PvXwiki: How it works

Democracy is great until you realize how stupid the average person is.

It's pretty well-understood fact that only about 1-20% of players in guild wars (depending on how pessimistic you are feeling) know how to recognize a good build from a bad one. Letting the 50th percentile make decisions is a recipe for failure. Asking them whether a build is good or not is as worthwhile as asking them the length of the Emperor of China's nose.

All which points to the inescapable conclusion that a wiki of the nature of PvX needs to be a meritocracy rather than a democracy.

I have tried to be active on the old wiki, but most of the time I felt like I was the only sane person in the entire PvE section, drowning in a sea of trolls and flames.
In the end I got permanently banned because of Tahiri-something-, after he flamed me on a buildpage, to which I replied if he had anything intelligent to say, or if he/she was just blind.

Needless to say I did not bother to create a new account on the new wiki.
I do look at discussion pages from time to time however, but it doesn't seem like anything has changed.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but to me it still looks like there is a core group of people ( with the majority of them not being that great in anything other then a few select SC's )that decides what builds are awesome and which ones are not, a herd of people simply agreeing with them because its them, and them as a whole flaming everyone with a different opinion.

Relyk if you could take over the entire PvX vetting process and turn it into a one-man show where you have the final say over everything, I'm sure PvX would be so much better.

Assuming that those in charge have merit. There is little evidence to support this.

I don't know about the whole PvXwiki thing. It sounds like there is some attitude and feel to it that the GW developers, the ones who work on the actual game and get paid for it, did not intend for the game. Whatever the case, I wasn't that enthusiastic about the two posts about PvXwiki in this forum. When I saw them with still no replies, I was kind of hoping it would stay that way. It was just a blatant copy and paste job on a forum where people usually communicate and interact. Like someone just came here, pasted a lot of text in mere seconds, and left expecting us to take all the time it takes to read all that.

I get a similar experience sometimes on Yahoo answers. I post a question and some "Top Contributor" pastes some generic section of literature from some website as an answer. An answer that is vague. And just expects me to be impressed and choose it as the "best answer" to give him more points. It's like they come and they're like, "here, I'm pasting this, now choose my answer and give me my points, bye."

I think that's the main problem with the site. Although there's some helpful suggestions every once and then, I feel that people over there usually prefer to just trash builds than properly work on them, but I had to do it alone. For example, even my current Mind Burn build has been improved since I posted it there. But I havent' touched it for a while, under the belief that maybe PvX vetters were right and maybe Mind Blast was completely superior. Anyways, recently I went back to remember the sheer power of Mind Burn, got to start using again, and it still overwhelms enemy monks as much as it used to did (~240 damage for 5 energy, 5 recharge and 5 exhaustion is way too much, and requires one healing skill and one condition removal skill to take care of it). I'll probably attempt to post it again over there, now that I've polished the build and found the (my) "best way" to use it without exhaustion problems.

EDIT: I also don't like how the vetting system works, honestly. It's annoying when a single, random 0-0 is enough to take a build away from being great, or even from being good.

And then I also see PvE builds like Onslaught Dervish, which completely faceroll everything, and are possibly better than most "good builds" and a good chuck of "great" builds, being categorized on "good" because Pious is (slightly) more overpowered.

It's a popularity contest, let's call it what it is. With policies in place like this...

"Administrators, once promoted, are considered fully autonomous...because the Administrator's character is well-known before his promotion, abuses of administrator power simply do not happen."

...an assumption which stems from either being naive or retarded, take your pick.

I tried to create discussion to improve builds and it got me banned. I'm still compelled to try to contribute for some retarded reason, like PvX is my drowning foal and I have the oar to save it. I also agree with Jeydra.

When it comes to good PvE players on PvX, they are Relyk, Xenomortis, Chieftain Alex and, dare I say it, myself. This is heavily outweighed by the bad players who are good or merited on Speed Clearing, PvP and botting. They're not so good at PvE and are the ones that require the build discussions to explain why they're wrong something (not always, but often)

Then maybe those player merited at speed clearing should be overseeing the SC builds only? Meritocracy is great in theory, it's just the problem of proving merit.

The system originally had a 3 point scale with innovation having its own value and weight. this was moved to a check because innovation was a poor representation for vetting builds. I don't understand how it's one dimensional when the scale is supported with comments and votes can be removed if the score isn't reflected by the review. That's an oversimplification of the vetting process.

I'm sure if you were quoted on your response, it wouldn't sound as polite. Are you the same Wielder of Magic on wikia because that account isn't banned? It's quite difficult to get yourself permabanned if you actively contribute to the wiki, there have only been two cases where that's happened. Seems to me like it was a case of you getting banned for attacking Tahiri while he was only attacking your build. If you didn't bother contacting admins contesting the ban, blaming the wiki doesn't seem fair. I dislike generalizations because I don't know which people or builds you're talking about. You could easily use the AP ele issue to make that statement, which is likely considering the attention it got on guru.

Are you simply posting this reply reading the first line of both threads? This is copied word for word stuff I wrote on the wiki. I'm the same person posting it here as on the wiki, it would take 30 seconds to check that was true. You surmise that the threads have no value based on that? That's blatant shallow-mindedness. The advantage of posting it here is for the very reason people communicate and interact.

If you're going to cherry pick a policy, at least choose one where it isn't stated in the same section this only applies to situations involving administrative duties. There is a policy located directly below this in the list of policies called PvXwiki:Administrate users, not content, that explicitly states that autonomy only applies to users and not content related to the wiki. The issue we have now is the lack of admins because most of the rfAs for adminship have been declined.

Life and Athrun were made PvE admins because they had expertise in fowsc and deep respectively among the other qualities required for adminship. Most people who contribute and update the speedclears are casual contributors and anons that only stay for a couple weeks. The only semi-active players currently would be Falrach and Tahiri.

I stick to 7 hero teams and rarely pug. I have a completely different playstyle and perception than most players and it makes it hard to discuss builds. I also have limited experience with speedclears as I don't particularly enjoy them. That leaves me at a woeful disadvantage in discussion for the "player" portion of the PvE section.

And I care that other people think a build is effective or fun to play if I find it fun or effective, so that would be an impossible proposition (not to sound melodramatic). Most people tend to not be so modest when it comes to builds they create and play.

That policy includes this line:
"the administrator should not protect the page to preserve his edit, block users that disagree with him, or apply any other administrative powers to his advantage in a dispute."

Hang on... So when I was banned by Fagmin for being "annoying" and not agreeing with her ideas, that was outside policy?

Well, true or not, PvX has had a reputation of being a circlejerk, like you said it. Personally I think the problem wasn't as widespread, but some build discussions drew more of such behaviour than others and then got generalized to the whole site. In any case, it's very late in the GW1 lifetime, and trying to repair that reputation now probably won't work, since there just aren't enough players to care. Hopefully a build site for GW2 will get off to a better start.

You misinterpreted 'two point scale'.
Builds are rated out of 5, except everything 3 and below is considered trash, so stored builds are actually only rated between 3 and 5, hence my '2 point scale': If it's not 4/5 it's terrible. You may as well have scores of 0,1 and 2: in fact that may be an improvement since it'd weaken the effect of negative spike voting (see the E/A AP build).
You require the population to differentiate between builds of varying quality using a tiny scale and consider 'average' to be 'trash'; not something I necessarily disagree with, but understand that even something that I consider to be 'above average' and vote accordingly, I can still be casting a 'trash vote' (see the Searing Flames build).

It is one dimensional because, well, the real number line is one dimensional.
You may take input across two factors (with one more heavily weighted than the other), but this information is lost when you collapse it into a single, one dimensional, value.
The comments are there to rationalise a vote; they're not immediately reflected in the rating a build gets and do not affect where a build is placed.

I think you meant many, but it can so easily be hasn't.
I really like to take part in a build related site, but I'm not dumb enough hang around a place where people screw with the rating system. People 0 and 5 things and it only makes another person score harder in the other direction to counter it to keep a build in great or even good. A lot of builds are obviously not perfect or complete trash, yet they get 0 (or very close to it) or 5. Can't even bother arguing about something because it's often a tool used to get someone to waste their time into thinking people care.

I'm someone who thinks a site based on an older game can still stick around with activity, but I can't see that with PvX.

PvX is a site with staff and those that run the site. End users ultimately don't have much say on how the site is run or how features are enabled.

Pvxwiki isn't as bad as you people make it to be. The two point system is more to reduce bulk than anything. There are a lot of great builds but only so many that are popular even if suboptimal.

The problem is PvP players in the PVE section and PvErs in the PVP section. Lump this with people who aren't very good at the game, voting for builds that work but have skills that are plain useless most of the time.

Also, PvE builds are much more specialized due to zones. You don't need deny hexes in a zone where there's only hexes like parasitic bond.

The other reason is because skills change but the wiki doesn't keep up due to bureacracy. Patient spirit doesn't heal when removed anymore.

People being bad: It's the reason you see ethereal light as a skill on UA builds. Or Healer's boon with no Heal party. Or full protection prayers builds with no gift of health.

This is a discussion of average, weighted scores, so speaking about integers can be somewhat of a misnomer. The threshold to keep a build is 3.75, it's completely possible for scores to be below three with enough votes. It only becomes that "two point" system for the minimum 5 vote requirement. The wiki previously allowed for scores where builds that were considered average were stored, the Other section. The problem is that builds that get vetted as 'average' don't get used. The only thing worse than trashing a build is storing a build that people theorycraft as average. There are plenty of great and awesome builds available on every profession, if someone comes to the site looking for builds, why would a choose one the a vetting process regards as average and there are builds considered superior in quality? That's what happened with the Other section, where builds there weren't used for years. A build carries with it a connotation that if it's good or great, that people will like it and use it. Does that mean that happens? Not all the time. But that's how consensus was reached for the build and I think gives a lot of weight to builds that actually get vetted. It's also a way to reduce systemic bias for individuals actually testing builds. Issues such as vote bombing are simply an abuse of the system and are more of an issue of users themselves than the actually system.

You don't lose that information, it's an average score that's representative of the votes for the build. The average for each scale and the votes used to calculate that score are shown directly below on the ratings page as well as the weights and criteria being stated in policy. That's hardly one-dimensional compared to vetting it by the number of thumbs up a build receives for instance. One-dimensional would be like buying a game because it received over 80 on Metacritic without looking at the average user score, ratings, or reviews behind the ratings. That's not what is happening when builds get assigned to Good or Great by vetting procedure.

It does put a substantial amount of weight on individual votes. It has to because if even a single person doesn't find it valuable in a small sample size, you sure as hell want that reflected on a site that takes pride in hosting only the best of builds for the Guild Wars community as a whole to reference and use. That's my personal view on how vetting has been treated now and in the past.

Perhaps but you also have enough of a world view to understand everyone else, and you personally test teambuilds in a way few people do. And you have the rare quality that you are fair. If you can't handle speed clear teambuilds, you could easily get someone else you trust to do it, e.g. I would get impulsion to vet all speed clear builds. If you're worried about player teams that aren't 7H, you could ask Xenomortis.

If I needed a quick check on an idea, I'm more willing to trust your word whether it's worth pursuing or not than any 'discussion' or 'consensus' on PvX. You might not agree with my approach, but it's something I believe in.

If it works as you claim then what difference does it make if they are appointed by an entirely neutral party such as Curse. There is the appearance of cronyism in the selection process which would be easily eliminated in this way. You have had one social group on PvX vs. the rest of the site for at least 2 years now including an admin with demonstrable bias. That's a serious problem when these people have the ability to interpret and enforce site policy against regular contributors as they see fit. I am not implying this person is necessarily unjustified simply that the concept of neutrality flies out the window when a group has a history together and decides they don't like someone.

It's worked so far for Wikipedia, Guildwiki, and Guildwarswiki. Anet itself seems content to let users run Guildwarswiki. Adminship is hard to obtain because most of it is done at their own discretion and every admin has their own criteria and strictness, at least for pvxwiki. Cronyism (which I had to look up sadly) would imply they aren't qualified; becoming an admin isn't a popularity contest and the requirements are stated in policy. As Auron is often the one to evaluate adminship and hates everyone, I don't think that's an issue. What social group are you talking about, because there is more than one? Which admin are you discussing? You don't provide examples for his "demonstratable bias." At least give a name to the person that you have an issue with. If it was a guessing game, you are most likely referring to Frosty.

Admins don't interpret and enforce site policy, policy simply serves as guidelines like any other wiki. Policy lawyering is quite despised in discussions on the wiki, more so than on most wikis from my experience.

On part of having a neutral party like Curse, we did have that with the Wikia staff over at Wikia. You can tell how well that went. They ended up restricting admin powers as well as moderated and limited the userbase from making their own decisions. They ended up banning one admin (Karate Jesus) because he was outspoken against them. There's a reason any wiki community chooses to moderate itself.