Do we not directly reference competitive play for video games?

Apparently, this rule is being enforced on the Pokémon pages and is starting to be enforced on the Super Smash Bros. pages.

What's wrong with competitive play? It's not like it's a completely invalid way to play a game; it's just something that the hardcore fans mold out of their favorite game without changing anything. And, almost by definition, using competitive strategies in the main game (if there is one) always helps when going against the computer, since no computer can be as good as a human player without cheating at this point.

Can you provide examples of this supposed ban?

We do want to avoid what we call Walkthrough Mode, where game articles turn into strategy guides rather than a listing of tropes. But we also recognize that the various Competitive Balance tropes can be highly mutable depending on the metagame, making them subject to endless arguments.

If we were to reference every individual experience for every person who played the game, the page would go on forever, also I one can argue that outside of gameplay mechanics which are mentioned in wiki pages, multiplayer is pretty out of the creators hands and can be anything you want it to be.

Me and my cousins you used to form plotline on Halo 2 multiplayer maps. One of them involved one of us being the chosen one. Does that have any business being on the Halo 2 page as a trope?

Oh, are we talking about troping individual users' gameplay experiences? That's forbidden for the same reason we torched Troper Tales. We have no interest in it.

@Fighteer:

Here's an editor's note from one of the Pokemon pages:

And here's an edit reason from the history of Characters.Super Smash Bros 64:

The reason I brought it to Wiki Talk is because the issue is pretty fuzzy. We don't seem to have any definite rules other than stuff that fan groups will loosely agree upon.

edited 14th Oct '14 1:48:31 PM by WaxingName

I suspect that it went too deep into Walkthrough Mode, with every character getting a GameFAQs level of detail in their description and trope lists, with plenty of arguing back and forth. It falls under the "don't rock the boat" section of our general rules.

I am not sure if we want to have such a rule. It's kind of too vaguely formulated for my liking. I would go with just "no personal experiences please" or somesuch.

There's no definite rule, but if there was one, it would deter Natter all the more.

We also do have a UsefulNotes.Professional Gaming page. So some of the competitive play stuff might have been moved there.

Again, the issue here is that competitive gaming can be a wiki all by itself. It's too much, and too polarizing, to work in the environment that we have.

edited 15th Oct '14 8:31:23 AM by Fighteer

And non-serious/casual play is any less vague? The viability of characters varies immensely among skill levels.

And none of it is of any interest to us as a wiki. Talk about it on the forums all you like.

I think the ruling banning the Smogon stuff in the Pokémon character pages is that the pages are supposed to be talking about stuff in the Pokémon games themselves, not what non-official sources have ruled over.

Therefore, they've been moved to Website.Smogon.

What about Super Smash Bros, then?

This. We are documenting what's in the game, not what some third party has decided should be in the game.

Same thing. Keep it about the game and not the fanwank.

I dont see any harm in say making a subpage for various tournaments, organized gaming and such.

It is not Troper Tales as these are organized events.

But they aren't tropable in the way that we trope works of fiction. We don't make articles for concerts, elections, or video game tournaments, because they lack narrative intent. We could list the major ones in a Useful Notes article, but they are off-topic for the wiki proper.

Right, that stuff could go under useful notes. We do, in general, have tropes about gameplay balance and I don't see anything wrong with acknowledging how it applies at the professional gaming level, like Difficult, but Awesome, Awesome Yet Practical and Boring Yet Practical. But long entries about the League Of Legends championship matches don't really apply to the actual game.

If we want to enforce this, and I think it's a good move to do so, the Pokemon pages are gonna need a lot of cleanup. I see a bunch of discussion about competitive strategies leaking in, and I've only looked at three of the many, many character pages.

The way I see it, strategies are fine, as long as the strategies are the actual trope (such as the tropes on Videogame Tactical Index), and not so elaborately written that they include stuff like counters (Walkthrough Mode), opinions about the strategies (Natter and Thread Mode) and other secondary details that aren't important to understand why that's an example of the trope.

@Umbee Which Pokemon pages are you talking about? All the character pages have been purged of comp stuff barring some extremely borderline examples (Zoroark and Aegislash due to how their abilities work). I was under the impression that the YMMV were fair game since competitive play is an important part of many fandoms and opinions related to them can't really be excluded, especially when a fair number of comp-related tropes like Character Tiers and Tier Induced Scrappy are YMMV.

edited 18th Oct '14 5:05:21 PM by Karxrida

The character pages for Kanto species. I'm seeing some stuff about how [insert Pokemon here] is weak to Stealth Rock, or how you can always expect to see such-and-such move in [insert Pokemon here]'s moveset.

Stealth Rock can still under For Massive Damage, since losing half of your health in kind of a big deal in any game. I'll go over the Kanto pages when I get a chance to fix them.

I mean that specific character listings place special emphasis on weaknesses to moves commonly used in the metagame, including Stealth Rock. A general For Massive Damage entry isn't an issue, since that kind of thing isn't exclusive to any single play style.