Talk:Arthur Ayala/Weapons

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This page is rather ambigous.

Not sure what you mean RotJ. Check out Crafter (Weapon Crafter) if you're confused. --Rainith 16:51, 31 October 2005 (EST)

Ah, didn't know this page was part of a re-formatting test. My bad. Ruricu 12:35, 4 June 2007 (CDT)

[edit] Change of formatting

Please see GuildWiki_talk:Style_and_formatting/NPCs#Weaponsmith_formatting for discussion. --NieA7 13:40, 17 December 2006 (CST)

I would personally like to see "5-10 slashing" instead of "Slashing 5-10", and likewise "+3 energy" - or even "+3 ", or maybe (well, that won't go over so well with +10 energy, and minus won't work at all). Best would be if we had icons for damage types - slashing would be sword and axe crossed, piercing would be bow and spear, and blunt would be hammer. Unfortunately, I suck at icons. --◄mendel► 17:21, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

I just realized (as I was closing the Legend window) that the colors are by item type. I did them by profession here, and I move that we do it that way. It is usually quite obvious by the name what type of item we're dealing with, and if we go so far as to provide scaled-down images of the items in the table, it would be even easier, but what I really want to know when I look at this table is "what kind of stuff does he have for me?", and that means I need to find my first and secondary professions there. This is very hard to do in-game as the list is unicolor, but we can do it here. If you feel it is important to show handedness, we could use hand icons . Of course we can also do profession icons for the colorblind.

I like the inline materials, and we need templates for those (like {{iron}} and {{dust}}, they should be able to be used {{iron|x25px}} as well). --◄mendel► 17:30, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and get rid of the legend completely. Just make all of the abbreviations be links, with the long name showing up in the mouseover. A data display that relies on a legend to be understood is usally not good enough. --◄mendel► 17:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

See Candysmith for a completely different way to format these (might need to be modified to show inherents etc. better, and for longer lists). --◄mendel► 17:35, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

• I don't like how the energy icon looks in the table, especially without icons for damage - and since there's no in-game icon for damage types, it would probably just confuse people if we made up our own icons.
• I added a profession icon column (which I was planning to do anyway, you didn't give me a chance to finish this up :P), that combined with the color by item type makes it very easy to scan the table and find exactly what you're looking for - foci for monks, or weapons for rangers, or staves for ritualists, etc.
• See here about the material icons.
• "A data display that relies on a legend to be understood is usally not good enough." Then why do road maps have a legend? Or multi-variable graphs?
• Honestly, I don't like what you did for Candysmith. Having the data in a two-dimensional table makes it easy to compare the stats of different items. What you did is fine for a gallery display, but doesn't seem useful at all for actually listing the items.

—Dr Ishmael 17:59, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, the two dimensions don't work for itmes with lots of stats, but the weapon images add a whole new dimension. Anyway, the candy weapons don't have stats to speak of, and I'd been editing the axe gallery, so that was ok there. The point is that maybe we can use the excellently done weapon pictures (Jennalee did most of them?) to improve the appeal (and usefulness) of these tables, as skin is a factor in buying for some people (much as the color of a car).

I don't need to refer to the legend of a roadmap to understand, but the colors for the weapon type are just counterintuitive. I also believe that it is faster to find the monk section by color and then figure out what is staff, rod or focus by some icon, than to find the weapon type by color and then sort out the profession. Background color almost always codes profession on this wiki, and to break that, you need to provide a strong reason. In other words, please convince me that icons won't do to discriminate weapon types.

No contest on energy (for now, I still think we ought to make our own icons, but they need to be well-designed, and I know of nobody who'd do that).

NOt many people can read multi-variable graphs. This is not an argument in favor of legends. --◄mendel► 18:11, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

If someone is actually crafting a weapon, they're probably doing it for the stats, not for the skin. In any case, making the weapon images small enough to fit in the table would make them too small to be useful, and I would strongly oppose anything that would make the tables bigger than they already are (this is the probably the smallest table of all weaponsmiths; for the opposite, look at Telamon or Jonathan Blunt).

You don't have to refer to the legend on road maps because you're familiar with them. That's the point of making this legend collapsible - so that the people who need it can refer to it, and the people who are familiar enough with the abbreviations/colors don't have to.

There are many cases where color does not denote profession: the various infoboxes (Beast info = yellow, but not all beasts are warriors; Skill info = green, but not all skills are for necromancers), the Perfect stat weapons pages use color to denote weapon type (this is an extension of that, adding colors for martial weapons and shields).

Why the bias against legends? I've always been taught that they should be used, that you shouldn't assume that people will be able to understand your data without one. —Dr Ishmael 18:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

The infoboxes don't have a full color background, and they don't really need the color coding either (I certainly don't have them memorized, while I DO know the profession colors).

The bias against legends is that they can be used to cover up laziness in information presentation design. If someone doesn't understand your presentation, you can either improve it to the point that people do, or you can add a legend. That said, sometimes a legend gives additional info (like the roadmap legend that links styles of town names to population sizes), or your multivariable graph, where putting the info into teh graph would make it harder to work with. But our legend here just gives the long names for the abbreviations (all of which ought to have an article or a redirect on this wiki anyhow), and it explains the nonintuitive color scheme.

The size argument is one that I see, but that won't prevent me from trying if we can add weapon thumbnails without enlarging the table and have them be useful. With the candysmiths, the tables did not become larger vertically - I was looking out for that. If we do skill popups (and especially if we do them using a "generic" popup tag), then we can maybe pop up the weapon images. Hmm, I think I need to research available Mediawiki extensions - it may be that there is a popup extension we can get wikia to install, because that'd be extremely usefull across all wikis. If we roll our own, we should make it pop up a wiki page with action=render, whic is likely to do for most purposes (but how to size it?). --◄mendel► 18:45, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Popups would be nice to have for a lot of things, I just haven't had time to do any research about it myself yet.

After thinking about this a little longer, I've decided I don't really like the idea of background colors on these tables at all. Profession icons are more subtle than splashing colors all over the place, so I'd like to avoid that still. And it is easy enough to tell the weapon type by the name, so type-specific colors are unnecessary, as well. On the other hand, it would still be useful to somehow denote the different item types, perhaps as subheaders within the table (I can't find any weaponsmith that has item types mixed, so we wouldn't have to reorder anything). I've put those in here now, let me know what you think.

Without strange colors that need explaining, and with all abbreviations properly linked (as they are on this table), I will agree that the legend is not necessary. It would be courteous, though, to keep an explanatory note pointing out the usage of abbreviations and that the reader can hove the link for the full term.

Now to respond to one of your other comments that I've overlooked: The stats are worded as "Slashing 5-10" because it matches the in-game stats, which say "Slashing damage: 5-10" (other weaponsmiths have all stats in full form, like Telamon). I don't see what the benefit would be of switching the order. —Dr Ishmael 21:03, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

The subheaders are a definite improvement, they look fine that way. Personally, I think the strong colors clash with white-ish monobook, have a look at the pale colors on M.mendel/Colors and tell me whether they'd be an option. I want the stats worded that way because as you look at the melee weapons it looks quite ragged and doesn't scan well; having the order reversed would a) be more natural as the spoken language and b) be slightly faster to read. --◄mendel► 22:04, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Eh, I'm pretty much convinced now that "painting" the tables for any reason isn't necessary. Maybe just coloring the cell with the prof icon in it?

I'd like to get more peoples' opinions on the numbers thing, because while I see your point, I'm not convinced it's enough of a reason to go against the in-game ordering. Usually, people only craft max-damage(/energy/armor) weapons(/foci/shields), and that max number will always be the same. People crafting weapons are usually more concerned with the bonuses you can get on them. —Dr Ishmael 02:12, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Compromise: color the rows using the CSS class and override that in your personal CSS? ;-) I mean, we have tables colored all over the wiki even though it is never strictly necessary. Why is that, then? --◄mendel► 06:18, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] templates to delete

See User talk:Hgen banks. Please do not use a hack like that when you redesign the pages. --◄mendel► 15:41, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I might use little templates like that for subst:ing as I go (I've done that in the past), but I would not use them as permanent templates, no. Considering the majority of the formatting is already in place, though, I doubt something like that would be very helpful in this case. —Dr Ishmael 17:50, 12 August 2008 (UTC)