Forum:The Master and Crazy Hand pages are weird

Hello! So for those unaware, I've been working on documenting the unplayables of the Smash series. I'm following up from this proposal, as I'm reaching a point where I'll inevitably start revamping the Master and Crazy Hand pages. I'll admit - while I did have something in mind for them, I never explicitly detailed it. I'm realising that I would likely change these pages completely, and I'm not about to step around these without gathering opinions on the topic, given they've existed for quite a long time.

Originally, I stated the following;
 * So my proposal is this: should we expand upon the documentation of these characters in cases they can be played as through hacking? If so, should we design moveset pages for them that document their frame data and utility as if they were playable normally? I'm thinking to the degree of Master Hand and Crazy Hand's character pages, plus the moveset pages.
 * Master Hand and Crazy Hand have their own "character" pages, which has strangely not been done for any other unplayable fighter. I consider their pages to be pretty great for this role and could even be expanded on.

Indeed, not very transparent of me - when the proposal was made, those pages were essentially my standards for how the unplayables should be covered. Being passed, I also got the groundwork down for moveset page coverage down the line. In practicality, the unplayables are now effectively treated with the same standards as Project M and Smash Remix characters, which is ideal, given they are played as much as, if not more, than those characters.

I have definitely succeeded in coverage so far, but the framing of the pages I've made is very different to the Master and Crazy Hand pages, and this is where I begin a head-on collision with the pages that sparked my proposal in the first place.

Here's the thing: I've been looking through the Master and Crazy Hand pages a lot more, and I'm realising that they...kind of suck. Let's go over each one. You'll (hopefully) see what I mean.
 * "So what's the issue, Plaguey?"

The issue is, these pages seem strictly made to store the movesets and attack patterns, and the rest of the page copypastes information from the mother page in what seems to be an attempt to post-hoc justify their existence. In doing this, they seem to actually make things worse, as it makes the mother pages much barer, scattering information and looking kind of incoherent. Looking at Galleom's page, along with the other Brawl bosses, they seem much...better? You'll see that those pages compress the attack pattern into the attack listing table, decreasing a significant amount of bloat that you could argue would occur if these pages were merged back with the mother pages. Even Giga Bowser seems to do this better - I see the Ultimate section as a gold standard.

I looked through the split proposals on Talk:Master_Hand and it seems to largely be Toomai who was looking for this, primarily because of the way the pages were structured making them very disorganised. Given this, my proposal here will be looking to supercede that previous one. This is another part of why I'm making this proposal - I will definitely be stepping on its toes, even if it is 9 years later.

I quickly got up the edits on the Master Hand page to find the problem, and here's what I found;
 * Sept 2014 - This is where the page desired a clean-up.
 * Mar 2015 - This is how it looked post-split.

Immediately, I see that the movesets were bundled together, as were the appearances. Thus, my critique here will be this: Was there a better way to do this without scattering information?

A key difference between the split and now is that each appearance Master Hand and Crazy Hand have in the series now has its own section, where the trophies and such are slotted in, making them mini-character pages. I believe that this change has retroactively solved the issue that existed before, with Giga Bowser and Galleom being great examples of boss pages not needing splits. The movesets here are non-invasive, positioned in a way that is easily understandable, and compressed effectively. I believe that when the movesets are just tables in their appropriate sections, they become much less bothersome, as you're not just looking at tables, you're scrolling through standard-issue text and pictures as well.

I believe that splitting the movesets off immediately made the pages worse as boss resources. Perhaps that was the intent - have the mother page serve as an overview of the character, and have the "character" pages serve as individual boss resources. However, the amount of clicks to actually get to these pages makes them very inconvenient to access; I think most would seek the contents before the small disclaimer at the top. While I'm an advanced player and don't really need to access these, just from a web design perspective I don't think it's very good.
 * "What's your solution, then?"

I have "graduated" characters from mother pages to unplayables before, with Giga Bowser (SSBU) from the Giga Bowser motherpage being my best examples. My methodology was as follows, though you can also look here;
 * People generally aren't looking for buffs/nerfs to bosses unless they are looking to play as them, so I moved that to the unplayable page.
 * Attacks were not removed from the perspective of someone potentially looking for details on how those work and how to avoid them. Boss sections should be framed as boss fights, after all.

And then, when making the unplayable page, I effectively just did what's done for like, Mario (SSBU). So far, this has made perfect sense and makes for solid resources, as I can also describe why the characters are banned in standard play, among other things.

I am having trouble seeing the justification for these pages existing as-is, and propose the following:
 * Merge the moveset tables into the Master and Crazy Hand pages, compressing the attack pattern information in a way akin to the Brawl boss pages. The "bloat" is deceptively small in my opinion and is largely mitigated by the appearance sections - for such impactful characters in Smash as a franchise, I think they're actually quite short and don't do the characters justice at all.
 * Repurpose the current pages into how I have been covering the unplayable characters, as in, covering them as if they were proper fighters with the appropriate notes. For those unfamiliar, they would look much like Galleom (SSBB) and Rayquaza (SSBB) here. This would preserve much of the repeats and compress the 1P mode information into the lower part of the page, as is seen with, again, Mario (SSBU).

Thank you for your time, and I hope this was all understandable. -- Plague  von Karma  07:22, August 4, 2023 (EDT)


 * You are indeed correct that the current state of these pages is an artifact of the time. Master Hand and Crazy Hand were the only bosses that appeared in multiple games back then, so the idea of splitting them per-game like characters was new and weird, thus creating a lack of standards compared to how things are done now.
 * That being said, I don't think I agree with having moveset tables on both the main page and the per-game subpage - we don't do it for characters, so why would we do it for bosses (some of whom are characters)? Readers are used to having to go to a per-game page for character movesets, so I don't think doing so for bosses would exactly be a big step. Your argument for doing so looks like "one page is for the "moveset as a boss" and the other is for "moveset as played by hacking"". The thing is, I don't feel like there's much of a difference. Looking at the Giga Bowser (SSBU) page, I don't see much (any?) information of the form "this is true when he's being played as but untrue/unhelpful when he's a boss" - notes like "this is unsafe offstage" may not necessarily matter if you're playing a CPU who never goes for that, but that's the case with any character, not just bosses. Toomai Glittershine Toomai.png The Producer 07:46, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * My issue is mainly framing. If you've gone through the pages as I've done them thus far, there are many things I've written that would be very uncanny/unhelpful for someone trying to get boss information. In the case of Master and Crazy Hand, the same issue would arise, if not worse - for example, in Melee, the concept of timer stalling the hands is a very very important one for fighting them when played as through hacking. I think splitting the attributes etc into "as a boss / when playable" would be really odd and clunky as well. My view on this is that having abbreviated movesets on the mother page allows someone to view that information from the single player perspective, rather than sifting through far more detailed information to get the same result. All the Brawl bosses do this right now.
 * A key thing you're missing here is that I tend to remove attack patterns and unusable attacks when referencing the "playable" versions of each character as well, and this is seen actively when referencing the Brawl bosses. This is done to ensure that the information, with the "this is the hacked playable version of x", is delivered transparently. I think this method is much more accessible to readers, and having Master and Crazy Hand changed to fit this standard would only improve the pages as resources. - PlagueSigImage.png Plague  von Karma PlagueSigImage.png 07:58, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * My main concern is that we now have a clashing standard in our long-established system of page divisions:
 * For characters, "Char" is about them in general with an overview of their per-game natures, while "Char (G)" is about them specifically in that game.
 * For bosses, "Char" is about them in general as well as the details of their non-playable forms in each game, while "Char (G)" is about their hacked playable form in that game.
 * This feels especially jarring for someone like Ridley, who is both a boss and a legit character in different games. I would venture to say that [Ridley (SSBU)] being a "typical" per-game character page, but [Ridley (SSBB)] is specifically about a playable boss hack, and the information on how to fight him is a subsection of [Ridley], violates the principle of least surprise. The two Hands are certainly not as bad in this sense, but I'd say they wouldn't be free of this sort of confusion. Toomai Glittershine Toomai.png The Irrepressible 18:02, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * I see "X (G)" as a playable form of a character - in the case of the boss Ridley, it most certainly is, just not in the orthodox way. I wouldn't simply call it a "boss hack", given it is enabling debug controls, which feels a little different to, say, modding Waluigi into Smash 64 in full. I take this same principle with character slot havers, and this has been the focal point of my entire initial proposal. The scale of code and official material are what matter to me here - thus why I wouldn't cover, say, Dracula. The only difference between the playable roster and the unplayable roster I have covered is that one isn't on the CSS - I believe the "hacked" label here to hold very little weight in a world where hacking characters like this in is effortless. The pages are very upfront about the "unplayableness" of characters and are rightfully hidden away at the moment, and I think that this is more than enough to ensure people go to the right place. This is why each boss directs people back right now.
 * I've taken this principle very literally in my coverage so far - this is why I've removed the unusable moves for the Brawl bosses, with notes above about them, which you asked me to do, if I recall correctly. I don't believe this violates the "least surprise" principle, I think having bosses work the way you're saying is actually worse as stated in my opening argument - it scatters information - not to mention that it seems contradictory across all pages except for the Hand ones specifically. In the case of Ridley, he plays so differently to his actual boss appearance that explaining how to fight him, and how to fight the actual boss, would be completely different. Like, Meta Ridley is just three moves, one of which is only usable once, while the boss fight has like 8 more attacks. The lack of a jump on Petey Piranha causes outright unwinnable matchups. Do you see why I've had to cover them the way I have here? These are fundamentally different characters. This same issue happens with the hands.
 * Follow-up edit to clarify my position, I don't know if I articulated this well. Simply put: I don't see a significant difference between "regular playable" and "hacked playable" as the sole differentiating factor is if the character is on the CSS. At the end of the day, both are playable appearances, one is just official; on that account, I believe NOT actually comes into this. Likewise, the same can apply to the "boss" nature of characters, I don't see how this substantiates anything, it's just a label. To me, the playable Brawl bosses are fundamentally different characters to their actual boss appearances, because of all the unusable moves, and this would apply to the Hands in the exact same manner, as they often do as well. You cannot replicate the boss fights in almost every case - the sole exception is Rayquaza (SSBB), and that's solely because the Roar attack does nothing. With or without that fact, I still believe that the entire framing of the page makes it difficult to justify reserving such useful information to pages I've intentionally kept in the background. -PlagueSigImage.png Plague  von Karma PlagueSigImage.png 18:18, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * I see "X (G)" as a playable form of a character
 * This is the root of the disagreement, then. I see "Page (G)" as the page for going into detail of the subject as they appear in that game. Being playable doesn't factor into it - we could have "Beam Sword (SSBM)", or "Waluigi (SSB4)", in the same way that we have "Yoshi's Island (SSBB)" and "Crazy Hand (SSBU)". Toomai Glittershine Toomai.png Da Bess 22:53, August 4, 2023 (EDT)

(resetting indent) I don't see how this changes much, to be honest? When it comes to stages, they are very rarely divided in the same way characters are, usually only done so because a stage has the same name. This doesn't seem to be for the reason you state. Kongo Jungle 64 is notoriously buggy in Smash 64 but doesn't have a differentiating page for Ultimate, for example. This also doesn't address my other arguments, which kind of comes off as a strawman. I've mentioned the following: Boss characters in hacked playable appearances are largely different characters due to move mechanics and removals; it is very easy for people to become confused if viewing my coverage for boss advice; and the fact we have been doing what I've been suggesting for literally every other page with zero qualms until I brought this up. - Plague   von Karma  23:04, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * My point is moreso that the per-game split format for pages is standard enough that readers have expectations when it's used. Having certain pages break this expectation - in this case, "Master Hand" having a lot of per-game content while there's also a set of per-game pages - simply feels strange. Toomai Glittershine Toomai.png The Spark 23:20, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * I don't think I'm trying to say "we shouldn't split the hacked info from the regular boss info". But rather, I'm wondering how we can present this split in a way that is more congruent with how other pages work. Toomai Glittershine Toomai.png The Indescribable 23:24, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * I've repeatedly and persistently told you how other pages of the exact same concept work - every Brawl boss motherpage, Giga Bowser, literally all of them, work exactly as I am proposing the Hand pages work. The Hands have consistently been the exception and not the rule. As a user of this wiki itself, I find it stranger that the Hand pages break formula and have such bear appearance sections. -PlagueSigImage.png Plague  von Karma PlagueSigImage.png 23:27, August 4, 2023 (EDT)
 * I guess I never made this clear: Before this discussion began, I hadn't previously realised that those other boss pages were "mixed" on where the per-game info is, because when I was looking at per-game pages before I wasn't comparing with the root page. It's due to these two conflicting standards that I'm trying to think of if there's a better way for the idea as a whole. I think you also kind of hope there's a better way, or you would've just gone ahead with your plan instead of asking permission.
 * It would be nice if someone else offered an opinion. My entire argument is based on "we have 200+ major pages creating an expectation that this breaks"; if that's not true for a majority of other people, then I'm wrong. Toomai Glittershine Toomai.png The SMASH-GINEER 09:54, August 5, 2023 (EDT)
 * Whoops, never replied to this. I didn't go ahead with it directly because there had been a previous proposal that I personally believe was wrong. I think the previous way was perfectly fine and just needed more effective presentation, which my proposal outlined. I'm an open book - if I wanted a better way, I would have just said it, otherwise I'm not being productive...
 * Looking through my previous points, I still maintain my positions. I have yet to see any compelling argument as to why the information has been merged when the characters are so fundamentally different when fought as bosses and played as through hacking. All the boss pages so far have shown differences that make them fundamentally different characters: Metal Mario has knockback-based armor, the Brawl bosses often have entire moves missing that breaks them, and so on. I think that the way things have been done so far is fine because of the abundant clarification given at the beginning of each character's page, and how the information is framed. The pages have very clear purposes and I don't see why the Hands need to be different, nor why the pages I've produced so far would need dialing back. -PlagueSigImage.png Plague  von Karma PlagueSigImage.png 19:50, September 26, 2023 (EDT)


 * Still looking for additional opinions on this. My current opinions remain the same as before. - PlagueSigImage.png Plague  von Karma PlagueSigImage.png 17:33, October 19, 2023 (EDT)