Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-2234967-20180720225210/@comment-2234967-20180722030631

Cerrwiden wrote: I agree with all of your "!!" articles.

In some cases, like the ZED Strike Rough Cuts, we have a page on the actual pack, so I don't think we need an article on the blasters as well.

I think we could also include in our criteria that the blasters need to be changed in some way, either performance wise or a new colour scheme. That way, we can weed out some that are simple re-releases in different series. The ZED Rough Cuts would need a separate page from the pack, since that's how we have articles set up. Separating them from the pack keeps things more organized, for anyone looking for information on the product set separate from the blaster itself.

I think doing it by substantial changes could work; we'd need to come up with a list and figure out what constitutes as that, though. Color scheme, series, and updated performances could help... but also runs the risk of something like the 2011 Dart Tag blasters, that were given a re-release that only changed performance and trigger color. Would those need a "blue trigger" article? And if that was the case, wouldn't that mean we'd need to do separate articles for blasters with orange and gray trigger releases?

Reffie1997 wrote: Regarding the merging and de-merging of articles, I think all the "Elite XD" blasters that were introduced in 2014 should be merged to the primary N-Strike Elite series. A.ka Elite XD blasters should not have a separate article themselves.

(Warning my elaboration below is getting a little bittttt technical so bear yourselves!)

The issue with Elite XD blasters is that this was not an official sub-series. To Hasbro, they never officially pronounced these released blasters as Elite XD blasters on their website. Apart from that, in almost all of the stores I've come across selling Elite XD blasters, they never put "Elite XD" on their product tag. Not to mention that most of the Elite XD blasters have their "Elite XD" tag removed in further re-packaged releases.

Furthermore, there are numerous evidence and experiments that have proved "Elite XD" blasters does not have any performance upgrades internally. This means that Elite XD blasters are not "successors" of the original blasters but just a re-release and repaint.

With that being said, I think we should treat the Elite XD blasters as how we treat the N-Strike blasters' repaints (e.g Midnight blue Longshot and Yellow Longshot) - where we consider them as a "re-painted re-release" instead of considering them as a new sub-series.

We can still define Elite XD series as an unofficial series... (just like Elite Repaint) But in the end, I think we should remove the Elite XD blaster articles and merge them with the primary series. The problem with merging these with the core articles is that these would most likely count as substantial re-releases with the rules we're working to define. Elite XD isn't a series, no, but the blasters did have initial labeling as an "Elite XD" version. Even if the packaging has changed, it's a part of the release's history, and we do need to treat it as such. Even if the advertising about the upgraded internals was wrong, it still needs to be documented.

Of course, this is just my stance on it, and perhaps other people have different takes on this. But personally, it'd most likely stay as it is, un-merged as a separate article, if we set up rules about de-merged product articles.