User talk:HH LEADER/Archive 2009-04-21

Thanks for your note

Hi Leader, thanks for your note on my talk page, I think I will probably move a lot of my suggestions over to me userspace, so your explanation on how to do so will be helpful.

As for your suggested compromise, I think it is an interesting suggestion. Just to give you some background in case you did not dig into the archives of how the suggestions came to be. Originally, suggestions, all suggestions, were made on a single talk space in Gaile Grey's userspace. This got totally out of control and most browsers could not load the page, and Gaile had a terrible time trying to archive things quickly enough. Then we decided to move the suggestions to the Arenanet portal when it was created because we thought we, the community, coud better manage the flow of suggestions.

The system for suggestions that is now being phased out was primarily created by me and Aspectacle. We were hoping to create a system by which people would create an idea and then others would collaborate on it to develop each idea into a well thought out suggestion that could be used by arenanet (or not), but would be fun to think about in any case. We created all kinds of tools for making suggestions that were easy to use, and developed categories to help people find suggestions.

Ultimately, our success was our failure. We ended up making the system too easy, and people did not bother to collaborate on ideas, they just created their own without bothering to look at anyone else's. Eventually, those who had been enthusiastic about the whole thing and worked hard to keep it all clean and clear ended up getting exhausted by the sheer volume of suggestions and fed up with the lack of effort many were putting into their ideas. The proposal to delete everything was simply backlash to the latter.

I think this new system could work, and I like your idea. However, for your idea to work, we can not let just anyone create the kind of holistic article you are talking about, because then this idea will befall the same fate as the previous idea system, people will just create a "holistic" article of their own ideas, and redundancy will ensue. The unfortunate thing is that, for this to work, we would have to establish just a few users, say one or two, who will browse new ideas and create the holistic articles. These two users would have to have complete control over the creation of these articles, and at least some ability to limit the extent of existing articles. These users would have to be very diligent and heartless, especially in the beggining, about making sure the system is not abused and does not get out of control. If you think you can do that, then I would be willing to work with you to create a viable system, but I warn you the workload could be huge, and it will likely not work the way either of us would be able to guess. (Satanael 06:11, 20 March 2009 (UTC))

The problems with this system is the fact that it would have to be done by a specific few people. How are they to be chosen? What guidelines do they follow? What authority do they have that others don't? The idea of having a 'committee' to deal with the suggestion pages has been discussed and discussed. (See the archive links on the Restructuring page). The kind of system you are talking about would work fine on a forum, where there are designated moderators and admins for specific areas. However, the wiki is not set up with this kind of hierarchy, and adding it would mean policy changes to admin (which could literally take months). On the wiki, everything is decided by the community. So it would have to be up to the community to choose the people who would have control over this, especially since it directly affects the input of so many of the community. If you read through the archives of months of discussion that lead to the decision to simply eliminate any community maintained suggestion area (including archives) and go strictly with a list of userspace suggestion pages, you will see that all of these issues (and potential solutions) have been discussed. I don't see this idea changing some of the basic problems we have encountered to date with the suggestions. It will still rely on a 3rd party to interpret someone's suggestion, to provide an overview that may not be what the original creator's interpretation is and then they will come in and change it, and the revert wars will start... etc. Personally I think we need to focus more energy on encouraging users to take their suggestions to places that are really set up to deal with suggestions in a proper way, which the wiki just doesn't do. -- Wyn 07:03, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Wiki is the perfect way of doing it.

I have included an initial implementation idea here. The discussion about this particular approach can be continued on its page if desired. HH LEADER talk 13:34, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Um... I have to totally disagree, and ArenaNet (Regina) also disagrees about the appropriateness of the wiki format for the kind of structured discussion suggestions require. -- Wyn 05:39, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Link? I was under the impression that anet was completely apathetic to the suggestions area. When did they start to support this reform? Sock 05:50, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Here -- Wyn 06:29, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

In that case, when she was discussing how cumbersome wikis are, she was speaking from her own personal standpoint, and not stating an official standpoint of ANet. You can see this is true because she prefeces the statement with "in my personal opinion".

Furthermore, wikis quite commonly designate certain users to exercise greater control over specific aspects of that particular wiki, just look at any project page on any wiki, or another example that I have specific experience with is the process by which a featured article in Wikipedia loses its featured article status. This process involves several specific steps or stages, and currently there are only two users who have been given the power to move articles from one step to another (this is not a physical tool provided to them, anyone could conceivably make the move, but it would be reverted immedately). If I am not mistaken, only one of these users is an admin, and the other is just a regular editor. Particularly if the proposed process were purely voluntary on the part of the suggestion creator(s), then there should not be a problem in designating one or two users to maintain the space and enforce the groundrules. (Satanael 07:44, 21 March 2009 (UTC))

Satanael: after reading you notes I have changed templates that can be supported by the process you have described. I placed an illustration here. To create this illustration I have picked few real suggestions and broke them down to simple one phrase requirements suitable for inventory while identifying dependencies. I have not put links to the original suggestions because it is for illustration only. What should happen that if new unique requirement can be identified, it is added with unique ID. All variations in scenarios on how to satisfy it are have to be formulated in single phrase. After an addition to particular use case they can be discussed only on the original suggestion/idea page(s) by following the links. I hope that second edition of templates is more user friendly.

Answering to Wyn's arguments: apparently, I do not see how creating a summary in a form of use cases is any different from doing any other documentation in this Wiki. I remember, for instance that Guild categorization has been handled by very few people including yourself and it was run as a project. If there are any differencies on how to represent it or what to include in it, it still can be resolved by concensus. But essentially, any scenario can be listed regardless of it 'usefulness'. The argument that some of the ideas are better than others simply does not exist in this context. HH LEADER talk 15:37, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

"We are currently in the discussion phase for the April 2009 bureaucrat election. Please participate per the guidelines in our elections policy."

^ -Auron >8< 12:24, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

I just nominated Satanael. Hopefully It was done accordingly to the guidlines. HH LEADER talk 12:28, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Read Guild Wars Wiki:Elections, namely, the order of steps. -Auron >8< 12:29, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Got it. I am late with nomination. I won't make a good bureacrat. Will you correct my mistake, or I should do something about it? HH LEADER talk 12:36, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

you can tag it and remove it from the bcrat page or wait until someone else does, idc -Auron >8< 12:42, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Comments about the organisation of Arenanet's code

Actually everything I have seen points to poorly organised code which makes it difficult for them to modify/add new things. I can't comment on the reasons for these things, but I will cite as examples their inability to scale the length of knockdown durations for a very long time and their inability to rename guilds with inappropriate names. They seem to have reused parts of code and hard-coded variables that ideally, they should not have. Not being a programmer at Arenanet I can't comment on the reasoning behind these things, but I suspect it has something to do with the collaborative nature of programming on a large project like a game making it impossible to avoid such problems. I doubt it would be trivial at all for them to implement in-game feedback, despite the fact that they had a similar system in place for reporting bugs in the past. I don't care what your background is, you cannot assume any changes to their code would be trivial without specific knowledge of the code itself. Misery 20:36, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

It doesn't really matter. Any implementation that size is a major undertaking, even under perfect cirumstances. Backsword 20:39, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

User talk:Mike O'Brien

I guess you're new to wikis, or at least this wikis culture, so I think an explanation of our culture is in order. The way things work is that we discuss everything until we have worked out the issues. It doesn't work by Anet deciding everything, instead they let us run the wiki.

Not is it realistic to expect that telling people to shut up about the failure points of your suggestion and only focus on any good part will happen. There is no reason for them to do so, nor would they gain anything by doing so. Backsword 11:43, 19 April 2009 (UTC)