I think people are getting too hung up on comparing this to Kantai Collection or Touhou. Azur Lane is a gacha game. Fate/Grand Order is a gacha game. It's not a fair comparison to say "oh, we don't tag outfits for Touhou or Kancolle, so we shouldn't do it for other games". Gacha games today go much further with having dozens of alternate skins/outfits/whatever than past games ever did. Our tagging has to adapt to that.

Once again, I point out that we have literally hundreds of tags for Overwatch and League of Legends skins and it's not a problem. Look at characters like D.Va or Ahri and imagine how you would find their skins using gentags. Nuking these tags would make searching infinitely harder.

I think it's completely backwards that we spend 30 or 40 tags describing every detail of a character's appearance, but then balk at adding 1 tag for the character design as a whole. Distinctive character designs are more interesting and useful to search for than the buttons on someone's shirt, or the color of someone's socks.

Even Pixiv tags Azur Lane skins. That's part of the motivation for this. It's a problem when it's easier to search for something on Pixiv than it is on Danbooru.

And I'm not interested in splitting hairs over what is considered to be a separate character by the game's lore and what isn't. I'm interested in what's useful for searching. Is Verniy a separate character from Hibiki, or is she just Hibiki with a white hat? It's beside the point - Verniy is a popular alternate version, and that makes it useful enough to have a tag for her.

feline_lump said:

OK, I'm seeing the issues with keeping these as character tags now. To weigh our best options at the moment:

• Don't tag named costumes at all and revert to using descriptors.
  

I prefer this. And I know I'm guilty of using this: taihou_(forbidden_feast)_(azur_lane) once or twice (if I count that time I uploaded Prinz Eugen in a particular skin with its own tag)

But yeah, I'd prefer skins not to have their own character tag, at least for this title.

evazion said:

I think people are getting too hung up on comparing this to Kantai Collection or Touhou. Azur Lane is a gacha game. Fate/Grand Order is a gacha game. It's not a fair comparison to say "oh, we don't tag outfits for Touhou or Kancolle, so we shouldn't do it for other games". Gacha games today go much further with having dozens of alternate skins/outfits/whatever than past games ever did. Our tagging has to adapt to that.

Once again, I point out that we have literally hundreds of tags for Overwatch and League of Legends skins and it's not a problem. Look at characters like D.Va or Ahri and imagine how you would find their skins using gentags. Nuking these tags would make searching infinitely harder.

I think it's completely backwards that we spend 30 or 40 tags describing every detail of a character's appearance, but then balk at adding 1 tag for the character design as a whole. Distinctive character designs are more interesting and useful to search for than the buttons on someone's shirt, or the color of someone's socks.

Even Pixiv tags Azur Lane skins. That's part of the motivation for this. It's a problem when it's easier to search for something on Pixiv than it is on Danbooru.

And I'm not interested in splitting hairs over what is considered to be a separate character by the game's lore and what isn't. I'm interested in what's useful for searching. Is Verniy a separate character from Hibiki, or is she just Hibiki with a white hat? It's beside the point - Verniy is a popular alternate version, and that makes it useful enough to have a tag for her.

I guess I can see your point. But... conversely, that would also imply having to retag all the Yuudachi posts in KC, given that pre-retrofit and post-retrofit are distinctively different and post-retrofit is way more popular than pre-retrofit... and there's not a character tag to distinguish between the two.

Alternatively: Create a single general tag that encompasses a category of designs, like remodel (kantai collection).

The issue then becomes that you have to memorize things like "this skin was part of the summer 2016 skins, but this skin was part of the summer 2017 skins." That's not necessarily easier than memorizing that "olympian bloomers is that one Nero skin".

We do this with heroic spirit traveling outfit in F/GO and it's messy. This tag consists of several dozen characters crammed together under one tag, even though in reality, the tag is almost all Abigail Williams. It also messes up the related tags when a bunch of different skins are under the same tag.

I recognize that "one tag per skin" has issues of its own. I think it depends on the copyright whether individual tags or group tags are feasible.

Part of me wishes we could create a new tag type for costumes/skins just to standardize all of this nonsense and stop having forum spats. But that would be a huge ordeal on its own.

It's been suggested before to have a tag type for unique named entities that aren't characters. Tanks, ships, cars, named weapons, so forth. It wouldn't be that big of a deal, technically speaking. I think the main concern would be deciding where to draw the lines.

feline_lump said:

• Move single-character costumes to general tags along with the multiple-character ones. Because a lot of outfit names don't make sense out of context, this also necessitates qualifying any name that might not be immediately clear. Alternatively: Create a single general tag that encompasses a category of designs, like remodel (kantai collection).

I like this idea. If I want to search for a particular skin of laffey_(azur_lane) then I can at least easily filter out her default outfit. When it gets to a point where I have to sift through multiple pages of alternative outfits, then it makes sense to start pulling the most common outfits into their own tag.

As for what that tag should be, if this is something that's going to happen often, then there should be a straightforward process anyone can follow for figuring out a canonical name. Even if the name is fully qualified it doesn't necessarily have to be typed as a character tag. In my mind (and there are some exceptions in FGO as there always are) these variants are not so much alternative identities as they are just different costumes. Even with battleship Kaga there's no straightforward way to distinguish her from the carrier version aside from clothing. This makes it marginally more useful for things like autocomplete.

albert said:
figuring out a canonical name

The main AL wiki lists the actual names of each and every single skin in the game, so at least there's that.

iridescent_slime said:

I'm glad someone brought this up. It's incredibly frustrating to see posts with utterly misleading tags like water shine or royal icing and have to constantly check the wiki to make sure that someone isn't just making up new gentags we don't need. Every general tag pertaining to a copyright-specific costume or skin should have a qualifier to make it immediately obvious what the tag is meant for.

I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. I have definitely fallen for flowing_dress more than once since it just sounds so generic.

Elfaleon said:

I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. I have definitely fallen for flowing_dress more than once since it just sounds so generic.

So maybe make something like forbidden_feast_(skin) and so on?

The property name should be fine for the qualifier.

Rampardos said:

The property name should be fine for the qualifier.

care to create an example?

instead of (skin), it would be (property name). it's way less likely for there to be overlap within a property than for two properties to share a name for an outfit.

given how crazy the name of the skins are in azur lane, i doubt they would ever overlap. just 1 character has 3 skins called "Sacred Bush Lily", "Everlasting Killing Stone" and "White Fox's New Years Greetings" -- i honestly doubt there's other games where a skin would have such names.

but if (property name) must be added to the tag, then I also suggest (skin) is added because some people might not realize that such tag is because a particular skin.