Marvel & DC rules on minimum appearance count

[Antvasima]

All that I remember is that I agreed that we would be much more flexible for characters that are very significant for major storylines and are easy to scale.

 

[Eficiente]

I find the reasons that disagree with this more responsible. It's a bit bad that it has to be that way, but it's also a very small bad thing to deal with when thinking on the alternative.

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you for trying to be responsible, Eficiente.

 

[Antvasima]

I more had something similar to this draft in mind:

"We also have some safety restrictions for the sake of finding sufficient consistency to scale from, and not have our wiki spammed by many hundreds of pages for very minor characters with extremely unreliable scaling. The constantly changing nature of the power levels and other statistics for characters from story to story, and differing preferences in relative power levels between writer to writer also make it hard for us to keep our pages for these verses updated and reliable as is.

• For Marvel Comics, it is usually best to refrain from creating profile pages for characters with less than 20 appearances across comic books, or approximately 2 years worth of appearances.
• For DC Comics, it is usually best to refrain from making profiles for Golden Age characters with less than 5 appearances, Pre-Crisis characters with less than 15 appearances and Post-Crisis or Post-Flashpoint characters with less than 10 appearances.
• However, exceptions for the above guidelines can quite often be made if characters with a more limited number of appearances play an highly important part in the scaling of more notable other characters, or are extremely significant during very prominent storylines, and are quite easy/self-evident to determine the statistics for."

So about this...

 

[Firestorm808]

So about this...

It seems okay as general guidelines and not hard-set rules. The point is that you need to justify the character's significance.

 

[KLOL506]

If you ask me, I don't think even a character's significance is a good way to cap who gets to be on here and who doesn't. All we need is for the character to not be 10-B average human with some decent combat feats and some superhuman feats sprinkled on and that should be that. We are an indexing wiki first and foremost, after all.

 

[Antvasima]

I do not think that you remotely realise just how much of a nearly completely inconsistent mess that Marvel and DC Comics have become in terms of power levels and fighting matchups after their 84+ years of many tens of thousands of stories.

We do need some safeguards. We cannot just flood our wiki with absolutely every minor character that fought one of the protagonist characters once in a story where they were portrayed as enormously weaker than what we list them as. We would end up with a complete tsunami of scaling messes.

 

[KLOL506]

I do not think that you remotely realise just how much of a nearly completely inconsistent mess that Marvel and DC Comics have become in terms of power levels and fighting matchups after their 84+ years of many tens of thousands of stories.

We do need some safeguards. We cannot just flood our wiki with absolutely every minor character that fought one of the protagonist characters once in a story where they were portrayed as enormously weaker than what we list them as. We would end up with a complete tsunami of scaling messes.

That literally applies to all our profiles here and majority of them aren't even from Marvel or DC.

 

[DaReaperMan]

Ant, both Marvel and DC are already massive scaling messes, remember?

 

[Antvasima]

No, it definitely does not. There is an enormous difference between a purely linear story by a single writer or a collaborating team of them, with a beginning and end, and tens of thousands of disconnected sprawling storylines with many hundreds of authors set over a period of 84+ years where the overall power levels gradually also changed very drastically.

 

[Antvasima]

Ant, both Marvel and DC are already massive scaling messes, remember?

Then let's improve that situation instead of making it a few hundred times worse.

 

[Firestorm808]

While I understand scaling may be something to look into down the line, what are some general guidelines we can all agree on regarding a series with a large volume of characters?

 

[DaReaperMan]

Then let's improve that situation instead of making it a few hundred times worse.

Don't you chant "everyone can fight everyone"? Scaling will always be a mess one way or the other.

 

[Firestorm808]

Don't you chant "everyone can fight everyone"? Scaling will always be a mess one way or the other.

Can we please drop the scaling discussions? That can be handled later.

 

[Tllmbrg]

Low appearance characters would not cause scaling issues, because they'd have like 1 to maybe 2 people they scale

Also being minor has never stopped other verses from making various pages

 

[Ayewale]

Can we please drop the scaling discussions? That can be handled later.

The scaling discussions are the sole justification for this thread not passing, so you probably can't drop it.

 

[Firestorm808]

The scaling discussions are the sole justification for this thread not passing, so you probably can't drop it.

The current perception is that a large volume of characters can lead to scaling issues.

I disagree that high character volume is a root cause. At the end of the day, we still follow consistency rules. If the power level of an interaction with a one off villain of the week characters deviate extremely from the consistency, then it would be more apparent not to accept that individual scaling.

 

[Antvasima]

Low appearance characters would not cause scaling issues, because they'd have like 1 to maybe 2 people they scale

Also being minor has never stopped other verses from making various pages

One problem that I haven't already mentioned is that Marvel Comics writers tend to only treat characters with as much respect as they are mandated to, and that respect is based on character popularity and personal favouritism.

Minor characters that have fought what are nowadays portrayed as extreme powerhouse protagonists tend to frequently be used as cannon fodder for minor low-powered characters later on, and as such we would be required to scale The Punisher, The Scourge of the Underworld, or Captain America level characters to 3-C and above.

The sheer matchup inconsistency is especially high if we cannot establish a consistent pattern from a reasonable number of appearances or we start to introduce parallell realities with very different power structures.

So again, I would greatly appreciate if our members, especially staff, would collaborate with me here by trying be as responsible as possible here, especially as I have tried to reach a compromise solution with my suggestion above. Our Marvel Comics pages in particular already largely have very inconsistent and messy scaling, and we shouldn't greatly worsen the problem.

 

[Antvasima]

I more had something similar to this draft in mind:

"We also have some safety restrictions for the sake of finding sufficient consistency to scale from, and not have our wiki spammed by many hundreds of pages for very minor characters with extremely unreliable scaling. The constantly changing nature of the power levels and other statistics for characters from story to story, and differing preferences in relative power levels between writer to writer also make it hard for us to keep our pages for these verses updated and reliable as is.

• For Marvel Comics, it is usually best to refrain from creating profile pages for characters with less than 20 appearances across comic books, or approximately 2 years worth of appearances.
• For DC Comics, it is usually best to refrain from making profiles for Golden Age characters with less than 5 appearances, Pre-Crisis characters with less than 15 appearances and Post-Crisis or Post-Flashpoint characters with less than 10 appearances.
• However, exceptions for the above guidelines can quite often be made if characters with a more limited number of appearances play an highly important part in the scaling of more notable other characters, or are extremely significant during very prominent storylines, and are quite easy/self-evident to determine the statistics for."

Again...

 

[Firestorm808]

One problem that I haven't already mentioned is that Marvel Comics writers tend to only treat characters with as much respect as they are mandated to, and that respect is based on character popularity and personal favouritism.

Minor characters that have fought what are nowadays portrayed as extreme powerhouse protagonists tend to frequently be used as cannon fodder for minor low-powered characters later on, and as such we would be required to scale The Punisher, The Scourge of the Underworld, or Captain America level characters to 3-C and above.

The sheer matchup inconsistency is especially high if we cannot establish a consistent pattern from a reasonable number of appearances or we start to introduce parallell realities with very different power structures.

So again, I would greatly appreciate if our members, especially staff, would collaborate with me here by trying be as responsible as possible here, especially as I have tried to reach a compromise solution with my suggestion above. Our Marvel Comics pages in particular already largely have very inconsistent and messy scaling, and we shouldn't greatly worsen the problem.

To paint a better picture of the issue, is there an example minor character you have in mind that would be an inconsistency in the scaling chain of existing characters should a profile be made?

 

[Antvasima]

Well, from the top of my head lots of superpowered characters have been killed off by Scourge, who are just "regular" people with regular weaponry, and I have seen characters like the U-Foes kicked unconscious by athletic "regular" Marvel Comics humans. However, it is more a general impression from that I used to read many thousands of Marvel comic books, and as such I want to take precautions.

 

[IdiosyncraticLawyer]

Bump.

 

[IdiosyncraticLawyer]

@Antvasima

 

[Antvasima]

What currently needs to be done here?

I am extremely behind with my work in this forum so constantly adding to my catch-up workload, which currently already likely includes a backlog of over 120 discussion threads, doesn't seem appropriate at the moment btw.