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Warning: contains rant

Creator: Vynertje September 10, 2014 10:49am
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Vynertje
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Disclaimer: I'm upset, let me vent this pls

The Mobafire team doesn't learn from their mistakes is all I can conclude from the news post that hit today’s front-page. While all the design upgrades are definitely a step forward if you look past the minor inconveniences, the new partnership is something I highly despise.


I like C9, let there be no misunderstanding that this is all a fanboy war. I don’t really think the players are to blame in this as they are bound by partnerships and rules. This purely looks like a scream for attention from the Mobafire website: “Look at us, we have C9 guides!”, whereas everyone who looks only slightly further than the flashy blue colours appearing everywhere will be heavily disappointed – much like how populist parties work.


Right now I'm looking at Sneaky’s Twitch guide, let’s just have a look at some of his chapters:

click if you haven’t read any C9 guides yet



Allow me to explain what I think is wrong with this.
Mobafire is a website that has a reputation for extensive, in-depth guides. People come here because they want more than just a build, they want to learn how to play the champion and perhaps learn a little bit about the overall role as well. I think it would be safe to say that most Mobafire users aren't even level 30.


Now if that user wants to learn something about Twitch, he won’t understand a thing of these 1-line explanation. Those users will want to know WHY his laning phase is so bad (short range, very low base stats) or even better, why these factors affect his laning phase so weak (short range makes it harder to get in range to the enemy carry which means he can get free hits off on you without you being able to retaliate).


Mobafire should've known that most users took offense. Not only have standard users regularly commented on the previous “Special Guest” guides with comments like “would like a bit more explanations” or something along those lines, a lot of the long standing members and other guide writers (I'm not generalizing only my opinion here) have voiced that this really demotivates them to keep writing guides.


This is not the first time I voice (amongst many others) that I prefer one or two extensive guides which really explain a champion over 20 champion guides that aren't helpful at all. Quality > quantity.
With regards to my previous statement about motivation, it is a terrible move to remove all incentives to A) write guides and B) look any further than these 20 guides. I've already discussed something along these lines in the scouting forum: people need incentives to look for specific guides. If you want people to start looking for scouted guides, you need to create incentives to: give these guides extra exposure, make people aware of their status.


What Mobafire just did right now was remove all incentive to look for scouted guides because there is a flashy blue banner saying C9 GUIDES HERE, giving them a whole new status next to the other guides. This status is undeserved but that’s something I talked about previously, what it means for most guide writers is that people need incentives to start looking PAST the C9 guides because they are not going to go to “build guides” by default any more which absolutely makes no sense.
What this means for guide writers is that they’ll feel completely disrespected (if I may speak for myself only: this feels like a stab in the back) for their hard work if some kind of pro comes win, writes down a few lines, gets paid and a ****-ton of exposure while a lot of us put in HOURS and HOURS of work.


The only right move for Mobafire was to say “We don’t want your guides, thanks”. There’s no way these guides are ever going to be half-decent because we’re talking about pro gamers here. They have to play the game for a living, not write guides. There’s no way these guides are ever going to be frequently updated, there’s no way they will ever live up to their special status.


What does this mean? For me personally I'm putting any future guides on hold and will focus more on /r/summonerschool instead, for the others we’ll have to wait and see.
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I agree on this, these guides seem to have been written not only in like fifteen minutes, but they also clearly are not suited for the average league player; the average MOBAFire user even.

Now don't get me wrong here, I don't agree with everything, I think going in business with a pro team such as C9 is alright but not this way. The past "partnerships" have not been fruitful in terms of the website either (I don't know what's going on behind the scenes) and none of these players take the time to actually write an in-depth guide, answer questions, or show themselves on the site, probably because they don't have the time. This I don't condemn, but I do think that one, as a pro player, shouldn't join a major community and not become part of the community itself. Instead leave your builds on your facebook, twitter, probuilds.net, etc. There's plenty of websites out there that can display whatever a pro player did in a game - probuilds.net even showing the purchase order.

I don't care that they're on the front page though, like they're in business with mobafire and this is part of the deal. Also it draws viewers and it is what people want to see, so I really don't mind. However, in the end MOBAFire is about providing newer player with as much information as possible and the C9 guides don't really contribute to that as of now.
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Quoted:

Mobafire is a website that has a reputation for extensive, in-depth guides


no it doesn't, it has a reputation of having noob guides produced by people that have no idea what they're talking about

Quoted:

I think it would be safe to say that most Mobafire users aren't even level 30.


probably not true, a lot are probably new level 30s, but this community has a pretty good amount of players across all elo's.

Quoted:

What does this mean? For me personally I'm putting any future guides on hold and will focus more on /r/summonerschool instead, for the others we’ll have to wait and see.


pls don't threaten us with putting your guides on hold mastah.

In all honesty I agree with you in the large scheme of things. Whoever is in charge of hiring pro's to write guides needs to stop. Pro's are never able to adequately make a guide, not that they're entirely to blame, but going back to Season 1, when mobafire hired CLG to write guides, they were the most half-***ed guides I've ever seen. I don't entirely blame the pro's either though, they don't have hours to sit around writing guides.

As for "being offended", honestly get over it dude, no one ****ing cares. If you're offended because they hire a pro to write a guide, then tough luck. I've seen plenty of bad guides on here, ones that have been scouted and upvoted, but I don't feel offended. There have been guides I've worked hard on that were much better in substance than so many of the other guides for the champion that happened to be rated higher than it, but it is what it is. You write the guide to give people knowledge, thats the point, it's not for you to see how many upvotes you can get or stroke your own ego. If people don't feel satisfied with the information in the C9 guides they can go look elsewhere, just as you can with any other guide.


As far as the guides, what were you honestly expecting to get out of them? you're Diamond 1? like what could any guide possibly teach you? I honestly can't remember the last time I read a guide, because I have a pretty good idea of what to do on every champion, and I'm sure you do too. This guide isn't for players like you, hell its probably not for players above gold 5.

Also there was never any incentive to scout in the first place, it was a failed system from the start that gave the scouting ability to players who didn't necessarily have any more idea of how to correctly play a champion or the game than plenty of other people on mobafire who actually did.
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Vynertje wrote:
Right now I'm looking at Sneaky’s Twitch guide, let’s just have a look at some of his chapters:

click if you haven’t read any C9 guides yet


Honestly this doesn't really surprise me. I'm more surprised that you didn't expect this from professional players. There are very few real theorycrafters and innovators in pro play, likely because they spend the majority of their time practicing mechanics and decision-making, which have a much greater impact on games than the nuances of masteries. This might not help your opinion of these guides, but before its release, Balls' Shen guide was mismatching HP and armor seals and quints giving him less stats overall with no benefit. This area isn't where pro players can really teach people because a lot of them don't know much more about runes and masteries other than what they've experienced and what everyone else is doing.

That said, I'm not super satisfied with some of these skin-and-bones sections. When it's possible I'd like some more sections to be added to some of the weaker guides and some of the brief sections to be fleshed out a bit. It's an on-going process.

Vynertje wrote:
With regards to my previous statement about motivation, it is a terrible move to remove all incentives to A) write guides and B) look any further than these 20 guides.

This doesn't make much sense to me. I'm sure there could be some people that will ONLY read guides written by pro players, but those people wouldn't even look at a user guide in the first place anyway. What rule is there that players can only look at pro guides just because they have a spot on the front page? It's not like Scouted guides (with their previous front-page exposure) were the only guides people visited. I still expect Top-Rated guides to get the most attention, especially since they tend to be updated and last much longer than pro guides. When these C9 guides become obsolete they'll lose their front page exposure. I'm certainly not going to stop writing guides just because C9 has some brief champion/build overviews.

This point seems to conflict with everything else you've said about C9 guides being too brief or otherwise inadequate. If they're not the end-all be-all of mobafire guides, then there's plenty of opportunity for other user guides to get views, yeah? It's not like special guest guides in the past have completely killed activity in other guides anyway.

Quoted:

What Mobafire just did right now was remove all incentive to look for scouted guides because there is a flashy blue banner saying C9 GUIDES HERE, giving them a whole new status next to the other guides. This status is undeserved but that’s something I talked about previously, what it means for most guide writers is that people need incentives to start looking PAST the C9 guides because they are not going to go to “build guides” by default any more which absolutely makes no sense.
What this means for guide writers is that they’ll feel completely disrespected (if I may speak for myself only: this feels like a stab in the back) for their hard work if some kind of pro comes win, writes down a few lines, gets paid and a ****-ton of exposure while a lot of us put in HOURS and HOURS of work.

It sounds like you have more of a problem with scouted guides having enough exposure than C9 guides existing and having a front page spot. C9 guides are getting a lot of exposure because they're brand new and they're the most relevant. Pro guides don't really have a long enough lifespan to slowly build viewership so they get a lot at the beginning and then usually die off after a couple patches. As I said before, mobafire's past experience with special guest guides has not been hugely successful (though the guides then were often worse than the C9 guides) and certainly hasn't dominated the viewership of all guides. I don't really see any support to these blanket statements saying that no one is going to go anywhere except to C9 guides now. If that were true, Mobafire would have died out a long time ago in favor of sites like probuilds.

While I'm on that topic, the argument that "we don't need pro guides because probuilds has that" is not a very good argument because Mobafire is still a business that needs to attract traffic and it doesn't own Probuilds. If anything, probuilds' existence and popularity should give us incentive to have some pro content on the site to draw similar people.

tl;dr: Pro guides are not going to dominate viewership and I think it's fine that they're not the most comprehensive guides on the site. Guides from other users will still get the exposure they've always had.
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HOLY *** GET REKT
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What i've always loved about some of Psiguard's posts is that he finds a way to politely and eloquently prove that the person he's calling out is being shortsighted and is thinking about some circumstance the wrong way

Psiguard does have a point though; If a user is not satisfied with the content of the guides that the Pros wrote, then it is quite likely that they will just segway into other user created guides.
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Quoted:
Mobafire is a website that has a reputation for extensive, in-depth guides.

What.
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Yah I was gonna say, even most of the "good" guides aren't that in-depth.
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No, we're known for extensive and in-depth guides.

Needlessly extensive and in-depth guides with incorrect information.

See: The Comprehensive Karma
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That's hardly an accurate representation of the majority of mobafire guides lol.
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