Talk:Escape from Lion's Arch/Daily achievements

Hold the Line

The table currently just repeats what's in the game client, without providing additional information nor links, so it doesn't really help much. For example, there is no way of telling what Hold the Line (Escape from Lion's Arch version), Rally Point Defense, and Defend Event actually mean in a specific way. Wiki search doesn't seem to help either. As a result it's a bit of a mystery when your "Hold the Line" achievement percentage remains firmly stuck at 0% despite seemingly having defended everything at the 3 points inside and out. If anyone knows the details, some additions would be useful where it's not obvious, perhaps in the form of notes if there is not enough material for separate pages. Morgaine (talk) 18:26, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

It seems clear enough to me. The events in question are:

• Defend the Fort Marriner rally location
• Defend the Postern Ward rally location
• Defend the Trader's Forum rally location

The event must succeed and you must receive credit for it. —Dr Ishmael 18:40, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

If it's clear enough to you, perhaps you could document it in the wiki to make it clear to others as well. Explanations in Talk pages aren't generally going to help people, and this is a question that people continually ask in map chat, so evidently it's far from clear. Morgaine (talk) 18:54, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Basically copy/pasted my comment above, you could've done that and become a contributor! —Dr Ishmael 20:12, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

If I did so, it would be without personal knowledge about the matter and just repeating hearsay from you. In contrast, if you had done so instead of just replying here in Talk, the matter would have been documented authoritatively based on your knowledge in the matter. Try to be helpful. And thanks for doing so now. Morgaine (talk) 01:00, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Shots fired! pewpewpewpewpewpew! Psycho Robot (talk) 01:03, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Pew pews seem to be the norm whenever one engages the old guard of the wiki. It's unfortunate. It's also why I pretty much abandoned contributing here, and it's also why the GW2 wiki is so much weaker and less informative than the GW one was --- the barrier they erect against contributing is just too high to bother. Morgaine (talk) 02:05, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

I've gotten tired of hearing this sort of argument. If you think the wiki sucks, DO SOMETHING! CONTRIBUTE! The old guard is almost all gone anyway. —Dr Ishmael 02:40, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

It's far easier to complain from the sidelines than effect any actual change. -Auron 02:44, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Good in theory, but ineffective in practice when the old guard won't budge. What do you suggest, that we get into revert wars in order to effect change? Not my idea of fun. Morgaine (talk) 02:57, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Incidentally, this particular page is a case in point. In some of my old contributions in the early days of GW2 I was trying to get agreement on hierarchical reference structuring in order to make the wiki as usable for drilling down from the known to the unknown as the GW wiki was, but it got shouted down by the old guard. And so we now have pages like the current one, in which there are references to game details that have their own pages but no way to go from the first to the second (until Ish added the note just now). It's pretty much endemic throughout the GW2 wiki. Still time to rememdy it? Well, it's a bit late in the day. Morgaine (talk) 03:16, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

For achievements in particular, unless they had some unique requirements (lots of stuff in the Explorer category, for instance), there was just not much of a reason to make a whole separate page for them, or even write much text beyond what it says in-game. Generally they were quite self-explanatory. For the specific Escape from Lion's Arch daily you cite, I honestly don't see how it is confusing...it's explained in the release notes that there are three rally points to defend, and the achieve says you need to complete three of them (although they can be the same one three times, too). I think it would also be fairly obvious for anyone who's participated in the release, since the rally point defend events are typically the first active, along with miasma deployment. Maybe that's just me, though.

As to old fogeys getting in the way of making the wiki better, well...it's really more that no one cares about this wiki and never has. The community was just never here in the same way as it was for GWW or GuildWiki, and ArenaNet themselves have generally avoided publicizing or promoting the wiki in any way. So the only people who still bother to contribute these days are largely ancient relics. It's been a long time since a "new" user has stepped up and contributed in a big way. When all of your typical editors are the same people you've been working with for forever (literally years, for some of us), there's a tendency towards groupthink and assuming that we know better than others. It's not necessarily justified, but that's what's happened. So when some new person comes in and starts throwing around accusations of everything being terrible, I think it's logical to feel a little bit defensive - "I edit this wiki when everyone else has abandoned it, and no one appreciates me".

It's too late to do anything major to fix the wiki; that train came and went long ago. We just do what we can, and wonder why we bother at all. Vili 点 03:30, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Regarding "it's explained in the release notes" --- knowledge of the Release Notes should not be a prerequisite in order for the wiki to be understandable. Only those who happen to know that there are three events with "Defend" in their titles will make the connection from "Defend Events" to those three specific events, but for everyone else "defend" is what we do all the time at those 3 rally points, and simply defending won't earn you the reward. If the wiki is to be a useful resource, it needs to link from the known (terms like "Defend Event" that appear in the Achievement name) to the unknown, like names of specific events that are required but don't appear in the achievement description and are initially unknown to players. It's basic information structuring, and it's also basic wiki structuring too --- connect up everything with links. Morgaine (talk) 04:07, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

"Participate in Rally Point Defense events in Lion's Arch. 3/3 Defend Events Completed"

How is this in any way ambiguous or unknown? Are players confused about what constitutes an event? Are they confusing miasma deployment events with rally point defense events, which don't even take place in the same location? And are you really going to claim that it's unreasonable for the wiki to assume players bother to read the update notes to understand new game content? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. Vili 点 06:35, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Neither Rally Point Defense nor Defend Events link to anything, and therefore people reading that description will not have been informed which specific events they have to complete, so the description will not have filled the need for which most people are likely to be reading it. Good linkage and helpful information are fundamental to a useful wiki. Just repeating in-game information without adding value serves very little purpose --- nobody would bother looking here if the wiki did not document huge amounts of information beyond that readily available in the client! Morgaine (talk) 12:17, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

If there is a reasonable possibility of it being unclear, then we can consider adding more data (helpful text at the bottom of achievement tables). In this case, "no way of telling", "mystery", and "not obvious" were good indications that Ish needed to make it "clear" to you. Now, I don't think he was being dismissive, just stating that's how he sees it (clear = reasonable). And he answered your question, so that's not being unhelpful. He probably didn't immediately add it to the page, since if someone comes to this page and doesn't know how to get the achievement, they'd possibly go to the talk page, and there it is. And his second comment about adding it to the page was taken in good faith. And your reply actually violates one of the rules of old GWiki: "You are valuable". Aka, it doesn't have to be Ish who authoritatively says which events contribute. --JonTheMon (talk) 13:23, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

That's a fair comment, Jon, but I would add two provisos. One is that if I required the information then there is a good chance that other players would require it as well, and this is indeed confirmed by having heard puzzled questions about Hold the Line in LA map chat. That suggests that this information would be more useful to readers if it were located in a well structured wiki article rather than in ad hoc and difficult to navigate Talk pages.

The second proviso is that people check the Talk pages as an information resource only if the main article is missing the information that they require about a topic, not as the first location. In other words, when people visit Talk pages for information it is a sign of failure of the corresponding wiki page to be adequately informative. Consequently, while I'm happy to accept your opinion that it was given in good faith and not as pushback, I don't agree that important information of interest to many people has any place in Talk pages at all. I appreciate having been informed here, but that information constitutes a missing link between Achievements and Events and so it was quite naturally destined for a proper place on the wiki. Morgaine (talk) 19:40, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Right, it's usually a question of: based on what a normal gamer would know, how much information do we need on the page itself. Like, the page itself wouldn't be good for answering the question of: "if i deal 80% damage to an aetherblade, but then it disappears because of an event, should I get credit?" And the answer is "no, it didn't actually die", but should be on the talk page. In this case, it doesn't meet the threshold of "what a normal gamer would know", so it's on the page. --JonTheMon (talk) 20:47, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Yep, the amount of detail you hang on the tree is always going to be a matter of compromise, because there is an infinite amount of possible detail and it has a long tail of decreasing relevance which must be sliced off at some reasonable point for very pragmatic reasons. However, that refers mostly to the detail on pages, not to the links between them. Wikis live and die based on the effectiveness of their inter-page links to provide navigation through the information base, and if you whittle away at the links you'll soon find yourself with a dysfunctional wiki. The parent page about which this discussion was started was completely dysfunctional as a wiki page until Drishmael added the Notes, as it contained no links to anything at all except the default ones. It was in effect a dumb leaf document, not an effective wiki page.

Although I generally appreciate more depth of information, in this discussion I'm mainly concerned about achieving effective linkage rather than adding more detail. In this particular case we did not have a page defining [[Defend Events]] and consequently a little bit of extra textual detail had to be added to the Achievements page to make up for it, but in other circumstances just attaching a link to that term in the table could have been enough. Morgaine (talk) 22:02, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Nobody would ever get in the way of adding links to articles, so I'm not sure why you feel like there's some conspiracy to appease the old guards at the expense of readability. Are you upset that people aren't doing it, and are looking for a reason besides "they just aren't motivated to do it"? Psycho Robot (talk) 04:11, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Neither, I just gave it as an example of the fact that eyes are not on the access usability ball here, a convenient example only because it happened to be the current page. There are countless examples of the same problem which I stumble across each time that I need something and it requires many searches to find it, instead of a direct progression of hierarchical links. It was never like this on the GW wiki --- it had hierarchical structure. Morgaine (talk) 04:45, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

And yet you rarely, if ever, contributed to the fixing of those problems? Simply because you expected to be reverted and shouted down? And you wonder why the wiki is unusable... —Dr Ishmael 05:05, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Dr ishmael: I believe in reasoned agreement followed by working in unison towards agreed goals, not in revert warfare. It seems you're saying that that's too much to expect of the community. Well maybe you're right, but I don't find it palatable to push through improvements by force. Morgaine (talk) 05:44, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Psycho Robot: You probably said "conspiracy" only in jest, but to be clear, no, I don't think that there is any conspiracy about anything. What I do think exists quite strongly though is pushback against any suggestion that something falls short of sheer perfection as it stands. It was knee-jerk pushback that made Ish give a condescending answer to my post in Talk, instead of replying with a neutral observation about the wiki like "Oh yes, there is no Defend Events page and so people who don't already know the answer won't be able to make head or tail of that Achievements description. I know what the events are and we have pages for them, so I'll add links when I have a moment." That would have been nice, but sadly the response showed no interest in recognizing a failure in the wiki. The desire to help also exists but so often seems to be buried behind such knee-jerk rejection. Anyway, enough about that. This page is now a little bit more useful than it was, and for that I am grateful to Ish. Morgaine (talk) 05:44, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

From numerous experiences with other users who made similar claims of a "lack of usability" and people being "blind to flaws" - and not even on this wiki specifically, it happened to GWW too - I just want to put it out there that it's important to distinguish between theoretical confusion and actual confusion. Basically, it's the utilitarian approach to wiki changes.

A great example is disambiguation pages for acronyms. GWW had one such page, MB. As you can see, the current version of this page simply redirects to one thing. But, as the talk page discussion and history show, there was a BIG argument back and forth about whether the wiki should document "possible" alternative meanings, as opposed to "what players actually use this term to mean 99% of the time". Some people put forth the notion that it's impossible to determine something subjective like that, and you can't prove it anyway due to a lack of official statistics. But that's a rubbish argument; all of us who spend time in or around the game can personally say that yes, this is confusing, or no, this isn't confusing. Ultimately, that's the view that prevailed: the wiki should document the game, and the community, as it actually exists...not as it should be, or might be, or theoretically maybe is if you squint really hard. So unless there were a lot of people who were mistakenly redirected to Mind Burn instead of Mind Blast (there weren't), it didn't make any sense to keep it as a disambiguation instead of a redirect.

Most people, even old guys, want to help out on this wiki instead of scare users off (we have few enough as it is). The knee-jerk response is more likely when the request seems unreasonable; that cuts both ways, though, because a lot of the older users forget how intimidating it can be for an inexperienced editor to change a wiki page, especially an important/visible one. We like to call that "laziness", but that's probably because we forgot what it's like to be afraid to edit.

The other aspect of frustration is that so many major documentation aspects of this wiki are either flat-out missing or hilariously out of date. The dungeon pages, for example, are full of awful/no longer relevant advice, and need to be completely redone. It's a massive and daunting task, and chipping away at it - or any other part of this wiki, honestly - tends to be a frustrating, hopeless, thankless task. The amount of work to do is ridiculous, with too few workers. I know it's not a good "excuse" to be surly or hostile, but I hope it's understandable at least why we might occasionally snap like that. Vili 点 06:35, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Stop writing so much text Vili--Relyk ~ talk < 06:39, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

That sort of knee-jerk rejection is what turns me off of editing this wiki, you old guard. Vili 点 06:54, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

What old guard?--Relyk ~ talk < 06:57, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Dude, I have no idea what you're talking about. This is wiki, when you want to change something - you change it, unless you're afraid you will broke more pages. I didn't play GW and therefore didn't participate in GWW, but, I hope, I made noticable contributions to GW2W just because I wanted it. And I don't know why you call these fellow people "old guards" - I remember when I was arguing with Ish about last PoI in Cursed Shores, and, you know, we just discussed it, without edit wars. And if I was unsure in something - I asked, and if I was wrong - they wrote to my page. There's absolutely no point in pointing out "you're doing it wrong" without doing something yourself. Dixi. MalGalad 07:14, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

In case you genuinely didn't understand what I was talking about, a bit more information might make it clearer. Sure, for small improvements one can just dive in and make changes without breaking anything, but larger changes often cannot be performed atomically and so there will generally be breakage while the process is ongoing until it is finished. When such non-atomic development is combined with disputes and equally non-atomic reverts, it can get hairy very quickly. To avoid problems, I would not advocate such an approach for anything affecting more than a single page, and certainly not for overall design improvements. Instead, I prefer discussing goals that need significant changes with others first. I know that not everybody feels that way, YMMV. Morgaine (talk) 10:08, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

If you're really a rationalist, than you should know that blaming other will not achieve anything. You can only change yourself. So change your attitude and do something, other than just speculating how grass was greener in the good old days.

In this particular case achivements seemed transparent to guys who read patch notes, and adding notes for those who don't is a matter of minutes. I can't understand why you think this will start a reverse war. And if you're going to change something big - well, you got your personal userspace. DO something before telling how others don't do it. Sentences like "Oh guys we should change something, it's so bad" are counterproductive, you should instead be like "Oh guys, look at my amazing sandbox, what do you think, can it be applied to the main wiki?", so we can discuss basing on it, not on some abstract vision.

Of course, that's my personal opinion. MalGalad 12:48, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

I've written numerous times now that what I would like to see is extensive linkage between pages to allow drilling down from known details to obtain desired but unknown information, such as in this example, names of specific required events starting from the description given in Daily Achievements. If you have been following this discussion, you cannot have failed to notice this. Yet instead of answering to such constructive actual suggestions, you portray my comments as "Oh guys we should change something, it's so bad". That is a complete fabrication of your own making, a deliberate misrepresentation just to give you a straw man to knock down. Please don't do it. Improving the wiki through better linkage is a useful and interesting topic, and resorting to fallacies doesn't help the discussion nor the wiki. Morgaine (talk) 13:31, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

You're stubbornly holding on to your preconceived notion that whatever you do will get reverted. It won't. JUST DO IT ALREADY and stop complaining. —Dr Ishmael 13:51, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

What exactly makes you feel like attempts to implement a hierarchical link structure would be blocked? I can only imagine that you encountered red tape at some point that blocked you from doing what you wanted, and this went on to color your perception of the wiki as an impotent bureaucracy under the oppressive yoke of old GWW regulars rather than a dynamic, if someone sleepy, community of passionate editors. Psycho Robot (talk) 18:55, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

You both seem to be addressing a completely different topic to mine. I've never sought "permission to modify" the wiki because like everyone else I've always had it (and used it), nor have I ever sought "immunity from reverts" because that would be a totally daft and incorrect thing to request and totally non-wiki'ish, so I'm not sure why you're both harping on about it. Instead, what I've been seeking is some understanding that we're all on the same page for the future and that a well-linked and informative wiki is desired by all of us, not just by myself. If it were only me who has that interest, there would be no purpose and no future in any of this. Assuming that the answer is Yes, then the discussion about areas to improve needs to be started, because it hasn't yet. We've been having a rather purposeless discussion about this discussion and about the people in it, instead of what I want which is a constructive discussion about the wiki structure. Morgaine (talk) 20:37, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Fine, let's reset the discussion then.

(Reset indent) We can safely assume that nobody would oppose a "well-linked and informative wiki," but of course the devil's in the details, so let's get down to specifics. As far as achievements go, I would actually like to see a subpage for every single achievement in the game. The sparse lists we have now aren't giving us any kind of edge over sites like Dulfy. I want to be able to type in the name of any achievement and get a page telling me exactly how to get that achievement. I want to see maps and walkthroughs and suggestions of good places to farm whatever. If each achievement has its own page, there should be no reason not to give as much information as we can. 21:23, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Discussion at that level should definitely be moved off of the talk page of a random subpage. To the CP? —Dr Ishmael 21:25, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

That's reasonable. There's also relevant discussion at User talk:Morgaine that we should include. 21:27, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

You guys keep edit conflicting me, so by now this needs to be moved elsewhere, but I don't feel like opening a new tab to the community portal. So it goes here.

The trouble seems to be that no one understands what this better wiki structure is. The example given as illustration (Hold the Line achievement) is not very informative since there is no agreement that it is confusing or that something should have been changed on the page, other than maybe adding a text note, which has been done. In that specific context, I also don't agree with making separate pages for each achievement, anyway; a "Defend Events" page would also be illogical and confusing, because 1) no one is going to search for that term unless there's a link to it; 2) it has no basis in the game, being an arbitrary title for a player-defined collection of events (there are other defend events in the game); and 3) how do you categorize or organize such a fragment? Sub-page of this sub-page?

As far as searching for a particular achievement name, I think only ones that actually merit a walkthrough or other information need a dedicated page; the rest can be redirects to that general achievement category, with an anchor to a line or two of text explaining any confusing parts (or best places to farm, etc). For certain categories, like Slayer in particular, the wiki can't really get an edge over Dulfy without plagiarizing the content...documentation is a race, and we've fallen behind or lost most of them, so the wiki would need some sort of wiki-specific trick to get a leg up. And I don't think separate achievement pages would really help that. It's true that sometimes Dulfy explanations of things are a bit lacking, but they have a faster and more responsive documenting team, so we'd still be playing catch-up. "First but a bit unclear" usually wins more votes than "Late but very thorough", in my experience.

I'd also hesitate to say map chat is a good indicator of anything, because there are still people logging on and asking "how do I do LA event", "where do I turn in heirlooms", etc. Similar to all other living stories to date, the range of knowledge regarding events is pretty broad. I would not support starting a massive wiki project without seeing more evidence that it's necessary, or even useful beyond a few people. Vili 点 21:40, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

In this case, the article would be named "Hold the Line" or "Escape from Lion's Arch/Hold the Line" with a mainspace redirect. We would still have the achievement lists as they are now but each title would link to its subpage. We could have an achievement infobox, because infoboxes solve all problems. And there will always be people who are collecting AP, so "late but very thorough" is relevant for anything other than Living Story achievements (which we should step up our game on regardless). 22:03, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

I think that's an excellent initial statement of requirements (right after your reset), Felix. :-) Morgaine (talk) 22:09, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

I also agree that Achievement Points are with us for the long haul, so it's probably worth investing some time in good pages about them. It seems that Anet is relying on this extremely popular daily ritual to give old content a degree of longevity and to bridge the gap between new living stories. In reality it's a grind of course, but people seem entirely unstressed and happy with it, perhaps because it's over so fast. A comprehensive set of pages on the topic could prove very popular, particularly recipes for accelerating the Daily. Morgaine (talk) 23:14, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Achievement formatting for a place for further discussion. Keep in mind any specific points brought up here have probably been discussed on {{Achievement table row}}, so hopefully we don't rehash previous discussion.--Relyk ~ talk < 23:16, 28 February 2014 (UTC)