The Manual of Style (MoS or MOS) is the style manual for all SuperCombo articles. This primary page is further supported by Writing Character Pages and Writing System Explanations. If any contradiction arises, this page takes 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 Editors' 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. (e.g.: "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 takes priority. If the English and Japanese text for a game on this wiki differ, the official English localization take priority.
If a borrowed word that is not normally part of the English language is used, 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 Juri's Anketsatsu (officially named 暗剣殺 in Japanese), you get the following link:
Header: ==暗剣殺 (236MK)== Results in: https://wiki.supercombo.gg/w/Street_Fighter_6/Juri#%E6%9A%97%E5%89%A3%E6%AE%BA_(236MK)
If you instead use the English translation, the link will look like:
Header: ==Ankensatsu (236MK)== Results in: https://wiki.supercombo.gg/w/Street_Fighter_6/Juri#Ankensatsu_(236MK)
Pronouns and Gendered Language
We recommend an approach adopted from the APA Style.
Use "They/Their/Them" When:
- If They/Their/Them are the official pronouns 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 Gendered 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
Captions
Criteria for captions on character moves:
- Explanations of what the moves do
- 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 captions:
- 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 Wiki. 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. A reader should walk away from an overview with a baseline understanding of how a character plays at a macro scale.
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 can be reacted to 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.
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 Replay Theater.
- The section must link to example footage. 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 metagames.
Do not vandalize these tables, and be careful with who you link to. The Bureaucrat team reserves the right to moderate these tables.
Avoid Pros and Cons
Pros and Cons tables, also known as the Strengths and Weaknesses section, are potentially very contentious and can be damaging to the wiki's reputation when handled without care. Being purely subjective material and the frequent target of edit wars we discourage using them entirely. Instead, editors are encouraged to use character introductions.
Because of how old some of the wikis hosted on SuperCombo Wiki are, you may encounter them across the site and the guidelines below exist to moderate them. These sections should be collaborative efforts which are frequently cross referenced and verified.
Expand this section for a non-exhaustive list of guidelines to follow when editing this section. The Bureaucrat team reserves the right to make rulings on these sections (including to remove them entirely) on a per-case basis.
- Begin every bullet point with a bolded summary of the bullet point, followed by an non-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. This includes when the page is under construction for characters that are as of yet unreleased or in "pre-release" status with limited information.
Format
Each strength or weakness should follow the following format:
Bold Text: 1-3 sentence explanation. One for simpler strengths/weaknesses, two-three for more complex strengths/weaknesses.
- For example:
- Massive Damage: Honda's abilities tend to let him deal incredible amounts of non-combo damage and dizzy very quickly.
- Can't Get In: Playing Blanka means you'll have to work hard to get in, and even so you'll often lack the tools to damage once you do.
- If there's something that you feel is absolutely imperative to be mentioned to any newer or inexperienced player about a character (i.e. difficulty barriers, defensive quirks), but does not exactly fit as a legitimate, objective strength or weakness; remember that you have ~3 paragraphs worth of space in the character's overview section to make that known, at the top of the page, above the strengths and weaknesses table.
- Lastly, please refrain from using the section as a battleground for balance. If you're unsure about a change or feel like something is not listed that is relevant to the character, ask around the Discord for our opinions on the subject, or consult other experts on the game.
What Constitutes a Strength and a Weakness?
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 be abused with this character to gain an advantage?
- What flaws does one have to play around with this character?
- What about this character can opposing characters exploit to gain an advantage?
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.
On Writing Strengths
- Whereas weaknesses are more specific, strengths can be very open-ended and generalized. For example, having good defense in a game with generally bad defense is likely worth noting, even if other characters are also strong on defense.
- Always make sure to specify what elements of a strength make it valid. Adding Space Control for a character and following it up with "Using her good normals, Chun-Li can control space well" is very vague. Which of Chun-Li's normals are good for space control? Listing specific examples is a good way to clear things up.
- Don't get overly into minutia, such as things like having an extra frame of jump startup, or having an overhead that is 2 frames faster than average. Are these really a key strength/weakness of the character?
- Don't try to balance the number of strengths and weaknesses to be equal. They don't need to be. Developers don't purposefully make characters to be just plain bad (anymore), and what players end up discovering and valuing to be "good" in a game may vary greatly from their intent. As a result, some characters will inevitably have more strengths than weaknesses and vice versa. Trying to balance this by adding poorly-justified or outright fake strengths or weaknesses gives people an incorrect view of the character, which can hurt the learning process of newcomers.
On Writing Weaknesses
- Weaknesses should be very specific to the issue that plagues the character. Always make sure that you specify the exact problem a character has when listing their weakness.
- The absence of a good tool isn't the same thing as having a weakness, especially if the character is built to do something that does not need that tool, but lacking something "essential" would be a weakness.
- Therefore, lacking a DP in a game with bad defensive options is a negative, but not having a gap closer is not a defining weakness. A DP can be essential for getting characters away from you or demanding space, but not having a dedicated gap closer just means you need to use universal mechanics to get around, and your character may not even need a gap closer to perform well.
- Make sure the absence of a tool is not covered somewhere else in the character's kit. A character's regular throws being lackluster is not a weakness if they have access to a command grab that fills that same role better.
- A character without any notable weaknesses is not necessarily a flawless character. It often means that their weaknesses are things that apply to the whole cast, or are not significant enough to be worth noting.