Should YMMV tropes have examples?

I know this will probably get me banned, however, should YMMV tropes have examples?

I would rather not cut YMMV entirely, but to me, it seems illogical to have examples for YMMV, when most of the time, it will be your own opinion.

We used to have YMMV, regular tropes, trivia, etc all on the same page before we started dividing them up for better organization. One of the trades off to that is people believing certain pages are somehow "inferior" to the others, because otherwise why would we divide it up?

While there are a lot of ymmv tropes that are purely about audience reactions like Broken Base, there are many tropes that are just as much about storytelling as any of the main page tropes. But the problem is that examples tend to evoke audience reactions rather than something purely objective and academic. Moral Event Horizon is one major example of that. It's sort of a "Why the wiki can't have nice things." Big-Lipped Alligator Moment is another example, as the trope itself looks like it should be objective but it attracts merely odd or unusual moments rather than genuinely bizarre scenes according to the criteria of the trope.

Okay, I see now.

A large part of it is also that pretty much all tropes are based on what the audience can see. And people by nature see things subjectively. There are a lot of tropes with objective definitions, but those definitions include things that can only be judged subjectively. That doesn't mean the pattern isn't there, or that it's less important than something that can be measured objectively.

For one thing, most of the game balance tropes are YMMV because they depend on player skill to judge whether something is hard or easy. An Anti-Climax Boss is one example of a relatively objective trope, but the line where it's easy enough of a boss is very wide.

The same goes for Player Punch and other tropes meant to affect the emotions of the audience. (Though I'm a bit confused as to why that's YMMV and Gut Punch isn't, despite being rather similar in nature.)

And while I don't speak for the mods, asking for something doesn't get you banned (assuming good faith), but outright making sweeping changes against current policy will.

If I may take a wild guess, I'd say you still got that time when some joker who shall not be named got bounced for preemptively changing the name of Nakama (now officially known as True Companions) to "Band of Brothers" or something like that without official mod approval fresh on your mind and didn't want to step on any moderator toes when offering this (admittedly radical) suggestion. If I may take a wild guess.

edited 2nd Aug '14 12:29:21 PM by ryanasaurus0077

What is with the first clause? Fear not :)

The problem with not only YMMV entries, but also ANY entry that bluntly says "no examples on this page" is that despite the pages themselves having no examples, the examples for these entries are still being posted on YMMV sections of various media. And since you can easily find any instance of that by just clicking "Related", the only thing that results from forcing no examples on the entry itself is that finding the examples is less convenient. So I have to question why should it be done at all.

edited 3rd Aug '14 10:55:37 AM by ZuTheSkunk

Example sections of tropes collect all examples in one place. That means that any problems with examples that is tolerable when they are spread out (i.e on YMMV pages) is amplified by the concentration effect when they are in one place (i.e the trope's example section).