Board Thread:Dark Assembly/@comment-653063-20150514024408

Today's post is brought to you by the letter 'E', for Efficiency.

The one of the biggest pieces of the thought process behind T2C is: "why go to multiple pages for info on the same related thing? Why have 7 tabs open, for Archclass, Tier1, Tier2, etc, when all that information can (and should!) be displayed on a single page?" That same thought process can be applied to "Character vs Class."

Take these guys, to start with: Seraph Lamington - the Character. Seraph - the Class. Vulcanus_(Disgaea) - the Character. Archangel (Disgaea) - the Class. Don Joaquin - the Character. 1st Defender - the Class.

'''What is the value of a page? What is the worth of an article?''' Why are those class pages worth existing on their own? Don Joaquin shows up for like 10 minutes in the game, but he gets two pages about him? If it weren't for one image in the Gallery, his Character template would be three times taller than the rest of the data on the page. And that's in Oasis; in Monobook, the text doesn't even get past the images.

Vulcanus is at least someone who really matters in the game, but look how little information there is on his class page. There is a single sentence. What more can be said? What more needs to be said? I argue in favor of, 'nothing more needs to be said.' (Yes, that's hilarious, coming from me, I know.) Or at the very least, there's just not enough that can possibly be there to make it worth being a separate page.

Seraph Lamington is also an important character, but from a gameplay standpoint, the player interacts less with him than with Vulcanus; don't you fight Vulcanus twice? It's been years since I played D1, and hubby's playthrough isn't anywhere close to that part of the story. If a user wants to know something about Seraph Lamington, why must they visit two pages to get that information?

It's far better to consolidate closely-related information -- especially when the individual pieces of that information are basically the same thing -- so that a user only needs to visit one page.

Here are some additional points for consideration: Is there any example, other than 'Overlord' and maybe-sorta the part where Kyoko and Asuka are both 'Raspberyl's Lackey's, where a Character's Class is shared by another significantly different Character, at any point in any game? Should there be only one 'Overlord' class page, that holds all the data for all the various characters that are Overlords? We don't even do that, we divvy it up, 'Overlord (Laharl),' 'Overlord (Baal)', 'Overlord (of the week)'.
 * World of Disgaea, the D1 art/infobook (which I've actually owned since idk 2003? I just forgot about it for a long time, A+ me) doesn't even distinguish between 'character' and 'class', for the purposes of characters like 'Laharl', 'Etna', 'Seraph Lamington,' 'Don Joaquin'.
 * Disgaea 2: The Official Strategy Guide (DoubleJump) (which I have on long-term loan from a friend) does, technically, list things like 'Adell, Class: Demon Hunter,' 'Rozalin, Class: Zenon's Child.' But they also list each tier of each creatable class as 'Fighter, Class: Warrior,' 'Warrior, Class: Warrior', 'Destroyer, Class: Warrior,' etc. Laharl, Class: Overlord. Elenor (who even is this?), Class: Prophet. Serion, Class: Dark Priest. It feels like Class is there almost as an afterthought, a side note. "oh yeah, this thing exists about them because it has to for internal game-code reasons." Is there more than one 'Prophet' in D2?
 * Disgaea 3: The Official Strategy Guide (DoubleJump) (also on long-term loan from said friend) similarly lists 'Class' in that afterthought sort of way. Mr Champloo, Class: Home Ec Teacher. Could there be another Home Ec Teacher? Theoretically, I suppose. Is there? No.

If a person is playing, say, Disgaea:HOD, and they want information on what spells Etna can cast, are they going to come to this site and look up 'Beauty Queen' or whatever her class is? No, they're going to search for Etna -- and then read (or at least skim) that whole page, and maybe figure out that there's a link in the infobox that goes to her Class page. That's not efficient. If a person wants info on Fubuki, his stats or skills or how he plays, how likely are they to care that his 'class' is Ninja Master ? If a person is looking at Template:Disgaea 2 Classes, are they going to say, 'ah yes, Fallen Angel, that's what I want to know about'? Or are they going to be asking 'Why can't I click anything here that says Flonne?'

My overall point here is that for Story Characters, 'Character' has a higher value than 'the Class of a Character,' to the point where it's not worth making the distinction between the two. The '1st Defender' page shouldn't exist, that information should be rolled into the 'Don Joaquin' page. For that matter, even for very important Story Characters like Laharl or Flonne, there should be a way to fold all their 'classes' into their one page.

The preceding part of this post is mostly concerned with 'should it happen'. There's a lot to be said about 'how should it happen / what should it look like.' What I did with the merging, that was a test. A 'proof of concept'... an early-stage draft, at best. When dealing with short pages like Don Joaquin, we don't need to have two templates running down the right side of the page (ie, the 'character' template over the 'tierstats' template), making for a very very tall page that is still 75% white space. I pondered having the character template and the tierstats template be horizontally next to each other, depending on if the two float-rights played nice with each other, so something like this: text text text text -- -- text text text text |tier| |char| gallery  text text -- -- Then I thought, 'you know, this /is/ what Tabber is for,' and then I put the two templates in a Tabber.

Yes, the differing widths caused alignment issues. I didn't then and I don't right now fully have a solution for that. My next thought would have been to try to put entire chunks of the page into a tabber, something akin to text about the character -- text about the character |char| text about the character --
 * TAB1|tab2|

text about the class -- text about the class |tier| text about the class -- Or, eschew tabber outright and have it be more like text about the character -- text about the character |char|
 * tab1|TAB2|

Section Header
-- -- text about the class -- text about the class
 * tier| text about the class

Gallery
The challenge would be to figure out how to make a Style that will work for thin pages like Don Joaquin as well as beefy ones like Laharl.

So, why did I do several pages for something that was a rough idea? I was hoping for an energy boost from getting a sense of completion. I was getting burned out on the part where I was having to rewrite the regex so many times to take care of the D4 Hums, and I thought to myself, "if I can get something /done/, maybe that will give me what it takes to finish the Hums." I looked at the Template Disgaea Classes, and checked and saw that all the blue links in the Special and Enemy sections had been T2C'd, so I thought I would knock out the two or three redlinks. And, why create a page when you can make an existing page serve the function? Why have clutter when you can have merged sleekness? I just needed to, you know, work on the actual sleekness.

Yes, it's possible to go overboard, and have pages that have unrelated content on them. But, especially for these minor 'story' characters, Class and Character are just not sufficiently different to warrant having different pages. Players would hardly care about the different classes. And just as a tiny final note, it's a pain in the butt to be trying to compare the 'Template:Disgaea # Classes' redlinks to a strategy guide, where 'class' is a tiny little note and I have to look through about 20 pages to find the data on the character for the page I'm trying to make.

Tomorrow (or later; life is still a bit busy, but, you know, 'soon'), I'll set up some mocks in my sandbox, see if I can make some progress on some decent formatting. But here's my logic. What do yall think? 