Talk:Tavern Brawl

The subject of this article has
an entry in the Editor's Handbook.

For background information and
guides on maintaining this article,
see Adding new Tavern Brawls.

Chronological order

Why are Tavern_Brawl#Previous_Tavern_Brawls listed in reverse chronological order? -- Karol007 (talk) 15:12, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

It makes sense to put the current/newest one at the top; after that it feels natural to keep overall sequence by running them backwards from there. It's also going to make a lot more sense in that the original Brawl shouldn't forever be stuck at the top of the list; better that it gets refreshed as new Brawls come and go. This also makes it easier for players to search through recent Brawls without getting lost in ancient ones. It's basically a Brawl stack. -- Taohinton (talk) 01:12, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

I agree. Aegonostic (talk) 21:31, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Brawl-specific daily quest?

"there are no plans to introduce new Brawl-specific quests"Daxxarri on Twitter (X). (2015-06-11).  v. 'Everybody! Get in here!': Win 5 Tavern Brawls. -- Karol007 (talk) 23:18, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Fixed. -- Taohinton (talk) 04:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Brawl-specific info

As a policy point it's probably worth noting here that info relating to specific Tavern Brawls should not be posted on most other pages, such as individual card pages. The reason is that the occurrence of a specific Brawl is fleeting and especially as the range expands, extremely rare, and outside of that Brawl, the info has zero relevance. Tavern Brawl is also only one game mode, and arguably the least consequential of all. Luckily, we have a very good place for putting Brawl-specific info - on the individual Brawl page. This is also a far smarter place to put it for those seeking such info, for several reasons. -- Taohinton (talk) 19:03, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Templating

In response to the templating by User:Shammiesgun, I have to say I can't really see the benefit. The same amount of work is required by editors - in fact, slightly more, since a new template has to be created each time, while the same text still has to be entered - and the content is only used on a single page so there's no effort saved. If wanting to change this page, the editor can't simply edit it, they have to find the appropriate template/s and then open and edit them individually. However, they can't preview the changes in situ since they won't show up until the template has been saved, making the process a lot trickier. The presence of sections inside the templates also makes the page less clear when editing.

I had previously considered making a 'Tavern Brawl section' template for use on this page: the editor would type in the name of the Brawl, the flavor text and the content text, and the section would produce itself, header, image, formatting and all. However, when I tested it, it didn't actually save much effort: we already copy, paste and edit the text from a previous Brawl, for similar savings. In exchange, the varying content of each Brawl (including cards and mini-subsections) combined with the lack of visible section headers meant that use of the template made the editing layout of the page much less clear. Using a template like this would make it easier to make page-wide formatting changes in the future if we wanted to, but would also make it much harder to make exceptions.

I'm open to input, but overall, neither of these models seem to offer something better than the current straightforward one. -- Taohinton (talk) 17:10, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

It's been a month, so if there are no replies to this I'll revert the page to its former setup. -- Taohinton (talk) 00:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

This is an old section, but anyways, my stance is that I am very much against content-templating (the linking of big templates of content into articles) because there will most likely be articles wherein the content of the template needs to change, and then it's just best to revert back to editing the content on a per-article basis. In short, templates containing a large amount of content which are to be used in multiple articles, is simply bad design, and will cause headaches. Aegonostic (talk) 01:55, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Table of Contents will eventually get out of hand; any proposals?

Another question is, how big can a TOC get? lol Aegonostic (talk) 21:30, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm guessing some sort of archiving as the solution. Aegonostic (talk) 21:34, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

I could see archiving once per real year, once per Standard format year (both leading to about 52 entries before reset), or once per product release (significantly fewer). If the latter, we could keep Brawls from the TWO most recent product releases, but archive each before that individually, so there's always at least a couple months of content. - jerodast (talk) 01:48, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

I've been thinking about this for a while :) Personally I don't mind the TOC, but the page is getting longer and longer, and slower to load. I agree that periodically archiving the older Brawls makes sense, although we'll need to go to the archives to grab older Brawls when they get reprised (and presumably remove them from the archive page in the process), so archiving too heavily will make maintenance fiddlier. I don't like the page taking so long to load, but it's certainly nice to have a good range of Brawls for interested players to read through (most won't bother to visit an archive page). -- Taohinton (talk) 11:29, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

We can just have this article be a more generic list of brawls. Existing headers and sections can be retained. This will not require archiving. Only the most recent brawls are displayed under sections, and these sections can be copies of their respective main article headers or something, so to make reprising an easy copy and paste from the main article into this one. Older brawls will not be displayed in all their antiquated glory, and newer brawls will still be displayed on this article. It sounds like a good plan. What do you guys think? :) Aegonostic (talk) 06:06, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

The main difference I'm getting here is not using an archive, and actually I agree that probably isn't necessary. The best solution would in fact be to simply comment out older Brawls - until we get to a truly mammoth page that should be fine and will reduce page size and load time while still making it easy to retrieve for reprises.

A related issue is the "History" - this is also getting out of hand. In this case I think a full history somewhere would be worthwhile. We could link to a 'main' "Tavern Brawl list" or such where a full list would be kept, but this would be annoying in terms of updating. A better solution might be a self-hiding div beneath the main History (similar to the Wild format card sections), where the older list would be available. I've made a draft of this which works fine, but I'm not sure if it's necessary yet? -- Taohinton (talk) 05:09, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. Your table already looks awesome. I'm sure you have the right design idea. Aegonostic (talk) 00:13, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

If one concern is page size and load time, it might be worth the effort to trim the size of the Brawl summaries in the Previous Tavern Brawls section. All that information is repeated from the main article page for each brawl, so really the "Previous" section could just be a table with the barest information -- brawl name, brief summary, no card images. For that matter, the History table could serve double duty if you want to cut out a lot of content. Ambignostic (talk) 19:37, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, it's a possibility. However, I suspect that if we're not going to list every previous Brawl (and that will soon become impractical or simply not useful... who is going to scroll through 200 different Brawls?!) then the load time/size will probably be fine with the current level of detail.

In terms of length, I've added some comment tags to hide roughly half the current list of previous Brawls. The page was really too long (especially considering it would not be able to be 'complete'), and I think this feels more reasonable. I'm not sure of the exact number we should list (and it will vary by Brawl type and also grow slowly over time anyway), but does this feel like a reasonable size? -- Taohinton (talk) 20:55, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

Personally I'd be fine with only the current brawl having any description beyond what's in the History table. It's all linked from History anyway. But you know me...I'm a splitter :) The current state is also fine. - jerodast (talk) 02:36, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

It's been a while, so I've gone ahead and made some changes to wrap this up. I've implemented the hidden 'Older Brawls' list as discussed and sandboxed; and reduced the number of previous Brawls by about half again. Both lists will slowly grow and can be shortened every few months or so as they grow too lengthy. For now this feels reasonable, loads far more quickly, and I think is probably a bit more accessible than the previous version. -- Taohinton (talk) 01:06, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Brawl counts

When Brawls were first introduced, it made sense to state that a Brawl was "the seventeenth Tavern Brawl." etc. Now that we have many reprises, the introductory sentence on some Brawl pages is beginning to get a bit long. The worst example so far is of course Randomonium, which starts with "Randomonium is the eighteenth, twenty-eighth, thirty-ninth, fifty-ninth, and sixty-seventh Tavern Brawl." As we get more and more reprises, this is only going to grow.

We already have a table of previous Brawls, so I don't think we need to list the Brawl numbers in the lead section too. However, I'm not quite sure how best to replace the list. Perhaps we should simply remove the first part and make it

Randomonium is a Tavern Brawl. It made its debut on October 14, 2015.

We could state the placement of the Brawl in terms of how many different Brawls had come before it, but this would likely be both unclear and simply hard to work out each time a new Brawl is added: Miniature Warfare made its debut as the 33rd Brawl, and the table below the lead section reminds us it was also the 74th Brawl, but it was in fact the 24th Brawl to be added.

I'm leaning toward the first option, but I'm interested in other ideas. -- Taohinton (talk) 06:09, 1 February 2017 (UTC) Possible solution:

Columns per each Brawl:

Numbers (for each reprises, e.g 27/86 )

Duration (e.g February 1 - February 6)

Name (e.g Gift Exchange)

Type (e.g Constructed)

TheGamer765 (talk)

It's best to be simplistic, thus I like your first option, aka the part about:

"removing the first part" and doing "Randomonium is a Tavern Brawl. It made its debut on October 14, 2015."

However, it is possible to document different versions of each Brawl in a tabular format. A table with the column "Notable Changes" (from the previous version of a Brawl) could be implemented (like the one in the table of this section: Tavern_Brawl#Repeated_Tavern_Brawls).

Tavern Brawl	Start	End	Notable Changes
18th	October 14, 2015	October 19, 2015	blah
28th	December 23, 2015	December 28, 2015	blank
39th	March 9, 2016	March 14, 2016
59th	July 27, 2016	August 1, 2016
67th	September 21, 2016	September 27, 2016	some card got super nerfed

Something like the above perhaps. Aegonostic (talk) 03:30, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

The discussion seems to have gotten a little confused. We already have a table like the one suggested by TheGamer765 on Tavern Brawl; and a table almost identical to the one suggested by Aegonostic on individual Brawl pages. An extra column for changes would be fine to add there in the few cases that have actually had changes.

However, it seems we do agree on removing the extra info from the lead section. Let's consider this consensus and remove it from future Brawl pages, if not past ones too. -- Taohinton (talk) 00:18, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree with that consensus, yes. Past and future Tavern Brawl pages will definitely improve on their introductory headers. Aegonostic (talk) 01:45, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

CET vs UTC

Re this edit and its follow-up, I'm neither for nor against but I am curious why this is considered to make more sense. We have times for all other time zones listed in local time (PST, CST, KST) - CET is the European equivalent. CET is used whenever an EU time is stated for an event or stream, and is by definition the central time zone for Europe. -- Taohinton (talk) 00:10, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

My guess is that the original editor is living in Great Britain and not the rest of the EU. (all hail Brexit) Aegonostic (talk) 02:00, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

This: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/ Aegonostic (talk) 02:04, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm aware of the time zone, but even then it doesn't make sense as a standard for the Europe region in general, hence my wondering what the editor's thinking was. If no-one can give a good answer I'll just revert it. -- Taohinton (talk) 03:11, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

In defense of UTC, it literally is "universal" time, so I can see its appeal as the go-to standard. Hell, people love UTC so much that the French gave it its acronym even though they don't use it locally :P It is perhaps also relevant that this is an English language wiki. CET may be Central European Time, but it's not Central Anglophone Europe Time. Also, we use PST for the Americas, not CST, because the time zone choices are not some perfect standard of balance and fairness. (In PST's case, Blizzard's just playing favorites.)

However, there's no real debate. If Blizzard gives Europe times in CET, we should too. - jerodast (talk) 05:15, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

100th Brawl

According to this post on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/63jo38/the_100th_tavern_brawl_is_going_to_be_each_player/), The 100th Brawl will not be a single Brawl, but a randomly selected previous one. TheGamer765 (talk) 07:02, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

We have just reached the 98th Brawl, so 2 more, and we will see what will the 100th Brawl be. TheGamer765 (talk) 20:26, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

The 100th Brawl is will be revealed tomorrow! TheGamer765 (talk) 17:05, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Previous brawls list length

This is kind of a follow-up to the earlier discussion about how to "archive" previous brawl descriptions, which we do simply by moving them into a commented-out section. We didn't really settle on a length in that discussion. I'm going to arbitrarily propose "8 plus a few" previous brawls as the goal. 8 covers about 2 months (once you include the current brawl), since 1 month seems too short. This is a fairly significant reduction but I really don't see the point of listing ones that are more than a couple "seasons" in the past, once new ones start occupying peoples' attention.

Also, let's try to keep the previous brawls in reverse chronological order. Not only is this consistent, it's the easiest way to edit - just copy the current one into the top of the very next section when the weeks change. (Side note, as of this comment the page needs to be updated with the Wild Heroic Tavern Brawl - which by the way I DO think should be considered a reprise - but I don't have time to get into that right now.)

I'll make this change now, but as always it's open to discussion if folks prefer it different. - jerodast (talk) 17:18, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Heroic Tavern Brawl -Wild format --> New or reprise

There's an edit note about the curent Wild format Heroic Tavern Brawl, questioning whether it is a new brawl or a reprise. Perhaps because of that, the current brawl has not been added to the page.

There have been cases before where an old tavern brawl returned with slightly changed rules. It is debatable whether standerd vs wild should be considered a "slight" change. Not in gameplay terms, that's obvious. But in Wiki terms, it is - if we would create a new page for this tavern brawl, we could fill it with a copy of the existing text after doing a "replace all" for standard --> wild.

I will edit the main page now to add the current tavern brawl. As a reprise. We can always change it later, but for now I think it's more important that the page is up to date than that it is in a form we all agree on. -- BigHugger (talk) 15:33, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree it feels like a reprise. You have described well the oddness of this variation compared to variations in other brawls - massive strategically yet almost unnoticeable conceptually :) Mainly, they're still calling it Heroic Tavern Brawl. - jerodast (talk) 15:45, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Latest Tavern Brawl and Previous

Would anybody be sad if this part of the article was removed? It's a real pain in the ass to maintain and I don't think it does a better job at tracking tavern brawls than the table. It also makes the page a lot longer when you're editing, which can be annoying when you're trying to find your place. TheMurlocAggroB (talk) 18:59, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

If it makes editing easier, I'd say to remove it. This way, it will be easier for you and also for other future people to learn how to edit and update this page. Aegonostic (talk) 01:21, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree, the section is just the pages of the tavern brawls copied and pasted together. There is one problem though. Because the Tavern Brawls rotate at different times on the different servers, it may be confusing between the rotations. The Chinese servers currently don't have a tavern brawl in place (possibly because maintenence) so seeing that the January 1st tavern brawl was already up didn't make a lot of sense. Maybe we could try to make a self-updating section detailing each server's tavern brawl status with the time templates? Cactusisawesome (talk) 01:33, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

I mean, this is an English wiki that stays up to date with the NA region. We can do something, but the table listing the hours per region is probably good enough. It's not a pressing issue. I'm gonna go ahead and cut the section. TheMurlocAggroB (talk) 22:10, 3 January 2020 (UTC)