Briefing

Combopedia is a database of user-contributed combos for the fighting game Persona 4 Arena.  This game, generally played on a gamepad, has a large community dedicated to creating new combos and finding ideal combos for competitions.  Currently combo searching and sharing is scattered over many different forums, requiring scanning through hundreds-of-posts-long discussion threads and familiarity with with a complex notation, where numbers represent joystick positions and letters are assigned to various buttons.  This "traditional" notation can be daunting for a beginner.

Combopedia addresses two major problems:  it provides a direct database of combos such that combos and the information and discussion surrounding them are all grouped in one location, and it provides a new graphical notation alongside the traditional notation to allow users new to fighting games to read and submit combos without confusion.

Tasks

1. Find the combo which drains the most meter.
2. Find the most difficult combo for the character Aigis.
3. Find all combos with a difficulty rating of 3 stars.
4. Submit a combo named "Sweeping Kick" for Teddie.  It contains the following information
   1. type:  Jump In
   2. meter gain: 5
   3. meter drain: 10
   4. damage: 350
   5. two star difficulty

   6. set of moves [(236,A), (4, CD), (214,B)]

5. Find the combo you just submitted.
6. Leave a comment in the discussion section for "FC Combo 1"

Users

Of the 3 people we had test our system, one was an advanced Persona 4 Arena player with experience researching and developing combos, one was a novice player who had tested our system back in the very early stages of its development, and the third was another novice player who was completely new to our system.

Feedback

• The price we paid for using the Disqus plugin was that users were required to sign in twice if they wished to comment on a combo, and then were registered with Disqus.  If we were to release our project for public use, we would want to implement our own comments section, hosted on our own server, to avoid this inconvenience for the users. (major)
• The novice user who was also new to our system said that the joystick input felt slightly unnatural for normal computer input, but would be great for a mobile device.  However, he was not confused about how to use the system in any way. (cosmetic)
• It was not immediately obvious to the new-to-our-system user that clicking on a row would lead to a separate page devoted to the individual combo (despite the highlighting and change of cursor).  When presented with the task to comment on a combo, he was initially confused on how to do so, but ultimately figured it out.  He suggested having an additional column or link somewhere in the row that said "see comments" would be beneficial in indicating that that was even something that existed. (major)