User talk:Wolfie/Archive 4

Just newly created an account here, have been an active contributor on the GuildWiki for a long time (although did take an unplanned long break from GW and the wiki). Guess I come from what many would call a "traditional" RPG playing background (Wizardry 1-8, Ultima 1-9, original Bard's Tale trilogy and so on, armed with pencil and graph paper painstakingly drafting maps etc), so mainly was editing the quests and skills side of the wiki, gravitated heavily towards trying to keep articles to the standard format guides.

Will take some time to do a random wandering read through the policy discussions so far before making comments myself, but do have one major question to ask upfront:

Are ArenaNet...

a) Providing the physical hardware, Internet bandwidth and IT support (ie, the back-end systems and support)

b) All of (a) + planning to offer some form of data integration with the in-game information [1]

c) None of the above, please specify

[1] To explain this in more detail: As I understand it, all the quest dialog, the XP / Gold / skills etc rewards, all the details about every skill (energy cost, recharge time, description etc), all that data is sourced from a "master" in-game (or live) database, which when ArenaNet staff wish to make a change to a skill, edit a quest, alter the drop rate of an item whatever, after the change passes through their internal change control procedures, it ultimately gets applied to this master database. This in turn, winds up as an update for the GW clients. If this is the case, with some clever scripting, would think it possible to extract that data and format it into wiki articles as an automated process.

This would have three major advantages: (1) the information on this wiki would be current and correct (ie, sourced direct from the "horse's mouth" as it were), (2) would take a massive workload off the fan-base having to search for discrepancies (between in-game and the wiki) and editing the article, and (3) the format would always be standarised since it getting churned out cookie-cutter style.


 * Just (a). ^_^ Actually, the idea is the other way around, eventually they want to incorporate this wiki into an in-game help system. For the moment, though, it's all us. edit, sorry, forgot to log in =P - Pepe talk 17:17, 20 February 2007 (PST)