Discussion VideoGame / EquestriaAtWar

• About moving the countries to the characters page, that is just the informally agreed format for HOI 4 mod character pages.
  • The countries can be thought of as "factions" in a sense, with individual heads of state being the individual characters under them. On TV Tropes, we do describe faction tropes in the character pages, so there is some precedent to this.
  • Tropes that concern individual countries can be covered on either the main page or the character sub-pages (if a trope only concerns one country then it is better to put it on the character pages).
  • The Equus and Griffonia split is a pre-emptive measure intended to split the countries based on the ones that primarily interact with each other. Only a few Griffon countries have real interactions with Equestria, and none generally until late game, so splitting the two doesn't really detract much. There will be more countries eventually to justify the existence of both pages; Equus alone has more than ten countries, if you count the Equestrian Civil War countries too.

• About the new image, it's just a better illustrative image for the mod itself. If you put a bunch of random images from the show, it doesn't illustrate the fact that the game is a mod too well. If anything, the comp photo makes the page look more like a trope page than anything. The current photo, while not the logo of the game, does a far better job at actually illustrating the mod than a bunch of screenshots from the original show. Remember, this page is about the game mod, not the show.

• ZCE purge; this is more of a temporary drastic measure intended to cut down on ZCE completely so the rebuilding can progress more effectively. A sizeable proportion of the content on the original page were ZC Es, and the page was almost unreadable. The ZCE deletions will not happen in the future, and will be instead commented out or fleshed out.

• I think flag sizes are OK. 350px is good enough. Anything smaller makes the flag looks too small compared to the character avatars.

1. "The Equus and Griffonia split is a pre-emptive measure intended to split the countries based on the ones that primarily interact with each other. "

For now, I'll move to merge them. We can cross that bridge when we come to it. Adding another unneeded clickthrough is a big no no in webpage design, especially for only two. If it was 3 or 4 choices, I think there would be a good case, but page loads, browser requests clicking, dealing with ads, etc etc is honestly harder than scrolling more. This is especially true on mobile.

2. I accept your arguments about moving countries to the character page. I think we will have to think carefully about what belongs where, and ensure there is still lots of flavour left on the main page. Tropes that only affect one country have a case for going in the character page, though I think we should be flexible here - decide this on a case by case basis, depending on interest, relevance etc.

3. You've ignored the case about it being a) more fun, b) wittier. The composite parody of wikipedia illustrates the central theme of the mod well - the setting of WW 2 in the context of MLP. I don't think users will suffer from being "insufficiently informed" - we are pretty clear about what the mod represents. Nor does the picture of a pony with a gun really tell us anything we didn't already know about this mod.

I'm sticking to my case on this one, especially as its in line with TV Tropes policy of encouraging witiness, fun, and not taking things too seriously.

You note that image is more similar to an image for a trope page - so what? TV Tvtropes recommends that both title images and trope images work to be witty.

4. ZCE - Commenting out vs deleting things cost nothing, and mass deletions without discussion is against the spirit of the wiki process. Its also against the recommendations for dealing with ZCE in TV Tropes Customs page.

Many of these ZCE were also part of a thorough effort to review large trope lists and tick ones that applied to EAW, which would then be built upon - they were not a scattershot of tropes that random people added - doing them from scratch means going through those lists again, something I'd rather not do.

I'd kindly request you restore them for us as you are most familiar with your edits and I don't look forward to pouring through the revision history.

5. I'll also concede the case on this one. I was thinking about the very stringent limits on page pictures, but then saw that TV Tropes is actually quite flexible about images on their character page.

However, Having thought about it further,my question to this is - does the page actually need flags? They take up a looot of space. They are also competing with the leader portraits. I think the leader portraits do a good job of representing the nations and we shouldn't have the flags compete with them. Its just too much image to text ratio - this is primarily a text article.

Alternatively - ditch the leader images - keep the flags.