-
This forum is strictly intended to be used by members of the VS Battles wiki. Please only register if you have an autoconfirmed account there, as otherwise your registration will be rejected. If you have already registered once, do not do so again, and contact Antvasima if you encounter any problems.
For instructions regarding the exact procedure to sign up to this forum, please click here. -
We need Patreon donations for this forum to have all of its running costs financially secured.
Community members who help us out will receive badges that give them several different benefits, including the removal of all advertisements in this forum, but donations from non-members are also extremely appreciated.
Please click here for further information, or here to directly visit our Patreon donations page. -
Please click here for information about a large petition to help children in need.
Marvel & DC rules on minimum appearance count
- Thread starter Ayewale
- Start date
-
- Tags
- dc comics marvel comics
- 177,276
- 90,162
So about this...
- 9,103
- 9,958
It seems okay as general guidelines and not hard-set rules. The point is that you need to justify the character's significance.
- 35,060
- 41,649
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.
- 177,276
- 90,162
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.
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.
- 35,060
- 41,649
That literally applies to all our profiles here and majority of them aren't even from Marvel or DC.
- 52,554
- 46,782
Ant, both Marvel and DC are already massive scaling messes, remember?
- 177,276
- 90,162
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.
- 177,276
- 90,162
Then let's improve that situation instead of making it a few hundred times worse.
- 9,103
- 9,958
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?
- 52,554
- 46,782
Don't you chant "everyone can fight everyone"? Scaling will always be a mess one way or the other.
- 9,103
- 9,958
Can we please drop the scaling discussions? That can be handled later.
- 9,103
- 9,958
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.
- 177,276
- 90,162
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.
- 177,276
- 90,162
Again...
- 9,103
- 9,958
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?
- 177,276
- 90,162
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
Username OnlyVS Battles
Joke Battles
Administrator
Content Moderator
Translation Helper
- 3,604
- 4,333
Bump.
IdiosyncraticLawyer
Username OnlyVS Battles
Joke Battles
Administrator
Content Moderator
Translation Helper
- 3,604
- 4,333
Excellence616
He/Him- 6,968
- 5,107
Bump
- 177,276
- 90,162
So about this...
Also, don't we already have largely incoherently scaled characters? Should we really add further to the problem by opening the floodgates for lots of minor characters?
IdiosyncraticLawyer
Username OnlyVS Battles
Joke Battles
Administrator
Content Moderator
Translation Helper
- 3,604
- 4,333
Bump.
- 1,876
- 4,525
Got permission to post here.
I personally sympathize more with Ant/Impress/Suigetsu's sentiments as one of the most active Marvel researchers currently, but to move things along, I worked on a tally. Unless I misrepresented anyone:
It looks like the side in favor of a compromise has more votes, and a complete removal of the guidelines has been rejected. I recommend that a new CRT be made proposing revised standards, but of course, that's just my suggestion.
I personally sympathize more with Ant/Impress/Suigetsu's sentiments as one of the most active Marvel researchers currently, but to move things along, I worked on a tally. Unless I misrepresented anyone:
Agree
Maverick_Zero_X (Agrees with everything)
Elizhaa (Agrees with everything)
Damage3245 (Argued against the premise of a minimum appearance count, supports even stricter scaling rules for comics characters to deal with possible challenges)
CrimsonStarFallen (Agrees with everything)
IdiosyncraticLawyer (Agrees with everything)
Tllmbrg (Agrees with everything)
CloverDragon03 (Agrees with everything)
KLOL506 (Agrees with no requirements so long as the characters have any kind of coherent feats)
Neutral/In-Between/Compromise
Antvasima (Affirmed he'd be ready and willing to veto the approval of a complete removal, later expressed willingness to greatly reduce minimum appearances for characters extremely notable or easy to scale)
LephyrTheRevanchist (Favors a compromise)
Firestorm808 (Appearance count should be supporting evidence, notability should be a requirement)
Deagonx (Agreed, then leaned against it, but wants to revise the rule into a broader one requiring "notability")
Armorchompy (Had no firm opinion at first, but favors a rule of notability, particulary one where minimum appearances don't apply only to characters with extreme notability)
Disagree
None
It looks like the side in favor of a compromise has more votes, and a complete removal of the guidelines has been rejected. I recommend that a new CRT be made proposing revised standards, but of course, that's just my suggestion.
Last edited:
- 12,807
- 8,633
I don't think anyone except maybe Mav and Tllm work on characters or revisions, so like, drive-by revisions by people who will not ever deal with the verse in the future, shouldn't be a thing.
Also I will say this, wiki staff has become weirdly obtuse on what is allowed since my time, it's NOT 20 issues AT LEAST, it's around 20 issues, and if you were the main antagonist of any major arc or primary scaling for another major character you qualify, so a lot of characters actually do qualify, and alt. canon characters don't have to check off both boxes (this got established in a prior revision). These aren't like, hardcore ****-you-for-contributing type proposals, the issue at hand is yeeting some 3 issue guy who does nothing but still has to be handled around for revisions
So like, imo a big part of this aggravated response is just staff overzealousness when applying what are honestly very loose rules to begin with.
Meanwhile there have been revisions recently, like the Moon Knight revision, Rhino rework and honestly all the high tier revisions, that have been done so poorly that you have 9-B+s getting their stats scaling from High 8-Cs, characters getting their 9-B+s scaling to NOTHING, characters getting their VERY SPECIFIC High 8-C+ values scaling to nothing, characters getting High 8-C+ scaling (NOT UPSCALING) to High 8-C, characters getting 3-C, 5-B and Low 1-C scaling to 1-As (Boy that is a devastating revision waiting to happen). Characters also don't get added to the verse page, and Marvel Comics is a 600 item category that it's very likely there are characters we have pages, specific stats and scaling for that just NEVER SHOW UP. Excuse is "oh I didn't know this page existed"
We have gotten WORSE at updating pages, NOT better. Inflating the page count now is a death sentence.
Also I will say this, wiki staff has become weirdly obtuse on what is allowed since my time, it's NOT 20 issues AT LEAST, it's around 20 issues, and if you were the main antagonist of any major arc or primary scaling for another major character you qualify, so a lot of characters actually do qualify, and alt. canon characters don't have to check off both boxes (this got established in a prior revision). These aren't like, hardcore ****-you-for-contributing type proposals, the issue at hand is yeeting some 3 issue guy who does nothing but still has to be handled around for revisions
So like, imo a big part of this aggravated response is just staff overzealousness when applying what are honestly very loose rules to begin with.
Meanwhile there have been revisions recently, like the Moon Knight revision, Rhino rework and honestly all the high tier revisions, that have been done so poorly that you have 9-B+s getting their stats scaling from High 8-Cs, characters getting their 9-B+s scaling to NOTHING, characters getting their VERY SPECIFIC High 8-C+ values scaling to nothing, characters getting High 8-C+ scaling (NOT UPSCALING) to High 8-C, characters getting 3-C, 5-B and Low 1-C scaling to 1-As (Boy that is a devastating revision waiting to happen). Characters also don't get added to the verse page, and Marvel Comics is a 600 item category that it's very likely there are characters we have pages, specific stats and scaling for that just NEVER SHOW UP. Excuse is "oh I didn't know this page existed"
We have gotten WORSE at updating pages, NOT better. Inflating the page count now is a death sentence.
Last edited:
- 177,276
- 90,162
I agree about that inflating our number of Marvel Comics character pages and lessening our standards for their inclusions, when we haven't managed to straighten out our current scaling and update the statistics for all of the affected pages accordingly, seems like an extremely bad idea. 
