"First appearance" is not used correctly. Field useless?

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DeF

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Hey there. The "first appearance" on concept, object, etc pages used to be a manual entry field. Now it is automatically populated by the game with the earliest release date. However, this is often entirely inaccurate as games get rereleased, patched, updated, remastered, remade, ported and what have you.

Here's an example:

I've just edited the amiibo concept page. It lists Mario Kart 8 as the "first appearance" which is incorrect since amiibo launches alongside Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. While Mario Kart 8 will support it, that will not happen until some as-yet unknown point in time in 2015 when it gets an update to introduce support for it. Hence, Smash U is the actual first appearance. But since the wiki auto populates the field with game having the earliest release date, it lists Mario Kart.

There are way sillier examples out there with games from the 80s or 70s supposedly being the first to support features that were introduced in the last few years.

Either the field needs to be renamed (no idea how you'd rename it to make it make more sense without changing anything else), removed or returned to manual edit. The way it is now makes it mostly useless since you can't be sure the information is accurate. I'd think a drop-down menu listing all the linked titles would make the most sense, letting you select one of the games linked to this page as the actual first appearance.

But I know, low-priority since it's not a real bug.

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BeachThunder

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Yep, it's an issue with rereleased games too. Allegedly, the first game to appear on Steam is Pac-Man...

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Yummylee

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#3  Edited By Yummylee

Yup, I agree. Another example would be how I've added the BSAA concept to the Resident Evil remake, as the remastered version will include Chris and Jill's BSAA uniforms. However what that now means is Resident Evil is marked as the 'first appearance' of the BSAA.

I think that reverting it back to manual edit would be the most suitable (and easiest?) solution.

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BeachThunder

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@yummylee said:

Yup, I agree. Another example would be how I've added the BSAA concept to the Resident Evil remake, as the remastered version will include Chris and Jill's BSAA uniforms. However what that now means is Resident Evil is marked as the 'first appearance' of the BSAA.

I think that reverting it back to manual edit would be the most suitable (and easiest?) solution.

I think the best plan would be to have it automatic, but editable.