Talk:Questinfo

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• Melkor told me when I signed up that we will likely be providing Questinfo, on the premise that those who are interested in acquiring it will always find a way. While I'm a little troubled at providing details to all of the quests we can think up, I can understand Melkor's POV on this. Currently, I'm wondering if we can do item pages, and then have "see also" pages off of those with questinfo in them. I'm not sure how specific we should get - I'd like to use some vagueness such as that employed in the Adventurer's Tome, but what about numbers? "This weapon is 90/90," for example? Or directions to an area? Or walkthroughs of difficult quests? What do you guys think?--Dorf 18:35, 27 March 2007 (MST)

• Frankly I think even having item descriptions here is a killjoy. We want to inspire people to explore and immerse themselves in the world. Part of the excitement in learning a new quest or finding a new item is coming upon it for the first time, seeing the details up close. Making that kind of information here seems very contrary to our purpose of creating a comprehensive guide while still leaving room for people to find answers in-game. Do we really have to offer this kind of information? I would much rather leave this to the MUCH more engaging Adventurer's Tome. I suppose I would be ok with us offering, perhaps, a handful of example items for each category, just to give a sense for what's out there, but please...please let's not assassinate the romance of the game by cataloguing everything. Those who really want hard details on items are going to find a way to do it regardless. Inversely, documenting the game's quests here is only going to harm the experience of new players. I have never heard of any MU* doing such a thing before and it's going to be an immediate turnoff to the entire explorer playerset that we want to encourage to join us.--Carver 18:42, 27 March 2007 (MST)

I definitely see your point. But as far as the "explorer" subset goes, would the "offering two pages about the same thing" bit do any good there? I think that would help. On the other hand, I take a level of personal pride in knowing the ins and outs of some things that many people would either never bother with or don't care to risk. Having the answers here would end that sense of "status" on MY part - that would probably leave the only "real" accomplishments in the realm of the social and the playerkilling, which in my opinion would be pretty negative. SO! What about offering basic descriptions, a general area it's found in, and maybe a "difficulty for maxed player" gauge of 1-5? "'A skull helmet,' 'desc,' 'The Grey Mountains,' 'Difficulty: 2'"? *shrug* I'm not certain, but I do know that we need to establish a standard soon before we start making pages where QI might be involved.--Dorf 18:51, 27 March 2007 (MST)

I guess I don't really see the purpose in creating a website list of all the gear in game without eradicating the mystery. Part of the joy is uncovering new items or quests lost to time (like those bolas recently) as opposed to creating a checklist. Personally I found coming upon items like Aiglos for the first time to be a great game experience, but I'm certain that would have been cheapened if I had already seen what they looked like in advance. Does a list without such descriptions really lend any benefit to our game, longterm? I'm not sure it does. If Melkor 'must have' this though, let's at least keep the descs or quest details out of it and let the Tome do its job. Instead, a simple list of Helmets with entries like 'Skull Helmet: Grey Mountains, Difficulty 2' without their own individual pages would be more suitable. There's really no reason to serve all this up on a silver platter when there's so much else we could fill the Wiki with.--Carver 19:27, 27 March 2007 (MST)

• My take: this should be the ultimate resource for T2T. Anything you want to know, you can find here. For the community, by the community.

Regarding questinfo and the joy of solving quests: Remember, accessing these resources is entirely by user choice. Gamefaqs exist for nearly every game, offering every detail possible - to those who want it. Those who enjoy the mystery will choose NOT to use the gamefaqs. Same concept applies to cheatcodes in games. Yes you can play with cheatcodes, but no, you might not get as much out of it as you would otherwise. That being said, I do not think our charge here is to preserve the mystery of T2T for people, instead, its to provide accurate, helpful, relevant information that people can choose to access.

Also regarding QI: I think we might want to use a SPOILER ALERT type of system. Frequently movie reviews that have info that gives away the plot of the movie will use a spoiler alert. Sometimes, Ive seen the information in question set in the same font color as the background or the page; the user has to select the text to view it. I think we should consider some kind of approach like this. --Melkor 06:22, 28 March 2007 (MST)

• I'm of the opinion that there's no reason to post "hard" questinfo--walkthroughs, aliases, stats. General Tome-worthy information is nearly as useful (if you know what the goal is), far more fun, and doesn't eclipse the utility of such basics as "compare", "value", and even "look" (you're welcome, Carver). So, I won't be adding the hard stuff, and where I see that it's intrusive I'll be editing it to be less so, until a suitable level of invisibility/spoilerwarningness is devised. By the by, I see no reason that the Adventurer's Tome couldn't be copied over whole, which would nicely circumvent the cranky interface that's so far limited its usefulness. (I suggest that a rule be made that content must appear on the game version first, to keep the two consistent.) --Tevildo 07:14, 28 March 2007 (MST)

• We should definitely be posting and allowing walkthroughs and related questinfo. If you guys don't want to add it, thats fine - just know that someone else WILL. We've seen for many years questinfo cannot be stopped. It has been available for those who want it for over a decade.

The difference is, that in this case, it will be (hopefully) quality information added and updated by people who care, and not something on a crappy geocities site made by a person with an axe to grind.--Melkor 09:23, 28 March 2007 (MST)

• Quest info has always been available in one form or another - fair enough. But it hasn't been as commonly available, in my opinion, as you might think. I for one didn't hear about Turin's site until maybe a year or two ago, and I was loathe to use anything from it. People always have access to instant messaging and friends helping them out, sure... but it seems like that's vastly different from one huge website with every little thing they could ever ask for. Here's an idea - how about not only judging quests by difficulty, but also by how commonly they are known? We could be lenient on quest info on items like the skull helmet, for example, but be a lot more stingy with information about brand-new quests in Moria. Does that idea have any merit? P.S. - remember to sign your posts, guys!--Dorf 12:41, 28 March 2007 (MST)

• I will first say I don't like the idea of us creating a library and roadmap to every quest in Arda and have it up on this site for everyone to use. I agree with the others here...even though I've gotten help in the past, even visited a few quest sites, I still had to work for it and most I figured out on my own or was shown by my guildmates. However, it seems like Melkor is pretty set on having this on here, so I need to agree with Carver. Can we at least post them without much guidance other than a general area? Most QI sites have DIRS, and every single thing you need to do. We can't make it that easy.

I am also somewhat worried about certain pieces of EQ that are of high quality and should be discovered over time. Aiglos for one, no one needs to post how to do it. Mithril Mail, or Radiant Armour...I don't want everyone knowing how to do those quests. I don't even know how to do Aiglos all the way yet. Regardless...handing it to them on a silver platter will just be bad. We need to be less detailed in this and more general. Something along the lines of things broken down by places. East Arda > Gundabad...then an overview of Gundabad and then maybe a list of things found there?

I just do not want to see detailed instructions on how to quest things. Yes, there is one other site that does it...but I don't know if we have to follow suit. -- --Kelos 14:13, 28 March 2007 (MST)

One thing we should probably consider: Certain quests are balanced with the presumption that only few players will figure them out. For example, take the dwarf tomb in Erebor. Even now, only a few players really understand the quest - and that limited availability makes the quest better balanced.--Drogian 16:49, 28 March 2007 (MST)

Let's at least, then, establish some rule about uniques. These are meant to be the legendary of the legendary. Again, to cite something like Aiglos, here's a weapon that defeated Sauron in direct combat and has been lost for an entire age. Can we at least do that some kind of justice? Even if all standard gear is going to be spread wide open, I feel like these items in particular deserve a level of mystique. I agree with Dorf about new quests having a 'reduced information' load. And I still don't entirely grasp why we need to give item descs if the goal is offering QI.--Carver 18:24, 28 March 2007 (MST)

[edit] Proposal

All right. How about this:

• For every item (worth noting, not every beer bottle etc.) and its quest, we have a page. On this first page, we could include the short desc, the general location, and thematic notes and suggestions (bring some wine with you) - including Adventurer's Tome material. Before adding Tome here, make sure it exists in-game first.
• On a mirror "(spoilers)" page, we could include: long description, difficulty (scale of 1-5), censored level (1-3, 1 being QI not really censored at all, 3 being minimal information allowed, for things like uniques, new quests, etc.), a spoiler alert, and "additional notes" (whatever the QI rating allows, from directions, tips, or whatever).--Dorf 21:02, 28 March 2007 (MST)

Change:

• I think that having a 1-3 rating for QI might be a bit too subjective. Maybe just 1-2 would be better - quests where we will allow some grace, and ones where we will not - newer quests (we can judge each quest independently, based on how new it is, how commonly it's already known, or how unique it is). Difficulty doesn't have to be set in stone - whoever puts in the quest should have a fair idea of it, and if anyone notices a glaring problem (under no circumstances is a skull helmet a difficulty of 5 for a maxed 19), we can just make a quick edit.--Dorf (Talk | Contribs) 09:52, 30 March 2007 (MST)

I've added example pages for this with Emerald shield/Emerald shield (spoilers) and Beautiful longsword of elven make/Beautiful longsword of elven make (spoilers). Think this system would work?--Dorf 22:23, 28 March 2007 (MST)

• And I'll edit these to reflect the spoilerwarning format later.--Dorf (Talk | Contribs) 09:52, 30 March 2007 (MST)

I still don't think it's a good idea, as it seems like a "can't beat 'em, join 'em" plan to deal with a minor threat (said geocities webpage), but nevertheless it doesn't look like I'm going to win this one ;\. Thus, as long as that 3 rating is sincerely maintained, I'll leave this be.--Carver 23:19, 28 March 2007 (MST)

As I told Melkor, I'm not sure it's a moral victory to legitimize QI-passing rather than just letting the baby have his bottle. If we have to let the genie out of the bottle, let's at least do it in a controlled fashion. Everyone can agree that Ainur-only information such as weapon stats should not be posted. I also think anything that can just be pasted into an alias shouldn't be allowed. Anything more specific than Adventurer's Tome content should be on a specific questinfo page, bracketed with spoiler warnings and probably written in white text. That's probably the closest we'll come to a consensus. If things get started this way, we could maintain other people's additions in the same format fairly easily... easier than people posting in randomly chosen formats, anyway, and trying to reconcile them all after the fact. --Tevildo 00:34, 29 March 2007 (MST)

• Remember: We dont have to add the quest info. But someone will, because will will be opening this up for all to post content to. So we can either fight a constant battle, using using content deletions and IP bans, which will ultimately fail, leading us down the path of much more restricted wiki access. Or we find a way to gracefully handle it when it is inevitably submitted.

• This is how wikipedia handles spoilers, from a format perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoiler_warning

There is a way have a "spoilers box" which has its contents hidden until the user clicks the "show spoilers" link. Using it would allow the more detailed information to be on the same page, so the number of pages would be greatly reduced.--Chord 07:09, 29 March 2007 (MST)

I don't know anything about a spoilers BOX, but I added a couple templates so spoiler warnings show up as intended (see Chord's post for an example). The basic format is {{spoiler}}, and {{endspoiler}}. To make text invisible until selected, simple HTML tags work: font color="white" and /font between angle brackets. Bullet points still show up, but nothing else seems to. I'll add a few more specific templates later. --Tevildo 09:49, 29 March 2007 (MST)

Here is an example of a spoiler box: another wiki page (near the bottom of the page). When I tried to recreate a similar box here, It only appeared as the spoiler tag that Tevildo used, so I don't know. P.S. The text above my signed line was not mine.--Chord 10:09, 29 March 2007 (MST)

Spoiler boxes such as Chord showed can be created as a separate spoiler template, but they also require Javascript, which seems not to be turned on--and I'm not sure we want to be messing around with the configuration settings. Separate spoiler pages, spoiler warnings, and white text ought to be enough tools to start with... --Tevildo 15:31, 29 March 2007 (MST)

Not to be a broken record, but if we're at the stage when we're concerned that someone will, inevitably, add QI (although I imagine someone could've already made a wiki to this effect if that was desired), then this seems to suggest we don't put up any at all. It's unlikely someone would come along and decide to start adding descriptions of the Black Sword quest out of nowhere. It's far more likely that someone would try to tweak an existing section by adding more details. That whole line of argument aside, however, there's also nothing to say we can't lock down sections against unauthorized edits once they're 'finished'. A quest like Emerald Shield isn't going to undergo any significant changes anytime soon, making the offering of free, open, 24/7 editing by anyone without much purpose.--Carver 22:40, 29 March 2007 (MST)

• Well, people HAVE made websites to this effect - and general "geocities" websites are WAY easier to create, maintain, and delete if necessary than an entire multi-user wiki - a wiki forces people to use their names, for example, IPs are tracked, etc. I think that the main issue we're presented with is that simply by virtue of HAVING this be a wiki, we open up most pages for alteration. Once we get in everything we could want to get in here, then we have to start the process of MONITORING everything that everyone else is doing. We can't just "lock" every page; a wiki's goal isn't just to have a massive interconnected website, but to have things be changeable at need or will. That said, we will need to be doing some monitoring, obviously, but I think it will be a lot harder to monitor everything if we leave the bare minimum at Emerald shield without any descriptions or non-thematic hints - most people that are really searching out information won't be satisfied with a one-line desc and a vague area of where to start looking. So let's set some rules, and get them written down and accessible to everyone, so people know what is acceptable and what is not. I think that "no exact directions, no aliases" would be a lot easier for most people to swallow than "no OOC or specific hints."--Dorf (Talk | Contribs) 09:52, 30 March 2007 (MST)

[edit] Entirely in agreement with Dorf

We can all agree on this: no Ainur-only information, no weapon stats. If someone wants to create a ranked list using Compare, more power to them. Most of us also agree that specific directions/aliases are out. So, here's my proposal: Write a handful of questinfo pages--someone put links to all the stuff in "help abbreviations" (actually on the abbreviations, for some reason), so that's a good place to start. Keep it general and non-specific as much as possible; when possible keep it Tome-like. For uniques, write that no information is available and protect those pages from edits. With that bunch of stuff done, it will hopefully set an example for other people's additions. They can stray a bit closer to actual info, but not just paste up a bunch of aliases. --Tevildo (Talk | Contribs) 15:15, 30 March 2007 (MST)