Category talk:Items/Archive01

yea, this section of the wiki has lots of problems, in terms of category-ing... time to time, i try to clean em up as much as i can but i think its time for us to make basic principles clearer and work together...

• "named" items vs "unique" items - these two words mean the same thing, but we have like "named weapons" category here and then "unique armor" category right next to that... thats confusing. this particular terminology conflict has been around like 4 years on this wiki, youll find old discussions once you search talk pages for it.
• "items by this and that" categories mostly contain named items only, and they are not titled "named items by this and that". another inconsistency here. we have "basic item" categories too, and the rest of item pages are all about named items, so, uh...
• too many templates. its very hard to do maintenance on all of them. personally, i find it annoying when people dont tell difference between "chest loot" and "reward items" and create both categories. (ofc each time turbine adds new way of acquiring items, its hard for us to decide which category to use)
  • a) maybe we need to be more clear and rename all quest name "... loot" category to "... chest loot" and all "... reward items" to "... quest rewards". oh well, tahts guna be lots of work...
  • b) is it possible to have separate material section template, location section template and such and then pipe all item templates to them? so that we can do auto-categorying at one place? (uh... do this even make sense? lol)
  • c) one more thing, we need to educate people (incl. ourselves) on how to use "|quest = |turn in = " trick! --yoko5000 23:07, December 29, 2011 (EST)

Yea I did lots of work trying to clean this up too, its quite a huge mess and very confusing with all the templating.. Especially templates that add pages to categories, taht makes quite a huge mess, and while I apprecriate what Techs trying to do.. His new stat template causes even more. He fixed the category page bleeding into other pages with some kludge.. But sadly that only worked on category namespace pages, and being we integrate the category into all quest pages (why we do something so weird i dont know), we now have all quests pages listed as if they are stat items.. argh.

Proper fix for that would likely be modifiying the quest template to not integrate a category (think thats pretty much against wiki101), and instead just integrate a page (eg Questname_loot)

Your points:

• Named vs Unique: I'd vote we use Unique. Thats what the big, ultra popular "definitive unique loot guide" thread maintain by dragonstar and others on the forums always refered to it by, and thus what I think most players have come to incorporate into their gaming lingo.
• no prefix vs a prefix for parent cats: I don't really think thats a big deal. All the basic item pages are in the basic item cat. I put em there and I think its fairly clean and mostly done. 99.9% of the item pages on the wiki are unique, so I don't think we need parent-cats to specific that. I mean the users are smart enough to get that unique weapons inside the items by type category are still unique. We dont need to tell them they are unique 5 times in teh cat structure.
  • So: Items by type>
  • Items by type> Unique weapons
  • Items by type> Unique armor

etc.

• one template to rule them all: Yea i think this is a good idea.. But seems like a coding nightmare.. But Tech is working on it, so props to him.

• quest equals vs chest vs reward: I don't like to use this much mainly because its bugged atm:
  • If you use chest =.. You get an autocat of X loot.. Which is good
  • However if you use reward equal.. You get an autocat of X loot AND X rewards.. Which is not good. We don't want a _loot cat for that, we want either or. There are only a small handful of items in the game that are available from both end rewards AND chest loot, so for those few cases we can just use reward and set the chest cat manually.. Tech probably knows how to fix this too. Once he gets it fixed I'll try to update pages to have only chest or reward, (not both) so they cat correctly. (Same for turn in. EG you just did: [1] to turn in and now it has a redlink invalid cat of Cannith Challenge loot... Which should be reward items only.

Shade 23:40, December 29, 2011 (EST)

one person once claimed that "Unique" sounds like its referring to items that only one of them can exist on a sever at one time. some other MMOs, like Star-Wars Galaxies, have that kind of items. MtG card game has that kind of cards too where you only can have one in your deck and can only be played once. might be confusing to new comers to the game. yea but i agree dragonstar/cataclysm's thread name has huge influence on us old timers too.

me and Borror then once agreed to use "Named" as much as possible. but we didnt do anything on existing "Unique items" categories, yeah, so thats what resulted in a mess we have today. what a lazy-ass gay couple we are, i know...

dont have much time for now, will reply later on other points. and looking for more inputs from other contributors!

yoko5000 00:19, December 30, 2011 (EST)

Props on the MtG reference (is one typo'd reference himself). One thing, is to get rid of the category by material type, because not many people would go "Oh, I want to see every named item in the game that is made of Steel... wow thats alot" I personally look for them based on the ML, and usefulness. Second, for the chest/reward/craft debate, how about one single slot in the template. Location= Chest or Crafted or Reward | Quest or CraftMechanic or Turn-in., Yawgmoth 04:08, December 30, 2011 (EST)

Yes, coding Template:Named Item has been a coding nightmare, but I will be getting back to working on that one shortly. I am still ironing out bugs in the new :Category:Stat items by ability change cat bleeding.. I have some more ideas and research to find the leaks causing the bleeding, and I have some more directory structure to fill out. I think it will be great for that Level 11 Wiz that wants to know which INT +4 / +5 items are available. The reasoning behind the material type category wasn't for people who want to know what is available for steel items. It was to help people to find the items that suit them for by-passing certain mobs DRs such as Silver, Cold Iron, and the such, or to find out which items are made of glass from Oozes or wood for Rust Monsters. I am still learning how the whole Cat structure works (Doesn't work) and am playing with this and that in my head to clean it up. Shade (Contribs • Message • Email) had mentioned a problem with Template:Named Weapon where handedness was showing up as Two-handed weapon in the cat system instead of Two-handed weapons. This seems like a simple fix; however, the problem wasn't with how the template was categorizing, it was a problem in various editors not being uniform in what they typed into the "|hand = " argument.. It took:

{{#if:{{#pos:{{lc:{{{hand|}}}}}|weapon}}|{{#ifeq:{{#expr:{{#len:{{{hand}}}}}-{{#pos:{{lc:{{{hand}}}}}|weapon}}}}|6|{{{hand|}}}s|{{{hand|}}}}}|{{{hand|}}} weapons}}

Which says:
If the word "weapon" exists
     Check to see if the entire length of the argument - the starting point of the word weapon (Leaving just the word weapon and beyond) = 6
               (# of letters in the word "weapon", "weapons" would be 7)
          If it is 6, then the word "weapon" exists, add an "s" to make it "weapons"
          If it is not 6, then assume it is already "weapons" and pass it through
     If weapon did not exist to start with, add " weapons"

Let me tell you, that was a coding PitA! I am hoping that the new Template:Named Item will fix these kinds of problems by giving a selection list for "Appropriate choices" for each argument. I wonder if there is some way we can eliminate then need to copy/paste the templates into new item pages and instead offer an "Add new item" page with drop down menus and the such. That would be the only sure-fire way to eliminate a lot of our headaches.. ShoeMaker 04:48, December 30, 2011 (EST)

re: templates which give dropdown options to fill.. Yea pretty sure its possible, as its present on some other gaming wikis ive seen. Likely requires some extra extension our wiki doesnt have installed tho.

Shade 10:29, January 10, 2012 (EST)

Been thinking about this, and the more I think, the more I realise we don't need either prefix.

We now have a bunch of categories that are just "items". Not unique/named. Some I created, some others set up..

I think thats fine really. I mean 99.9999% of the items in this category are named anyways, so I dont see the point in specificying it 50 times in the category structure over and over. If we want it somewhere, we could rename this root category to Named items and move the few pages of basic un-named stuff elsewhere.

Anyways, gona go ahead and clean up the category/subcategories, remove all "unique/named" references, move things into their proper place, and modify templates to fit everywhere unless many object soon.

Shade 18:56, January 22, 2012 (EST)

ok, fair enough. before doing that, can you show us planned category structure somewhere though?

yoko5000 22:49, January 22, 2012 (EST)

Back in April 2010 I went through and cleaned up a lot of the item templates, I started using the Named templates as per Borror0 request. You can see the small discussion about it on my talk page. I also went through and constructed most of the lists (The ones in the style of 'Item Name - Item Abilities [ML] (Item gained from)' ). I fixed every single item template I could find at the time (Except for Weapons and Armor). So now you know the reason for why the wiki now uses the Named templates.

UltraMonk 01:19, January 23, 2012 (EST)

Yea just gona be as now, without the prefixes.. So:

• Items by enchantment
• Items by bind status
• Items by enchantment
• Items by equipment slot
• Items by type
  • Weapons
  • Armor
  • Shields

etc

Shade 18:39, January 28, 2012 (EST)

mostly done now..

Notes:

• Went with items by equipment slot instead of the more vague type for where to put weapons/armor/etc.
  • That is slightly long tho, so also put the largest categorys in the root.. Maybe shorten it to Items by slot?
• Some weapon types need parents filled.
• Docents need to be put into the template.. Seems every docent is hardlinked to unique docents atm.
• Might be some minor mess left to clean up in the Basic items category. Had to move around a lot there as its old names are the new homes for most stuff now.

Shade 21:28, January 28, 2012 (EST)

nice job. i moved some out of "items by location" category. now we have;

• Items by location - intended to give idea out of which general area you get the item
• Items by Adventure Pack - not populated much, do we really wanna do this?
• Items by quest name - intended to give very specific quest name you get the item from, and these cats are linked from quest articles )
  • chest
  • reward
  • raid

yoko5000 00:35, January 29, 2012 (EST)

Cool.. Yea wasn't sure what to do with the location/chest loot thing. I'd like to clear the prefix on thatt oo, or at least call it Named.. Unique to me now i think abot it. kinda implies one of a kind, which is more what random items are...

Adventure pack - yea dont think its that neccesary. Now most ppl think of adventure packs as things you have to buy, but theres lot of loot thats in the more ambigious free packs too..

Another naming issue we have going on: Great Sword vs Greatsword.. (or Club/Axe/etc)

This ones a bit tricky: The game uses both (and so do we, seemingly randomly):

• Item descript: Epic Sword of Shadow - it lists "Great Sword" in both the top area, and the item description area.. yet,
• Feats/Enhancements: They call em "Greatswords"

A quick google search shows Great Sword is probably slightly more popular spelling.

Either way lets pick one and i'll set up the categories.. Will likely need editing of a lot of pages, but oh well.

Shade 22:03, January 29, 2012 (EST)

Going with the 2 words version, seems to make the most sense.. Will start with Category:Great Swords.

Shade 01:28, February 24, 2012 (EST)