User talk:Dagger

Please verify the commander compendium is account bound. Developers once stated it was soulbound by design. One would have to be purchased for each character. Your revision contradicts the pages not section now. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Turbo404 (talk • contribs) at 08:01, 10 May 2013‎ (UTC).

My understanding is that the manual itself is account bound, but that it unlocks the ability to be a commander only on the character you use it on. (I checked with two commander friends, and that matches their memory of the manual.)

It's not a contradiction with the notes section because there's no need for the unlock item to have the same binding as the unlock effect. Trait manuals only unlock traits on your current character, even though the manuals themselves aren't even account bound. -- Dagger (talk) 08:11, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

I just checked in-game, none of the manuals including the Compendium are bound at all - they're listed on the Trading Post. Nothing account bound shows up on the TP. —Dr Ishmael 12:45, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

I assumed that was a tooltip bug, but both gw2spidy.com and gw2db.com appear to show some historical sell orders for it on the TP, so it does actually look like that's the case. -- Dagger (talk) 12:51, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

skill infobox/effects

You would use {{skill infobox/effects|misc|alt=Number of Targets}} instead.--Relyk ~ talk > 13:23, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

That works, but it's a bit of a pain to type out, and if we ever want to linkify the "Number of Targets" text to go somewhere useful, it'll complicate things. What are the guidelines on adding new {{Skill infobox/effects|XYZ}} effects vs using misc? -- Dagger (talk) 13:50, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Siege weapons

Hi, Dagger. I wanted to organize the the siege weapons and blueprints a bit. poke told me that you care for these articles and so I wanted to make sure that we both have half way consitened view how this part of the wiki should be organized.

• Every Blueprint should have a separate article which discribes how to aquire these items and if they might be upgraded. (I think it would also be nice to list the supply cost to construct the sieg engine from the blueprint.)
• Every siege weapon has one article were the functionality is discribed and the diffrences between all variants are discribed.
• There were a few links between articles in the see also section. I would like to delete all of them and put in a siege nav were all relevent articles are linked.
• Siege Golems are a special case I am not sure how to handle them.

If you object or have input I would like to hear it. - Yandere 12:25, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Those four points pretty much sum up my thoughts.

• Supply requirement should be there already, in the in-game description.
• I was working on a nav too: User:Dagger/Sandbox. I like yours better though -- it manages to link to every blueprint while not being huge vertically, and without needing to spam "Blueprint" everywhere to make it clear it's linking to the blueprint article. I reformatted it a bit on my sandbox page.
• Argh, golems. I was thinking of making Siege Golem the main article, and describing Alpha/Omega/Guild golems on that page. The alternative would be to have Alpha Siege Golem as the main article, which would cover Guild golems (because they aren't different enough to justify their own page) and have a summary Omega golem section with a "Main article: Omega Siege Golem" link. Feels like a weird place to put the main article though...

The other problem was Trebuchet and Cannon: SPvP also has weapons with those names, but they're a bit different (Trebuchet) or a lot different (Cannon). I was thinking of splitting them into Trebuchet/Cannon for WvW and [[Trebuchet (Battle of Khylo)]]/[[Cannon (SPvP)]] for SPvP. I don't SPvP at all though, so I'd only be able to make very basic articles for the SPvP versions. -- Dagger (talk) 15:51, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

You could also link to the sPvP map pages from general treb and cannon articles, since they are (so far) unique to them, and add a section describing unique mechanics of the siege weapon(s) on that map. Just a suggestion. Mediggo (talk) 17:33, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. Looks like Battle of Khylo and Raid on the Capricorn already pretty much cover them anyway, and I guess that's probably where people would look first too. -- Dagger (talk) 17:54, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Nice. I think it would be best to have a main Siege Golem article. The golems aren't so diffrent when you pilot them. The Omega has a slightly other skill line up though.

I am also not much of an sPvP player, but I think it is a good idea to explain these things on the map articles. You can also find them in the Heart of the Mist when I remember correctly.

I went ahead and created Template:Siege nav and put this under every article this basiclly covers all 'See also' sections. I never actually had an Omega Siege Blueprint in my hand so the article I made only has bare bones information. I also don't what the canonical name for the Guild Siege Suit blueprint is.

We should also add a proper aquisition section to all blueprints, especially the guild and the basic variant.

The Trebuchet article also needs a proper variants section. Is there something else to to? I think I read something that they wanted to change the icons for the Superior Blueprints or was that the Guild Blueprints? I am not sure.

And by the way... Thanks! I totally missed the account bound update, because that was during my hiatus. Hurray for more inventory space! - Yandere 20:25, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Ok, just did the treb page. I had it written up before you started editing it just now, so sorry if I caused any edit conflicts. You're right, there's a treb/cannon in Heart of the Mists, but I'm not sure if they have exactly the same skills etc as in the actual SPvP maps.

Yay, so glad to have those See Also sections cleared up.

Guild Siege Suit blueprints: hmmm. Originally, using a Guild Catapult or Golem from the guild panel didn't actually give you a blueprint, you just ended up holding the box as if you'd double-clicked on one. I think that's changed for catas now, and you actually get given a blueprint, but I don't think it's changed for golems. I kinda don't want to test though, since I'm going to end up with a useless golem if it hasn't....

I can get the item preview codes from gw2db.com though: [&AgF/UgAA] and [&AgGAUgAA]. From the descriptions, I'd guess my above paragraph is correct (and I guess we should use "Guild Siege Golem Blueprints", even though players never actually get given the item itself). For maximum confusion, there's also a [&AgEUpAAA] which is what you get if you buy Guild Catapult blueprints with commendations.

Yeah, they updated the icons for superior siege blueprints. I have the new icons, I just need to upload them. (Interestingly, the icons aren't new: they've been in the game since 2012, just not used.)

My todo list at this point looks something like this: clean up Burning Oil, Mortar (siege weapon), Cannon and the golem pages. Add Acquisition sections to BP pages, and update Siege Master to match. Create/update skill pages for all siege weapons. Clean up and update Siege weapon and Blueprint (maybe merge them?).

I'm going to work on these as I can/feel like it, so it might take me a while (or I might get it done in a few days). Feel free to hop in and take any of them. -- Dagger (talk) 21:59, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I removed the Guild Suit Blueprints becaue it isn't really an item you can aquire. The cannons work both ways. I updated the Siege weapon and the Blueprints article. They should now contain all interesting informations. I plan to add a table with mystic forge recipes to the blueprint page.

But I think the Siege Golem rewrite is the most important thing right now.

By the way, are 'turn left' and 'turn right' identical icons for cannons and trebs? - Yandere 22:42, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Same icons, yeah. They're different skills though (with different channel times), so you can't merge the skill pages. Also, the "Fire" skill (for explosive shots, not for cows) is the same as the Flame Ram "Ram" skill (the crosshair icon). For the other skills, I'll have to hunt for the icons in Ishmael's icon dump. -- Dagger (talk) 22:55, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I think the item pages look good now. The Omega Siege Golem Blueprints are missing the ingame information and I have currently non at hand.

I will try if I can do a Siege Golem re-write. - Yandere 21:22, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

I tried to find a working item link for them, but the one on gw2db.com doesn't include the name/description text. Then I got a bit waylaid into fiddling with the chat link format, and managed to make plenty of links that permanently (until client restart) corrupt the name/description of superior BPs... but no working Omega Golem link. Nobody in WvW on my server seems to have any, either. I might have to actually make one.

It might be better if I wrote the Siege Golem article, just so the style is consistent with the other articles... but I get the feeling it'll get done a lot quicker if you do it ;) Your call (especially if you've already started). -- Dagger (talk) 14:46, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, the Siege Golem article is now rewriten. The other three articles are now redirects to the respective section. I am really tired right now, had a horribile night, so there might be some "interesting" sentences in there. ^^ - Yandere 12:56, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Mastery description

Seems like we display a Before/After text.

“

Before completion: With Dessa's authorization, gain access to additional daily achievements and special vendors with unique items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

After completion: You have unlocked additional daily achievements for fractal scales 21-49. You can also now access vendors with special items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

— In-game text

I want to say get rid of the pre-completion description entirely.--Relyk ~ talk < 04:00, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

And change the parameter for completion to simply completion.--Relyk ~ talk < 04:03, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I think we should keep both, it's just finding a way to display them nicely. Here's another possibility for that:

“

With Dessa's authorization, gain access to additional daily achievements and special vendors with unique items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

— In-game description, before completion

“

You have unlocked additional daily achievements for fractal scales 21-49. You can also now access vendors with special items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

— In-game description, after completion

...although I'm not sure how much I like it. There's also the question of which description (or both) to put on the index page. -- Dagger (talk) 03:55, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

The {{quotation}} template is already whitespace devouring enough, two quotes look terrible.--24.16.164.174 06:04, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps a modified {{quotation}} with two parameters?

“

With Dessa's authorization, gain access to additional daily achievements and special vendors with unique items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

— In-game description, before completion

You have unlocked additional daily achievements for fractal scales 21-49. You can also now access vendors with special items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

— In-game description, after completion

Dunno. -Chieftain Alex 10:34, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

We should definitely keep both. Casual players who don't burn through the new content are going to be seeing the "before" text for a long time, so only having the "complete" text on the wiki would confuse them.

In terms of format, I'd favor something like what Dagger first put up, with the before/after indicators at the beginning of each line - although I'd insert an extra linebreak between them.

“

(Before completion) With Dessa's authorization, gain access to additional daily achievements and special vendors with unique items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

(After completion) You have unlocked additional daily achievements for fractal scales 21-49. You can also now access vendors with special items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

— In-game text

In regards to whitespace, I don't see that as a huge problem. In fact, I think it makes the quote + infobox layout work better for the quote to be a bit longer vertically. See my edit on Pact Mentor for a proof of concept. —Dr Ishmael 15:27, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Looks good to me. Maybe without the brackets:

“

Before completion: With Dessa's authorization, gain access to additional daily achievements and special vendors with unique items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

After completion: You have unlocked additional daily achievements for fractal scales 21-49. You can also now access vendors with special items inside the Mistlock Observatory.

— In-game text

(See Pact Mentor]/Central Tyria mastery tracks for live versions.)

I'd rather keep the two separate parameters; that way the boilerplate text can go into the template and it's easier to change the format without editing a bunch of pages. Of course, I added the parameter, so of course I'd think that. -- Dagger (talk) 03:13, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I used parentheses because I felt it made those notations stand off a bit more, made it more obvious they're not part of the description, where a colon often implies that it's part of what follows. But I don't want to get hung up on the formatting, it's the content that matters.

Having separate parameters sounds good to me.

On the overview tables, I would go with the before description, simply because the way they're phrased makes them more suited for that purpose, IMO. —Dr Ishmael 04:26, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

And it's done. They're bold and small, I think that's probably enough. -- Dagger (talk) 20:01, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Api stuff

Did you really just add a bunch of dd elements to the main namespace templates to support your possible widget? This seems a bit hasty without any heads up at all. (don't revert yourself since this will cause even more template updates). -Chieftain Alex 22:12, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes... yes I did. Sorry, maybe I got a bit too keen there. And apparently I don't understand the job queue; I assumed editing a template would invalidate all using pages immediately, but it seems to still be going up. -- Dagger (talk) 22:30, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Lol job queue sitting on 2689 pages to process (it does about 1 per second, so about 45 min til settle). Don't get me wrong, I like new stuff, but we appreciate some kind of warning before big changes ;) It probably would have been cool to see some test pages in your userspace first. If I understand correctly, it would allow you to compare materials/currencies/skins/dyes on a page with those in your account?

Also thanks for reverting the spambots earlier - a pity they were being insistent. All from different IPs with no discernable pattern... -Chieftain Alex 22:44, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

It was at ~1500 or so after I made the first template change. It must have been bouncing between there and 3000 since...

It shows you whether you have the thing unlocked, or how many of them you have. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/RwmC3f1.png. Skin pages show Unlocked: Yes/No (and I'd like to see that info on the pages of items which use that skin too). Mini pages and dye pages can also show Unlocked, but we need mini IDs (which you handily added a few hours ago) and dye IDs on the wiki for that. I also wrote some support for showing how much of each wallet currency you have, but I'm not sure where to put it, since currency pages don't have infoboxes.

I found it mildly amusing that their spams were up for, ohh, a good 30-60 seconds or so. -- Dagger (talk) 23:29, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

The semantic queries must also be updated. All pages using the templates must be evaluated and any page with queries referencing those pages must be evaluated and so on. Not to be a party pooper, but I don't think we'd put the API calls in the infoboxes.--Relyk ~ talk < 00:55, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

No, SMW doesn't jump in the job queue. Transclusion is the only thing that puts pages in there. —Dr Ishmael 02:01, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

(Reset indent) I'm adding the colors API ids to the dye infobox items right now. I assume this is helpful :p -Chieftain Alex 21:00, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes :p I already wrote the dye code, it just needs something like this edited into {{Dye infobox}}, only with api-dyeunlocked/data-colorid instead of api-skinunlocked/data-skinid. -- Dagger (talk) 21:15, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Added to the dye infobox. Theres only 492 dyes, compared with the 40k pages affected by default item parameter ;) -Chieftain Alex 21:22, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Question about using Collections API on the wiki

Hi Dagger,

Following our discussion about the cool API widget you created and a discussion I'm having with another wiki editor (from the German wiki), I was wondering if you knew or had ideas if it'd be possible to use the Collections API to populate articles and/or create templates that would benefit the wikis. I'm done that a lot of work is done by hand (see Ad_Infinitum_I:_Finite_Result, Ad_Infinitum_II:_Upper_Bound, Ad_Infinitum_III:_Unbound, Precursor_weapon, Specialization_Collections and Rare_Collections), but since a lot of the text for collections is available via API this seems like an opportunity. Here are the API infos I was given:

https://api.guildwars2.com/v2/achievements/2351?lang=de

https://api.guildwars2.com/v2/achievements/categories/118?lang=de

https://github.com/arenanet/api-cdi/tree/master/v2/achievements

Thanks for your answer! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 20:44, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Getting the data from the API is pretty simple, but how would a user invoke the tool?

Achievements api is missing loads of the achieves isn't it? E.g. Second tier legendary precursor achieves -81.158.150.247 21:48, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

First Q: I'm not sure, a template? Second Q: I know that Lawton was working on unlocking Collections more info on the API, but I'm not sure how much is missing. I can always work with him on this, as long as we have a plan for the use of that info on the wiki. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 21:52, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

On second thoughts querying the API for a particular group is awkward since the group is only revealed at the second level expansion, so you'd have to parse every possible ID from the first expansion level, which is horrible. :( -81.158.150.247 22:07, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm not an API programmer but do you think it's something worth discussing with them? In that case, I'd need to have more technical questions. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 22:47, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Expanding for a category wouldn't be too bad as it turns out, I had no idea about the achievements/categories endpoint. -Chieftain Alex 09:56, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

So basically, some form of automatic page creation. I can think of two ways of doing this:

1. Add some UI to the edit/create page. We can do this with site-wide JS. I'm thinking something like a dropdown that lets you pick what to add ("item infobox", "collection list", "interwiki links" etc) and some way to specify which item you're talking about. The user's browser would then pull the info from the API and generate the wiki text to insert. (You could also create something similar as an external webpage, but then people would have to magically know about the page in order to use it.)
2. A bot that somebody runs regularly, which scans the API for changes and creates the pages itself. It wouldn't be able to write the entire page, but it could generate a basic page with info from the API, and placeholders for a human editor to fill out the rest.

What we can't do is have the wiki itself pull info directly from the API; it has to be indirectly (like above, where it's the user's browser or a bot that fetches the info and then saves it to the wiki).

One thing to note, if you look at the Ad Infinitum collections, is that there's not a lot that can be generated automatically. The blue achievement table, ok, but the prerequisite text and the "Collected X Fractal Components" aren't in the API. More importantly, the collection items table: the list of items is in the API, but the item descriptions have links, wiki markup, extra info etc that you can't automatically generate from the item descriptions. But saving people from having to make a table and transcribe the list of items is an improvement. I can imagine that's exceptionally tedious when you're adding a lot of collections (I know I managed about 2 Attuned ring pages before giving up and writing a Python script to generate the rest for me.)

(And a different note: my desktop has decided that it's either dying or dead, so I might be even more intermittent than I usually am for a bit.) -- Dagger (talk) 03:18, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Hey Dagger, which of these 2 options do you think is easier to code? Is there a way that our API devs could make this easier (maybe it's something we'll know once you or someone else started working on this). It seems that from a usability perspective, #1 is better, but #2 maybe safer as it tackles specifically that topic. Shall we expand the scope of the discussion by going on the Community Portal, for example? Thanks for your time and good luck with your desktop! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 00:00, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

And I'm back! I solved my desktop problems with some targeted application of a new i5-6600k+mobo :-)

From a usability perspective, both have advantages; the first because it can add data to existing pages and won't splurt a bunch of unverified articles on the wiki, and the second because it prevents people from needing to hunt down everything that needs creating, and it gets basic info up as fast as possible after a patch.

From a coding perspective, the hard part for both of them is that they need a way to define the text templates used to generate pages. You'd want them stored on the wiki so that anybody could edit them, but actual wiki templates are probably a bad idea, and how do you cope with, say, a template that wants to iterate over items and pull in API info for each one? But the bot also has the extra issue of picking which template to use for each page. Doing a good job figuring that out ahead of time for new items seems tricky, especially if the new items really need their own custom template (the end result of that will be to create a bunch of pages that all need to be edited in the same way).

A wider audience is probably a good idea. Maybe somebody with have experience with this sort of thing, and thus be more willing to take a stab at it. -- Dagger (talk) 01:15, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

We already have Semantic Forms for the UI. All the Javascript would need to do is generate the query parameters. No one except me seems to care about forms though :(--Relyk ~ talk < 05:15, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

IF it's going to help us do cool stuff on the wiki, count me in Rely. Also Dagger: happy you could solve your issues! Do you think it's worth just trying an early prototype of this? Although it's a fairly complicated project, maybe starting it is a worthy first step? We may be able to make a call to API developers (players) to see if we can find help to expand it (or even find help if we'd like to start there). --Stephane Lo Presti talk 00:11, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Yo

{{Inventory/kits and tools}}

{{data content}}

<onlyinclude>

<Content here>

</onlyinclude>

And maybe if the template has documentation, we do:

{{#dpl:
|titlematch=Inventory
|namespace=Template
|include=##.*Usage.*
|mode=userformat
|secseparators=\n==[[%PAGE%#%SECTION%|%SECTION%]]==\n
}}

Example: User:Relyk/sandbox/datapageexample--Relyk ~ talk < 23:58, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

It looks like everybody agrees that we should have a unified header on these pages. We can bikeshed precisely what the header is once we don't have to copy/paste to fifty separate pages every time we want to change anything.

FWIW I don't think transcluding a section of {{Inventory}} is going to work very well, because it's probably going to be tricky to write something that makes sense as a section on that page at the same time as making sense when standalone on one of the table pages. -- Dagger (talk) 15:13, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

I was proposing a generic notice template for the content, not for this group of pages in particularly. Attempting to describe content in a header or description is pointless for pages that contain nothing but data. There's nothing tricky about pulling the usage section from the parent page, it's the exact same thing as creating a documentation subpage.--Relyk ~ talk < 00:26, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Concept:Container

Hello Dagger, do you still have a use for [[Concept:Container]]? You commented on the talk page, but didn't mention that you were still using it or had a need to. Is it okay to delete it, or do you want us to keep it? —Ventriloquist 17:09, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

It was used on [[Form:Container item prices]], which I blanked about a month ago whilst investigating the load of crap on Special:WantedProperties... which miraculously cleared up a few weeks later after blanking all the forms. I suspect the forms are the cause of the problem (specifically "values from concept" + "values from property"). We should probably keep the concept page until we can figure out the root source of the properties problem. -Chieftain Alex 19:32, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Incidentally the idea of the form is to list the price of every item in a container (so you know which one to pick for maximum profit or whatever). I don't use the form often but I'd definitely like to keep it for whenever I do want to use it.

(I created the concept page because I couldn't find any other way to do the query for the form, and I left the deletion request there because it felt inappropriate to remove a deletion request that somebody else added to a page I created.) -- Dagger (talk) 22:11, 18 September 2016 (UTC)