Category talk:Quest Item Icons

Adding to List

I'm adding to the list all the generic icons that exist, or files with fitting generic names, but I'm not sure if I should keep some the way they are, while I believe there is only one apple or hoe icon, there is more than one ore icon, should I leave it like that and add the next as "ore 2" or change that one to follow the naming of the rest? (ore 1). Perhaps even change everything to have (quest) at the end? --Gwenwyfar (talk) 01:53, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

I commented somewhat at File talk:Basket 1 (quest)-icon.png‎‎ (geez what spread out conversations). My wish would be one or maybe two tables at the category page. One table with the most common icons, and their generic names ready for copy&paste, and this without regards where those icons actually exist (e.g. there are a few quests involving mushrooms, etc., and they are identical with cook-recipe icons, and we either add also Cat:Quest Item Icons to those files, or dodge). And maybe one table with links to other categories which have nice tables of generic icons, such as discussed at the Basket-icon talk-page. The main idea is to easily find those existing icons not having to click one's way around the globe first :)
-- Zimoon 06:04, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

Quest Item Icons is one area where I have explicitly loaded duplicate icons. There are certainly a few common icons that get reused very frequently, such as the paper pages, scrolls and books. The majority of icons are unique or used by a very small number of items. This is in contrast to trophy, weapon and armour where a small number of icons are reused by many items. I'd like to see some kind of guideline along the lines of using generic icons, if a generic already exists, or only converting to a generic if more than say 5 or 10 items reference the same icon image. I suspect there is a point at which converting a few duplicates to a generic is simply not worth it.

I am also concerned about the possibility of assigning the wrong icon to an item.

• There are cases where items have different icons depending on their source: store bought items have a different icon than quest reward items.
• There are cases where so called vendor trash items have different icons depending on their minimum level. When you observe an icon change to one of those items, it may not be correct to assume that all other items that previously used that generic icon now have a new icon.
• At one time, scroll cases were mostly uses as rare bounty quest reward items. In an upgrade, almost all recipe drops were changed to uncommon scroll case drops. A bit of well-intentioned icon replacement (by myself and others) left the scroll case icons on our wiki out-of-synch with the in-game icons.
• Similarly, the icons for some legendary weapons with minimum levels above level 65 originally had the same icons as lower level items, but were later given new icons. Again, well-intentioned icon replacements caused the lower level items to gain incorrect icons. Despite the large number of legendary items that share the same icons, I am very cautious about using generic icons for LIs.

- RingTailCat (talk) 08:16, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

My concern is mainly about new items as we walk over quests and find that something is missing an item. Of course you are right in that we should not replace cons on a whim. However, if we see a one-use item which is identically looking as a generic, or more-used icon, then I do not see the problem. Either there really are identical, or there was a mistake to begin with in which case nothing is neither better nor worse.

Yes, right now I see no point in spending a massive amount of time on digging up duplicates. But if, on the other hand, somebody is careful and likes that kind of wiki-ing, I am the last to advise them to go elsewhere. And if I find something that is duplicate I will fix it, even though I may not try to find all other possible duplicates of that item.

However, look at Gwenwyfar's table and see that there are not so few identical quest icons as you may believe, and I think that table is easily doubled just by those having a dozen or more quests bound to them. Just at the first page you by inspection see several duplicates.

That said, the important subject is not finding the duplicates now, but to afford editors with easily finding an icon that already exists rather than having the fuss of creating and uploading a new one. Please, do not confuse the good side of the project with possible drawbacks, even if it is good to keep an eye at over-zealous fixes based on your historical experiences. I am one to blame when it comes to those not-so-good fixes but I try to clean up after myself when I find out ;)
-- Zimoon 08:47, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

I think one of the best things we have done recently is to add links to the generic icon pages from the upload pages. I have always found it a pain to go to the search box to find the right category talk page. The link will be a real time saver, making it much easier to quickly find generic icons.

There are a few more quest item icons that need to be made generic. You might notice that I have been using the first non-generic identical quest item icon when it is appropriate.

Here are a few suggestions for generic icons: , , File:Scroll 3 (quest)-icon.png|Tied Scroll, , , , , , ,

- RingTailCat (talk) 09:19, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

I have :) -- Zimoon 10:08, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

Yes, there were some that repeated themselves not much more than 2 or 3 times, but there are so many quest icons, that in this case, there are quite a lot of generics to add, even the most uncommon ones repeat themselves quite a bit. But I'll try to add only those that have a significant amount of repetitions then.

Now, what about the file names? (Which was my main question here :P). Should it have numbers? (quest) at the end?

--Gwenwyfar (talk) 12:05, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

I agree about not going crazy with the duplicate icons - during questing there are a few icons that come up over and over, and I feel a little wasteful every time I upload another meat icon, for example. Those are the ones to focus on. But as Zimoon points out, first things first - compile the generic ones that already exist so that they actually get used. I know I'm too lazy to go paging through hundreds of icons to see if there's a generic one for me to link to. :)

As far as I'm concerned, the simple file names like Ore-icon are fine. The reason to have parentheticals or trailing numbers is for disambiguation, and if there's nothing to distinguish from there's no point to making the file name longer to type. Maybe it makes the table look a little more sloppy, when some say (quest) and others don't, but they're easier to use. There's such a nice simplicity to something like Egg-icon.png. -- Elinnea (talk) 12:47, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

I do like the idea of naming the icon to make it stand out a bit, helping to suggest that it is generic and distinguish it from the icons that below with a specific item. Appending a number, or "(Quest)" are two good ideas. BTW, doing page (or file) renames is one thing my bot does know how to do quite well. RingTailCat (talk) 15:53, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

I thought about how we could use a bot to help with that, but, (and I don't know exactly how bots work, just have a general idea), even with the marker for duplicates, unless there are cases of multiple identical files, or a file being used in lengthy or multiple pages (which doesn't happen too often unfortunately), the amount of work would not be reduced too much. Only pixel-by-pixel exact files are marked as duplicates, so that reduces the chance of marking all of certain icon to be changed, and although (I believe), you could make a list of all the files to get changed, I don't see that helping too much, as many icons are only used in one or two pages anyways, so you'd still be finding them and changing it one by one. I may be wrong, of course, since I don't know how bots work for sure, but it really doesn't seem like that much of reduced effort for most files to me :P --Gwenwyfar (talk) 16:59, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

Bots shine are automating repetitive tasks. First, you need to identify the set of pages to work on, and the change, be it a page reference rename, or a search and replace type operation. They do not work well when the number of pages to be changed is small, and each set of pages gets a different change. But, if you want to rename a file from "foo-icon.png" to "baz-icon.png" on several hundred pages, a bot is the way to go! See User:RingTailBot for more info about my bot (and specs on some of the changes it has been tasked with). RingTailCat (talk) 17:29, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

Yeah, that's what I thought. I had read a bit about bots to see what they were for and what they do, but never really got into specifics onto how :P Even the icons with most files to rename are still too little to compensate putting it into a bot. Well, I'm kinda used with these repetitive tasks anyways, one of the wikis I worked on was kind of abandoned for some time, so I had to go through hundreds of files categorizing, deleting and reuploading. But to be honest, I prefer to do that than go in the game looking for content to add. Nobody likes doing these tasks too, so I still have a lot of things to do ahead, and mostly by myself :D --Gwenwyfar (talk) 18:05, 1 September 2012 (EDT)

You sound a big bit like me, when having some time to spend but not want to, or cannot, go into game I can spend quite some time on repetitive tasks like this one. Nice that you find icon-hunt interesting, I guess I would have ended up here when my current task-list is drained :P

Good job this far, keep it up! -- Zimoon 06:39, 2 September 2012 (EDT)

Icon Consolidation

I'm taking a break from consolidating quest item icons. I feel a need to play the game for a while.

There are a couple of guidelines I'd like to suggest for the naming of generic icons. First, please always insert a number in the icon name. Items in-game do not include numbers, so this clearly identifies them as being non-standard named icons. Second, please add the "(quest)" suffix. Again, it helps to distinguish the icon. Compare the Category:Quest Item Icons and Category:Scroll Icons: the quest scroll icons are a subset of the scroll icons. When a quest item icon is identical to another icon, but for the frame and background colour, please try to use a similar name.

I tried to catch every case where there were more than 5 duplicate icons. I probably missed a few. I did a few smaller duplicate sets, but generally did not bother with the duos and trios.

On a go forward basic, I would suggest that we attempt to find a generic icon in the listing at the head of the category page, but not search through all the icons in the category looking for a match. (Unless you have a good idea that the new item's icon is a duplicate.) Periodically, we should have the icon matching utility run to report the close matches.

- RingTailCat (talk) 13:06, 3 September 2012 (EDT)

Having fun is the most important, whatever we do. This is a really nice start, indeed. Thanks for adding numbers to icons, in case several show up it is the less job later on I guess.

Right now the table has unbalanced columns, but I believe we can wait with a more thorough clean up. Maybe even simplify adding more icons by having a few but larger cells, line breaking with BR or simply by every second line blank. That would make it easier to add, resize, whatever, even if we lose the altRowsMed tinting. We'll see later on I think. You've done a brilliant start you guys :-)

-- Zimoon 17:44, 6 September 2012 (EDT)

There are so many different quest icons that I am hesitant to add icons to the static list at the top of the page unless they are used by a number of items. You may have noticed that I have removed several single use icons. They had nice, generic, names but they were only used once. The icons that really deserve to be in this listing are those that are used by 10, 20 or more different items. Otherwise, the short listing becomes too long to be convenient. Maybe we need to break it into an A-list and B-list, with the recommendation that you always check the A-list for duplicates, even if you are in a hurry. Then, check the B-list; and if you have the time, scan through the entire list for a match. RingTailCat (talk) 18:31, 6 September 2012 (EDT)

Table format

Just noticed the table used at the top of page is hard to modify. In User:Moinante/Sandbox-3 I converted it to a more edit friendly version. Since it modify the appearance a bit, I did not edit it directly here. Any comments are appreciated Moinante (talk) 19:27, 18 November 2012 (EST)

I made a couple of changes on the User:Moinante/Sandbox-3 page. It was incredibly easy compared to the existing page. I'd like to see some HTML comments to more clearly mark off the start and end of each column of icons. This layout should definitely replace the existing one. RingTailCat (talk) 20:12, 18 November 2012 (EST)