Fringe/Rogue hub?
TappedOut forum
Posted on Feb. 9, 2015, 1:42 p.m. by grumbledore
would it be possible to get a hub added for fringe/rogue builds?
Serendipitous_Hummingbird says... #3
If we could also get a Stompy hub, I'd appreciate that.
February 9, 2015 1:59 p.m.
i love grub hub just saying. and a fringe hub would be a nice home for most of my builds.
February 9, 2015 2:55 p.m.
why bother removing hubs? just not common anymore? something rotated out?
February 9, 2015 2:59 p.m.
Well Birthing Pod isn't even legal in modern so it like doesn't exist anymore as a deck.
February 9, 2015 3:03 p.m.
RoarMaster says... #9
I think that the Hub list is a bit all over the place. There are a lot of 'niche' decks that have hubs, and many other common deck types that have no Hubs for them.
February 9, 2015 3:25 p.m.
grumbledore says... #10
to RoarMaster's point, i think that the hubs system is used to describe decks by play style as well as by archetype. unfortunately, there is a lot of cross over terminology between the two, which is a little confusing. have you ever made the mistake of adding a grixis control deck that does not use Cruel Ultimatum to the 'Cruel Control' hub? i have... lol. theres a few users that seem to like to police the hubs to keep them archetype-relevant, which is completely legit and i get. however, its kind of annoying to not be able to add a deck to a hub which accurately describes its play style because it doesn't exactly fit into an archetype of the same name.
given that, i think it would be sick if there was a second hub-style tagging system specific to major archetypes such as twin, burn, scapeshift, etc.
February 9, 2015 3:58 p.m.
Yea, as long as we are talking about irrelevant hubs, "cruel control" could probably be removed.
February 9, 2015 3:59 p.m.
the problem is mixing user suggested versus official. i guess an autocomplete could work for that case, or something.
February 9, 2015 4:05 p.m.
julianjmoss says... #13
Removing hubs because they aren't common is kind of stupid. You can still build a pod deck even if it isn't modern legal and cruel control is still a thing. There should be more added and this thread would be a good place to talk about hubs that seem to be missing
February 9, 2015 4:12 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #14
The last time I did a major clean out of the hubs, I tried to delete all of the irrelevant or overly specific stuff that found its way into the system.
Really, I think hubs could be limited to colors, major archetypes (as in control, combo, aggro, midrange, etc.), and maybe a few special cases. Maybe we could blend these more general hubs with the advanced search feature and let users find secks of hub X with card Y if they're looking for a specific kind of deck. Once you start adding a hub for every decklist, the system gets unwieldy.
February 9, 2015 4:19 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #16
@julianjmoss: Except that's the process by which we end up with all these artifacts in the hub directory. Not everything needs to be represented by a hub. Streamline the system, and add the detail at the deck level.
February 9, 2015 4:34 p.m.
maybe :P
i think its descriptivism vs prescriptivism. i wrote it to handle cases where people were obviously searching for a particular type of deck based on google traffic. i don't think any kind of mass deletion is useful without a very clear and obvious rubric to determine what's a valid hub, and i don't really think anyone has much of a monopoly on that.
February 9, 2015 6:18 p.m.
grumbledore says... #18
Seems like when datasets become too large/convoluted, the most straight forward approach is to break it into more granular sets.
February 9, 2015 6:27 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #20
I left the hubs that were still significant; I didn't just delete everything. However, I'm still a proponent of a simplified hub system. One of the issues with the hubs we have now is that many users seem not to know how or when to use certain hubs (Cruel Control is basically the prime example at this point; over half of the decks I've seen that have that hub don't even have the card that's supposed to define them). Another issue is that people ask for hubs for Standard decks, and then we have to keep track of what isn't relevant after rotation. If you let all of those obsolete hubs stay in the system, you just generate confusion. Some of these decks even become obsolete long before rotation.
How about this:
We go through and do some thorough cleaning in the hub lists. We offer a tag system (think categories and tags on a blog site) in addition to the more conservative hub system. Users can select the hubs that most effectively describe the broad families to which their decks belong, and they can also input their own tags to further identify those decks.
We then clean up the hub pages. Maybe section them by format, kind of like how we can tab through the front page deck feed for "latest," "top 8," and "featured." Then, on the side of the hub pages (maybe where the latest thread feed would be on the home page), we have a "trending tags" listing that displays the top 10-20 tags. Selecting one would filter the deck feed.
In theory, this is a self-policing system. Users would be rewarded for choosing meaningful tags because they'd get more visibility. Most users are likely to use a tag they think actually represents their deck, such as "Twin" or "Delver," and, because the user inputs the tags, joke tags should have low frequency (are enough people really going to think to use the exact tag "thebestdeckever" to get it into the top 10-20?). Worst case, we could implement a blacklist to be used only on distasteful or troll tags.
An example of this system:
- User A, who has a Modern deck with the hubs "combo" and "U/R (Izzet)" and the tag "Twin," would be likelier to get views from the tag because it's likely that other users are also using those tags in those hubs and format.
- User B, who has a Modern deck with the hubs "combo," "control," "aggro," and "midrange" and the tags "lolbestdeckever" and "checkthisout," would be less likely to get views from the tags because it's unlikely that other users are using those tags.
Of course, this idea doesn't solve the issue of people misusing hubs intentionally, but I think it's much less likely that people will misuse a simplified hub system than it is that they'll misuse the current one. Plus, neither the hub nor the tag system should require much upkeep after implementation (although getting to implementation would take some work, I imagine).
Thoughts? Completely implausible? Unrealistic? Doable? Likely to be used?
February 9, 2015 7:01 p.m.
that's all a fairly huge overhaul :P i am not against it, but it would take a lot of work. i have opened this up a little bit with the ability to tag cards in your deck, which in a weird way correlates to this. but i still haven't really audited that for any kind of usefulness.
i don't think being relevant forever is the goal of hubs (except for maybe cannonical ones like control). i think trendy ones are very useful. and if they fall out of trendiness then they're pretty easy to deactivate. are there really that many that are not active? as often as standard rotates i guess.
February 9, 2015 7:09 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #22
I would give you a better assessment if I had access to the hubs still. I'd need to double check and see (or estimate) how many are currently obsolete or underrepresented.
February 9, 2015 7:14 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #24
It doesn't seem like too much has changed since I last pared it down. There are a lot of tribal and obscure hubs, though. Stuff like Solar Flare, which, to my knowledge, isn't even relevant anymore, is still in the list because it was a major Standard deck at the time. And how many people are likely to know what the Aikido hub even is?
The more I look at the existing hubs, the more I think we may be better off (workload aside; looking at long-term usability) with a conservative and fairly obvious hub selection and then some other system (tags are my proposal right now) that allows users more creative freedom. That way, we don't have to add and maintain hubs; the hubs are essentially timeless and the tags change as the formats develop and as new deck ideas take root.
Plus, we should really have a hub directory with a link to each hub's page and a brief description of what the hub is (although I'm still a favor of obvious naming conventions), and the more I think about writing that page, the less reasonable it seems to have all of these tribal hubs and semi-relevant deck types floating around.
February 9, 2015 7:45 p.m.
RoarMaster says... #25
Sounds like a good idea to me Epochalyptik, best of both worlds. Might be a lot of work, but sounds like it both streamlines the hub section while still leaving the ability to tag specific deck types.
February 9, 2015 10:13 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #26
I think the main issue would be the sheer amount of labor that will need to go into writing and testing the systems needed to implement the feature.
February 9, 2015 10:25 p.m.
well the only drawbacks to the system we have right now are potentially just having annoying options in the dropdown. I wonder if most people don't just use the autocomplete feature because I don't hear anyone complaining about it.
so as for the hubs suggested...... :P fringe...rogue.... others?
February 10, 2015 1:02 p.m.
vampirelazarus says... #28
I would love a "hub" hub just to screw with people, but its your call.
February 10, 2015 1:31 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #29
I'm still opposed to adding hubs like that. Just with these two alone:
Fringe: What does a deck have to do or be to be considered fringe? Is a less popular version of a tier 1 or tier 2 deck considered fringe because it isn't the mainstream version? Should only non-tier 1 or tier 2 decks use this hub? Homebrews? What's the qualification?
Rogue: Same as above. Is a rogue deck one that runs Rogue tribal? One that goes outside the expected meta? (I can tell you already there will be both in this hub because the term isn't obvious.) Does it have to have a unique element to it, or does it only have to be unanticipated?
I get that hubs do help users characterize their decks, but I think an accurate characterization is better than allowing people to randomly throw their decks into hubs they weren't intended to be in or, definitionally, shouldn't be in.
February 10, 2015 1:47 p.m.
grumbledore says... #30
i hadn't thought of the rogue tribal type. fringe seems like a better hub name. that said, there is really no way of demarcating non-tier decks without using the 'casual' hub, but that implies that you aren't going to run them competitively which isn't always the case. personally everything i make is fringe, lol
February 10, 2015 1:49 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #31
You see the problem, though, right? Hubs are kinda just... there. You could pick ten users and get ten different interpretations of what some of these hubs mean, and that's pretty bad from a usability standpoint. I'm of the opinion that any user-selected features like this should be self-explanatory, or at least as obvious as possible.
February 10, 2015 1:53 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #33
I'm not quite sure where you're going with that. The hub system is a form of faceted classification, yes.
ChiefBell says... #2
Also can we remove the birthing pod hub.
yeaGO, Epochalyptik
February 9, 2015 1:44 p.m.