• Welcome to Smashboards, the world's largest Super Smash Brothers community! Over 250,000 Smash Bros. fans from around the world have come to discuss these great games in over 19 million posts!

    You are currently viewing our boards as a visitor. Click here to sign up right now and start on your path in the Smash community!

The Future of Character Guides

TheBuzzSaw

Young Link Extraordinaire
Moderator
BRoomer
Joined
Jul 21, 2005
Messages
10,479
An integral part of smash culture (particularly here at SWF) is the plethora of wonderful guides that zero in on the utmost details of each character. They detail the character's strengths, weaknesses, strategies, combos, character matchups, etc. I can assure you they will return when Brawl hits the streets.

I am hoping to set some new standards. With these new guides, I would like to see an evolution in how we handle them. There were several things that bugged me about the current system. First and foremost, I cannot stand reading guides in forum thread form. I like the threads themselves for comments, questions, and feedback, but the guide needs to be placed elsewhere and formatted nicely. Let the forum be a forum while the guide does its own thing. The SmashWiki is an excellent compendium of knowledge, but when it comes to character guides, I think the Wiki is even uglier than the threads, so please don't put them into the Wiki.

Second, there needs to be more of a character guide "home". This is where the SmashWiki would be useful. An index of guides sorted by character would be wonderful as opposed to having to dig them out of the character specific forums individually. There can also (hopefully) be a master update page where guide creators can post notifications of guide modifications.

Third, there needs to be at least one "open source" guide for each character. I learned the hard way the burden of attempting to be the knowledge center of a character. It works out at first, but the game evolves, and everyone starts disagreeing and bickering about certain aspects (mostly character matchups). It would be nice if the community worked together to agree on those aspects. This is a more complex issue that would need to be discussed further.

Thoughts?
 

TheBuzzSaw

Young Link Extraordinaire
Moderator
BRoomer
Joined
Jul 21, 2005
Messages
10,479
Is there a point to do this when we don't know the entire roster and the game is not coming out for another 3 months?
Yeah, let's wait for the roster to be revealed and then decide on an organization. Yeah, that'll go over real well. I'm not telling people to go start making guides. I'm discussing a new way to organize them. It could easily be applied to Melee for practice.
 

WeXzuZ

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Jun 15, 2007
Messages
185
*gets dictionary for first paragraph*
I see your point and I agree with you.
An open source would be great to have for a character guide. But that is a bit similar to SmashWiki.
Personally I think a thread may link to a guide written on e.g. gamefaqs.com, the person who wrote the
guide can take feedback and upgrade his/her guide at will (with credits given). This would work almost like an open source-ish guide.
For this, I am thinking of mods making an open source guide where people contribute with feedback in shape of characteristics, stages, story mode etc.

As of guide "home" I am thinking of Gamefaqs again, not to advertise, but the homepage is set up perfectly, its easy to navigate through and the guides HAVE to be written Notepad style.
 

Firekid2

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Sep 30, 2007
Messages
130
Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I don't really mind fourm FAQs, but we should definately have some sort of compendium.
 
Top Bottom