User talk:Lolimsogreat21/Sandbox2

Before submitting

Before you submit this, I'd suggest running it by some other editors for spelling mistakes and a wording check. Making an entire strategy page by yourself can also make the strategy very biased.
GrampaSwood (talk) 20:03, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

I was already planning to go through the entire page after I'm finished and correct any grammar mistakes I found, so I won't need help on that teritory. But asking other editors for potential biases does seem like a good idea.

Lolimsogreat21 (talk) 21:41, 2 September 2021 (UTC)Lolimsogreat21

I'd still say you need help on this, you still replace "due" with "duo" and replace "quite" with "quit". The reason it needs to be checked by people is that rewriting an entire strategy by yourself is not a very good thing, strategies are meant to be strategies given by multiple people with different experiences to make a good combination of strategies and tips. I'd recommend after this one to add onto existing strategies, rather than to rewrite them entirely.
GrampaSwood (talk) 10:13, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

It's not that I rewrote the entire Goldrush strategy just because I prefer completely changing a page rather then adding onto it. No, doing that is tiresome and very time consuming. But unfortunately, some (If not all...but we'll get to that later) map strategy pages leave no other choice other then to entirely, or at least partially, rewrite them. This is because of a couple of reasons.

1. Many of the map strategies are filled with information which is simply too general for that map, and has no business being there. Because of this, I'll first need to remove all of that excess information and replace it with something appropriate, before I can add any additions.

2. I also plan to introduce a minor formatting change which should be implemented in every map strategy. The change consists of dividing the existing map strategy pages by checkpoints and stages, so that every checkpoint can be thoroughly covered and explored, something I already did with the Mercenary park and Goldrush strategy. So even if the page in question contains appropriate information, I'll still reorganize it and slightly reword it, for the sake of formatting.

Here, I hope I made myself clear enough. Lolimsogreat21 (talk) 12:17, 12 September 2021 (UTC)Lolimsogreat21

I certainly have been a proponent of removing generic (not specific to the map) and/or redundant (already stated elsewhere) strategy, that doesn't quite seem to case with the Gold Rush that it had generic or redundant content. But, more towards our previous discussions of newer map and Event map Strategies, absence or removal of redundant or generic Strategies does not create any imperative to fill in the voids left by their absence or removal.

When I stated editing, Strategies were very messy, having, as intended, grown by many small individual contributions, and I made a few efforts to clean a few, but I had two premises; 1) improve grammar, structure, and logical flow 2) preserve other's contributions as much as possible. Strategies pages aren't so important in any scheme of things that we have to thoroughly adjudicate everyone's suggestions of how to play a map.

However, between my newness to the wiki and recurring imposed hiatuses, the project created by others to broadly improved the Strategy pages though the Project. Others managed to get a lot (basically all) of this work done without me. So, I approach existing well-developed strategy pages such as Gold Rush with the presumption of having been reworked and vetted under that effort.

So, it was not obvious to me that Gold Rush Community Strategy needed rewriting.

"doing that is tiresome and very time consuming." Reviewing total rewrites for omissions, errors, and biases is also tiresome and very time consuming; this work requires side by side comparison of the whole page of before and after to see what was added or removed. When I have made gross changes in a page, nothing ever so close to such a rewrite (e.g., Synopses), I would list and justify details of the changes in the Talk page.

Off the bat, as far as I can tell, you deleted the BLU Gold Rush Stage 1 rollout strategy that is/was very specific to the map. On asymmetric mode maps, BLU always have rollout, and so there are generic rollout strategy, but the rollout strategy that you removed was very specific to the Gold Rush Stage one roll out. You may have also removed BLU Stage one roll out from Mercenary Park, but I cannot tell for sure without tiresome and very time consuming cross-referencing without any help at all from Revision history.

Narrative format: It is not like I have never written a narrative strategy, and a narrative format, especially for offense can be effective, especially where strategy engages multiple class cooperations. An example one I wrote somewhat like this is Community Mossrock strategy. Hypothetically, a limitation to narrative style arises when there are conditional narratives; alternate team makeups, alternate attacks, alternate defensive deployments, etc..

Without further time to analyze, your effort seems to focus more on direct control point captures with less attention to essential de facto stages of control of spaces between the capture. Taking a time-limited review of your Community Mercenary Park strategy rewrite, again limited largely to BLU roll out, you replaced more detailed map specific discussion of control of the intermediate areas with a generic statement that is true for any asymmetric mode map, "After the round starts and the gates open up, the Blu team should be aggressively pushing out of their spawn in order to capture the <roll out area>." Name any AD or PL where this does not apply?

I did need to see the origin of what you replaced in Mercenary Park; honestly, I might have written something like that. But, I see that you, without explanation, replaced your own 26 March 2021 map-specific rollout and area control strategy with much more generic phases "At start, roll out and control this area and this area ... and then the first CP." Again, this is true of any AD or PL, and if all one is going to say is not really different for any map, then there is no reason to say it. "Blu team has X ways to exit ..." is simple counting, unless you offer strategies that differentiate the exits.

Sorry for the delayed, limited, and possibly erroneous analysis.

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk | contribs) (Help Wanted!) 17:22, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Ah! What a nice surprise to have you here Mikado :D. I almost thought that you wouldn't leave a comment of any kind on my strategy, because you were busy or something. But yet here you are, and I'm glad for that, even if your comment is mostly criticism (which was expected) :(

Anyway, before I start tackleing (Is this a word?) your points one by one, I have to tell you that I won't be doing this in any particular order, so sorry in advance for any confusion. Now, let's begin.

1. I was wondering something, what is this "Narrative strategy" which you've talked about? Is this what I was doing all this time? If yes, what is then a "conditional strategy" which you also use in your comment.

2. Although I would usually consider using only the Blu rollout part of a strategy as basis for its criticism unjust, I must admit that this particular strategy was way, way too long, and you certainly didn't have enough time to read, and evaluate it all. So I'm okay with you judging my Goldrush rework with this method, but there are still some questions I have. First of, where is the Goldrush-Stage 1 "very specific" Blu rollout which I supposedly removed. Because I just went to the 2014 version of Goldrush strategy (The last version of this page before I started editing in March of this year), and nowhere did I see any kind of a Blu rollout or something connected to it being mentioned. Back then, the General Strategy only contained some information about the Blu having to capture the Attic on stage 1 (Which I included in my rework), Cart serving as excellent cover, Red Demoman's traps being very useful, and "brute force" which shouldn't be underestimated. There is no "Very specific Blu rollout which I removed", unless I missing something. You also said that I deleted a Blu rollout from the Mercenary Park strategy, something which doesn't make much sense. Simply because there was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing present within the General strategy section of the aforementioned Mercenary Park article, up until the point when I started editing and had to build up everything from scratch.

2.1 Now, perhaps you mean that I removed a Blu rollout from my very first revision of those two pages. Which still doesn't explain much, considering that my old revision of Mercenary Park strategy from March (Which was so abysmally terrible...) still contained what you would consider a "General Blu rollout", and it really wasn't to different from my newest revision in July.

3. You also mention in your comment that I'm more focused on directly capturing a control point, instead of focusing on "de facto spaces between the checkpoints". Which is once again, untrue. I do indeed give out tips for securing those spaces between the individual objectives. For example, on Goldrush, I lay out a tactic on how to take out the Raised Tracks, or how to encircle and destroy the Hut, or how to secure the Attic, or how to take over the Watchtower, or how to flush out the defenders from the Choke area, or how to climb onto the Platform and the Truck House. I don't just go: "Ohhh, simply push push the Cart up to the checkpoint 1, while shooting at the defenders commonly located inside the A, B and C location". No, I usually say something like this: "First, capture the location A this way, before moving onto the location B which can be captured from this angle. Once you've done that, it should be safe to continue pushing the payload, just beaware of the defenders attempting a last stand inside the location C.

4. Now, for closing remarks, I would like to ask you the big question I was waiting for. Considering that both your, and InShane's response to my rework were mostly negative (For mostly justified reasons), I begin wondering: "Should I just delete the entire Goldrush rework and move onto to something more productive?". I mean, at this point it seems that the page is beyond saving, and that my skills at writing map strategies just cannot met the standards of the wiki. So if you do want me to delete it, what should we do with the current state of Goldrush strategy, which also currently hosts my edits which are equally bad. Should I just revert that page back to its 2014 version? On the topic of that, should we do also the same to my Mercenary Park Strategy, which you seemed to dislike as well.

Well, that's about it. I know that this response probably seems very unorganized and messy, and that it doesn't answer all of the points you brought up, but hey...it's the best I could do, which isn't very much as you should know by now... Welp, with that out of the way, I wish you a pleasant rest of the day, and an enjoyable stay. Good night!

Lolimsogreat21 (talk) 20:09, 19 September 2021 (UTC)Lolimsogreat21

I generally have little to do with Strategy other than to t-up new pages for new maps, including cleaning out cut and paste from Event maps. I usually just let people post what one-se two-ses the want without review especially with there are no bad patterns. But you asked me to look at a big edit, which prompted me to review MP.

1) Conditional narrative; suppose there are two or more very effective defenses. How does a single narrative address "if they do this then do this and this and this, but if they do this then do such and such and such. If the narrative is detailed, then it risks tl;dnr, but if it is too brief, it just lists go through this area and this area and then cap, which is relatively observational. Honestly, on (probably unfairly) brief examination, your final efforts to me seemed to skip the key areas before the caps, to focus mot on the caps. (What comes to mind is the rollout of Upwards, where too many team can't get out of Spawn.) As as I see below, your past efforts may have gone into more detail than in the present MP.

The more narrative style does 1) present one POV, maybe even overthought 2) doesn't seem to be conducive to future single contributions of specific tactics others might come up with.

2) I have revisited the Mercenary Park differences, previously I went back to far back to to the roughly 14 April version, which was my previous basis. From this, it seems that you may have deleted your content. It looked like you had cut back on content, prompting editors’ concerns that you have removed others’ contributions. but tonight, tracing all of your edits, you were responsible for about 90% of the content. In fact, probably most of what you removed was your voluminous contributions. This is all very difficult to track. That's part of the cost of this, for me to go back over your editing patterns, I learned that I had not gone far enough back, after realizing that you had reverted your own work, yes, you reduced roll out, but now I see it was your earlier roll out you were reducing.

3) Saying "I changed it because it was terrible" can set off a patroller's alarm, but now it appears that with MP, you were calling your previous work terrible. I am just now taking a few hours to check just a few classes. (Still I just lost an hour getting accidentally lost in change tracking, I was distracted by several generic class strategies in the 2014 you suggest reverting to should have been removed, but in the end you removed them. (OK, just a couple in Pyro, but I that is only one of two I checked.) So, don't go back to 2014. )

As I have commented before, an empty section of a strategy page does not rate the label (libel) of "terrible" (not that that is what you were calling terrible).

So it is still at a point where the scale of your proposal is large, but now I have a bit better context. Still it it is difficult with your style (compared to previously bullet point-by-billet point styles) to catch just what the tactics are and how specifics of a map can be used to one's advantage. When you say that it was so complex that you had to rewrite it, that is waht is now set up for anyone else that want to add a different POV.

sorry, wayyyy past gtg M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk | contribs) (Help Wanted!) 03:50, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Sorry, I really should already be asleep (meeting new client tomorrow), but this struck me, and forgive if this broadens the topic other editors. How much is Map Strategy as we have done it actually "Map Trivia" plus "Map DYK"? As opposed to a Map Guide, Map Strategy is really about highlighting specific features of the map that would be helpful for people new to the map. So, Map Strategy should be

• ... be facts, not generalization.
• ... be about the specific released content of that one map only.
• ... not be obvious for somebody who has played that map for a small amount of time.
• ... make the reader say "Wow! I did not know that!"
• ... not be information that belongs in or is already covered in other pages.

Largely, your work complies with much of this, and has improved places where previous work broke some of these points, and you may have potential to write map guides, but in places (to my limited hours-long review) what I have seen can get thin on uniqueness.

For maintenance, review, and collaboration, I would suggest "Strategy should be short, clear, and concise. All Strategy sections are styled as bullet points, not paragraphs."

• Your heading structure has merits, but I would not impose it on every map.
• You do have unique strategy to contribute.

gn M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk | contribs) (Help Wanted!) 04:37, 29 September 2021 (UTC) 21:26, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

I must admit, that I never thought that my actions would result in Map Strategies or Goldrush being so heavily disscused about. Atleast to the point where this talk page is almost as large as my own. And although I find this slightly unsual, I'm glad that this disscusion is so long, because we can finally clarify many of the thing which both you and I got wrong, clear up some misconceptions and set future plans.

1) Speaking of clarifying things, thank you for finally explaining to me what a "narrative strategy" is. Looking back at it now, I realise that this way of writting strategy guides really isn't good. As you said it yourself, it's complicated, convoluted, repetetive and makes it hard for new editors to incorporate their own tips in. The reason why I didn't change away from this style before is because I never thought that it was the problem. Instead, I assumed that I simply wrote too much text, and if I just toned down on information, everything would be fine and I would become a great editor. Welp, that was a wrong assesment. Thank you for letting me know that.

2 and 3) Damn, I was not aware that you were so unaware about my past edits. And to be honest, this is mostly my fault for not giving you a proper explanation and immediately assuming that you knew about everything. So allow me to give you a recap of my biggest edits:

13 March 2021 Immediately after joining the wiki, I make a complete rewrite of the desolate Community Gold Rush strategy page [1]

26 March 2021 I add a huge update to the Community Mercenary park strategy [2]

4 July 2021 I am grossly unhappy with my previous reworks, so I try to fix them up, starting with Mercenary park [3]

6 July 2021 I start preparing an update to the Goldrush strategy page in my sandbox --->> [4]

As you can see, I first made large edits to Goldrush and Mercenary park back in March, before realizing that those edits were in fact "terrible" and attempted to improve/fix them in July. And allthoug I did correct numerous grammar mistakes and shortened the text, the pages still aren't good since they are written in my "old" writting style (the narrative one). So...expect me to come back to those pages and attempt a rework of the rework of the rework.

What do you exactly mean when you say "Map Strategy as we have done it". Are you referring to me, to you and other editors, to both me and other MP editors, or something else. Anyway, excluding the ones which contain a large amount of general information, I don't think that Map Strategies are just Trivia or DYK. While its true that they highlight specific locations, they also point out the advantages and disadvantages of the aforementioned locations. Something which Trivia, DYK or regular Map pages don't do.

Lastly, I would like to touch on my heading structure. Although I agree with you that it doesn't need to be implemented in every MP, I do think that it is a good idea for it to be implemented in ones which have multiple checkpoints/capture points. Because this way, a MP will be a lot more detailed, since it will cover every possible objective from both team's perspectives. In addition, the whole page will seem a lot more organized, since both general and class specific strategies will be sorted by objectives, allowing the reader to know whether that Demoman strategy he is looking at applies to checkpoint A, or checkpoint C.

gn Lolimsogreat21 (talk) 19:45, 4 October 2021 (UTC)Lolimsogreat21

Although, there could be some merit to a narrative strategy. Looking at a general strategy section of the Community Badwater Basin Strategy, it seems that the writer, Miami in this case, did a good job of restructuring my old edits into a pretty decent looking strategy sectiom. Meanwhile, the class-specifics of the Badwater page still have the same bullet by bullet point style of strategy.

So...maybe the narrative steategy can be successfully employed inside the general strategy section, when talking how a team should coordinate as a whole. While the bullet points can he reserved for class specifics. What do you think?

Lolimsogreat21 (talk) 23:30, 13 November 2021 (UTC)Lolimsogreat21

Zombie Escape feedback

I thought before it's pushed to the main article, I think some feedback is in order. My main complaints are that there are way too many maps documented with way too much info that's just not relevant. Just the stages and if it contains a boss (e.g. "Has a boss?", not which bosses) would be enough. Which music plays, if it's a port, and which specific boss it is are not really relevant imo. Part of the issue is also the kind of bosses, I don't think we need to document them as they're map-specific and any map can choose to add any boss. Freak Fortress 2 already documents every boss, and I think that is one of the worst articles simply because of how bad a lot of them are.

I would also drastically reduce the amount of maps, just listing 5-10 different maps would be preferable over having 100 maps (roughly counted). Not only does it make the article very long (especially with all the individual weapon changes before it) but we don't really need to have every single map on here.
| s | GrampaSwood (talk) (contribs) 20:09, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

 Agree I agree with swood. The page is already going to be pretty long with all the weapon changes and having all the extra info about 100ish maps feels a bit unnecessary. I would sorta try to stick with the core changes of the gamemode itself instead of trying to cover all the details of every map all at once. Mediarch ♥ Talk ♥ My Edits 21:35, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Honestly, I already kinda realized that documenting every single one of the 101 maps is going to take way to long of a time for a single individual. I didn't want to cut down on the workload because of my work acholic tendencies, so having someone tell me that it isn't necessary documenting everything is a huge relief. I will select those maps that I deem are the are the staples of the Zombie Escape mod, something around 15 or so that regularly get voted on skial and other servers, and then go on from there. This unfortunately means that a lot of map images will have to get deleted but alright, it is what it is.

I'm fine with getting rid of the "Port?" column, however the bosses and the NPCs are alright in my opinion. I wasn't planning on listing out their abilities or health values or whatever like in Freak Fortress 2, just a simple name and a hlmv render in the gallery to give the reader an idea of what they look like. I'm a bit iffy about axing the soundtrack, since music is such an integral part of the zombie escape experience and can really make or break a map. But alright, I can make a playlist on youtube and simply link to that, instead of listing every track in this cluttered fashion. Lolimsogreat21 (talk) 23:01, 16 November 2024 (UTC)Lolimsogreat21

The bosses/NPCs concept should be explained on the article somewhere, the rows on the table should be a simple yes/no rather than listing out which bosses/NPCs they are (e.g. "Boss?" row, then under each it's  Yes or  No). For the gallery, the renders are unnecessary. They are not necessarily part of the game mode, but part of maps. As for the music, just mention that many maps feature music. One giant playlist is also unnecessary, these are map-specific and should be covered as part of map articles and not the game mode. A playlist just managed by you is not accessible for any of us and would require you being here forever (which you won't be) so it can be changed if needed. Any new maps deemed notable enough to add to the list or any videos that get lost would require constant updating too, which we would not be able to do. Remember that this article is to cover the game mode and its general mechanics, not the specifics to maps or servers (that is the exact reason Custom Weapons was removed, it was specific to one server).
| s | GrampaSwood (talk) (contribs) 23:28, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Also, as for the weapons, should I leave the vanilla weapon attribute column for comparison or get rid of it too? Lolimsogreat21 (talk) 23:36, 17 November 2024 (UTC)Lolimsogreat21