Talk:Party area

should this be named Party range? Party member range? Party member AoE? Compass Range? --Falconeye 08:47, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Range and AoE are similar ideas about distance, but not synonyms.

• Range can always be used to mean the distance between attacker/caster and target; AoE can never mean that. (A bow has a range, a caster has a range, but a dropped bundle has an area of effect.)
• AoE skills take place within a certain radius; we use AoE as a type of skill synonymously with a measurement of that locus. Although an AoE skill's AoE might be the same distance as a range, the ideas are not the same.

It's confusing because ANet (and players) use the terms as if they are synonyms, the terminology is similar, and we interchange the rulers used for measuring them (e.g. aggro bubble is, arguably, the area in which the combat-AI behaves differently, but we use it as a comparator for ranges, too). In this case, Party area is an attempt to describe the maximum distance at which party-wide skills have an effect, making it more of an AoE-specific distance than a range.

Short story: it's probably better than we rethink how we describe distances on the wiki holistically instead of incrementally changing each existing term. Personally, I think the best way to do that is to have one article on distance that covers both Range and Area of Effect ...and have that article transclude relevant sub-articles on each of the distances. That would involve refactoring dozens of articles (so that just the right bits are transcluded). At present, I don't detect much appetite for that type of thing...and the current articles get the job done well enough for now. — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 01:33, 9 August 2011 (UTC)