Help talk:Tactics

I don't see any reason why we should capitalise "Bow" in Crossbow. It is only one word and not two. --Takua 06:40, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Quality of tips

There was a LOT of poor grammar and outdated/outright wrong tips in here. Someone should probably do a double check, through some of them, i've left comments by some of the more questionable ones. --Ilya86 17:34, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Suggest Revamp

Erm... erm.... personally, I think the quality of the page is a bit lacking....
As Ilya86 pointed out 2 years ago, "a LOT of poor grammar and outdated/outright wrong tips in here.".
See:

1. "Like in the case of a Serker fightiing a Flesh Pound. If you shoot him while the server is engaginf him, you will enrage the FP, makinf it impossible for the serker to kill him."
2. "But don't ask for money unless you truly need it as their may be others who actually do. Also, Spend your money wisely, don't purchase weapons that are outside the scope of your perk. Exampl: I see people who are playing as a Sharp Shooter running around with flame throwers."

And I ESPECIALLY take offense at the below line:

"Lower level perks should cover for the higher level players by covering their backs."

It sounded like the "Ya noobs should stay back and watch how the PROS do it!" garbage sprouted by a self-centered 10 year old.
Anyway, my whining isn't going to fix anything, so here are my (hopefully) constructive suggestions:

• Split the Tactics into 3 sections. General (For tactics that would apply almost all of the time), Hard- (For beginner, normal & hard difficulties), and Suicidal+ (For suicidal and hell on earth difficulties).
• Add a disclaimer to the top of the page. See example below. A wiki I've seen added this to all the player-wrote guides & stuff to differentiate them from the hard facts such as weapon damage & other figures. I believe we can do something similar...

• Decide on some guidelines and procedures that we should follow when adding or editing tactics. Our current Help:Style_guide does not cover personal opinions very well.
  • For procedure, I'll suggest that spelling/grammar amendments can be made immediately to the main page as long as they do not change the original meaning of the words. When adding new tactics & making amendments to existing ones, they should be proposed on the talk page first, allowing up to maybe two weeks for discussion/objections before the final changes are made to the main page.
  • As for writing guidelines, I'm totally lost on this one. I was originally going to replace offending tactic #2 with "Use your money wisely. Players should strive to strike a balance between prudent investment (donating to team-mates to help upgrade their firepower), charity (giving money & equipment to newer players who may or may not survive the next wave), and self-indulgence (spending money on expensive, off-perk weapons that does not significantly increase damage output or utility).", but on second reading, it does seem to sound a bit too moralistic. What is the wiki's viewpoint? Do we accept self-centered tactics such as "NEVER give your money to teammates. Doing so will allow them to buy more powerful weapons to steal your kills, slowing down your leveling process and preventing you from winning the game by topping the score board!" or cruelly pragmatic statements like "DO NOT give your money to players that is less than level 2. They will most probably waste it by getting themselves killed and they wouldn't know the map well enough to retrieve their dropped weapons after they respawn. Your first priority should be to give to the level 6 support specialists and the demolitions experts to buy their expensive AA12 and M32." We should have some guidelines to help us decide what is acceptable. Erm.. to put it simply in engineering terms, Tactics = Strategy for optimising output. My question is: Which $VARIABLE are we optimising for?
• Decide on how strictly we are going to enforce these writing guidelines. Are we going to have locked pages, with new additions/amendments being discussed in the talk page first before being added by an admin? Or are we going to operate based on trust? I see pros and cons for both sides.... Too open, & we'll get a lot of shitty, questionable tactics, but it'll also foster a vibrant environment where new ideas can grow. Enclosed, & we'll have better quality control, but risk becoming stagnant & eventually irrelevant.

Proposed changes #1 & #2 (splitting sections and disclaimer) should be quite straightforward and easy to implement. Will go ahead & change it in 2 weeks time if there are no objections or counter-proposals to them. Will also change the offending tactics with:

1. Remove offending statement, leaving the original "help teammates in danger blah blah" part intact. Add an additional tactic "Communicate with your team-mates on how they wish to deal with Scrakes and Fleshpounds. Needlessly shooting and enraging the two specimens will often hinder your team-mates instead of helping them."
2. Remove offending statement, leave the original "Donating to team-mates who are short of cash blah blah blah" intact. Add an additional tactic "Save money by switching to another perk for one round when buying off-perk weapons." That's the best I can do under current circumstances. A sharpshooter who decides to run with a flamethrower, while silly, is really none of my bloody business as long as its bought using none of my bloody money... (Hard- of cos. Sui+, I'll probably switch servers)
3. Remove offending statement with extreme prejudice, leave the original "Stick together. Providing cover for each other aids survival." statement intact.

Again, anybody is welcome to object / leave counter-proposals against the statements within the 2 weeks period. (With rationale of course)

As for proposed changes #3 & #4 (writing guidelines, procedures & enforcement), I'll leave it to the other editors to discuss / decide. If there's no discussion / objection / conclusion, then lets just continue with what we were doing. (I mean, sure, we'll get questionable tactics, incoherent statements, good stuff being removed, etc etc from time to time, but its not like its going to kill us or anything. Sooner or later, someone is going to fix it.)
--Porkchops 09:55, 11 July 2012 (UTC)