Talk:MB

Mind Burn

Cynn/Argo use mind burn, so does afflicted eles and sparks of the titan, plus it's the only prophecies fire elite. It may not see daily use in PvP/meta, but if your abbreviate mind burn you get MB. --8765 01:49, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

The skill fits the disambig. Regardless of its "usefulness", it should be listed. The wiki is here to document the game as a whole, not just useful skills, in my opinion. -- Wandering Traveler 01:50, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Nobody means Mind Burn if they say "MB". The wiki exists to document facts about the game, and abbreviations/common terms have to actually be used if we're to document them as such. Corollary: The wiki documents the current state of the game, rather than keeping note of past changes. ("Hundred Blades used to..." No.) Therefore, for glossary terms/abbreviations, only the current usage/meaning ought to be listed. For example, "SS" can refer to a whole bunch of skills. But ones which no one uses anymore, for any reason - not popular, useless after nerfs, uncommonly used, etc. - shouldn't be there because that's obviously not what someone searching the term is looking for. Steady Stance is a good example. Vili 02:00, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I disagree. The most popular terminology isnt neccesarially the terminology we want to use. Documentation of the game should consist of a neutral perspective; sure, one skill may be used more then all the rest or searched for the most, but that doesnt mean that the others still fit the criteria. the wiki should be a neutral guide, not a "hey, this skill is better then the rest, go here" guide. -- Wandering Traveler 02:07, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you completely missed my point, because I said nothing at all about skills being better than others. HB can and should list Healing Breeze, even if it sucks, because people commonly use that term. The object of these articles (redirects/disambigs, really) is to point a person in the right direction when they search such term. So if I put CC into search because I am looking for Consume Corpse/Peppermint Candy Canes/whatever, it only serves to confuse me and clutter the page if stuff like Canthan Calendar is there too. For abbreviations, what is the point of listing every possible thing which they could stand for, if no one actually abbreviates the things in that way? Specific ones like Pwk are totally unambiguous and so there is no argument. But when you have something like SS etc. and there could be like twenty entries, I think it just doesn't make sense to list far-fetched and unlikely terms. Consider Conjure - 99% of the time, that refers to Conjure Flame, Conjure Frost, or Conjure Lightning. But wait! What about Conjure Phantasm or Conjure Nightmare? Both of those skills are also widely used. But, the problem is that in actual usage, "conjure" will almost never stand for those. Therefore, if I was to make the Conjure article/redirect, I would point it to the Elementalist skills.

To reiterate - if someone is going to search for "Mind Burn", they won't search for "MB", and vice versa. That's why it doesn't make sense to have it listed. Vili 02:17, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I see the merit, but I don't see the point....Canthan Calender is a strange thing to add to a disambig, I'll admit, but we're not talking about trying to link together Brother Mehnlo with Beast Mastery, or The Afflicted Miju with Abbadon. In personal preference, I like disambigs that relate; in this case, skills. All of these should be kept because they all fit in the same "category".

I probably explained that horribly, but thats my opinion. -- Wandering Traveler 02:28, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Except the wiki does record past changes. See Rodgort's Invocation, beta skills/icons. Nobody uses Soldier's Stance, Spirit' Strength (at least serious pvp), only occasionally spirit shackles. Those are still on SS.
If I'm in the middle of discussion about how bad mind burn is, I would abbreviate it MB, even though mind blast could be in the discussion as well. If some random person looks into this discussion without reading everything, my usage of MB is ambiguous. Particularly, mind burn and mind blast are incredibly similar. --8765 02:15, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Beta skills and icons is a different matter than documenting changes of skill functionality such as "Thunderclap used to hex target foe and they were knocked down when they took lightning damage", or like "Signet of Ghostly Might was briefly bugged, it would kill the opposing team, this was much abused", or "Spoil Victor was once used to instantly kill the Guild Lord when he used Cyclone Axe". You could ask why we don't list such historical notes like these, and the answer is that there are simply too many of them and it would clutter up the page; they also are no longer relevant. Beta stuff doesn't change and so it is fine to list as trivia; it is manageable.

Soldier's Stance ought to be removed from SS, but because that page seems to be highly disputed I don't think anyone is feeling bold enough to change it. Spirit's Strength may not be used in PvP, but that doesn't matter, because it is in fact commonly abbreviated as SS, and coincidentally still used in PvE. Spirit Shackles is pretty common for certain farming builds. Etc etc...

If you are in the middle of a discussion, you can make impromptu abbreviations for nearly anything and they will make sense because they are in context - you've already defined the term and so it makes sense...for example, it's rare to have SP refer to "Skill Point", but if I was talking about them and abbreviated it as such, people would understand, despite it being an uncommon term. In the sort of hypothetical discussion that you illustrate, it is true that confusion might arise if you used an ambiguous term like SS without context. "Does he mean Spirit's Strength? Spirit Shackles? Spiteful Spirit?" The problem with "MB" is that it is not such an ambiguous term, because it never means Mind Burn, 99.5% of the time...the only case you'd use that is if you were discussing Mind Burn. Mind Burn is like Amity; one of those odd neglected skills that hardly anyone cares/knows about. Even if certain NPC or monsters use it, that doesn't really mean much; Afflicted Elementalists do enormous damage with Lava Arrows too, and that is just as obscure/unused. So it wouldn't get added to the LA article. Vili 02:31, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

My bad, Mark of Rodgort. There's your trivial historical content. Signet of ghostly might has that historical trivia. Mark of rodgort's changes are insignificant, SoGM's bug was more prominent for that short time.

Anyways, I don't think we have any explicit disambiguation policy, so I'm using this for example: Wikipedia:Disambiguation and Arm (disambiguation). Btw, mind burn is more prevalent than lava arrows. --8765 03:22, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Ups. I forgot what wiki I'm on. My arguments are thus null and void; I yield. >.< Vili 03:39, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Well my point is we have no policy about it. So for now best to use the most established model available. Sure ARM has like a billion disambiguations, but that fact that someone will call ARM one thing and someone another thing, it all has to be accounted for. --8765 03:44, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

No, it doesn't. That's absolutely ridiculous. The point of redirects/disambig pages are to list things that people might hear in-game and not understand - so if the pages are cluttered, as vili said, they become less and less useful, to a point where they're pieces of shit when you have stuff like canthan calendar (since nobody refers to canthan calendar AT ALL, let alone with CC).

We're not wikipedia. We actually have a pretty good track record of not following their policies without cause - just because they list six billion entries for ARM doesn't mean we have to. It would honestly be fucking retarded to list every possible skill that matched an abbreviation, simply because it's not useful. Mind burn's initials are MB - but who cares? As vili already said, nobody refers to it as MB, and if they are it's already in context. That kind of stuff we don't have to list - in fact, we shouldn't list anything that you have to know the context to be able to figure out. That hints that the item is so obscure that it's cluttering up the page.

The point of an encyclopedia is to be a useful resource for game information. We're documenting what terms are actually used by players in the game, so if someone needs to look up what "pot" means he finds that it actually means protective was kaolai and not even single ash spell in the game, 90% of which are useless and thus are not being referred to. We aren't documenting "every skill with the initials M.B.," because frankly, nobody fucking cares and thus it's useless information. Who the hell is going to look for skills named MB without having heard it first? And in that scenario (a player hears others refer to something as MB), we'd be doing him a disservice by clogging the page with absolutely useless crap like mind burn, when that's not going to be what MB stands for in the first place.

To summarize - keep it simple, keep it trimmed. We shouldn't link to everything under the sun because that becomes confusing for any term, but when it comes to skill abbreviations, it becomes downright retarded. The state of the game is that very few of the 1000+ skills are viable. Instead of pretending that cluttering the page with unused and shitty skills is useful, realize that because of ArenaNet's insistence on whittling down the list of viable skills to almost nothing, the trend should be to redirect what is used, not what is possible in theoryland, since those are going to be, by and large, absolutely useless and generally confusing, and in the best case scenario, merely absolutely useless (since, again, nobody is going to search for MB thinking "hey, I wonder what a complete list of skills with the initials MB would look like," they're going to be looking for the specific MB that a player referred to). -Auron 23:47, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

It seems this is going in favour of listing the useful things only, but I've RFC'd it in case there are other points to bring up. If no one responds, we should go ahead and take out the unnecessary items. -- Brains12 \ talk 15:45, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) Auron, we're not all GW-experts like you (and no, thats not sarcasm, I actually hold very high respects for you). Guild Wars contains people who like both Mind Blast and Mind Burn. So why should we deny the fact that some newb player might have heard of a nice fire magic skill? He may look at a shortened list of only "good" skills and say "is this it?" or look at all the skills available and say "hey, this one looks fun to use". Usefulness =\= higher spots on disambig pages. -- Wandering Traveler 15:45, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

If people want to look at a list of elites they could use, they'd go to an elite skill listing - this isn't it. This is a page defining the term "MB", not a list of "things that could be MB, but aren't". If your newb heard of Mind Burn, he'd go to Mind Burn; he'd come to MB when he wants to find out what MB is - and MB isn't Mind Burn, because no one calls it that. A disambiguation page disambiguates terms, it doesn't make terms even more ambiguous by listing every possible thing that it could be (but almost certainly isn't). -- Brains12 \ talk 16:01, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Documenting probabilities is bad practice, because if that probability never happens, then we would have been hosting redundant information that whole time. Factual and concise beats length and obscurity. (Terra Xin 13:45, 22 March 2009 (UTC))

Bleh, I'm still really hesitant on only listing certain inquiries, but I can't really argue with the points given. Nevertheless, I won't stand in the way of consensus. -- Wandering Traveler 14:05, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Max Views

I don't want to restart this argument but shouldn't there be some sort of system to find out if a skill should go on a redirect list? Something like how many Vies it has, and if it has more then a set amount that it get to go on the redirect list if it has less then it dosn't. Just my thoughts on the matter. Yay Killing Charr talk 14:54, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I was thinking something like 125,000 views this would exclude Mental Block but add back in Mind Burn. My reasoning is that if so many people visit this page then chances are they dont want to type it out and will just put in an abbreviation(MB in this case) then thye just have to click on the link. Plus this way it dosnt lead into an argument about how good a skill is like the one above. Yay Killing Charr talk 15:11, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

No one will ever say MB and be referring to Mind Burn. Most of the time people will go "/wiki <term>" because they heard it in game and didn't know what it was, not because they are lazy. Misery 15:43, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

2014

I know that in the past MB = Mind Blast. Burn was crap, so it was unambiguous.

Nowadays, the (thoroughly outdated) PvXwiki Blast build has been replaced by a Burn build though, at least in GvG. So what about a disamb. page now? Steve1 (talk) 22:09, 1 September 2014 (UTC)