Forum:Hearthstone-exclusive characters
(This is a dead topic, Please do not edit this page!)
I think this ought to be nipped in the bud. I'm talking about pages such as Nalaa the Redeemer, where there is so little information that one could copy the text to the Hearthstone wiki, change the box to whatever they use... and it would essentially be "job done." (In before someone does do that to remove the red link for her page over there.)
It's one thing to have Hearthstone trivia and gallery images on a Wowpedia page. I consider it to be another when the page is entirely Hearthstone info (notwithstanding any WoW trivia). From my perspective, it's redundant and causes clutter.
[I'm also including this snip from the Slack channel]
Q u o t e:
[2:34 PM] DeludedTroll: https://wow.gamepedia.com/Nalaa_the_Redeemer
sigh
[2:35 PM] Alayea: That seems rather pointless to have on Wowpedia.
[2:36 PM] DeludedTroll: There's been quite a bit of debate on that
If we should even bother to have pages about HS-only characters on Wowpedia
If we decided to get rid of 'em it'd require deleting nearly 200 pages at this point
[2:37 PM] Alayea: Wowpedia is about World of Warcraft first and foremost, IMO. I'm OK with trivia and gallery images from Hearthstone, but that's it. That page could literally be transplanted from Wowpedia to the Hearthstone wiki.
[2:37 PM] DeludedTroll: In this specific case I had already created character pages for all of the characters from The Witchwood, and I had hoped to also create the page for Nalaa once the full artwork for her card was found
[2:37 PM] Alayea: It's that sort of thing that we don't need to be cluttering Wowpedia with.
[2:39 PM] DeludedTroll: Feel free to open a village pump topic about it. It's a discussion that affects a lot of pages. (edited)
[2:39 PM] Alayea: I mean, why bother with a completely separate website at that point.
-- Alayea (talk / contrib) 23:32, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
- Didn't we already have this discussion and decide against making pages for Hearthstone characters? -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 00:03, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
- I don't have a problem with having pages fo HS exclusive characters/creatures, but I do think we should largely avoid or simplify mentions of HS-gameplay info. PeterWind (talk) 07:08, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
- The problem with that is that in a lot of cases there wouldn't really be much left. I think context is important (I'd compare it to making sure to include on a page like Anyndra that the character is from World of Warcraft: Illidan, because otherwise readers and other editors wouldn't have any idea which novel the character is from) and if you remove the gameplay context of who Nalaa is and where she's featured in, all you're left with is "Nalaa the Redeemer is a draenei paladin" with nothing else to explain to readers how she fits into Warcraft lore (and I feel like I did try to do my best in wording it in such a way that it's both clearly stated what game she's from and in such a way that it's not overly gameplay-focused but is worded more in a story-focused in-universe way that makes sense even to non-HS players; instead of "Nalaa the Redeemer is a draenei paladin who can appear as a legendary minion treasure card in the Monster Hunt in The Witchwood" it's "Nalaa the Redeemer is a draenei paladin who can be recruited to aid the player in the Monster Hunt in The Witchwood"). I suppose we could go with a route of only making Wowpedia pages for HS characters that Blizzard has actually provided lore for (like Hagatha the Witch) and ignoring the ones that have no lore to speak of (Murloc Holmes) but I think that's very subjective on what counts as lore or not. Murloc Holmes is clearly a joke character and hasn't been given any serious backstory as of yet, but it was mentioned by a developer on Reddit that the pet frog featured in his card art is named Watson. Is that enough to consider him as having "lore"? --
DeludedTroll (talk • contribs) 06:01, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
- The problem with that is that in a lot of cases there wouldn't really be much left. I think context is important (I'd compare it to making sure to include on a page like Anyndra that the character is from World of Warcraft: Illidan, because otherwise readers and other editors wouldn't have any idea which novel the character is from) and if you remove the gameplay context of who Nalaa is and where she's featured in, all you're left with is "Nalaa the Redeemer is a draenei paladin" with nothing else to explain to readers how she fits into Warcraft lore (and I feel like I did try to do my best in wording it in such a way that it's both clearly stated what game she's from and in such a way that it's not overly gameplay-focused but is worded more in a story-focused in-universe way that makes sense even to non-HS players; instead of "Nalaa the Redeemer is a draenei paladin who can appear as a legendary minion treasure card in the Monster Hunt in The Witchwood" it's "Nalaa the Redeemer is a draenei paladin who can be recruited to aid the player in the Monster Hunt in The Witchwood"). I suppose we could go with a route of only making Wowpedia pages for HS characters that Blizzard has actually provided lore for (like Hagatha the Witch) and ignoring the ones that have no lore to speak of (Murloc Holmes) but I think that's very subjective on what counts as lore or not. Murloc Holmes is clearly a joke character and hasn't been given any serious backstory as of yet, but it was mentioned by a developer on Reddit that the pet frog featured in his card art is named Watson. Is that enough to consider him as having "lore"? --
- I don't have a problem with having pages fo HS exclusive characters/creatures, but I do think we should largely avoid or simplify mentions of HS-gameplay info. PeterWind (talk) 07:08, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
- I've personally used Mordecay's argument in the past (that the official description of Wowpedia states that it covers the entirety of the Warcraft franchise and not just WoW), but nowadays I'm not so sure if I still think that in regards to HS. The difference with the TCG and RPG is that they don't have dedicated wikis; they're primarily just documented right here on Wowpedia. HS, on the other hand, does have its own entire site that can easily be linked to from Wowpedia pages.
- It often feels to me like HS character pages don't really do much on Wowpedia other than fill out categories for things like Category:Houndmasters (though I don't have a problem with those categories themselves or HS characters being put in them, don't get me wrong). Most of the time, HS-exclusive characters remain HS-exclusive. The Hearthstone and WoW teams do interact a lot and influence each other, and Blizzard has of course started pulling material from HS and canonizing it (like Sir Finley Mrrgglton and tortollans), but so far that has really only been a rather small handful of characters and ideas. I imagine the majority of HS-exclusive characters like Nalaa are unlikely to ever be made canon and will likely just be forgotten. They don't tend to really be linked to much on Wowpedia, and HS lore usually exists in its own little bubble separate from the larger canon, so I can see why people think they just clutter up the wiki. I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this if Wowpedia was the only site available to document HS lore, but again, my main point is that we already have the Hearthstone wiki.
- In the cases of characters and creatures that do make it into WoW, we can easily just put a trivia note saying they're originally from HS. If Blizzard introduced a WoW item with a flavor text that said something like "This mace once belonged to the legendary paladin Nalaa the Redeemer, who vanished after traveling to the Ruins of Gilneas to investigate strange phenomena in the Blackwald" we could easily just add a trivia note saying "This item's flavor text references Nalaa the Redeemer, a draenei paladin featured in the The Witchwood expansion for Hearthstone". Or in the case of Skycap'n Kragg, something like "Kragg and his at the time unnamed parrot mount were first introduced in the The Grand Tournament expansion for Hearthstone, where they were seemingly affiliated with the Horde instead of being hostile pirates", and so on.
- Overall, this was a lot more manageable early on during Hearthstone's life cycle, when Blizzard stuck a lot more closely to the lore that WoW had established. There was the innkeeper from the beginning, of course, but it wasn't until The Grand Tournament that Blizzard started adding original characters as collectible cards, and now, between collectible legendaries and single-player modes with 40+ bosses, I'd say we easily get over several dozen new unique characters almost every expansion with few exceptions. On a selfish note, this tends to get pretty stressful and tiring for me personally during new expansion card reveal seasons; it often feels like I'm just rushing to duplicate information from the HS wiki to Wowpedia whenever the full artwork for an original character is posted on ArtStation or a Blizzard dev reveals a new story detail about an original character on Reddit or Twitter. While I wouldn't exactly be thrilled about seeing over 100 images and pages of HS-only characters — many of which were pages I worked on pretty heavily, especially the recent Wowpedia coverage of The Witchwood — be deleted from the wiki overnight, it would make things a lot less stressful for me personally if we stopped covering HS characters on Wowpedia and, as I said, just linked to the Hearthstone wiki's coverage of them using interwiki links when they do become relevant to WoW in some way.
- Sorry if this was all overly long and rambly; I have a lot of disorganized thoughts on this subject and I'm really not completely sure what I think is the best solution, but at the point we're at now, I think I lean more towards not having Wowpedia pages for characters that only appear or are only referenced in Hearthstone. -- DeludedTroll (talk • contribs) 06:01, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
- Well, as an admin I would not stand for us deleting content just because it's also on another wiki :p If you feel like this is too exhausting, maybe doing a "The Witchwood characters" page with a list of links toward the Hearthstone wiki is better. This surely would not stop Shammiesgun from creating pages tho. Xporc (talk) 09:27, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
I think DeludedTroll and Alayea have made a compelling case for stopping the creation of pages for characters that only appear or are only referenced in Hearthstone on Wowpedia, since Hearthstone, contrary to the RPG and TCG, already has its own (Curse !) wiki. There is no need to document the information and literally duplicate the pages on two different wikis. Wowpedia can easily link to the Hearthstone wiki when needed with {{Hearth|<Character>}} instead of [[Character (Hearthstone)]], so it's not like it would make the work of anyone more complicated. -- MyMindWontQuiet 01:01, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
Considering that I wasn't aware at the time of this discussion, I started a new one: Forum:Hearthstone content on Wowpedia. Feel free to continue this on that forum as it talks about Hearthstone content as a whole instead of just the exclusive characters (At first it was just the media stuff such as books but expanded to to include everything else). I marked this one as dead. — Surafbrov T / C 07:45, 22 October 2018 (UTC)