User talk:RingTailCat/Archive2-Part2

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New Quest System

Elluu,
Regarding the new quest quest systems, auto-bestowed and varied levels, and trying to look ahead ... are there any new strategies you can think of regarding bestower, level, group, etc.? So far we have seen the Yule Festival quests are auto-bestowed and at least the two I have seen had varied levels. I guess we need a category for auto-bestowed quests, but then, should we try to foresee subcategories or should we wait?

I guess the bigger question is, what is beneficial to have categories for, from a pragmatic/practical aspect. I mean, probably some will be auto-bestowed because of reaching a level, and I guess those would be better kept in a category for level-up-bestowals. Others will be because of festivals/events. They may be regional. Class. Vocation/profession. Etc. But what is useful, and what is just theoretical/philosophical? ;-)

Also, what "terms" is better to establish early on? Your "Auto-bestowed" is spot on, and combined with the group-name it is informative. But others? I am not English native so I often struggle with these things and rather ask others to do the thinking ;)

Either way, I created a new category, plus a redirect from "Auto-bestowed" to Automatic Quest Bestowal. -- Zimoon 11:14, 18 December 2012 (EST)

I have seen several different kinds of remote bestowal quests (not all of them new!):
All of these have additional restrictions or pre-requisites, such as your level, your location, your quest history, your quest pack or expansion status. I am sure we will see more trigger types as we go along.
Another term for these quests is remote bestowal quests. You are remote from an NPC when the quest is bestowed. The ethereal dungeon master gives you a new mission in life.
The way quests finish can now be different. Formerly, you took almost all quests to an NPC to turn in and get your reward. Most of the rest completed when you left an instance or dungeon. There were a very few quests that auto-completed in the landscape. Now, there are many more quests which auto-complete, i.e, they do not require any action on your part to complete. This is different from the quests which are manually completed using the Quest Action Button. As far as I can tell, quest completion will not place quest rewards into the pending loot container, so you must have space in the regular bags for any quest rewards. And, of course, you must choose your own reward.
The term auto-bestowal should probably be reserved for quests that have no bestowal dialog. They just appear in your quest log. Likewise, auto-complete quests should require no interaction to complete.
Turbine seems to use remote bestowal, and that makes a certain amount of sense for quests that are bestowed remotely from any NPC, but do require that you accept or decline the quest. Remote completion would be the term for quests that require some interaction to complete, out in the landscape.
I'm not sure how important the actual mechanism of quest bestowal is. More important is the flow from quest to quest; the quest (story) arc which has more-or-less replaced the quest chain.
The pattern of quest flow seems to use quest clusters. You receive the first one or two quests in a cluster. As you work through them, you may acquire some more landscape quests, possibly including one which leads you to the next cluster of quests. This pattern was very noticeable in Category:Eaves of Fangorn Quests.
RingTailCat (talk) 12:03, 18 December 2012 (EST)
The thought which immediately comes to mind -- I would simply leave Festival Quests as Category:Festival Quests and not try to include them in any other grouping as they are in fact, unique. Anything else is simply muddying the water. The thing I would recommend here is to use as a pattern: Category:Summer Festival Quests and transclude that into the Summer Festival page.
As for quests which are automatically bestowed... I don't know that they really deserve their own Category, as we don't really provide any separate category for NPC specific quests. One assumes that we will see more of this kind of thing in the Future... plus as we see with Update 9, Turbine is likely to change certain automatically bestowed quests into NPC quests if/when they are critical to "quest gating." I.e. the Langhold Quest Arc "Quest:An Unnerving Display of Confidence" is now NPC bestowed.
Level specific?, there are apparently two kinds here -- those which are typically bestowed with the receipt of some in-game mail message. And those which are bestowed by some NPC -- typically a Class Trainer. I don't know that there is any differentiation needed beyond what we already provide for Quest Levels. We have Category:Class Quests which appears to adequately cover those. Others, such as from "G" or from Galahdril are tied to the Epic line or purchase of the particular expansion. i.e. do you get them even if you did not purchase the expansions or are they "enticements" to get you to buy them? And, now that the levels of the areas have been lowered, have those 3 quests also been initiated at a lower level?
The idea that "quests" are level related in Instances is not particularly valid as they are really related to "difficulty" level of the Instance.
The overall issue of Categories is still with us -- We don't really have a rationalized (tree structured?) Category system where one can figure out what category to look for. One usually stumbles into a category rather than logically finding it. ... Or that is what it always seems to me. I never seem to be able to guess what is a reasonable Category... and the search function doesn't provide a mechanism for them... you simply find them buried inside the listing of 200 or so other not really relevant "Items."
Race... have to read RTC's reply. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 12:22, 18 December 2012 (EST)
One thing to note: Turbine is anything but consistent in their use of terms. Frequently there is surprisingly little communication between the Devs and the Community support folks. The Update 9 changes of Festival tokens is a good case in point. The Release notes (written by the Community Support folks) said one thing, pretty succinctly, but as it turned not NOT correctly according to the Dev who corrected the explanation. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 12:29, 18 December 2012 (EST)
LOL just found another version of the term... The Update 9 Release notes call them "New auto-bestow quests". Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 12:37, 18 December 2012 (EST)
Since I have yet just seen a few I cannot really comment but I believe we will only going to confuse people if we try to be too precise with the terms. The "Auto-bestowed" you phrased somewhere is brilliant, it does not state that you accepted it, but you are bestowed the quest at your discretion. Only if you also have ticked "auto-accept" the quest will end up in the quest-log, am I wrong?
Neither do I think we need to complicate the "Auto-bestowed" phrase as such with details of circumstance, those are inferred from other details, right? I doubt many players will ponder long whether there is an ethereal NPC somewhere, or of they just happened to come across a note at the ground, or whatever they imagine. I was more interested in how to prepare for categories and sub-categories, what would be really useful and what would not. I do not like "Remote bestowal" as it implies there is always somebody remotely located, and I think that is not true, some quests I would rather imagine I found something by chance and ...   The big blue button reads "Quest(s) Available" which is fine, neutral and does not imply neither of.
Neither do we have to think about completion I think, a note in the walk-through would do fine, right?
A problem I am thinking of is pre-requisites. Some will not be easy to figure out. Certainly if they are a combination of level + location, or race + class + something. If they then have some quests as prereqs ... geez, I think I go play Farmville for a change ;-)
Magill, I was not thinking of removing anything. Festival Quests are still Festival Quests and will remain so. We are more discussing how you obtain the quest, the "starter" ... since I plan to go ahead and update the Quest template with the initial job done by EoD the "startinglocation" will automagically put quests in categories, in this case into "Category:Auto-bestowed Quests". Perhaps we need no better granularity than that, and then we are done :-)
Mails versus auto-bestowed, I would not be surprised if this is changed from now on. Remember that last Yule you received mails which initiated quests, this year they are auto-bestowed and no mails. Personally I think the mails were the old-fashioned technique Turbine had to use, the only one they had. Other games have had auto-bestowed quests long since, mainly for events and festivals. That said, I do not dislike the mails, in a weird way they are appropriate for the time.
Well, let us just relax now and see what we find. We'll sort things out whenever. -- Zimoon 15:55, 18 December 2012 (EST)
Most quests will still be offered in response to some player action.
  • landmark quests should list the territory, area, landmark, city, dungeon, that you entered to receive the quest. Place that in the startinglocation, and leave queststarter blank.
  • slayer and collector quests should list the first thing you touch, so queststarter contains the item or mob name. We can continue to use [[Item:item|]] or [[File:item-icon.png]] [[Item:item|]] or {{Reward|item}} or [[Mob Name]]. If there is a clear geographic association, we can fill in startinglocation; otherwise, leave it blank. Mobs involved in the slayer quests will have quest rings and their tooltips will identify the quest both before and after you accept the quest.
New, are the out-of-the-blue quests that suddenly appear when you log in or level up:
  • event quests can have a link to the auto-bestowal game term or category in the queststarter parameter, although putting something like the festival name might be nice, e.g. put [[Yule Festival]] in the queststarter parameter. (We should have a page called, e.g. [[Yule Festival]] that redirects to the current version of the festival, e.g. [[Yule Festival 2012]] so we don't have to churn the quests every year, just change one redirect.
I think we should add the quest chain section into the default quest boilerplate. Every quest has per-requisites, even if we do not know them. Many quests seem to internally use the passive skills like Novice, Adept, etc. which are silently granted as you level up. From developer comments and experience, many quests also have a minimum level, specifically, tasks and class quests; with fall back to some rule about being withing 4 or 5 levels of the quest's level.
I expect that a F2P or Premium player above level 30, who acquires the Evendim quests, will suddenly receive the Quest:Destination: Evendim quest at whatever level they are at.
Which brings up the truly new thing: the variable level quest. Now that is different from anything we have seen before. At this point, I have not seen enough of them to draw firm conclusions, but I do think they are a positive step forward.
RingTailCat (talk) 18:16, 18 December 2012 (EST)
Nice summary. I agree from a quick read, and your suggestion about having festival redirects is splendid. Noted for in-between-Xmas-food activities ;-)
I will have a thorough second read later on. -- Zimoon 13:17, 19 December 2012 (EST)
For what it's worth... a number of the recent "new hires" at Turbine (especially at the executive level) come from Zenga. The new "Yule Festival" "pop-up" is much like the annoying ones I've just encountered in Farmvill2, but much less obnoxious, but just as annoying. This Yule pop-up cannot be removed. You must either accept the quest or cancel it. AND if you cancel it, every time you log back in, it re-appears so you are forced to cancel it again. It is getting to be more than slightly tiresome that every time I log one of my toons in, that I have this bloody blue arrow occupying screen real estate and being generally ugly... and NO, I have zero interest in traveling "NOW" to Frostbluff --- and that's just like the latest "Bubble-place" that pops up when you launch Farmville2 or Cityville2 you launch the game you want to play and this pop-up comes up telling you no, you can't play that game you must play the game we want you to play... or else you can't play. There is no ability to cancel the bloody pop-up. At least with LOTRO,you can cancel it and go about your business.
Sadly, this is the same strategy that Zenga employs to force people to spend money. (Despite this, Zenga is still hemoraging money. Theirs is anything but a profitable corporate strategy.) It's NOT pretty and were it not for the fact that I'm playing those Facebook games to "support" an bed-ridden friend of mine, I would drop them like a hot potato. With this year's Yule festival, all of the popular events from previous festivals have 24 hour cool-down timers ... UNLESS you buy Festival Tickets from the LOTRO store! You also see the same strategy employed with the re-design of the Stable-master. Just think, now anybody can go from Bree to Rivendell at level 5 without having to run the gauntlet of the Trollshaws!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 21:59, 20 December 2012 (EST)
One thing (among many) that really irks me, lately, is that once you go to Frostbluff on that first quest, you are not done. The damned thing pops up the next day as well. I did not pay several hundred dollars a year (It's double cause my wife plays!) to be harassed to spend even more money, or to play content that has nothing to do with Tolkien's Middle-earth.
I think they have fallen into one of the software development traps that comes from not maintaining a large enough pool of permanent developers. It is like the problems with off-shoring, out-sourcing, and hiring consultants instead of staff. You end up with beginners, or at least beginners with your application doing mission critical work. Sure, it's a lot cheaper than keeping a large stable of experienced staff, but your product turns into stable refuse. You get development done by folks who just don't care about your product. They don't understand it, they don't have a feel for it, so new features are not integrated or well thought out. This leads to the kinds of unintended consequences that we've seen recently, with Hytbold instance farming and the demise of group play outside end game instances.
They have forgotten the basics of the game, the lore and the role playing, and that the journey is as important as the destination.
RingTailCat (talk) 23:05, 20 December 2012 (EST)
Monetization at its best, most unfortunately - also visible in the "Go-to" Quest NPC option. Very cool and potentially very useful for quickly burning through quests, but...again, directing you straight to the store. For what it's worth, though, I found at least one gem thrown to the fanbase - one of the last new quests in Moria's First Hall has a very brief but cool scene. Maybe quest design (as opposed to technical implementation) is handled by someone more creative? I like a lot of the new Moria stuff overall, but I'm not too hard to please most of the time. Sethladan 04:58, 21 December 2012 (EST)
P.S. How did you know the new guys came from Zynga? I'm kind of disappointed now: Part of me was holding onto the pipe dream of signing on with Turbine once I finished my BS/MS in computer science. Way things are going, though, I'm guessing it's probably best I look somewhere else, huh?
Addendum - because I'm not sure where else to stick it - the level 65 quests (beginning In Their Absence, Volume III, the prompt to go to Dunland) still come via the mail at 65 as of today (instead of auto-bestowal). Support for what someone may have said above about both systems still coexisting to some extent. Sethladan 16:14, 21 December 2012 (EST)
Here's a copy of the press release: [1] over at Wargamer.com - note that this occurred on 19 October while the "unannounced" layoffs happened 6 days later on the 25th. [2] Escapistmagazine.com -- the Boston Globe broke that story. However, Turbine (WB) still has several openings... interestingly now posted on the just revised turbine.com home page. The most interesting posting is not Computer science, but economics ... "Franchise Director" -- "...This position will be responsible for the P&L of the franchise as well as ongoing development of the game. ..."
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 15:19, 21 December 2012 (EST)

Standard for NPC Quotes

First a smile :)
Then ... go see older NPCs then, for example all those near Mysterious Relics. And change them as well.

I dislike the bullets, they just chops up the page without reason, but I think the bold question-line is nice. I give another edit to Athelward and wait for your thoughts. -- Zimoon 06:45, 29 December 2012 (EST)

When I went to see Athelward to check this page, for one character, he was not there, and for two other, they were not at the right phase to talk to him. So, I could not confirm all the text. But you took out some place holders that are apparent to someone who can talk to him.
Remember that Bungo Grubb and his buddies at the other Mysterious relics were the very first NPCs to have these kinds of question and answer conversations. At that time, no one knew what those relics were about. The instances they set the scene for were not in-game yet. Since then, many more NPCs have these conversations, and they have become an important way of setting the scene, and passing along information that is not tied directly to a specific quest. In some cases, the quest dialogues actually refer you to an NPC for further information, e.g. Drewett and Quest:Instance: The Stone of Wyrgende.
Thane Utred illustrates all the features of this type of conversation. There is a introductory heading, followed by a list of conversations. The button to close the conversation has some text: Thank you or I see, in this case, but with variation in other conversations.
Now I don't have a problem with bullet items. They are a basic part of the technology. They are one way of making the point that these are not just some random bits of text. And don't forget that bullet items will get handled specially by screen readers and such, whereas the paragraphs, bold or not, do not get special recognition.
RingTailCat (talk) 07:45, 29 December 2012 (EST)
OK; I will put back the "pending" then, as they indeed filled a purspose.
The ; and : are also recognized by screen readers, since they form a Dictionary List (DL, DT, DD style). But I guess using plain ''' does not.
Dotted lists should be used for lists, not some meta-formatter used on our whim. A good rule to remember is that a dotted list could equally well be replaced by a numbered list, except that the difference is unordered versus ordered. If you cannot (as a thought process) replace a dotted list with a 1) or A) or i) style list, then don't use dots. DL-lists are special though.
In general, for easy reading the less formatting the better, and when it is used it should be as cosmetics for women, hardly noticeable but improve the looks. At least as long as there is no fancy party about ;-)
-- Zimoon 08:25, 29 December 2012 (EST)
I actually think the DT/DD list makes sense in this case, at least moreso than a bulleted (or numbered) one - those question-answer pairs are basically providing a query term or prompt and an explanation to said query. Works in my head, at least, both semantically and visually. Sethladan 14:30, 29 December 2012 (EST)
I tried that with the Hobbit-announcer of G.L.O.B.E. questions and answers.
Some of the NPCs are a bit complex. Consider Wulfin. He answers one question each day, depending on which pair of daily quests he is offering. I don't know what happens if you carry a quest forward from the previous day, i.e., take his quests but don't do your five Hytbold quests that day. I suspect he will have two question/answer pairs. His peers in the other 4 areas are similar.
Then, there are a few stationary NPCs who have a different choice of questions depending on your phase. And, of course, the travelling NPCs very often have different questions depending on their locations (which is directly related to your phase).
IIRC correctly, in one case I put one of the question and answer pairs inside a spoiler alert box to try to avoid spoiling the surprise.
RingTailCat (talk) 14:48, 29 December 2012 (EST)
Without having seen the "complexity" I would guess lining up all Q/A with a DL works well, but there could be a note that explains the connection between quests versus dialogue. In the end of the day, players are not stupid ;) Also, they probably do not come here for reading the dialogues, they are gathered for our own completeness hunger.
Your change to the G.L.O.B.E. guy looks nice, I went ahead and applied that look to some NPC in the regions I have visited this far. Perhaps we should add that format to the NPC boilerplate, should we?
-- Zimoon 18:22, 29 December 2012 (EST)
Sounds like a good idea. I feel it provides a bit of mood to include the text from the answer close button. As I recall, there was one answer where the button text made me feel down right skeptical about the answer given by the NPC. The definition list seems to be able to handle that just fine, but I think you need to manually enbolden the text from the button.
RingTailCat (talk) 18:31, 29 December 2012 (EST)
I agree and I will try to remember adding the button text the next time. -- Zimoon 06:37, 30 December 2012 (EST)
RE: Wulfin -- "I don't know what happens if you carry a quest forward from the previous day,..." Assuming it works the same way in which Discovering the Descendant works ... Yes, you get both sets of dialog and quests. The completion of the previous day's quest and the bestowal of the current day's. In fact, if you had simply accepted the previous days' quest and did not complete it, rather than simply did not turn it in, the same thing is true. When you talk to the NPC, he will show both quest.
Other than that, I don't know where/what started this dialog, however, Wulfin is quite a bit different when compared to Éogar (i.e. the "Quotes" section). Granted, this idea of NPC "scene setting Q&A" is another new "Game Technology" introduced with RoR, or at least I don't recall such a thing anywhere else before. One might assume that this "technology" comes directly from the WB acquisition of Turbine -- it is a classic theatrical technique aka "the Narator" Therefore, for me the question becomes, not just capturing the closing dialog, which is important as it represents the "Official," i.e. "correct" attitude of the Character to the information, but Where does such a Q&A belong? I don't believe it is particularly relevant to be under the NPC -- as folks are not likely to encounter it in a timely manner.
We first encounter this Q&A in Quest:The Wold bestowed by Dala on first entry into Langhold -- but we don't seem to have captured it anywhere.
I'm inclined to say that "Quotes" or "Comments" is probably not a good title, but rather something like "Scene Setting" (I'm too far removed from theater to remember the "technical term" for such dialogs... probably something akin to the "Narrator" in Winnie the Pooh or Our Town, or maybe "Backstory"... hmmm...
What I would propose is a new "Questbox" for the quest(s) involved.

Experimental backstory template and usages (Dala and Thane Utred) deleted Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:36, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

These could be set-up as a separate pages in Category:Backstory, which could be transcluded into multiple locations -- Location; Quest; NPC -- as needed. It could be added to a quest immediately above or below the Walkthrough and Notes and as simply another section on the Location page. See: Quest:The Thane of Langhold, Dala, Langhold, Thane Utred
Hmmm. Just realized, if we attach the backstory to a quest -- do we attach it to the quest being completed (when it is visible then) or to the Quest(s) being bestowed, if visible and more than one.
Done creatively, they could/would provide an interesting read all on their own! Much like reading through the Epic quest line in sequence. (And by using the collapsed box, we can "prevent" folks from reading things they don't want to until they are in-game.)
I don't particularly like the term "Backstory". In-game, the question and answer area is called Comments, I believe. The sections you see are "Current Quests", "Available Quests", and "Comments". Sometimes also "Available Private Instances" (or some such).
The NPC question and answer block was introduced with the NPCs beside the Mysterious Relics. At least, that was the first time I saw such a mechanism. IIRC, those appeared in the update (or the update before) the In Their Absence instances showed up.
RingTailCat (talk) 15:53, 30 December 2012 (EST)

How are we identifying auto-bestowed quests?

I'm updating (adding in) a bunch of the new Moria revision quests. Category: Moria: Zelem-melek Quests A number of them are auto bestowed upon hitting some trigger point. How are we identifying the "quest starter"? "Automatic Quest?" "Auto Bestowed?" Leaving it blank does not seem reasonable.

An interesting, related question. Is this new? -- Under deeds, Rhovanion/ Moria Central Halls -- I have a deed which I may or may not have had before -- Quests of Zelem-melek, which requires 20 quests to complete. Cleaning up deeds is what got me started on this project... I only had 4 of 20 quests, and had done all previously existing quests in 21st Hall. This was the only deed of this type which I "found" in my deed log. Others, for Nud-melek, were completed on one toon, but not on a second. I did find the "starting point" for the newly revised "Exploration of Zelem-melek" process, and have been documenting that under the category heading.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 12:21, 1 March 2013 (EST)
For auto bestowed quests, I'd look to what was done in East Rohan. See Category:East Rohan Quests, and its sub-categories.
In all cases, landscape quests are triggered by something. They are very similar to quests that start as the result of looting something, or finding something. But they trigger when we are proximate to an object, enter an area, remote loot something, or kill something. They are triggered by our circumstances, rather than our direct actions. As a result, they may trigger while we are busy with something else; so instead of having the quest bestowal dialog get in our face while we are fighting, for instance, we get a notification in the quest action button box. The quest starter should be identified by the starting object, or location. But materially, they are not really any different from other quests. The fact that some of them are also auto-complete or remote-complete does not change the fact that they are still a lot like the old familiar quests. After encountering several hundred of them, the fact that they are auto-bestowal is really not very interesting, or significant.
Now there is a type of auto-bestowal quest that might be interesting in a negative way. Unless the behaviour is altered by Turbine, the quests that start by killed a mob with a ring are problematic because they can not be started when the mob has a grey title. That means that for the first time, there are quests that you cannot do because you are too high level (ignoring Task quests, of course).
I'm training up some new toons to take through Moria for the first time. My previous experience with part one of the Moria revamp, using toons that had already started questing in Moria, was very unsatisfying - it was very difficult to distinguish between pre-revamp and post-revamp versions of quests. I decided to not try to use my existing toons to document Moria revamp part two.
- RingTailCat (talk) 14:20, 1 March 2013 (EST)

Combo of normal and landscape quest

While playing through Moria as part of working on quest updates after Moria revamp, I came across some quests in The Flaming Deep that can be started as both old talk to NPC quests or landscape quests using the new auto-bestowal mechanism. I have not updated the wiki pages for the quests yet, but they were Quest:Grimly Lethal and Quest:A Cunning Plan's Components which can be started from NPCs at Anazârmekhem. Grimly Lethal can alternatively be started by killing Grims in the appropriate area, and A Cunning Plan's Components can alternatively be started by clicking on ground spawn items.

My thoughts on how to handle this is take the old way of filling out a quest entry and combine it with how I am handling landscape quests in User_talk:Shardis#Auto-bestowed_Quests with " or<br>" between starters. For examples,

queststarter = [[<starter NPC>]] or<br>kill [[mob type]]
or
queststarter = [[<starter NPC>]] or<br>[[<ground item>]]

--Shardis (talk) 13:12, 2 May 2013 (EDT)

I have encountered quests like that in the past where the quest was started by several far removed NPCs, e.g. Quest:Foreword: Bulwark of the West. The challenge with this type of quest is that you may be tempted to change the quest starter, thinking that the previous editor got it wrong, or that Turbine changed the quest. You may not notice that there are multiple ways to start a quest unless you have multiple characters questing in the same area. I found, even then, I wanted to cancel a quest and go try to start it the other way, just to be sure of the multiple starters or start mechanisms.
I don't see any problem having those quests in Category:Anazârmekhem Quests, and in the appropriate auto-bestowal category, as appropriate for the two start mechanisms.
Happy questing. RingTailCat (talk) 18:51, 2 May 2013 (EDT)

U11- Yellow Trait Tree changes for War-steeds

Please see discussion at: Talk:War-steed Traits. I have begun building a page of "stuff" User:Magill/Projects-U11-LM-mounted-companion trying to capture the information being presented. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 10:24, 10 May 2013 (EDT)

what to do about this

I have move this discussion to User talk:Lotroadmin#what to do about this. RingTailCat (talk) 13:59, 20 May 2013 (EDT)

Quick Note

Also, in adding some mob drop properties I noticed that the items currently on your sandbox 8 are being recognized as sharing the property since its tagged there...which makes it pop up on the actual item page (the one or two I've updated anyway). Not sure if that botting process can begin yet or not, but if it will be sitting there for a long duration you might consider removing the property tags on your page.
--Savi (talk) 12:25, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
Could you give an example of where the property references are causing my sandbox page to show up on an item page? I'd like to look at the mechanism that is generating that reference. Please provide links to a specific page where this occurs.
- RingTailCat (talk) 16:56, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
Property reference - for example Item:Simple Celebrant Salve under the drops section. Once the item page is updated to query the property tags (listing all instances where said item is dropped) it finds all occurrences. It is picking up your sandbox because for testing reasons you have it coded with the Has Drop property.
--Savi (talk) 17:09, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
I see what you mean about the property reference. This could be a problem, if it restricts us from talking about properties or creating examples. Perhaps there is some parameter to #ask to restrict its results to a category tree or to exclude talk pages or user pages.
- RingTailCat (talk) 17:58, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
Talking about properties is not difficult. For reference, you can always link to its respective page, for example Property:Has Drop. Regarding parameters...they do allow for that; in fact the Mount Index was set up that way - to only use the pages in the Category:Mount Items. However, when I tried to similarly apply the category Creatures to the item query, it failed to find any results. My guess is that it doesn't like subcategories. Technically no mob is under the Category:Creatures, but under a specific sub, sub category. And using a particular sub heading as a parameter would not work either as lots of items drop in several different ones (For example, light hides are not only dropped by some mobs in the Category:The Shire Creatures but also the Category:Ered Luin Creatures, among others).
This is my guess because when I tested the query at Item:Light Hide by adding [[Category:The Shire Creatures]] to the parameters, it correctly populated the drops from that category, but using the encompassing category of Creatures resulted in nothing.
Now excluding talk pages or user pages might work...I believe I remember reading something about that but can't recall the usage off the top of my head. That could probably be used for certain items where testing was done...it seems silly to have to add that to Every item query but I suppose that is a possibility as well.
--Savi (talk) 19:19, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

Welcome template

(Splitting the Welcome template discussion out from the "Propertyies" reference above...)

You seem to often be the one to catch new users and tack on the welcome to their page. In doing some editing today, I saw that rather than using the welcome template directly you should instead use {{subst:Welcome}} ... I'm guessing that is due to the sub not needing to refresh when the template changes? Not entirely sure though. Just wanted to pass that on as I stumbled across it ;)
--Savi (talk) 12:25, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
I'm not sure where you got the idea of using {{subst:Welcome}}. Don't use that construct. It inserts the text generated by the Template:Welcome template directly into the user's talk page. When you insert a reference to the template using {{Template}}, only the template reference is inserted, a difference of inserting 1,579 characters vs 11 characters. When you use {{Template}}, as well, future changes (such as you made today) will be displayed for all users whose talk pages include the template reference.
- RingTailCat (talk) 16:56, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
The subst addition was found right on the face of the Template:Welcome Reading your respsonse it sounds like that should be removed then. I utilized it twice only on new accounts so I can fix that momentarily also.
--Savi (talk) 17:09, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
Ah, I see why they might want to use the subst: to reduce the template references to the Welcome template. And most welcomers sign the page. I don't. And, when I was welcomed, User:Ravanel used the template on my talk page.
- RingTailCat (talk) 17:58, 28 May 2013 (EDT)
Using the direct template would also be less confusing to look at when the new user goes to talk on their page.
--Savi (talk) 19:19, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

I must say... I have never noticed those first lines in the Welcome template before.

  • My talk page created back in May 2011 uses {{Welcome}}. I can't tell who created it because "Liquid Threads" intervened :)
  • Using the template does not display those top lines, which make no sense to me in the first place.
<!--[[Image:icon-warning-22x22.png]]-->Please remember to only {{subst|welcome}} this page, don't directly use it as a template. <!--See [[Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Welcome]] to see why.--> Adopted from: [https://www.wowwiki.com/Template:Welcome WoWWiki].

As best I can tell, that first line was simply left in place when the text was copied from the WOWwiki. (The Image referenced does not exist on lotro-wiki.) ... i.e. whoever did the original template didn't do a very good job.

I would simply delete them as they are not correct.

Which also brings out the changes that Savi and I have made recently! Namely that the Welcome message isn't really terribly welcoming, in that other than warm-fuzzy words, it doesn't provide a lot of useful information.

  • In particular, does anyone still use the IRC channel? Like the wiki Forums that nobody used (and are now history) ... should we simply drop reference to it?

I stopped using it some time ago because there was never anybody there... except for someone who was permanently logged in to the channel and who never said anything (BurningFeetMan).

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 12:04, 29 May 2013 (EDT)

Item Drop Display discussion

Not sure where you want to continue this discussion... (See Quick Note above and User_talk:Magill#changes_to_item_drop_display)

At any rate... I don't really understand this whole "Properties" business. Special:Properties doesn't tell me anything. And so far, I have been unable to find "them" documented either on lotro-wiki; MediaWiki or the main wiki.

So far, looking at User_talk:RingTailCat/Sandbox-8 and User:RingTailCat/Sandbox-8 I don't see anything that makes any sense. They are simply lists of items with the "Has Drop:" suffix.

Clicking on "Has drop" on Special:Properties doesn't provide a meaningful listing.

Or put another way -- What is this trying to accomplish? What is the purpose?

Later, every item page would be modified to use a {{#ask}} template call which uses these properties to list the mobs which drop the item, in place of the manual list we currently have.

Is there a page existent which does this? According to Special:Properties there are over 700 "Has drop" properties.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 12:47, 29 May 2013 (EDT)
The introduction here is where I started. The user manual on the right side is very helpful. To give you a quick starting place: for properties, check this; for queries, see here. An item page that is currently using a query is the Drops section of Item:Light Hide. --Savi (talk) 13:11, 29 May 2013 (EDT)