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As remarked by Sadly-not as a comment on this question. It seems that math.stackexchange has a lot of nice ways to express mathematical formulas. Perhaps it would be a nice feature for arqade to also have.

Inclusion of this feature would make it a lot easier to elegantly explain more complex internal formulas used by games.

One minor issue with it, advanced users that use browser tools that block external sites will have problems with this feature. (noscript on firefox for example).

Edit:
I know very little about the solution used by math.se. So MathJax might not be a good fix.

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  • Alternative I always use: Online LaTeX Equation Editor - codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php .
    – Martin Sojka
    Sep 28, 2012 at 12:44
  • 4
    In the example question, all the operators there can be expressed via standard Unicode codepoints and the regular SE markup, e.g. Expected Badass Rank = ⌊⌈Current Badass Rank<sup>5 / 9</sup>⌉<sup>9 / 5</sup>⌋. Games rarely have need of anywhere near the power of LaTeX to express their equations.
    – user2640
    Sep 28, 2012 at 14:47
  • I did not know that SE markup actually :D.
    – Ids
    Sep 28, 2012 at 15:35
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    @JoeWreschnig Is there any documentation around explaining all of the SE markup? I've never been able to figure out how to do these fancy unicode and markup things.‮‮
    – Sadly Not
    Sep 29, 2012 at 1:40

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MathJax is not exactly a lightweight solution. If it could be selectively enabled only on questions that actually use it, I would agree with this. I don't think we use mathematical formulas enough to justify enabling it on all sites.

The first step would have to be to convince SE to create a MathJax configuration for sites that only use it occasionally that doesn't decrease site loading and performance significanctly when it is not used (My old feature request on that topic on Meta.SO).

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  • Ow, I do know next to nothing about MathJax, so any comments about the pros and cons of it are appreciated of course.
    – Ids
    Sep 28, 2012 at 12:46
  • Yep, they won't enable site-wide it for one-offs. Per-page would be cool but then I'm still not sure we need it.
    – Matthew Read
    Sep 28, 2012 at 14:15
  • @MatthewRead Well I suppose if it were so complicated as to require MathJax to be readable, then most gamers probably wouldn't care about it anyways...still a shame it's too heavy weight to do site-wide. However, is the only issue with doing it on a per-question basis that users might over-use it? I have a feeling that our editing and content control stuff can deal with those issues pretty effectively.
    – Sadly Not
    Sep 29, 2012 at 1:23

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