He’s publishing a LOT of videos posthumously… 
The combo video overload is ridiculous and disgusting. It’s like this: Marvel is my main game. I fucking love it and I play magneto. I love combos, I really do. But srsly, week 1, there were at least 3 articles on the front page about “Magneto still has it”. Not only is it kind of false advertisement (he doesn’t have IT, he has some other shit) I don’t need to look at the same combos over and over again. That’s why I have the character specific forums. That’s where all the combo videos go.
Now, if it’s some sick-ass compilation with very original stuff, like Combonauts and full Desk CMVs, that’s fine, by all means, post it DAILY COMPILATION. But a video with a small example of “new technology” is extremely retarded outside character forums.
Frontpage is for important things, like Tom and David’s articles, Tournament results, important news about upcoming games (and holy shit, I am not talking about repeating every single Soul Calibur, ASSFxTekken and DoA “news” and video), in-depth reviews of FG related products (like the eightarc one) and SMART columns, like the one about the psychology behind learning combos and stuff.
No offense to d3v, but c’mon dude, you’re in a position of power, dropping the ball.
MyLifeisanRPG, you post way too much shit. You have some good stuff up there,that’s for sure, but 70% of it is one useless video. Srsly, annoying.
iantothemax, same.
Prioritize, maybe? My friend writes a popular(?) tech blog: he has articles written out for every day for the next three years at this point: there’s no shame in having a queue to publish through over time. I believe the people at Failblog talk about this (I at least know I heard Ben talk about it at the last event I went to of theirs) : having a consistent but not overwhelming flow of media is key to their strategy.
I kind of wish there were less of these “combo guides” and a few more articles on the neutral game in current fighters, it really seems to be the big unknown, so much of the time you can find 101 different ways to efficiantly change a hit into a half hp beatdown, but articles about how to actually get that hit in seem almost none existant in the present day.
I know this requires a lot of effort and knowledge on the said fighters, and could even be tacit knowledge rather than something that’s easy to teach by hand, but I feel it would be more interesting and more useful to newbies than the current trend in articles which seem to almost imply that fighting games are all about the combos.
Even the more realistic option of just bringing some of the older articles on the more strategic side of fighters like Maj’s article on footsies (with the respective autors permissions of course) would be a nice step forward from the current combo overload imo.
I think people have finally realized that skill and creativity don’t necessarily translate into winning. With damage and combo scaling in games it makes it pointless to try and have a 99+hit combo.
real talk, I have some Dr. Strange tech that I’d like to turn in to the front page (and uploading as of this posting) but now I’m second-guessing whether or not to submit a tip. >__> fuck it, I’ll just leave it in the character forum until somebody tells me to. lol.
just gonna chime in on this since I just saw this topic. in all honestly, I find the amount of CVs that take up one whole article excessive. submitted CVs (and tech I guess, depending on how valuable it might be for the character/s) should be limited to just roundups. wait for people to submit them until you hit a quota or something to reduce the clutter. like what Kanta-kun said earlier I don’t wanna see UMvC3 Mags videos showing “he still has it” nor do I care about Zero combos since he does a fuckton of damage and we get it already; no need to post the same combo with minor tweaks and variations to add a teensy bit of damage.
honestly the only time I see the front page as a valuable source of info is on tournament results. that and the new character reveals/trailers for UMvC3. and the CPS2 FG combo vids that get posted every now and then because they’re a hell of a lot more entertaining than Team Trenchcoat Mafia combos.
regardless of our views i doubt the front page will change from combo videos
I don’t mind ads because I know it brings in revenue, but holy shit are they intrusive.
I don’t see how this is any kind of revelation. Just because people are noticing this now, combo videos should be boring BnB’s over and over? That makes no sense.
Most people on this site are too lazy to even do the easy shit and can’t even grasp what’s really going on in more elaborate combo videos anyway. It’s fucking hilarious that they decide go all armchair professional and surmise that “those combos aren’t practical enough, boo.”
Seriously, gimme a break. Enjoy it for what it is and stop whining. Try to understand the core concept and find ways to apply it to practical situations.
Not to mention the point of combo videos is to show what the characters are able to do within the confines of the engine, not tell you what combos you should be doing in matches, over and over and over again. SF4 and MVC3 don’t make for good combo videos however.
I happen to have a degree in journalism, and experience writing for a couple of hard news sites, so I can’t help but offer my opinion.
There is too much unorganized content. Your front page has 14 article slots, and 4 rotating slots at the top. There are six combo/technology video stories, three match video stories, one streaming guide, one news story, and one retrospective. The rotating bar at the top has two announcements, a tourney results story, and a charity story. Not only that, but the content is spread across five games. With a little work, you can keep (or increase) the volume of content you’re putting out, while increasing satisfaction from everyone. The solution is to find a way to organize this content, either through multiple news pages or through the use of content tags. For example, look at destructoid.com. Their layout is great, I can click the top and see all the PS3/XB360/Wii/whatever news I want and ignore everything else. SRK could implement something similar, filtering by game, or by subject (combo video/news/tech guides/opinion).
Also the quality of the writing isn’t always up to par for a huge site like this, specifically in articles written by MylifeisanRPG. For example, from his top-of-the-page article this morning:
"AshtonDragon has found a flaw in most of the Frank West level-up tech that people have been finding. Most of it can’t be used from the start of a match! That’s why he developed this Vergil/Frank West Psuedo DHC combo that uses two meters but builds one, making it usable off any random hit-confirm at the beginning of a match. The combo gets Frank to lvl 4 using one repetition of a spiral swords loop."
The first two sentences are poorly worded, and should be one sentence. The tech on display here isn’t a “psuedo-DHC”, it’s a mid-combo hard tag, so he’s not using correct terminology. He abbreviates “level four” for no reason, and doesn’t use correct grammar by spelling out “four.” Also, the article itself is hardly news, there’s nothing genuinely new on display in this video, as setups like this have been around since the game came out (granted, this specific setup might be new). Here is a corrected version:
"User AshtonDragon wasn’t satisfied with current Frank West level-up tech. Utilizing Virgil’s comboability to drive up the hit count, and exploring the limits of mid-combo hard-tagging, he discovered a way to reach level four from a simple hit confirm. Note that Virgil’s spiral-swords loop builds enough meter to make this practical even at the start of the match."
All the information was preserved, but condensed and presented in a more logical, clear manner.
The only example I can think of this is in games that provide sample combos in practice/training mode (Tekken 6) and use them as a foundation of where to start and modify them to get more damage.
As much as the combo video flood can get annoying (heck, I actually try not to post too many combo vids, unless its for stuff I really like), you guys have to realize one thing - it pays the bills. We’re at the point where we do need the revenue just to keep the site going, what with how much we’ve grown over the years. I don’t have the exact numbers, but right not, the front page (and the ads) are the ones making it so that Wiz doesn’t have to resort to stuff like charging more for premium or cutting back on features just to stay afloat.
As for reorganizing the content on the front page, that’s not something I can comment on; though I can probably bring it up with keits or kineda.
EDIT: I was talking with keits the other day when he brought up an interesting fact - the front page and the forums have different audiences. So while some in the forums may not like the front page, the fact that we’re getting more and more hits/readers means that there is an audience out there for what we put up. I’m not saying we wont change the way we do things, however how we evolve the front page may not necessarily be in the way you think it should.
In all honesty, if you wrote a weekly article for SRK dissecting combo videos and explaining some of the finer points, I would read it religiously. Similarly if you wrote about the process you go throw to figure out combos, I would also read it.
The problem with the front page isn’t that it is catering to some random people but that it is solely catering to those random people. There is enough space in the front page to have material for the casual players as well as the competitive players. If we aren’t creating content for our community then nobody is going to provide that content.
Not to dent anybody’s ego, but if traffic on the front page has increased, I would put that more on the release of UMVC3 than I would the format change; if I recall correctly, they both happened about the same time. It’s kind of ironic that SRK is open about making money off other peoples work, when I seem to remember most people around here shitting on EventHubs for doing the same thing, but I guess EH was ahead their time :trollface:.
For those who aren’t happy with the direction the front page has took, I believe the SRK staff is aware of the concerns, but they appear to be happy with the current front page for now, I don’t think it is going to change anytime soon, sadly enough. I just come straight to the forums via a bookmark and bypass it entirely, which has worked well for me; it doesn’t get past the problem of real news getting lost in the jumbled mess, but at least I don’t get hit in the face with combo videos and questionable editorials every time I visit.
What format change? All that we’ve done is increase the output of what Keits was previously doing on his own. And the increase in numbers started way before that.
I would argue that the radical increase in volume of front page postings, in addition to the heavy editorializing (in particular, Renegade’s article about Wesker, and the article about tiers), changed the front page in such a way that it constituted basically a format change. The new contributors and the decision to broaden the content offered has fundamentally changed the SRK front page, in my opinion, so I think to refer to it as anything less than a format change would be to sell all the work that has been done there short.
Looking back through the front page, it appears that additional posters aside from Keits started appearing on the day Ultimate was released, just to get the time frame straight. You are the one who made the correlation between the changes to the front page and additional traffic, not me.
If traffic started increasing well before Ultimate came out, which would also be before the new staff started posting on the front page, then I don’t think you can really say “more hits/readers means that there is an audience out there for what we put up.”
I’m another that just has a bookmark to completely skip the front page and go straight to the forums. And for news, I just go to other sites. Are there really 8-14+ front page worthy news stories every single day? If the writers could condense all the fluff stories into a post or two on the weekends, the front page might become functional again.
This is my favorite thread in the entire forum.
There are some things I disagree with but a few people do have a point. Personally, I try to keep things relevant and interesting. Although a few people missed my points in my MK GOTY articles I wrote, there was a larger point to them rather than just saying “lol MK won a meaningless award”. Aside from that, I like to keep things more focused on news and results with a few strat related posts scattered throughout.