lost trying to find old hero battle threads there, but compiling all the links would remove risk of that.

[Flying Shogi]

4 hours ago, Othin said:

I wonder if a pinned War Room thread meant to function as a directory linking to other threads could work? Like, I've gotten lost trying to find old hero battle threads there, but compiling all the links would remove risk of that.

There's already a directory thread but it's locked, which is fine but it's gonna need someone to update it each time a new special map is released.