So I was speaking to da main man Phoenix "In His Own" Wright in the 'Best Players to Learn From' thread and we both saw this as a good idea. Basically, the Character specific thread feels a bit too general and having any specific questions asked/answered there wouldn't seem very efficient, nor would it be the best way to bring info out.

I'm gonna be really honest, we have a great community and all, but it's constantly expanding with long time players and for some reason, we have barely any materials to help new/amateur players to improve and catch up with the rest of us. This is honestly a running trend in the overall FGC and I don't think it would be right to have it here too.

"But Suli, how can we prevent such an awful thing from happening?!?!?!?!" Well, my curious, young friend, the solution is simple;
We make a more educational forum section.

Let me explain, sure we have the general character sections, which does have some great info, but that's all presented as pure general discussion. Say I want Lunary Senpai to notice me, I wanna pick up Meta Knight and for some reason, I struggle to take stocks from my opponent because I lack knowledge on killing moves or aerial pressure. Imma go, "Okay, there's info on the thread, let's check it out...." but after rummaging through the thread trying to find what I want to find, I come out with nothing. Even if I do, it takes me forever because I have to read the thread page by page since nothing is specific. That's a really time consuming and frustrating experience.

With an Educational section, players who are new to characters or the game in general can just pop a question there and wait for it to be answered. Even better, top tier players can post some kind of special guest thread or whatever where they can talk about who they are (as a player obviously) and answer the questions and give advice to anyone who is in need of it. Heck, we can make this even bigger with mentoring programs like what Smogon and the LoL community does!

Now you might be sitting there asking, "Why bother? Why go through so much effort?" Well, there's so much untapped potential and so many new players who drop the game so early on because they don't know how to play or don't know what they're doing. If you think about it, we only have 1 character specific guide. THATS IT! Just 1! We've made guides on how to play online, tier lists, combo videos and online tournaments but we have next to nothing when it comes to character specific guides?! That's crazy! That's bonkers! "It's bazeer!!!!" - VideoGameDunkey

However, I can't just sit here and voice out my opinion and magically expect this to happen. I feel like we're family here. So what's your opinion? Does this seem like a good idea? Why and why not? Vote and post below

tl;dr SSF2 Kindergarten.
It's a good idea but if you want me to learn people how to MK/Lloyd... I'm just that lazy and not motivated at all as for me.
At least not for now, however if other people have energy to give , it's a nice idea.

We should definitely do this. Although this game has a higher percentage of players than the main games that are competitive or close, we still have a lot of people who were introduced to this game without a background in Melee or PM (or perhaps Brawl and Sm4sh like Doof) who don't have the same resources that up-and-coming canon Smash players have.

Come to think of it, I'm gonna try and write a Yoshi guide, so coming soon there will be 2 character-specific guides.

Im all for it. Why not? We just need to get some guys who actually know their mains and can explain stuff so this doesnt go downhill. Can someone call Rem for a Tails guide?

If this is happening, then should we make it an invitation-only thread? I feel like a thread like that should only receive posts from players that actually know what they're talking about. We can't just let anyone give their input, for they could not be knowing what they talking about and give false information to the ones that are trying to learn.

Oh wait, then how can the players in need asks questions? Perhaps sending a message via PM or through the IRC?

The system is slightly flawed. Maybe have a BR Style thread where there's an application process for people who can answer questions.

Then again, that would still be really unfair to people who actually want to contribute something to help.

That'd be also counter-productive to people like me who just don't want to spend that much energy to do it.

Goshdarnit man you had one job (know I know how niayre feels lol)

I think the best system is to allow anyone to give their input. The Fox forums on Smashboards does this:

Of course, this works because the entire thread is devoted purely to Fox, and not to all of the characters. So there needs to be a little more organization than that, there is a reason that each character has their own specific thread rather than one thread pertaining to all of the characters.

The Falcon forum does something where they keep an index of any important info that someone says so that it doesn't get lost. Trying to keep an index that contain locations of info for all characters will fill up VERY fast though. There will probably need more than one post eventually, but this is a good thing to have.

So, I have a solution. We can have an educational thread that is streamlined for questions about characters/gameplay and/or mentoring (but that might do better in its own thread entirely), with this we use that as the Q&A for all of the characters until they gets guides, which upon a character getting an excellent guide that becomes the new platform for that character. This would probably go in the "Community" forum but I'm sure it could go in the general SSF2 section as well.

The other solution is to get an entirely new sub-forum dedicated to improvement and this stuff, that would be great too. All of the guides would have a place there, and so would any mentoring thread and general questions (like the Dev Q&A thread, but for players instead). There could even be a "post video/replay here for tips" topic, as well as a mentoring topic (which can probably be used to find a mentor but use PMs as the primary means of communication from that point on). A thread containing the index system would be good in here as well, additional posts would be used to expand the comprehensive nature. Of course, perhaps a series of threads titled "Index Thread #1: Black Mage, Bomberman, Bowser, Captain Falcon, and Chibi-Robo", "Index Thread #2: Donkey Kong, ..." you get the idea. Initially there would only need to be one thread/post but over time each character is going to have a decent number of entries. Consecutive posts reserved to keep this all down in one thread would be nice though, just make sure that 4-5 posts are reserved, I think that would be plenty and would keep everything close to the OP (I wouldn't want to start the second index post at like post #32 or something). This thread can be locked and only modified by a moderator, or it can be allowed to be posted in by every user. I think the latter works better since they can be like "Here's what 1337fox420XX said about edgeguarding with Kirby with Fox!" and they link the post to make sure the stuff gets saved. It gets reviewed by the author of the OP and inserted into that character's section in the index.

I think though that if the guides become the new platform for the character-specific questions about improvement (to relieve some stress on the main Q&A thread), then there should be some consensus of approval that the guide itself is up to 'snuff and will help players out immensely, so that if a player creates a guide and it doesn't meet community standards then it should be locked or revised so that it does meet community standards. I'm also of the opinion that we shouldn't try to make a guide for a character that already has one, if the guide has missed a substantial amount of information then it raises the questions of
1) Why did the guide miss this information in the first place? and
2) How to add in this new information?
I think that the new info should be inserted as appropriate with the new author receiving credit for what they did (for instance, if I didn't write any MUs for top tier characters then someone who does write a guide with the MUs should either amalgamate info from mine and become the new main guide [if theirs was much better overall], or new info from his guide should be added into mine with credit given where due).

Advanced How to Play videos or Advanced Tehcniques? Those kinds of tutorials would be great in here.

It is abundantly clear that this thread/forum would take a lot of work to maintain, but I think a forum would be the best case scenario given the extra organization it will get.
I am in the process of writing a guide to Falcon, I have been busy with exams as of late but it is 67% to 75% done I'd say. Still a lot of MUs to go and then I gotta polish it up to make it all look nice (it is also 3 posts long so far).

Having it closed off seems like an excellent way to kill the educational section with inactivity. Besides that we don't have enough active good players in the community to do such a thing. Having it tied into the IRC wouldn't work because although the IRC link is stickied, it's not "part of Mcleodgaming".

It sounds like the OP is asking for Smashboards-esque Character Discussion forums for each character, which I support since I've wanted that for a while. The only problem I'd foresee would be new versions that change characters and lack of activity that would push down the old threads to prevent people from trying to learn or execute old techniques/combos. But for the most part I'm still for Smashboards-esque Character Discussions forums.

This is the biggest problem, which is probably why a sub-forum shouldn't happen.

Character specific forums rather than specific threads would be great, I agree.

Thanks to everyone who voted and left their input!

Character specific forums would also be great, since it's way easier to control and less time consuming to set up.

As for the whole invitational only idea, I was thinking that maybe we could do something where top tier players will be asked to make some sort of AMA (game/character specific of course) and those threads can be pinned to the top of the section so that people can go immediately there if they are in need of help.

Also good luck to Phoenix (happy? xD) and TCS on your guides! Will definitely read them when they release

I may do a Lloyd guide myself, but it would have to be during the summer due to exams (I might also have to wait until after Beta, since there's gonna be a lot of significant changes to the game, including Lloyd's moveset).

If this thread gains more attention and recieves more inputs, I'll be more than happy to forward the idea to a site admin to see how we can do this. So spread word b o i s!

why not have a community run tutoring program or smth, like ppl sign up to get gud at x and someone who signed on as a tutor teaches them like some wise old sage.

'hi my name's xXrandom361Xx and I wanna learn the art of acquiring beautiful women's numbers over the internet with mad turnip skills.'

'@Gosick will be your tutor for this round, random.'

ik that's somewhat of a joke or w/e, but it could work out well, we'd just need respected players or w/e to be able to go along with it.

(wehns tagging)

Me and Phoenix brought that idea up, but I think it would be better of respected players announce on the educational section that they are offering such service instead of players being assigned to mentors.

And yes, we need tagging. Like, right now.

Can't let this get buried

i'd love to do this but the main issue i have is that we simply do not have enough distribution of mains. there are characters that no one cares enough about to write a guide for. i would consider transferring the OP of the Tails thread to Rem, the Bomberman thread to Huey... a lot of characters don't have anyone with that kind of devotion. making a FULL section for guides or a full section per character (what we originally wanted to do) would be wasteful because a lot of characters would have no activity.