Help:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style (MoS or MOS) is the style manual for all SuperCombo articles. This primary page is supported by further Writing Character Pages and Writing System Explanations. If any contradiction arises, this page has precedence. In the majority of situations no action will be taken against a user who fails to follow this guide because the Bureaucrat Team recognizes that mistakes happen, and not every user is confident and comfortable with editing wikis. With that made clear, the team does still reserve the right to remove user's edit access if that user makes egregious and intentional violations of this page.

Retaining Existing Styles

Sometimes the MoS provides more than one acceptable style or gives no specific guidance. Formatting is flexible and creative solutions are welcome, but you are encouraged to join the Editor's Discord to suggest changes to existing commonly used styles.

Edit-warring over style is never acceptable.

General Writing Style

SuperCombo aims at being an impartial, community driven source of information and education. In order to achieve that, articles need to be written in a manner conducive to maintaining trust, professionalism, and respect. SuperCombo would also like to recognize that a significant audience of the site does not speak English as their first language, and so the administration of the site asks that sentences are kept relatively simple when possible.

As a general rule of thumb:

• Avoid excessively emotive language when possible. (eg: "insanely oppressive offense and abysmally awful defense")
• Try to be impartial and objective.
• Avoid using swears whenever possible.
• Never use slurs under any circumstances.

To add to that point, SuperCombo needs to be written agnostic to the skill of the reader. Do not assume a certain level of reader competence; Write such that even a beginner could understand it. An easy way to achieve this is to stick to the descriptive nature of what the character can do as opposed to what the player can do. Instead of "you can block while in the air", write "X Character can block while in the air".

Casual language and inside jokes are acceptable so long as they are kept in moderation.

English, Please!

SuperCombo is an English website. Until the day comes that we have the resources, staff, and volunteers to set up an infrastructure for multiple languages, that will continue to be the case. Therefore, the wiki should remain in English.

Furthermore, the English localization always take priority. If the English and Japanese text for a game on this wiki differ, the official English Localization take priority.

If there's a borrow word that is not normally a part of the English language, such as "okizeme", then it should be used with a tooltip the first time that it appears on the page in order to explain it to the reader.

Why Using Non-English Text In Headers Causes Problems

Links to sections are generated based on the entire contents of the section header. Adding additional text to a section header that you plan to link to will have effects ranging from making the author add extra words when writing their link, or need to find and copy paste illegible hyperlinks that aren't easily remembered.

For example, using Anji's "Shin: Ichishiki" (Officially named 針: 壱式 in Japanese), you get the following link:

Header: ==針: 壱式==
Results in: https://www.dustloop.com/wiki/index.php?title=GGST/Anji_Mito#.E9.87.9D:_.E5.A3.B1.E5.BC.8F

If you instead use the English translation, the link will look like:

Header: ==Shin: Ichishiki==
Results in: https://www.dustloop.com/wiki/index.php?title=GGST/Anji_Mito#Shin:_Ichishiki

Pronouns and Gendered Language

We recommend an approach adopted from the APA Style. These best practices should not be taken as thoroughly vetted by the community nor representing consensus.

Use "They/Their/Them" When:

• If They/Their/Them are the official pronouns used, or if non-gendered pronouns are used.
• The gender of the subject is irrelevant to the point being discussed
• The gender of the subject is unknown
• There are multiple subjects

Use Official Gender Pronouns When:

• The source material uses gendered pronouns for text that will be copied to the wiki
• The text needs the additional specification of gender to be clear

Because there is a significant amount of content which already exists on the wiki and uses gendered pronouns to refer to characters, we do not recommend changing the existing pronoun usage unless it improves the quality of the article.

Jokes and Captions

Criteria for welcome jokes and captions:

• Jokes that are relevant to the character as they appear in game
• Explanations of what the moves do
• Comedic or lighthearted references to how the move is used
• Comedic references to the primary source material (the game itself, not anime or manga which it is based on)
• References to the metagame
• Anything that attempts to be informative or educational
• Translated attack names (usually in <small /> font, underneath the main caption)

Examples of unwelcome jokes and captions:

• Inside Jokes
• Unrelated References/Quotes from YouTube/Twitter/social media
• References/Quotes to content unrelated to the source material
• Memes that you would expect to find on social media—such as TikTok, Vine, Snapchat, etc.
• Political content or hateful content

This list is not exhaustive, and everything you post is subject to the discretion of your peers and the moderation team. Arguing over captions is a waste of time and effort. The purpose of the site is not to be a platform for jokes, but instead to be informative and helpful.

Using Bullet Points

Bullet points are a form of writing which help communicate lists of information quickly while emphasizing that text on the page. It is, however, possible to poorly use bullet points and thus de-value them in writing.

For this reason, it is recommended that writers follow these guidelines for the use of bullet points as set by Miami University.

• Make sure all items in the list are related to each other
• Keep bullet points short, preferably no more than three lines long
• Emphasize the beginning of each bullet point to make the list skim-friendly
• Begin all items with the same part of speech (active verbs work well) and make sure they are in parallel form
• Make all bullet points approximately the same length
• Use periods at the end of each line only if they are complete sentences

Character Overviews

Character Overview Pages are the most commonly read articles on the entirety of SuperCombo. As such, these articles will be held to the highest standard.

Many readers do not have a long attention span, so get to the point. Be descriptive, detailed, and accurate, but avoid wasting time with flowery language. Overviews need to cover a lot of information in a relatively compact space so it is recommended that editors avoid making excessive use of adjectives fluff phrases.

The overview for a given character should give a reader a basic understanding of what the character can do, what the character's gameplan is, crucial flaws, and key strengths are. The latter two points can be carried by the pros/cons table in the majority of situations, but it is sometimes appropriate to mention things in greater detail within the overview. A reader should walk away from an overview with a baseline understanding of how a character players at a macro scale.

Playstyle Summaries

Playstyle summaries are single sentence summaries of their respective character's overview. These do not need to be incredibly detailed and are meant to be read at a glance. The template will force every playstyle summary to start with an icon of the character and the character's name.

Pros and Cons Tables

Pros and Cons tables, also known as the Strengths and Weaknesses section, are potentially very contentious and can be damaging to the site's reputation when handled without care. As such, these sections should be collaborative efforts which are frequently cross referenced and verified. Below is a non-exhaustive list of guidelines to follow when editing this section. The Bureaucrat team reserves the right to make rulings on these sections on a per-case basis.

• Begin every bullet point with a bolded summary of the bullet point, followed by an un-bolded colon.
• Try to keep each bullet point to a maximum of 4 lines of text.
• Be specific. If a point depends on a specific set of moves or situations, enumerate them.
• Be fair. It is natural to want to emphasize how weak a character's option may be, or how strong it may be. Keep these lists metered and avoid making absolute statements as to what is best and worst in the game.

This section is one of the most scrutinized by outside eyes, and as such it should contain the absolute bare minimum of jokes.

What Constitutes a Pro and a Con?

This is constantly up for debate, and sometimes people's opinions will change with time. The goal with these lists should be to inform readers as to the following traits:

• What does this character excel at?
• What can I abuse as this character to gain an advantage?
• What flaws do I have to play around with this character?
• What about my character can opposing characters exploit to gain an advantage over me?

In most cases, it's best to compare the character to the average power level of their respective game. Comparing a character to a perceived stronger one or the "top tiers" isn't helpful in illustrating what kind of issues a player might encounter when picking up the character, or what can be exploited against them.

Let's take a look at some examples:

Character A doesn't have a ranged attack. In their game, only 30% of characters have any sort of ranged attacks. "Does not have a ranged attack" cannot be considered a Con for this character, since it's something shared by the majority of cast.

Character B does have a ranged attack. "Has a ranged attack" can be considered a Pro, but not necessarily so. It is certainly an advantage they have over the other 70%, but does this one tool make them stand out? Is ranged attack a major part of the metagame, or simply an added bonus that a player can do without? These should be taken into consideration when writing Pros/Cons, rather than listing out all the unique tools a character possesses.

Character C has a ranged attack, but it's extremely slow. It might be tempting to list "Worst ranged attack in the game" as a Con, but let's consider C's overall power level if they didn't have this awful ranged attack. Would they be essentially unchanged, or would they struggle against most of the cast? If the answer is the former, then C never needed it, and so "Worst ranged attack in the game" cannot be a Con. If the answer is the latter, then maybe the problem lies elsewhere, and their extremely slow ranged attack was merely a symptom. It might be better to reword the Con as "Terrible frame data" instead.

Bad Moves VS Situational Moves

Sometimes characters have moves that are questionably helpful. In some cases, the community can come to the conclusion that the move is more risk than it's worth, and advise players to avoid using said move in most circumstances. In others, it's helpful in enough scenarios where the move is simply referred to as "situational." Despite this, it's rather common for writers to list many moves with considerable downsides as simply being situational, which is ill-advised due to its vague narrative, dishonesty, confusion to new players and potentially contradicting competitive expertise.

Ask yourself the following questions if you can't decide what a move should be described as:

• Does the move only become helpful in few, select situations?
• Does the move have reactable startup, punishable recovery, avoidable hitboxes, or otherwise high risk characteristics?
• Does the move give low reward for landing it?
• Does the move have a cost such as meter, cooldowns, health, or a character-specific resource?
• Does the move replace other moves? Is it possible to revert the replacement in the middle of the match?
• Does the move have an easy obvious counter, reducing the attack to a knowledge check?

There are also three simpler questions, but these are prone to more debate so handle these with care or use them as tiebreakers.

• Will top level players, character discords, or the community at large advise against using the move?
• Does the character have an objectively better choice for the same situation?
• Does the move invariably put you in a worse situation regardless of success?

If you find that too many of these can be checked off, you are likely staring at a bad move, not a situational one. It's important to differentiate the two, as you don't want readers to believe that a move is better or worse than it really is, but also don't want readers to believe that a helpful move limited to certain scenarios is bad simply because it's not all-purpose. Likewise, just because a move is reactable or has limited range does not make it bad on its own, unless these flaws are so pronounced it will never realistically be feasible to use the move.

Please exercise caution when describing certain moves as "bad" in a hyperbolic sense, unless it truly is deserving of such harsh criticism.

Using Move Names or Inputs

Depending on the context, both move names and inputs can be appropriately used, and both come with advantages and disadvantages. Some players know moves by their inputs, other by their names. In order to reduce confusion for readers who are less familiar with a character you can use tooltip data to clarify the basic info for that move—the image, startup, recovery, advantage, and guard requirement.

Creating Players to Watch Sections

The "Players to Watch" table is a resource guide and suggestion template meant to go on a character's Resources tab. The idea behind the table is that it provides new players with examples of veteran player footage.

However, these tables should have a few restraints.

• The section should be presented as "Players to Watch" not as "Notable Players". Players who are put into this table need to have a large amount of publicly available footage to observe, whether on YouTube or on a replay viewing site like keeponrock.in.
• The section must link to example footage, for example:
  EVO 2022 Grand Finals against Slash (MA)
  Multiple sources of footage, preferably against different characters, are strongly recommended.
• The section should never link to social media for the players, only their footage. This section is not for endorsement.
• The Notes field should provide some basic explanation of why the player's footage is noteworthy for watching.
• You should perhaps note if a player is retired or not, as that could impact their footage relative to older versions of the game or modern metas.

Do not vandalize these tables, and be careful with who you link to. The Bureaucrat team reserves the right to moderate these tables.