Hi guys, I wanted to let you know that the moderators and I are making a slight change to our grouping policy. By "grouping", I refer to the practice of separating the figures and accessories for each product record via the linking widget at the bottom of the "modify part" page. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you may safely go back to looking at pictures of cats.
Anyway, up to now we've used a fairly inconsistent approach to doing groups. Usually we consider a group to contain all of the parts involved with a toy, so we would toss an Armada deluxe figure, his partner mini-con and his instruction booklet in a single group.
This usually works very well, but we occasionally run into trouble with part ambiguity, meaning that when all of the figures and accessories included with a toy are in the same group, it's not always clear which parts go with which figures (for example, three mini-cons with three parts called "missile"), which makes using the part checklist in the collection interface impractical.
In the past, we've worked around this problem by using more groups, such that the deluxe Armada figure goes in one group, and his partner mini-con and missile go in another. The trouble is that that creates a very inconsistent presentation.
Our suggested solution going forward is to enforce one group per toy, and to resolve ambiguity by simply naming the parts more distinctly. So, for something like the "Space Mini-Con Team & Night Attack Mini-Con Team Bonus Pack", we'd have:
Group 1:
Payload
Astroscope
SkyBlast
Instruction Booklet
Missile (Astroscope)
Group 2:
Broadside
Fetch
Scattor
High-Powered Artillery Missile (Broadside)
High-Powered Artillery Missile (Fetch)
High-Powered Missile (Scattor)
So, we go back to having two nice groups, there's no ambiguity, and everybody's happy.
Not too keen on it? Not to worry, this is only a temporary solution. The groups are going bye-bye and will be replaced by a more versatile system that won't require naming games. No solid ETA on that, but hopefully we'll have it by the end of the year.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Embittered moaning?
