Changes pertaining to previous "Memes" boards:
My perception is that calling it a "Memes" board somewhat makes the game name unprofessional, and subliminally encourages people to do stupid things with game covers and category names. We're changing the name to "Category Extensions", because that's what it technically is. Treat it like an extension of the board for now.
Consider the fact that some boards have been allowed this an exception, not the norm.
My opinion of "Category Extensions" is that it's fine only in the specific case for highly popular games as a temporary solution to a current shortcoming of the site. Misc categories are intending for tracking miscellaneous things. Separate boards are not intending for tracking miscellaneous things. I think the ideal situation would be that the site lets you have "multiple full game and IL boards" per board, such that there can be multiple tracked "boards" within one board. In my opinion, that's the issue creating most of the desire for separate tracking. My hope has been that we can get the functionality to merge these back eventually. In addition, any merging will be less of a headache if we can minimize the number of these that exist.
Category extensions MUST be added or approved of by moderators for the games they are based off of.
Factors:
- Large number of runners on main board
- Misc categories not providing sufficient mechanism for tracking.
- Official commercial releases only
- Probably other stuff
If you don't meet these criteria, you probably don't have a strong need for one. This policy also somewhat applies to Multi-Game boards.
If people start adding really stupid ones, I will start deleting them.
Also, any comments on site limitations necessitating the desire for these boards would be appreciated. Why not use misc categories? Do we need something slightly different? Is there something we can do in the short term that doesn't require massive restructuring?
As someone who has runs on one of the memeboards, I think you touched on what I think the "solution" is which is having the possibility for a game to have multiple leaderboards tied to it. For example, take a severely broken game like Ocarina of Time. Due to the nature of the game, it can be exploited in more ways than I can count and has a number of sequence breaks, glitches and other tricks that can do a number of interesting things, but none that are beneficial to the main categories. However, these tricks can still be used to create a number of fun and exciting arbitrary runs. For OOT, there are 6 main categories and 9 Misc. ones, however the memeboards have 20 categories on it. Sure, you could combine the memeboards into Misc categories on the main game, but then you've got ~30 Misc categories and that to me gets a little unwieldy to look at. Plus, the categories on the memeboards are incredibly arbitrary and often don't have goals that include beating the game fully (all current categories on the main game including Misc ones beat the game).
So, in a case like this, having a second leaderboards similar to the IL board on some games (maybe call it Misc Leaderboard or something) would be ideal so that people can look at the main boards or the memeboards without the need for a completely separate game. This would prevent Misc categories on the main game from becoming massive, but it would still provide a place to track runs for all of the unique categories a game like this has.
TLDR: The ability to tie multiple leaderboards to a single game would be a good way to go about handling this stuff in the long run.
How about just an arbitrary number of boards for each game, and you as a moderator get to decide what to call them, rather than having predefined names like "main", "Indvidual Level", "misc". You should just be able to create these boards at will, just like creating categories, and then have a dropdown for them to switch between boards easily. That way people could make up their own, like "achievements" or "less competitive" or "beginner categories" or "demonstration runs" or things like that. I think individual communities should have more options for organization, and having this extra layer of grouping categories would be extremely helpful. Smaller games wouldnt necessarily need to use it, they might just have a "main" board and thats it. Just depends on the game and the community for it, but the option should be there for everyone.
I'm opposed to the inclusion of 'Meme' or 'Category Extension' boards in the same place as the genuine game boards, since as Kirk pointed out it just looks unprofessional/stupid to those who aren't already in the community in question. The way it is now, with separate boards seems fine to me, since it's only core community members who are going to even see or care about the boards in the first place, so going a little further afield to find them is not a problem. For the rest of people, it can just look ridiculous, plenty of people in speedrunning already don't like them as a CONCEPT, let alone how it actually pans out in execution.
I'm pretty sure someone has already said something like this but I'll mention it here anyway. I do think that categories could be classed as something like 4 groups: Primary, Secondary, Miscellaneous, and Arbitrary. Names can be different of course. Primary is always shown, Secondary is shown by default, Miscellaneous is hidden by default, and Arbitrary is always hidden. Most of the 'meme' categories would fall under the bottom group.
I don't think it would require much restructure of the database since it's just converting a boolean to a byte, and the existing categories get set to 0 for main categories and 2 for misc.
This is a video game hobby. All categories are arbitrary and people are clearly having fun with them. It doesn't make sense from a site organization perspective to hide these separate boards. "Unprofessional" my eye.
So I cheer greater integration of this stuff.
I agree with Nathan, mainly because it'd give us a decent place to put segmented runs, a type of run that otherwise has nobody really filling the role of central repository for them.
it being good for memes is a side effect
I just look forward to when this third extension tier works without a secondary game being put in.
Lately there's been a push in Zelda 2 for a bunch of weird categories. They belong on the site, as people are running them, seriously routing them, and having a good time with it. And that's what counts. But they really are a third tier of category that really only pertains to the core of the game's community.
Perhaps the way forward is to generalize the Miscellaneous tag. Instead of having a toggle, allow the creation of sections of categories, in addition to the 'main' list of categories as a default section. Then have a drop down of categories, giving access to "Miscellaneous," "Memes," "Weird," "Segmented," "High Scores," or whatever else.
In response to Agnic's post: The site has some obligation to maintain the games list in sane fashion. The community consists of runners of the game and some extension of the larger majority of the community playing games. In my opinion making the game cover stupid degrades the perception of the site as a whole and thus all other games on the site lose a small amount of perceptive value. I think people in general want the site to look reasonably good. If a user and their friends want do stupid things, and the majority of site users don't want them to do stupid things, it's on the site to stupid stupid things from happening. Calling things meme boards is quite minor in comparison to that argument. With regard to "meme boards" in particular, I think it provides better quality of life to the site and by extension the larger base of users of the site to name things "Category Extensions." This is my opinion at least.
It's really not a user's leaderboard. It's a leaderboard for the community to use, maintained by a set of moderators.
I still want this stuff merged back into the main game once it is architected properly, but I can't exactly will code into existence.
well, I wanna make a No Shortcut catagorey for the MineCraft Console Misc (Glide Time Trials), but only a few people play Minecraft Console Misc. What do I do?
The first step is to not necro a year old thread that has nothing to do with your question.
The second step is to ask the mods of the game to add the category. I would have a recorded run of yours to show them when you request it (having a run gives more merit to a category request). You can post in the forums for that game or message the mods directly on social media about it.
Only really thinking about it since here we are, but couldn't it be possible to list category extensions on a lb in the same way the "Full Game Runs" and "Level Runs" are listed? It'd basically be like duplicating the Full Game Runs code and then calling the duplicate portion "Category Extensions" instead.
@NihilistComedyHour CEs also have seperate ILs so you would need to create another IL tab too, rather just add a link to the CEs then.
I didn't think about that, but ya I suppose so. Could be something that's added by request and approved by moderators, just so it wouldn't in appear on leaderboards where it wouldn't be relevant.
@jackgamer That game has an active moderator. Talk to them about it.
And yeah, this is absolutely not the right place for this.
Hey, I'm a moderator of the game Brawl Stars and we think that a Category Extensions leaderboard would add more fun to our active players. We have 42 players in total and 5 categories that we don't add to the main leaderboard because it would screw up the seriousness of the page, but that could go perfectly to Category Extensions. Thanks in advance