Talk:Expansion

Expansion pack / Expansion

I agreed with the original deletion request, and re-added it. For one thing, I've never ever heard them called "expansion pack", and on the official Guild Wars 2 website, Hot and Pof are only referred to as an "expansion" so I'd like to keep things the same as that. Additionally, I wouldn't count the Living World Seasons expansions packs, releases yes, but not expansions. The original expansion page worked just fine, and should be restored as it was imo(well without the one line of white space). - Do_odleplex 17:07, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

"Expansion pack" is a pretty common industry term, though, so I'd like to see it retained as a redirect. It seems that "Expansion" is currently a redirect to this article, so I propose we swap their contents. Edit: Just took a look at the history for Expansion, and I see it used to be the disambig page. In that case, I agree that the original setup was better. --Idris (talk) 17:17, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

I have no issues with "Expansion pack" as a redirect if it's a common industry term(guess I'm a little out of the loop). Probably should switch the nav back to how it was before/back to original name as well since it got moved around due to this page. - Do_odleplex 17:26, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. --Idris (talk) 17:32, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

I feel like every "paid release" should be in a single page somewhere, for new players to know what content the game has and what they might need to buy to get in. LW seasons are paid DLCs, so they should be fine here.

As for "expansion pack" vs "expansion", ArenaNet uses both all the time. I'd say its like "game" vs "videogame". Adding pack to it leaves no room for confusion with other "expansion" terms.--Lon-ami (talk) 20:08, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

As it stands, this article isn't much more than a glorified disambig. It would be much more straightforward to just restore the original disambig page, add paid releases to its list with a note clarifying the difference between those and expansions, and make "Expansion pack" redirect to it. --Idris (talk) 20:50, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

If you want to add prices to things, maybe the Release page could be tweaked, that might be more useful, though lack of computer atm means I wouldn't be able to figure if it's possible. =< - Do_odleplex 20:55, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm not getting the impression that Lon-ami wants to add prices, just that any expansion-like content you have to pay for should be included in a single list somewhere. --Idris (talk) 20:57, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

The release page should focus on covering just the patches, and nothing else. There needs to be a simple and short list of the game's paid content, just like every wiki out there (GW1 included) has, explaining what the term "expansion pack" means for this game. Something that can be googled easily, with no confusion possible.

This page can be further improved by adding a summary of what each expansion unlocks, so that new players can see everything with a quick glance. Ideally, it should evolve into something similar to the Living World page. Knowing what you need to buy to get playing should be easy, and no page so far is helping any bit with this matter.--Lon-ami (talk) 21:07, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Why not add such a list on the Living World page then? It already has a section covering the Living World costs, so maybe expand that section with dates and stuff? If I'm looking up when parts of the living world seasons were released, I'm honestly not gonna look up "expansion" or "expansion packs", I don't consider them expansions, I'd just go to that living world season or the Living World overview page. - Do_odleplex 21:14, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

You're speaking from the perspective of an experienced GW2 player, though. A newbie isn't necessarily going to know the difference between "release", "living world" and "expansion", nor are they going to realise that "expansion" is the least useful term to search for, even though it's the most likely one they're going to try. --Idris (talk) 01:17, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

So what term would you use then? I was thinking maybe "Game history", and it could be a page that covered both expansion and releases, and had dates of the release/expansion, if said release/expansion was still available for playing and for how much if not currently free, and include new areas & currency introduced if any(since those are usually thing big things newer/returning players want to know about). - Do_odleplex 02:21, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Do we really need a disambiguation for this? Other game wikis tend to just have a nav on the main page for the various games, expansinos, and DLC. I don't think people who play this game needs this article, and I don't think people who don't play this game will enjoy a game of "what keyword do I need to search the right article". Just add an extra line in the Basics or Gameplay section of the main page to link Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Living World and the expansions.

Backtracking to paint my opinion: The chances of people searching Expansion about expansion tabs from the gemstore is pretty damn small. It feels like trying to attribute for such is "taking every single possibility into consideration to the point of asinine actions" aka *way overdoing it*. Living World are not "expansions" either, not by colloqual terminology, but DLC. While it does fit the webster dictionary term of "expansion" (but then, so does every minor update that expands the game including every feature update), from what I've seen no common gamer or developer will call a DLC an expansion. IF this page exists, using Expansion article is more than sufficient. I firmly believe that Lon-ami is simply being overly anal about terminology or classification atm, and while necessarily not a bad thing, is simply unneeded and can be potentially confusing to players. "Expansion pack" may be common developer terminology, but it's not common player terminology. And player terminology is more important - that's why we use species and organization in infobox rather than family and army (Anet's terms). For example. Konig (talk) 03:20, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Lot of people call them expansion packs, give google a visit and you'll see it yourself. Also, it's the official industry term, not some obscure ArenaNet term.

Living World episodes are there because they require the expansions, not because they're the focus of the page. Expansions don't belong inside the Living World page. New players have no idea what the LW is either, and this page is directed to them, to let them know the game's content in a quick, short, and easy way, in a single location.

Really, I don't understand the hate and the urge to delete. The page is useful, and describes a widely searched term.--Lon-ami (talk) 16:21, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

It's not hate. Please don't take this personally. We're just sceptical that your solution is the best one -- and Konig is famously tactless. ;) I think he might have been to something when he said most wikis have a nav on the main page for this sort of thing, though. Currently, we don't. Maybe it's time we added one? --Idris (talk) 16:31, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Mock it up on Main Page/editcopy. Additionally, the only reason it's still tagged for deletion is because we don't have a tag for "we should change this into a redirect"; I think Idris and myself both agree that "expansion pack" should be a redirect to "expansion". - Do_odleplex 16:43, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

The problem with that, and the point you're missing, is that new players put something like "guild wars 2 expansions" in google and other search engines, expecting to find a list, to know the game's content (lot of recent releases is a sign of good health, the game is not dead), and what they need or might want to buy to start playing. Currently, there's nothing like that. Article title is important to find things correctly, moving this information somewhere else would make the whole page pointless in the first place.

Expansion already redirects here. This is the best solution for new players, since "expansion pack" already covers "expansion" for search queries. The only name that could be better than the one we have now would be "Guild Wars 2 expansion packs", but the header already has "Guild Wars 2" inside "Guild Wars 2 wiki", so it's not strictly necessary.

Merging this with LW or releases is a mistake, because this page should be short and simple. You can't expect a new player to open a page listing 50 patches and understand anything. They will just close and lose interest.

Most wikis have a list of expansions and DLCs in a single place, starting with GW1 itself, as I already linked above.

Also, Template:Move is a thing if the discussion isn't about deletion, though I think this entire conversation is pointless bureaucratic nitpicking at this point.--Lon-ami (talk) 17:14, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

That's true, there is a "move" template, but I'm not sure it really fits here, as this page isn't being moved? Eh, minor detail, anyway, I did search "guild wars 2 expansions" and the first things that popped up were "Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire", "Expansion"(not "expansion pack"), "Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire - Guild Wars 2 Wiki", and "Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire - Wikipedia". I think the best thing to do is to switch things back, turn this into a redirect and improve the original "expansion" page. (And add something to the main page about expansions). That way I think everybody is happy and new/returning players are helped, right? Am I missing anything here? - Do_odleplex 17:33, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Sorry if I contributed to making this discussion feel like pointless nitpicking; I did understand the points you were making in your initial explanations, but I decided I wanted to take a day to think about it before addressing them. I'll respond now though. I agree that we need to make this list highly accessible to newbies, and the question of what wiki pages will show up on a Google search by newbs is an important one, and one that I think everyone has been overlooking. I got the wiki article for "Expansion" about halfway down the first page of my Google search for "Guild Wars 2 expansions". On the other hand, redundantly repeating the same information over several articles is also really confusing for newbies. I'm all for creating pages that help direct people to where they need to go, but I want to get it done in as few pages as possible, so it doesn't become counter-productive. My proposal, then:

• Add a nav to the main page, titled by a link to "Expansion".
• Swap the contents of "Expansion pack" and "Expansion". My reasoning for this is because the word "Expansion" will always show up in searches for either term, and I think will both be searched for frequently, so we should cater to the simplest result.
• Delete "Expansion (disambiguation)" and put an {{otheruses}} tag at the top of "Expansion" that directs to "Account upgrades". This doesn't appear to be an article yet, but I think it would be a useful one to create at this point.

How does that sound? --Idris (talk) 17:44, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Works for me. Just do the mockup on the main page copy first though since the main page is kinda uber big deal and I'd like to not change it without consensus. Oh and while you're plotting main page updates, can you think of something to replace "power of the mists"? It's the main page, but it's historical, and I don't WvW so I don't have a clue what current WvW content link should be there. - Do_odleplex 17:48, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Non-admins can't edit the live main page anyway, so don't worry about that. ;) --Idris (talk) 17:53, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

As I said above, searching for "expansion" leads to both "expansion" and "expansion pack", but searching for "expansion pack" won't lead to "expansion" properly. Thus, the current name is better, and leaves no room for confusion with any other expansion-esque names. And don't try searching now, it isn't properly indexed yet (and the deletion tag is screwing the header and the search results, so the sooner it's removed the better). Also, expansion is only showing because I changed it recently, before deciding to move the content I put there to here because of the better name.

As for the disambiguation page, I don't really care about it. It was the previous content in the expansion article, which was a plain disambiguation. I don't think it hurts either, so I fail to see the hurry for deletion, it can come handy for someone searching for those specific account upgrades.--Lon-ami (talk) 18:00, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

"searching for "expansion" leads to both "expansion" and "expansion pack", but searching for "expansion pack" won't lead to "expansion" properly." -- Do you mean searching on the wiki or searching on Google? --Idris (talk) 18:05, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

^If on the wiki, Expansion comes up first in search results since it's alphabetical. On Google, the page with the most hits should show up first. Also I changed the tag to merge since it's not being deleted as much as just changed into a redirect with content going elsewhere, destinations unknown(atm). - Do_odleplex 18:13, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not seeing a problem with searches on either, to be honest. On the wiki, if someone searches for "expansion pack", it shouldn't matter if they don't see "expansion" show up in the suggested searches list, because if we turned it into a redirect then hitting enter would just take them straight to "expansion" anyway. On Google, I'm getting both the "Expansion" and "Expansion pack" wiki articles showing up high in the list when I search for "GW2 expansion packs". --Idris (talk) 18:19, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

It's still not indexed, it's not even a week old. Also, you've already searched for GW2 stuff, so google will discriminate. Also, you can get more defined results by searching "expansion pack" within quotation marks, useful for testing this kind of stuff. This is all SEO basics.

If expansion pack is the right term, why change it back to expansion? That's what redirects are for. With no "pack" in the article, searching for "expansion pack" will be far less effective, and probably lead the new player searching for it to some news sites talking about HoT or PoF instead. What's the logic reason to go back to "Expansion"?--Lon-ami (talk) 18:31, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Alright, this isn't a hill I'm willing to die on. --Idris (talk) 18:35, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Idris-On official website if you go to "releases" tab they're only called "expansion" on the drop down. Hence why I said above "stick with the official website" for consistency. That and general consensus(myself, Alex, Konig, and you, at least originally) are favoring "expansion" not "expansion pack". - Do_odleplex 18:43, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

They do seem to prefer simply "expansion", but I have spotted instances where ANet have used the term "expansion pack": Example 1, Example 2. I still feel that we should default to their default, but meh, Lon-ami makes a decent case with regard to using quotes in Google searches to remove hits for simply "Expansion". --Idris (talk) 18:53, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, and GW2 is called a game, too, but it's a videogame. They call it expansion pack and expansion whenever they feel like it, because expansion is short for expansion pack. As I said, removing pack from title will make the page score lower on searches including the full term, while it doesn't affect searches for expansion only.

We can wait a week after the move tag is removed, and see if it scores higher in google, since it stills need to recrawl the pages. I just want it to stay above all those news sites posting random information, calling it an "expansion pack".

And yeah, I definitely agree the same content we see here should be in the front page in some way. New players should see our list of content easily, specially for the psychological factor. Maybe go as far as to give HoT, PoF, and LW a column each, with the new content they add.--Lon-ami (talk) 18:56, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

The tag shouldn't be be removed until the matter is settled. However, what about this: what if we remove the tag but also change "expansion" back to how it was. After one week, if "expansion pack" pops up higher in search results than "expansion" then this page is improved, but if it's not, this gets turned into a redirect? Does that work? - Do_odleplex 19:13, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

This whole discussion is just ridiculous. What's the logical reason to change it from "expansion pack" to "expansion"? Just because you feel like it? I've given arguments again and again and they're just ignored.

Also, it's already higher, without recrawling (google stills indexes the old version). Once it recrawls it's going to disappear. What's the goddamn point? The page didn't exist in google, I updated it and made it appear there because new people can't find any useful resource telling them the list of expansions this game has, and now everyone seems to be on a troll party of some kind making constant excuses for an obscure disambiguation page no one gave a damn about a few hours ago. There's nothing better to do in the wiki, seriously?--Lon-ami (talk) 22:07, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Without wanting to get bogged down, I suggest we revert this page to this revision. -Chieftain Alex 18:21, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Lon-ami is right in the sense that the wiki doesn't really have a clearly defined 'expansion' page. The original disambig page had only one line for each expansion, and some items that honestly not many people would categorize as 'expansion'. I like their revision (with a bit of polish, perhaps), but not sure if the 'pack' part of the name is necessary. You keep bringing up how 'pack' is used in the industry (and Idris even pointed out that it has been used by ArenaNet, twice), but does it matter, if the other 99.5% of the time ArenaNet uses 'expansion'?

I like the idea of the page, but the name isn't intuitive. Write "Guild Wars 2 ex" on Google and the top three results are 'expansion', 'expansion bundle' and 'expansion price'. Even with the full word it's still 'expansion bundle/sale/price'. Adding a p in there puts 'price' (naturally), as opposed to 'pack'. People don't like to type. Expansion versus pack wins because it's the term ArenaNet uses most often, it's the term most players know it by and there's honestly no reason not to have it called that. I've said this a bunch of times before, but the wiki services its users - readers - who expect things to mimic game or official blog post terms, that has been proven time and time again.

I'd prefer we stick with Lon-ami's edit, because it points out many valuable things for new (and returning) users looking to find out what an 'expansion' really means in the GW2 universe (there's even a date of when the plot-related LW season started, which is neat), but located at a different article name (i.e. dropping the 'pack' out of the equation). As for the items originally found on the page, I'd agree with Idris that creating an 'Account upgrades' page (that's linked here via otheruses, or see also - both work) is the best in this case, since not many users would associate such items as an 'expansion' (in the 'industry' term, as Lon-ami put it).

To make things short - I prefer Lon-ami's revision due to its bundle of information, but prefer the name to be moved to "Expansion". —Ventriloquist 08:15, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't want to waste more time on this anymore, so if there's a majority in favor of moving this to expansion, so be it. I'll update the article accordingly, but some mod will need to delete Expansion to move this page there. Expansion (disambiguation) is working fine, and I see no need to delete it, specially now that the main page will be at expansion.--Lon-ami (talk) 11:52, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

I think ultimately we have reached the right content on the page, so perseverence with the conversation has paid off.

It is however unfortunate that the conversation was blown out of all proportion over something so trivial. -Chieftain Alex 20:04, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Page looks fine to me as is. Expansion is the term ArenaNet uses and I see no reason to break the convention of using official terminology. As far as the nav, the nav would be more useful to show the order of content releases so players can navigate chronologically. Linking to Guild Wars and Merchandise stand out as a sore thumb.--Relyk ~ talk < 07:54, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Colored table is not compatible with dark mode

I saw that there have been some changes in September by User:Flutte to the overview table which include hard-coded colors for the background. The current color scheme clashes with the dark mode "Vector (2022)" wiki Appearance because of how bright and pastel-y it is and honestly does not add any semantic info since each line has its own background color. Would it be ok to revert the table coloring to a neutral, transparent background? There don't seem to be many colored tables in the wiki, either. --BelleroPhone (talk) 18:32, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

If someone does not want to change their Appearance or does not know how to do it, this is how the table looks like: https://imgur.com/a/mOhI35x

The white text on the bright background is unreadable and this is where the automatic Appearance color schemes from the built-in wiki Appearance clashes with the hard-coded table background(s). --BelleroPhone (talk) 18:43, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Copying below previous response from my talk page. Also fine with removing background colors.
"Good catch BelleroPhone - didn't think about other views. Mainly meant for the colors to match the logo color schemes in-game as another way to visually organize the table. We could remove the background colors and add top & bottom borders to each row, but I haven't figured out how to do this yet." Flutte (talk) 22:23, 20 September 2024 (UTC)