Guild Wars Wiki:Projects/Drop research

{| cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 100%; border: 2px solid #BFB1A3;"  Drop Research Project This project aims to standardise and extend the (often ancient) data we currently have on acquisition, drop research and salvage research. '''Much of this is still open to discussion. Please see the talk page.
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Contributors
Dakota

Acquisition
Currently some acquisition sections contain only a brief note and a link to the drop research on the talk page (as on Halo Axe) whilst on some pages contain an almost complete list of all enemies that can drop the item (such as on Kournan Bracer).

I propose that we standardise this section so that it contains just a note of the campaign (Core, Prophecies, Factions or Nightfall) and a list of the regions that it drops in (such as Kourna and Vabbi for Nightfall items), along with a link to the drop/salvage research on the talk page.

Drop Research
This is a section I feel could be greatly expanded and presented in a much more readable manner. Personally I'd like to see it moved to it's own page, that way it frees up (often large amounts of) space on the items talk page, but can still be linked from the acquisition section of the main page and found by those who have an interest in it. This leaves the items talk page for more direct discussions of the item and provides a separate talk page for the drop research.

I've mocked up an example here and added in a few columns and done some reorganising to present the material in a way that I feel improves its usability. The columns are for the following data -


 * Mode - This column remains the same and contains either N (for Normal) or H (for Hard). The only difference here is that I've added them into separate tables to make the data easier to use and read.
 * Drop - This column also remains the same, noting the enemy or chest that dropped the item in question.
 * Location - Again, no changes here and this column simply lists the location the item was dropped.
 * Rarity - This is the first of the new columns I've added in and is used to indicate the rarity of the dropped item (white, blue, purple, gold). This column will obviously be left out for items such as trophies where it is of no relevance rather than adding it in and entering white for every item. I've also left out green from this section as green items only have drop location which is already adequately recorded on the appropriate places.
 * Quantity - Another new column, this one notes a running tally of the amount of times the item has been dropped in this drop/location/rarity combination.
 * Value - This new column records the upper and lower most merchant resale values for the drop/location/rarity combination. So the example of 24 - 36 that I've used indicates that this item has sold between those two prices. As this is a range, it only needs the lowest and highest prices and not every price for say a drop with a quantity of 5. An item should be identified to find its actual sale value, even if of White quality.

The normal/hard mode tables are exactly the same, I just feel it makes the information a little easier to find.

Another change I've made is to sort the data. The sort order is mode (N/H), Drop (alphabetically), Location (alphabetically), Rarity (rarity). Quantity and value are irrelevant to the sort order. Again I feel this makes the data more presentable and easier to read.

Salvage Research
I've treated this section in much the same way as the drop research (only I've currently left in on the talk page of my example rather than moving it) and I feel it should be located on a separate page from the talk page alongside the drop research data.

The columns here are -


 * Material - Simply the material salvaged from the item
 * HS - Whether or not the item contained the highly salvagable inscription, this will obviously only apply to weapons and offhand items
 * Quantity - Another simple one, this time the amount of the material salvaged from the item
 * Kit - the type of salvage kit used. I know the type of kit determines the type of materials/upgrades you can salvage but wasn't sure if it had any effect on the amount of materials salvage and so thought it would be good to document to try and determine trends.
 * Rarity - As above with drop research this is the rarity of the item that was salvaged.
 * AR - Armor Rating, this will only be used on salvage items
 * ISV - This is used like the HS column to indicate whether or not the item contained the Increased Sale Value inscription and like the HS column will only be used for weapons and offhand items.
 * The merchant sale value of the item

Unlike the drop research tables which group similar drops the salvage tables need to document each entry seperatly due to the number of variables and so this table is sorted by material (alphabetically), other than that I'm not yet certain on the best possible sort order.

Skins
On the subject of items that have the same name but different skins (examples being Ancient Daggers, Ancient Scythe and Talon Daggers), I suggest these pages be split. These allows people to place any information in the relevant place and allows us to keep the research pages more organised as only research relevant to the item in question is on that page.

Issues
The only major issue I can see with this is that the majority of the data already present will leave large gaps in the new tables and so to overcome this I would recommend adding the new tables in addition to the old tables and then once we have the details in the new tables we can remove the old tables, as the vast majority of the drop/salvage research has been carried out by quite a small group of individuals it shouldn't be hard to coordinate this and get the data recompiled.


 * After thinking on this some I think the best solution would be to leave the current data where it is on the talk pages and replace the link in the acquisition section with a link to the new page as I previously suggested. This way we're not removing any data until we have the same drop (with the extra details) on the new page.

Other minor issues include potentially getting separate pages setup up and all the current data and links moved/corrected, however this doesn't require much more than time to do. Another minor issue would be getting new data put in the right place, though if people follow the link from the main page (as I do) rather than just click through to the talk page this shouldn't cause any problems, again the small group of users generally involved with gathering this data means a message can be placed on there talk pages so the know where this data is going.

Category
I've created a new category entitled Category:Drop and salvage research that we can add to all item research pages as we create them. This will require the removal of the Ongoing drop research category which to date has only been applied to weapons and offhand items. This new category will cover all items included in Ongoing drop research but will allow us to use one category for both drop and salvage research rather than using two categories on every item.

Page template
Use this preliminary page template to create a new research page.

If you're interested in helping out either in moving the current data or providing new data after the move just add your name onto the contributor list at the top of the page.