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"Understand the Past, Gain the Future": Dustloop Revamp General

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DUSTLOOP REVAMP BRAINSTORM GENERAL

We're working to revitalize Dustloop. There's already work being put into a new front page, and an update to the forums in general soon.

Let's talk about what we can do. How to bring players in, what's wrong with the site now, what kind of concerns you've had built up over the years. Continue the conversation we were having in the front page thread Huey posted here.

There's already been a lot of feedback given about the front page, enough to give us plenty to chew on. But what about everything else that's been brought up.

Community involvement is important. Even the news can't get done if nobody sends in tips. (BTW: send in tips.)

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What originally brought me to dustloop was a link to the bbcp wiki. It's like a gateway for players that want to actually start learning their character and their game beyond a superficial level. I actually haven't checked in a while but last time I did I knew that at least my character's data was very wrong. Imo, this and not being pricks online to new players should be the two biggest things. Can't have a decent dustloop user base if you have no playerbase because you trolled them away.

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One of my friends actually mentioned that too. I just got him into BB, he wanted to just get info from the wiki instead of trawling through lots of threads, and found it was barebones empty.

 

In BB's case though that's partly because there's no frame data for EX, so what are you going to do.

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If the chat could somehow be implemented into a sidebar that is universal across the site, that'd be quite nice. I imagine that perhaps it isn't used as much as it could be because you have to restrict yourself to another part of the site. I've seen it done before on other sites, but I don't know if the current software would allow it.

You might find people who don't use the chat contributing to it because it's easier to access, and if someone's got a quick question (perhaps about how to deal with pressure from a specific character) then it can get answered quickly instead of said person having to wait on someone to reply on a forum.

 

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I'm not really sure how to go about getting data except that it requires recording equipment, which I don't have. I'd be fine with doing some writeups on my character's moves, but then we run into the problem of me not really being a good source on it.

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-Accessibility of information

-Correctness of information (confirm sources for frame data please if you're doing this, I had to fix frame data for some characters on the wiki)

-Let the community rock in discussions. This is actually super healthy, not as toxic as people make it seem. Invention is the mother of necessity.

-Trim the fat. Why do we have so many moderators, most of whom are just keyboard monkeys? These should be pillars of the community; the best of the best. If a new player comes, they should know their information is reliable, optimal, and up to date.

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I would also like to stress the frame data in BBCPE should be updated. a lot of stuff left unchecked, not really a good look

 

One of my friends actually mentioned that too. I just got him into BB, he wanted to just get info from the wiki instead of trawling through lots of threads, and found it was barebones empty.

 

In BB's case though that's partly because there's no frame data for EX, so what are you going to do.


Well, the thing a lot of the stuff is just copy and pasted from 1.0 stuff. it's just the finer things not being corrected (ex. Mu-12's DP being listed as frame 1 GP when as of 1.1 it was nerfed to frame 4 GP) 

 

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The issue is we don't have CPE frame data to put in the wiki. It's usually compiled by companies in japan in books or online. CPE has bucked the tradition and no "official" frame data is available.

 

as far as mods go. it's been very hit/miss when getting "known strong players" to be mods. A lot of the time they end up not doing much because they devote a lot of time to improve at teh game and not mod duties.

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I was having a discussion with someone on Skype about this. I believed (and still do) that if everyone was nicer in general, more new people would feel more comfortable coming here. I'm not saying people aren't nice. I'm not calling anyone out. I'm just saying there's room for growth here, even if just from an outsider perception angle.

 

 

He thought it couldn't be done, I thought it could. Prove me right, folks. :D

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The dustloop wiki is open to public editing, remember that this is a community effort.

 

Just because we don't have frame data doesn't mean that we should sit on our asses and wait for it to be delivered on a silver platter. Right now I'm testing attacks to see if they're negative, positive, punishable on IB or just punishable in general with my respective characters (Jin and Plat). I'll update the wiki pages with that data once I'm done. While they might not be exact numbers, it will at least give people an idea as to when they should and should not push buttons. 

 

Edit: Oh and just in case you're wondering how I'm testing this. Right now I'm just focusing on moves that can't be canceled into anything, we'll take Azrael's 236A for example. What I will do is record the move and immediately go into Ezreals' 5A (his fastest normal as far as I know) after blockstun and use Plat's 5A (her fastest normal) to see what happens. Right now it seems that 236A is positive seeing how Azreal's jab will beat Plat's jab after blockstun. Then I'll test it after IB'ing and so on. It's tedious, it's an experiment full of inaccuracies, but shit somebody has to do it, I'm doing it for myself right now. 

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I'm also planning on working for a more efficient format for the wiki to encourage people to use and contribute to it.

But if you want to help with the wiki as it currently is, please do.

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Hi. I don't know how many of the Google form submissions have been read yet but I'm going to repeat one of the suggestions I made in order to get feedback. I was the one who wrote about Tekken Zaibatsu's "Legend" pop-up. To elaborate on what I wrote, DL could have a "Notation Guide" link within that table that appears at the top of every page (the table with Articles, Forums, Members, Calendar, etc.). Clicking this link would open a pop-up that would have a quick guide to numpad & button notation and abbreviations common across all anime games as well as game-specific ones like DA = Dead Angle and OMC = One More Cancel. Go to www.tekkenzaibatsu.com and see it for yourself. It's really handy.

The legend should be as compact as possible IMO, so there won't be any dictionary definitions of terminology. Maybe the top of the legend could have a link to the notation guide on the wiki for users interested in more in-depth explanations, and each entry in the legend itself could have a link to the appropriate page of the wiki (like clicking "RC = Roman Cancel" will take the user to the wiki section that covers RCs). I'm not sure if we should include character-specific abbreviations. It's fine for Tekken Zaibatsu's legend because their site only covers Tekken, but DL covers multiple series and including character specific abbreviations across all games might make the legend too long.

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The issue is we don't have CPE frame data to put in the wiki. It's usually compiled by companies in japan in books or online. CPE has bucked the tradition and no "official" frame data is available.

 

as far as mods go. it's been very hit/miss when getting "known strong players" to be mods. A lot of the time they end up not doing much because they devote a lot of time to improve at teh game and not mod duties.

Then instead of a mod hire janitors. Edit and delete posts ONLY.

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DUSTLOOP REVAMP BRAINSTORM GENERAL

We're working to revitalize Dustloop. There's already work being put into a new front page, and an update to the forums in general soon.

Let's talk about what we can do. How to bring players in, what's wrong with the site now, what kind of concerns you've had built up over the years. Continue the conversation we were having in the front page thread Huey posted here.

There's already been a lot of feedback given about the front page, enough to give us plenty to chew on. But what about everything else that's been brought up.

Community involvement is important. Even the news can't get done if nobody sends in tips. (BTW: send in tips.)

Alright.  I (kind of) enjoy a challenge.  To me the biggest issue is that when there isn't a new game about to come out, a new version of an existing game about to drop or a loketest going on then this place (as in pretty much the entire forum) is dead.  Since I've already had my simplest solution to that (though not, obviously, a total solution) shot down repeatedly (an Off-Topic/General Discussion forum) the answer is simply more content.  Looking at other forums dedicated to non-Capcom games it's pretty clear to me that, for example, TestYourMight and FreeStepDodge are more active and robust communities despite having (by my best calculation) 2,000 fewer registered users and 26,000 fewer registered users respectively (no idea on number of "active" members but a cursory glance to post numbers would suggest that both TYM and FSD are more active overall than Dustloop).

 

While I might find some of their UI choices unfortunate there's no denying that both of the aforementioned sites have given their users reasons to come back even during lulls in the development and release cycle.  There is a ton of front page content and even if ~50% of it tournament results that's still something to talk about.  Looking at the header on Dustloop I see three categories that need to fuck off entirely or find somewhere more relevant on the site to reside as IMO "Submit a tip!", "Awards" and "Rules" should disappear, disappear and relocate somewhere else respectively.  "Calender" needs to change into something like "Events" and "TV" should change to "Streams" provided of course that there are actually any streams.  Hell, stealing the "Live Streams" feature from Eventhubs but having it only for games featured on this site wouldn't be the worst idea.

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Before we even scroll down from the front page there should be links at the top to direct users to where they want to go. Like an airport. You see the signs and go there. Not walk in for 2 minutes and then finally see where it is you want to go. There could be links at the very top that direct people to the game they came to Dustloop for. 

 

There's too much info being stretched vertically instead of horizontally in the same field of view. I don't know these are just aesthetic suggestions.

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There's also a lack of consistency with the way information is organized. It's trivial, but it's lead to some confusion and lost newbies unaware of where to start. A universal page for notation and shorthand would be greatly beneficial I think. Some people tend to use their own notation and sometimes it leads to confusion and unnecessary questions that could easily have been avoided in the first place. For the shorthand, threads are managed differently and sometimes people are unable to find the information. Some put it on the combo thread, others put it on the general thread. Instead of having it in the threads, it could just be one, singular condensed page that people can just CTRL+F to find. It would also look a lot more organized too, as the threads themselves would have less clutter.

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As far as the forums go they are far too moderated.  I'd rather ask twitter a question than post here.  Shit is crazy.  Focus on more front page content is dope though!  I was thinking after Evo that I wish anime had something like tekken does with avoidingthepuddle.com that just posts news for their scene´s interest.  Over time it's gotten pretty big.  I never feel as a Tekken fan that I need to go get news at other sites cause I can rely on ATP.  Anime doesn't have that afaik but if dustloop front page can become that it'd be awesome.  Hard to pull off though.  ATP has Flying Wonkey the god. Hard to find someone like that.

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As for the moderators situation, we can add an extra role in the form of Janitorial duties. They would take the weight of menial labor the moderators have to do, such as deleting shit-posts or updating old threads with new information. They would not have the power to enforce the rules, they would not have the power to interfere in discussions, analysis, critiques, etc. beyond contributing their own ideas to the pool. This would help keep the threads clean as well prevent people from abusing powers. The more serious situations which would require infractions (and I mean MUCH more serious) can be passed onto a moderator to make a decision. It'll also help newbies know whom to speak to regarding information. Janitors can just lead them to the right person/people/thread if asked themselves.

I'm not a bully. Nor am I angry. Just passionate. Don't take what am I saying personally; these are just things that need to be said.

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suggestion

the problem with doing this is that it's actually hard to come by trustworthy people nowadays. i'd be ok with getting more people to join the team, but only if i know for sure that they'll stick with us for the long run. i've seen mods come and go, so this is something that shouldn't be taken lightly.

 

if we wanted to incorporate this idea, then all we'd need to do is give every mod in the forums the ability to handle posts anywhere in the forum, rather than whatever they're assigned to. in my opinion, if a mod can be trusted to run their own subforum, then they should also be trusted to run all the other subforums. whether or not this would be a good idea, i dunno.

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the problem with doing this is that it's actually hard to come by trustworthy people nowadays. i'd be ok with getting more people to join the team, but only if i know for sure that they'll stick with us for the long run. i've seen mods come and go, so this is something that shouldn't be taken lightly.

 

if we wanted to incorporate this idea, then all we'd need to do is give every mod in the forums the ability to handle posts anywhere in the forum, rather than whatever they're assigned to. in my opinion, if a mod can be trusted to run their own subforum, then they should also be trusted to run all the other subforums. whether or not this would be a good idea, i dunno.

Sort of this.  I feel that overall sites benefit from having a small, well identified, unified moderating team over having a ton of people with varying degrees of authority and responsibility.  IMO you don't want a situation where someone sees a problem and corrects it only to get underminded by someone with more authority (because why have the lesser authority person at that point) nor do you want someone to see a problem but be unable to correct it because they don't have the authority to act in whatever sub-forum said problem occured because now you've wasted two peoples time to correct the issue.  Since the day I registed it has always amazed me at how many superfluous moderators this site has.  Even a very badly over-moderated site like The Escapist doesn't have as many mods as Dustloop does.  Hell, for example, Bodybuilding.com, a site whose "Misc." sub-forum alone has ~380 times the thread volume as all of Dustloop and whose registered member total is slightly over 11,000,000 users, manages to not burn to the ground with, as best as I can tell, a moderatoring team only slightly larger  than the one found here.  And while I realize that some (many?) of BB.coms moderators are likely compensated for their efforts the fact that that site hasn't burst into flames should indicate that this site is severly overstaffed.  Having the right people will do more good than having more people.

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the number of moderators here is primarily because of how many games we cover, and the idea that we need one moderator (or two) for each character. we can't really cut down on moderators without creating some sort of foundational problem

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

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i was hoping to make certain posts publicly editable, sorta like a wiki, but i don't think the forum software has this capability.

 

Another idea i had was for mods to "deputize" people that gave basic edit/delete permissions, but again, not sure if that's possible.

 

 

as far as having too many mods go, it's sorta true, we do have a lot. but most are inactive and they only manage a character forum that's why it looks like there's more than there actually are doing stuff.

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Can you split up duties as "General Moderator" and "Character Moderator"? This would also help direct people to the right people to communicate with if they have questions as well regarding a specific topic.

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