Mods/Edwin - can we change the thread title to something more descriptive for ease of future searching please?
Say I have the same question about Friction. I have no idea from reading "Two Villain Questions" that the answer is in here.
Done, but that was kind of a pain, since this thread has two different subjects.
Thanks Andy, that helps a lot. :)
And yeah, one thread per question is definitely better.
I have never been able to comprehend why you think that's so. To me it seems grotesquely wasteful to make an entire thread for just one question.
Ease of future searching, as I've explained before. And how is it "grotesquely wasteful"? It's not like it's written on paper or anything.
So last week I experienced a particular situation where I wanted to check what the ruling was. I knew it had come up recently because I remembered reading it only a little while before, but I didn't know which thread it was in. I had to search through a lot of threads before I found it in the middle of something unrelated, and it disrupted my game far more than was necessary. Seperate threads with sensible, descriptive titles means we don't waste time searching because it's immediately obvious which one we want.
If you take your opinion to extremes, we'd just have one thread with everything in it and no one would be able to find anything.
In computer programming, this would be:
Monolithic design vs. object oriented design.
In monolithic, everything is in one big block. You only have to copy one file over, but searching for anything can be long and tedious. Maintaining monolithic code is a lot harder.
In object oriented design, you have a separate file for each "object" (usually a section of code representing some aspect of the program that may be accessed from multiple different locations in the main code or that may have multiple instances of itself created, like building blocks). Finding a bug in an object just means checking through that object's code. You have a lot more files to keep track of so file names are very important, but maintenance is much easier.
In every case I have seen, the object oriented design was much better overall than the monolithic approach. In this case, I have to agree with Silverleaf. It makes it much easier to search for the relevant thread this way. We may get more threads overall, but getting to the one we want when we want it becomes much easier.
I envision…er…ummm…a world where forum threads are cheep enough to make en-mass so that there will never be a scarcity to waste. That's the world I wanna live in
Thread proliferation. Takes up space on the feed. Fewer threads are better. Search is worthless anyway, so "ease of future searching" is a lost cause IMO. Really, we need a rulings index.
So last week I experienced a particular situation where I wanted to check what the ruling was. I knew it had come up recently because I remembered reading it only a little while before, but I didn't know which thread it was in.
That happens to me a lot too, but because I don't have a portable computer, usually I just have to make a spot ruling and get on with the game.
Seperate threads with sensible, descriptive titles means we don't waste time searching
But unless you remember the EXACT wording of the thread title, how are you going to find it? If you tried to find this thread by searching "cards under Promo Blade" (prior to my typing that exact phrase in this post, of course, and possibly even thereafter since the search seems to be ANY-based rather than ALL-based), you'd probably find five thousand other threads but NOT this one. Your best hope to find this thread would be to search ONLY the word "facing". If you didn't happen to remember that this exact, fairly unusual word was in the title (which you likely wouldn't, since it's not really the most pertinent part of what the topic is about; you'd think of "Blade" or "Promo" much sooner I think, or even "face up or face down", which wouldn't work at all because it'd find every topic containing the word "or"), you'd have very little hope of finding the right thread, and even less of finding it promptly.
But, if it was under a SINGLE "all rules questions go here" thread, whose topic creator (or a moderator) regularly went through and indexed it, you'd be fine. We have something pretty close to that already with the Spiffworld ratings collective, though he insists on keeping that in a PDF rather than a Web-browsable text file (I know web browsers can sometimes open or "preview" PDFs now, but it's the sort of thing that can easily be impaired by all manner of technical issues), and he refuses to include rulings that are generally agreed upon by the community unless they've been confirmed by the >G crew.
because it's immediately obvious which one we want.If you take your opinion to extremes, we'd just have one thread with everything in it and no one would be able to find anything.
As opposed to ten thousand threads with everything in them and no one can find anything? What I proposed was much more of a compromise solution.
There might be better ways to use the search function? Idk. Just thinking out loud. Like, you could try just using Keywords in the "keywords" box instead of phrases that may or may not appear? Never rule out operator error.
I'm actually talking about the "scanning the list of thread titles" type of searching. If I'm looking for something about the order that Friction plays cards in, I'll pick up this thread very quickly now it has a title that references that. I couldn't do that before with the original, hugely unhelpful title.
Sure, the search on here isn't great. But that isn't an excuse to use bad thread titles, because the forum search isn't the only way people find things. It's also helpful for those people who might want to choose which threads to read (rather than reading every single thing like I tend to do), because it's much more difficult than it needs to be to assess which ones are relevant to you if they have generic titles. If everything's called "I have a few questions" then you can't even remember which was the one about the Chairman's flip side and which one was about whether you can discard your hand if you don't have any cards in it.
I agree that some kind of index would be great. But we don't have one, and so letting questions get buried in a composite monster thread is hardly ideal. More threads are much better, especially as comments in a composite thread would get mixed up with each other chronologically so if you were only interested in one question you'd have to sift through replies to other questions to find what you needed. More than likely a new person faced with this will just create a new thread to redundantly ask their question that has already been thoroughly answered and discussed elsewhere, which basically wastes everyone's time.
Not only that, but many threads have a tendency to get derailed (even if only slightly), even if they do get back on track in the end - having one big thread containing All of the Things would be pretty ridiculous if you wanted to find That One Thing in amongst all the other queries and random little conversational sidetracks that go on. There's always Ctrl+F to skim through a page for relevant words, but if you're putting all the queries into one thread, that thread is gonna be many pages long, so you'd still have to tediously click through each page if the keyword you'd searched for wasn't on the one you were looking at.
The fact that this thread has already derailed from Friction and Blade to thread structure is a pretty good example, really ;).
Good point. This one's prime for a split.
...and there it goes ;).
You're welcome. 
Gosh, that felt powerful. Let me try an experiment.
It's about time someone bought me a plane ticket so I can got to the thing on Saturday at >G! ;)
And thanks imprimis5.
But how many do you want to scan? If the thread I'm looking for isn't on the New Topics or Active Topics or maaaaybe page 1 of Rules and Gameplay, I lack the patience to keep looking. But if it's a thread I created for rules questions I myself asked, I can always find it in my Created Topics. It'd be even better if there was a Subscribed Topics function, of course, so I could find threads others have created. But the more different threads there are, the fewer of them fit in one list, so the more lists you have to look through to find them, and I'm not going to sit around going through page after page of lists trying to find something.
More than likely a new person faced with this will just create a new thread to redundantly ask their question that has already been thoroughly answered and discussed elsewhere, which basically wastes everyone's time.
That much we agree on at least. But that's not really a solvable problem, not unless >G will write a real rulebook for the game, instead of the splashy comic-font large-print "Look How Awesome Our Game Is" intro book that hardly tells you anything about how to actually play (though of course the bio information is nice). As long as the game's default position on how to solve rules conundrum is "uh, what do YOU think is right; it's you're game, so do whatever you think is fun", those threads are going to get created.
Just today in my ERT class, we looked at a rather simplistic psychological model which postulated four basic types of people, and one of the analyses it used was about each one's most fundamental need. One of the four types was listed as "Needs to be correct," and people like that just aren't completely happy playing a game with such an imprecise rulebook, no matter how awesome the game is overall. They - or perhaps I should say "we" - can't just accept "decide for yourself" as an answer; we need to have the RIGHT answer.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what Spiff's document thingy us for - all the "right" answers are there for pretty much every significant query which has come up, and those answers are right because they came directly from one of the >G guys. You don't get much righter than that ;).
Deciding for yourself is the right answer.
I agree with all of that except the "pretty much every significant query". He's not even close to that; every card whose workings are even vaguely ambiguous deserves to be clarified, and he only has a few of the earliest and most often-repeated questions.
That would only be true if I was always right. Are you saying I'm always right, Greywind? (If you are, don't expect to ever live it down.)
Any card with a "vaguely ambiguous" working has probably thus already been queried about on this forum (though whether the wording on a card is ambiguous is probably down to the opinion of whomever is reading said card at the time). Was there anything specific you wanted to ask about? Because that's partially what the forum is for (you know, apart from us all generally spouting off about how cool the game and >G are :D), after all ;).
That's not true. To my knowledge, I have every single instance where a >G employee has laid down a ruling on a particular card or interaction. Unless by "every significant query" you mean "every question ever asked (whether answered or not) including all possible future questions", I think I've got it covered. And if I don't, just point me to one I've missed and I'll add it. Easy peasy.
FWIW, I'm on Team Silverleaf. Imagine an encyclopedia with no chapters or headings, with all the info jumbled together into a single gigantic entry. That's what a forum that isn't well-groomed into separate threads for separate topics would become.
I would absolutely love for all rule question subjects to be in the form [<deck>] - <card> - <additional keywords>.
Example: "[Legacy] - Superhuman Durability - interaction with Fortitude"
Want to find all of the questions about a deck, just search for "[Legacy]" and you'll get a quick list. Might require some kind of magic for questions that belong to multiple decks (or just extra single-post threads that link to the base topic).
The fact that the search capability here is less than ideal is not an excuse for laziness when creating and titling threads. I would argue that it only strengthens the argument for having sensibly titled threads, since that has to be our primary search method in many cases.
That puts the burden on us the public to invest extra effort in something we're doing for fun. I know >G is a small company with very limited funds, so I'm not demanding that they improve their forum's functionality, but I do consider it to be their job, not ours; the responsibility should fall on them to deal with it as best they're able to, not to delegate tasks to their consumers, even if we're willing. I come here and I toss off the question that's on top of my head; from then on, the ball is no longer in my court.
Frankly, I'd much rather they spend their time making good games and leave it to us to act like adults that take responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves. Perhaps, rather than toss off the question that's on the top of your head, take some time to think about what it is you are trying to accomplish. If you are asking a question - asking all of us for the favor of giving you some information - take a moment to do us a favor as well and put a little effort into the asking. And, incidentally, the ball is always in your court. You can edit the subject of any thread you created at any time.
Sure, you can find it in your created topics. But what about everyone else? You want us to search through pages and pages each of many different threads (assuming we all have our own thread like you) to find a question, having to actually read every post? How is it reasonable to look under "Edwin" to find out what order Friction should play cards in?
You want everyone else to display far more patience than you're capable of displaying.
Even games with the best written rulebooks generate questions, and we need a place to discuss them. A place that's organised sensibly so we can find things. Redundant questions here are the result of a person either not bothering to read the forum, or being unable to find what they're looking for. Better organisation leads to less redundancy with that last scenario.
I'm totally with the sqgl. Much much better than "the search is crap so I'll make it much more difficult for everyone except myself to actually find things". Keywords? Genius.
Agreed again. We're a community, and we should all be pitching in to help each other out where we can, making things easier and better for each other and especially for new people. Doing things that inconvenience others just because you feel it's someone else's responsibility to deliver you the things that you want as and when you want them is pretty crappy behaviour. Many of us are perfectly happy to help out where we can because we love the game and the community, and don't expect something for nothing - >G has no obligation whatsoever to answer our questions or interact with us in any way, or provide us with a forum, or clear up things we haven't understood, or organise events for us. But they do all of those things, and the least we can do is spend a little extra effort to make things easier for everyone.