Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Awaclus]

I got an idea, so imma try it out. I want to make this a Thing, so I'm creating this thread first in order to establish what it's about, to have a place to discuss this format as a whole, and to have a thread where I can maintain a list of all of these articles if this becomes a Thing.

What is MDMA about?
There are threads on f.ds. Many of them contain useful, well-articulated and novel insights by some of the really good players who frequent the forum, and that is super great. The problem is that many of those discussions have had a tendency to get ignored because those threads were not exclusively dedicated to those specific pieces of strategy advice from high-level players. Instead, the main focus was on something completely different and something that was said in the thread prompted a good player to respond by giving out some excellent advice, everyone else participating in that discussion kept on focusing on the original topic or other tangents, and people who were not there to follow the discussion actively at the time would have no way of telling, based on the title of the thread, that there is something really valuable in there, buried beneath all that other stuff. MDMA is here to change that. MDMA dedicates threads exclusively to those specific pieces of strategy advice from high-level players.

Or, to put it more lamely, we're just going to quote stuff said by other people and get all the upvotes for doing so.

What does an MDMA article contain?

• A brief introduction where the OP explains why they felt like making an MDMA article covering that particular discussion
• If necessary, the original context of the discussion is explained as briefly as possible
• A bunch of quotes

Who can make an MDMA article?
Anyone! However, before you do, make sure that you yourself understand the strategy principles behind what is being said in the posts you quote, and that it qualifies for reasonable standards of "useful" and "novel insights". Preferably, what you're quoting should be something that you can agree with based on your own experiences with the game, not something that you learned by reading those posts that day. However, you can use your own judgment to make exceptions to this, especially when the strategy advice in question is being backed up by actual game log examples, simulation data, or other comparable reasons to believe that it is correct.

Who can be quoted for an MDMA article?
Again, anyone, as long as the advice itself qualifies. You are allowed to quote more than one person, and you are allowed to quote yourself (indeed, quoting yourself makes it very much more likely that you can agree with yourself based on your own experiences!). Avoid quoting opinions that caused a widespread backlash among high-level players in their original threads — not necessarily because those opinions are always wrong (although that is also true to a great extent), but if you do post an article with controversial advice, the only thing you're going to achieve is causing that exact same controversy again and we don't really want that to happen.

What might count as "useful and novel"?
Useful advice means advice that can actually be applied to practical in-game situations on a reasonably frequent basis. It should also help you win the game more often than not when it is applied. No edge cases, no card interactions requiring more than two different kingdom cards or events, and consider carefully whether or not a card interaction requiring exactly two different specific kingdom cards or events is really a big enough deal to make an article about. When the advice is about general rules, edge cases do not necessarily need to be taken into account in the posts you are quoting. While these are being posted in the Articles forum, they do not have to be as comprehensive as is the current standard for regular articles because obviously that standard does not apply to the kind of ordinary forum posts being quoted here, but there should be enough information going on to warrant making an article as opposed to paraphrasing the idea into something that can be posted, for example, here or here. The amount of information can come from the quoted person just making really informative posts in the first place, or from there being a lot of discussion between them and others in the thread.

Novel advice is something that you feel like is not being considered by a lot of people at the time of you making the article. There isn't really a way to know for sure how much something is an established fact that everyone already knows and how much it's something that's being largely ignored by everyone, so don't hesitate to post something you think is really cool just because you're not 100% sure that it's "novel". If you know for sure that at least one person does not seem to be aware of the advice you're about to post, that's a great reason to post it.

Why MDMA instead of just a regular article?
It is way faster to make an MDMA. This, I believe, significantly lowers the threshold for people to actually create articles with useful high-level advice, which is great.

[Awaclus]

List of MDMAs
MDMA: When is Scout good? (spoiler: not very often)

[schadd]

3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, (MDMA for short)

how did that one slip through QA?

this is a supergood. lawful yes. it has drawbacks in that we may generally get put on some watch lists and i'm just going to name the ones that i make (!) after different drugs. and i mean the bad ones, like krokodil

this is sorta the way that strategy discussion should happen. the game has a lot of information that can't be organized into an easily consumable format but it can be organized into a categorically consumable one, and there is less of an ante to starting some sort of big ol' discussion like these if there is a prescribed way that you're supposed to do it.

i feel like a minimum word count might be in order lmao

[faust]

I guess this is more the thread to discuss the idea you have, and the actual threads should rather be reserved for discussion about the topic at hand?

I'm not sure about the format. I mean part of that is probably just me finding quotes ugly. But it also feels like just repeating the discussion that already happened elsewhere. I guess that's fine if you make this a "these are our conclusions on the topic" kinda thing, but then I don't see the need to start an extra topic for each of those; just compile them in a single thread. Also there are lots of discussioons where actual "conclusions" will not be reached.

Second, I don't really know what kinds of things should be made into articles here. You give an example, but I feel that example doesn't even fit your own standards:

Instead, the main focus was on something completely different and something that was said in the thread prompted a good player to respond by giving out some excellent advice, everyone else participating in that discussion kept on focusing on the original topic or other tangents, and people who were not there to follow the discussion actively at the time would have no way of telling, based on the title of the thread, that there is something really valuable in there, buried beneath all that other stuff.

But you're quoting from a thread called "Scout archives", which any reasonable guy would expect to contain discussion about Scout. So nothing is buried.

Avoid quoting opinions that caused a widespread backlash among high-level players in their original threads

Yet in the Scout article, you're quoting Elanchana saying that Scout passes the Silver test.

Also quoting often removes context, and that makes things hard to follow. For example the Scout article contains a quote where you talk about a specific example kingdom, but we don't know what it is, and if I need to go back to the thread to understand what you're talking about, then this format seems to be missing its point.

Sorry for all the criticism. It would be nice to see some novel format work out, and thanks for trying it. I'm just not yet convinced that it's going to work out.

[Aleimon Thimble]

As a person with a healthy interest in consciousness-altering substances, I giggled at your acronym.

Otherwise, though, I have trouble seeing the point. But maybe you just chose a bad example, especially considering the fact that Scout is already the most over-discussed card in the Dominion universe.

[Awaclus]

I guess this is more the thread to discuss the idea you have, and the actual threads should rather be reserved for discussion about the topic at hand?

I'm not sure about the format. I mean part of that is probably just me finding quotes ugly. But it also feels like just repeating the discussion that already happened elsewhere. I guess that's fine if you make this a "these are our conclusions on the topic" kinda thing, but then I don't see the need to start an extra topic for each of those; just compile them in a single thread. Also there are lots of discussioons where actual "conclusions" will not be reached.

People don't read discussions that already happened elsewhere. It is extremely common that certain strategy principles have to be explained over and over to different people in different threads because nobody ever bothers to read old discussions and it is too much work to write a traditional article about it. What I don't know is if or not people are going to read these articles either, but I think it's more reasonable to expect people to be aware of strategy principles that have been covered in articles than ones that have been covered in old threads about something. You are probably not going to gain much from these articles, but not everyone is already a high-level player who has been hanging around the forums for a while and also reads them pretty actively, and especially lately I think that the user base of f.ds has been shifting towards the kind of people who would actually benefit from reading these.

Also, these aren't necessarily supposed to be "these are our conclusions on the topic". It's not so much about further establishing what was already established as it is about taking something worth establishing and establishing it. If there's a discussion where no consensus was reached, but you are confident that you know which of the different viewpoints should be the consensus, you can make one of these in an attempt to reach a conclusion this time.

It is crucial that these are not compiled into a single topic. I think that it would increase the threshold to actually read these, and the entire purpose of this is to lower the threshold to read strategy advice that has already been given on the forum.

Second, I don't really know what kinds of things should be made into articles here. You give an example, but I feel that example doesn't even fit your own standards:

Instead, the main focus was on something completely different and something that was said in the thread prompted a good player to respond by giving out some excellent advice, everyone else participating in that discussion kept on focusing on the original topic or other tangents, and people who were not there to follow the discussion actively at the time would have no way of telling, based on the title of the thread, that there is something really valuable in there, buried beneath all that other stuff.

But you're quoting from a thread called "Scout archives", which any reasonable guy would expect to contain discussion about Scout. So nothing is buried.

You would expect it to contain discussion about Scout, but normally, you wouldn't expect any "discussion" to contain new insights by high-level players. You expect that to be contained in articles, and discussions can be expected to contain a ton of jokes, not very useful advice, and the same old strategy advice being repeated. People who are new to the forum and want to learn how to get good at Dominion don't go and search for useful bits of advice in old discussions, they search for it in articles. Discussions are more for the purpose of having a good time, and a lot of the time, people are more interested in the discussions that are currently ongoing where they can also participate than the discussions that other people had months or years ago.

I made the article because I literally was just finished explaining the exact same principle to someone who presumably did not read the original discussion. Would he have read an article like this instead? I don't know, but that's what I intend to find out by trying this out.

Avoid quoting opinions that caused a widespread backlash among high-level players in their original threads

Yet in the Scout article, you're quoting Elanchana saying that Scout passes the Silver test.

I was mostly thinking of stuff like quoting the guy who said that KC is more skippable than people think. Ela posting one post in which she disagreed with me was not the kind of shitstorm that we should try to avoid from being started again.

Also quoting often removes context, and that makes things hard to follow. For example the Scout article contains a quote where you talk about a specific example kingdom, but we don't know what it is, and if I need to go back to the thread to understand what you're talking about, then this format seems to be missing its point.

Well, I guess this is mostly criticism towards that particular article, because I could have included the kingdom in it if I had chosen to do so. I just didn't feel like the exact kingdom cards were essential to know, because I quoted the post where it's described as being 'let's put everything that works with scout in one deck'.

Sorry for all the criticism. It would be nice to see some novel format work out, and thanks for trying it. I'm just not yet convinced that it's going to work out.

You shouldn't apologize for saying what you think. I guess there are a couple of things about the opening post that I could clarify a bit. The only thing this is supposed to achieve is to lower the threshold for good players to "write" articles, which will lower the threshold for newbies to learn that stuff. If it does that, it works out.

[Infthitbox]

I actually think this is a good idea, if it can be carried out properly. The main reason I think that is that the forum search function is awful. When I first joined the forum (and at somewhat decent intervals since then), I tried to find specific advice about a particular card or interaction. Generally, I did two things: first, I would scroll through the Articles forum for anything with a title that looked relevant; second, I would use forum search.

Awaclus is correct in saying that there is much good advice that shows up as comments (tangential or otherwise) in threads that show no signs of being helpful or relevant in the title. For the relatively small subset of forumers who read every topic on the forum this isn't a big deal; we'll read it, see the advice, and move on with our lives. The people who read the forum much more infrequently probably can't read every topic, and if there's a relevant insight into a particular card interaction hidden in the Best Otters Living in Moats Bracket, a discerning forum-goer looking for actual Legitimate Dominion Content isn't finding it.

I don't know that the Scout thing is a good example, but hey, you needed an example.