Needs Help: Guide Dang It

(Self-thumped, I can't read.)

Edited by Albert3105 on May 8th 2021 at 4:47:48 AM

Regarding Walkthrough Mode, I've had it in mind that some sort of cleanup would likely be called for in that direction however the crowner turned out.

Still, the original question was that of categorisation as YMMV or not. Speaking for myself, I would say that it's currently misclassified as non-YMMV, and that's primarily what I want to fix here.

@YourIdeas: Thank you for linking the wick-check in the first post! ^_^

Fair enough! We'll see what's happened by that point, then!

Day-five update!

• The crowner continues to be in turmoil. While the relative positions of the top two items remains stable, as do the relative positions of the two two items as a pair and the bottom two as a pair, the consensus seems to still be fleeting.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 8th 2021 at 10:55:44 AM

With the end of the weekend nearing, and with it the crowner deadline, I'm hereby bumping for votes!

At time of writing there's no consensus yet!

Would it help if I made an announcement in ATT?

Eh, maybe, though I'm personally just of the opinion that we should let this crowner die its slow death. Evidently, the ideas are controversial and the topic as a whole is, er...let's just call it "difficult" for us to even try and discuss here.

Even if we get consensus, I wouldn't actually feel good about it. Assuming the YMMV move would win since it currently has the most upvotes, I know a good portion of this thread would be pretty upset. And that can happen with any TRS crowner, but this thread seems especially volatile, and I'd rather make decisions that I know won't be highly controversial and questionable down the road.

So yeah. Make an ATT report if you think it's best, but my opinion is to just leave it alone.

I'm with WarJay. Leave the crowner alone.

This has been a divisive matter.

I'm not sure of how I feel about letting an extant issue lie specifically in order to avoid trouble—but I do understand the desire, I believe, and it is appealing, I'll confess.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 9th 2021 at 7:44:18 PM

Day-six update!

• It looks like the crowner has somewhat stabilised by this point.
• Alas, it looks like it has stabilised in a state that lacks consensus for any one option.
  • Presuming that this remains until the crowner is called at the end of the weekend, it looks like we'll be taking no action. (Save for cleanup of "Walkthrough Mode" issues, presumably.)
    • A pity, from my perspective—but so the process goes!

Now that it's in consensus range, I want the people who voted up the make YMMV option to really think about what they're doing. Negative YMMV items with loose definitions have been historically proven to lead to a lot of complaining, like Hype Backlash, The Scrappy, and Scrappy Level. Even if Guide Dang It! really is YMMV (it's not, and Guide Dang It Wick Check is evidence of that), having it stay in Main is the Lesser of Two Evils because both the page and examples will become significantly worse, and it will lead to excessive complaining that'll cause it to need TRS again. YMMV pages attract too much complaining as is, so we really don't need more of it. Then again, one person still wants it to be YMMV despite acknowledging evidence against the idea, so maybe I wasted my time writing this.

Anyhow, one idea I have to solve the Walkthrough Mode—which is what we should focus on more than anything else since that problem is why this trope got taken to TRS in the first place—is to create a long-term cleanup thread.

Is this consensus? We've been in this range for several days now and yet we've held off, so I'm not sure if this really qualifies. And this is me being genuine here- this crowner confuses me and I want to make sure we're all on the same page.

I'll admit that I don't actually have strong opinions for or against the YMMV idea. I was mostly just opposed to the split- my opinion was "Wherever we put it, it has to go to one of them", and I see the points on both sides of the Main/-YMMV/ debate.

Looking at the wick check, there was no folder to even detect if an example was written subjectively or not. This makes it harder to tell if there's actually YMMV usage hiding or if people just weren't thinking about that aspect when doing the wick check, or if there's just genuinely no subjective material to be found there. Skimming through it seems to be the latter, but again, it's not something made obvious from a cursory look.

And again, this is the issue with this thread in the first place. People who came here weren't reading the wick check. People who came here didn't even know the wick check existed. What they saw was the question of if this trope is YMMV and a massive debate about whether or not it's YMMV. Wick Check evidence means diddly-squat if the people voting didn't have easy access to it and had no reason to think it'd even change anything, since it obviously didn't affect the discussion at all.

I'm just saying. We can't really fault the people who favor the YMMV bit if they were going off the discussion and framing of this thread in isolation, which I'm sure most of them were. It also couldn't have helped that the main voice against the YMMV idea was AGuy, whose general tone might've driven people against him as a result even if his points were completely solid.

And that's another reason to just ditch and burn this crowner- because it's targeted at solving an issue that doesn't actually have anything to do with the problems GDI is actually facing.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 10th 2021 at 1:33:47 PM

At the time of this writing, the make YMMV option currently has a 2:1 ratio, so it's technically in consensus range per How Crowners Work. Also, is ditching and burning the crowner regardless of results something we can actually do? I highly doubt that would be allowed (without a do-over crowner), but if it's something we do, let's do it.

The mods basically said that if the results didn't improve over the weekend then we'd just close this crowner as a failure and move on. I've only ever seen it done at other times where the result was too controversial or questionable for us to actually go through with it in good conscience, or where the results just don't show any consensus at all. In this case, I think the ideas are so controversial and so unrelated to the actual issues that leaving it to die is the best option here.

Maybe we technically have consensus, but it's not a consensus I'd feel good about going through with.

In any case, I'm also not sure it's possible to fix the Walkthrough Mode issues. It's just one of those things that's going to happen with a trope like this, and I can't see any TRS fix for it.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 10th 2021 at 1:42:34 PM

Well, YMMV has just reached consensus. Let's see if it's stable for a couple more days before we call.

...Like I said, even if this thing is stable, I don't think our wiki will be so stable if we go through with it. I'm not even referring to the potential complaint bait, but just how goddamn controversial this whole issue has been and how upset people are going to be over it.

I'm just getting a bad feeling about this whole thing.

I agree. This whole thing feels "tainted" enough that I am not planning of calling the crowner.

I feel like original thread title screwed with things by making people predisposed to blindly vote for the YMMV option. It doesn't help that the wick check was buried in the middle of the thread since this was originally in Trope Talk (or Wiki Talk?).

Even with the title change the YMMV option had enough votes to be in the top spot, creating a feedback loop where it continued to be upvoted.

Edited by Karxrida on May 10th 2021 at 11:38:54 AM

It was Trope Talk. This thread was moved over wholesale, which yeah, sort of predisposes the sort of conversation people will be having when the title itself was still about YMMV.

...So if we ignore all the YMMV talk. If we scrap that whole discussion as irrelevant or off-topic, we're left with a trope that has some Walkthrough Mode usage, and not much else. At this point, I'd vote for just having a cleanup thread for it or making a general Walkthrough Mode Cleanup thread and closing this nightmare.

TRS is already backlogged and we need to get threads to close. I'd rather have this one close and turn our attention to one with more serious problems and a more coherent train of discussion, while still doing a cleanup effort.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 10th 2021 at 2:29:29 PM

If we decide to not move through with a transfer to YMMV, I'd say the following needs to occur:

• Description update so it's clearer what the trope is trying to accomplish.
• Clean-up thread to address the issues brought up in the Wick check (Walkthrough Mode, non-GDI examples, move some examples to a more appropriate trope, etc.). I'd be fine with a general Walkthrough Mode cleanup too.

Sounds good to me.

That... was actually a bit of a hurtful thing to say.

Yes, I acknowledged that one of the arguments against YMMV was fair. That doesn't mean that the argument against YMMV is stronger—rather, in this case it means that there was arguments both for and against. Personally, I found the arguments for to be more compelling. Others disagreed. (And that's okay.)

If anything, I'd think that acknowledging that a counter-argument does have points indicates that I'm actually engaging with what others are saying and considering what's being said. o_0

Having had time for the thought to settle in, I'm starting to feel more convinced by this line of thinking. I might not be happy about it—but perhaps better such passing things than major grief abroad on the forum.

Of course, it may be moot: I see that crowner the seems to have dropped out of consensus range again.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 10th 2021 at 11:56:34 AM

Sorry about that. The reason for my tone is because I'm worried about the consequences that'll happen if this becomes YMMV, how easily those consequences could be avoided if the YMMV option is simply downvoted, and I let my emotions get into what I typed. Let me put this more politely: it's pretty clear from reading this thread that both sides of the whole YMMV debate have already made up their minds, and there's little if anything that can be said to change them. That was the point I was trying to convey.

Also, I feel it's worth mentioning that there's a difference between sticking to your stance while acknowledging valid points in arguments against it, and acknowledging evidence against your point of view while sticking to it anyway. The latter is something that confuses me, and makes me wonder what could possibly convince someone to change their mind if even evidence can't.

Edited by Kevjro7 on May 10th 2021 at 4:46:23 AM

I'm actually against it being YMMV and the only reason I even switched in the first place was because the main debater for that side was a little too extreme for my tastes.

I'm fine for just keeping it a regular trope and removing the crowner.

With the crowner issue coming to a head, I feel I can provide my piece on the other issue brought up - Walkthrough Mode - though, for the good of everyone, I won't stick around beyond my initial post. Besides that, I noted the issue with the topic title being a leading question in the context of the crowner; for obvious reasons, however, I felt nothing good would come out of me bringing it up.

Given that the crowner seems to be resolved and is unlikely to be called, I will say, on the issue of Walkthrough Mode:

I don't see Walkthrough Mode as an actual issue here. Generally, the issue with Walkthrough Mode is that it's irrelevant natter, or used to back a Justifying Edit. The page distinctly notes it as natter - and natter is conversation in the main page, not someone noting things you have to do in a game in order to explain their example.

Most video game tropes are about some particular aspect of a game, not about specifically how to invoke or overcome that aspect. Guide Dang It! is not most tropes. Guide Dang It! is about a person not realistically being able to discover or solve something without outside knowledge (well, that can be debated, but I'm staying out of that.) It specifically involves actions a person must take to find/solve/beat something.

More important than anything else in an example is that it allows someone unfamiliar with a work to understand it. This is even referenced in Walkthrough Mode:

The problem is that, for Guide Dang It!, a generic example does the opposite of allowing a reader to understand it - it just tells the reader that there are steps that are needed to do something, which is true for a lot of things in a video game.

If someone posts an example of Guide Dang It! saying you need to talk to three specific characters and defeat a specific enemy to get something, and I don't know the game in question? It could be that the example is actually Guide Dang It! because the three characters are random gimmick NPCs each in one of three far-off villages that only appear at dawn, afternoon, and dusk respectively, and the enemy is a hidden random encounter that only appears at night. Or it could be that these guys are right next to each other and the enemy is easily found in the next route, and the troper just happens to be someone who skips everything that's not the main story.

I have no way of understanding the example without knowing what it is about the steps that would make it unreasonable for someone to learn, figure out, or happen upon by themself. Though some descriptions might be too detailed, they, unlike other examples of Walkthrough Mode, are important context for the trope.

Now, I feel we should not miss the forest for the trees - we should consider why Walkthrough Mode is a problem in the first place, not just draw a hard line against anything involving a description of gameplay solutions. Things that are necessary to understand the trope are the exact opposite of natter, and we risk zero context examples (which the wick check shows plenty of) without detailed enough descriptions.

A bit of background information that might help: Walkthrough Mode was around when we didn't bar tropes that fall under YMMV today from work pages, and some pages (like Fake Difficulty) served more as dumps for complaining. Thus, you would inevitably (and I do mean inevitably) get tropes like Fake Difficulty and Scrappy Level showing up on game pages, and you were very likely to get tropers who wanted to show off their game skill, be condescending to others, or defend the thing in question other people were bashing, by noting why those other people were bad and why what they were complaining about was perfectly fine. That's not to say that it's never a problem now - but it was a huge problem when the page was initially created, because the polarizing nature of the tropes now barred from work pages guaranteed a back-and-forth about what players were "supposed" to do and were just too dumb to know.

That is to say - one has to consider the context of Walkthrough Mode that makes it an issue. "Walkthrough" descriptions that are integral to understanding an example are far from the issues that are generally associated with Walkthrough Mode, and are often necessary to avoid ZCEs.

That said, if there are plenty of examples of people replying to Guide Dang It! examples with a walkthrough as to why the examples are not Guide Dang It!, those should be rewritten or removed. I believe a harder line regarding what qualifies as Guide Dang It! would help in this regard - if something is clearly not Guide Dang It! by the standard we have outlined, then the example can just be removed outright if there's actually a suitable solution.

Well, that's my piece. I'll sit back, now.

Edited by AGuy on May 10th 2021 at 8:06:02 AM

Those are really good points. And regarding this, I think it looks good and that you should take it to TLP.

Right, sorry that we keep forgetting about the other trope idea. If it's not on the TLP yet, take it there. If it is, bump it and I'm sure during cleanup we can find examples of GDI that fit better there.

And yeah, your points on Walkthrough Mode are, well...on point, pardon the pun. It's one of those things that's hard to combat, and I think there's a difference between examples explaining things in more detail and genuine walkthrough mode- and genuine walkthrough mode isn't unique to this trope and can only be fixed with diligent cleanup.