Guide Cleanup (Suggestion)

So me and some members of the site were talking (Predominantly me, Toast, and Genocide), and we were thinking of different ways to just improve the site in general to attract new members.

One thing we came to the conclusion of is, the one thing that people hate about big sites like Tiermonster is that they are known for making bad guides, which drives people away.

Smitefire, on the other hand, has MANY talented guide makers. However, as many guides as we have, a lot of them are... well, outdated.

Look at the page for Artemis. Out of the first 14 guides, I'd say only 3 are up to date. I mean, we have 2012 guides in there that that are using Ankh and Shard and Qin's Blades. Those guides, while very good at the time, are now out of date and clog up the God section, leaving new members to have to, literally, search for an up to date guide.

You may be asking me what this has to do with attracting new members, but I can tell you with confidence that most people find this site because of the guides.

New visitors may not be attracted to stay, make guides, participate on the forums, etc. If they have to look for an up to date guide every time they want one.

I'm not saying instantly remove all stale guides. Instead, my suggestion is that you archive them, so that way users who want to update their guides still can, and then re release it, updated. At the same time, users looking for guides can feel assured that they do not have to look for a guide that is up to date.

Thanks in advance.

Well, another idea is to have 2 tabs for guides. One for up to date guides and one for old guides. So you can find those old guides but if you choose that tab. But well the problem is - We don't have good guides for many guides. Some people just post builds, some people make guides but don't update them, so we don't have up to date guides for many of the gods and goddesses.
One way to attract new users here is to have pro and popular players make guides here (Like MobaFire has C9 guides, but I don't know on which terms they are making this) . I tried making an interview with CaptCoach of Titan ( that time - Aquila) to attract new users, but well there was no result so i gave up that idea.

I agree with you completely.

I don't really know HOW it should be done, but I do think we need to make it easier to find good guides.

#leevemeowt

Good idea. I'd say any guides that have items that are currently not in the game should be removed. Or a physical god building magical items. However it needs to be carefully overviewed as someone could have mistakes Shoes of the Magi for Boots of the Magi.

Pro player guides are good but they usually need someone to code it and I don't think they're of utmost importance as of now. Sure they'd be helpful but I think it's more important showing off the top guides we have now.

Instead of having the top guides of the month and new guides on the front page, we can have top guides of the month and most popular guides of all time. The top guides of the month are new so why should we have another tab showing off more new guides? The only thing we'd need are some people who continuously look over new guides upvoting the best ones. Or we can have three tabs on the front page showing top guides of the month, top guides of all time, and new/updated guides.

I suggested something similar which what moba fire has. Sure promoting the top guides of the month is important but the best of the best guides should be showcased on the front page. Easy access to the good guides can make the site a lot more popular.

I agree with this searching for guides is sometimes a pain in the *** (especially on reworked gods, looking at you Nu Wa) as the guides before the rework are also under it.

Very good points. I've been investigating this recently myself and yeah, finding some gods that are severely lacking in the up to date guide department (ex: Ra).

An issue with just archiving these... there may be no guides to replace them! At least a top rated older guide could have good gameplay tips, and was well rated at one point for that.

We changed the ranking formula quite a while ago so it's easier for new / updated guides to take the top spot. I'm just afraid that for some less popular gods there aren't any up to date guides to replace the old guides, and old guides > no guides. :(

That being said, I'm definitely going to look into what I can do to encourage new guide writing / guide updating. I've already been working with the devs to improve the clarity of the guide rating bars (as you may have noticed) and I will see what else I can do to help!

yeah that looks like a bit of a problem. So I think the best thing would be clean up the guides that aren't possible anymore (really really old items in it or god remaked e.g. nu wa))

Thanks a bunch Mowen, really appreciate it.

Eh now I feel bad I archived my ra guide.

I had an idea just to start learning and playing gods that lack new guides here and write guides about them, but well, due to my game problems and Hi-Rez support being OP (waiting for an answer for 3 weeks already) I can't do that. But well that might work when you think about it.