User talk:Qwer Stoneghost

Greetings and Core Page Edits

Hi. I appreciate your analysis ... it's very helpful. One overarching response: UniWiki seems to serve two conflicting audiences: expert players who want detailed, analytic insight into the bowels of the game, and new players who are trying to integrate a wide variety of factual bits and want surveys and examples. I got started trying to edit here when I wanted to find the basic difference between a missile and a projectile, and the two pages were mostly mathematics about explosion radius and falloff distance. I understand those now, but at the time it was very frustrating.

• Tanking. The question that new players ask is "how should I fit my frigate?" They're really not interested in the math of stacking penalties - nor should they be ... one of the things that makes this game so much fun is that there's always more to learn. But I agree with you that the sample fits are out of place. I'll delete them.
• Note: when UniWiki removed the fittings examples from its ship description pages, it didn't just delete information, it deleted authority. Experts argue about how to best fit ship for a given situation, but new players just want to see a fit or two that experts generally agree is OK. (EVE Workbench doesn't provide that ... it's impossible to tell which of their fittings work well.) I can see why it's controversial, but it stills feels like an unfilled need.
• Weapons. The definition of "weapon" is a module that affects an enemy ship. That doesn't necessarily imply damage. It looks to me like E-War is on the line between damage and logistics. But unless it is its own category, it has to be something. (I don't have any experience with the newest weapons, so someone else will have to make those changes.)
• Scanning. If you're a new player, who has never dealt with the words "directional" or "probe", and you type "scanning" into the search box, what should happen? I looked at some of the page links. Many, if not most, of them deal with exploration, and the Exploration template has "scanning" in its list. I don't see why that necessarily should take you to probe scanning, as d-scan is pretty useful in exploration. Many of the others are lines like: "You may refer to the Scanning and Exploration guides if you want to learn about finding wormholes." If you want to delete the page, I won't argue, but I don't quite understand your point ... what did the word "scanning" link to before? Or am I not understanding the problem?
• Yeah, you're surely right that there are a number of incomplete entries, not to mention flat out errors. Ummm ... there's a lot I don't know; and so it goes. I don't envy you the job of trying to keep all this info straight.
• Missiles are slow: The new player's question is - "what's the difference between a missile and a laser?" How do you answer that in one sentence? This gets back to my earlier point. Expert players will read that box and laugh at how simplistic it is. But new players will, one hopes, realize that missiles have to travel while laser beams are instantaneous. Again, if you want to delete it, I won't argue. But I don't see that it's enormously misleading.
• I get your point on the small edits. If I keep editing, I'll find a way to make fewer small changes.
• I went to this page UniWiki:To-Do List expecting to find a list of things to do. User:Noemie belacqua is listed at the bottom as one of the curators, and since I had talked to her a year or two ago, I went to check her page. Her to-do list is still up, and there's no obvious way to see that she's not active.
• I'll have to think about whether or not I want to keep doing this. I honestly don't have time for bureaucracy, benign as it might be. And my main purpose is, you know, to play the game.
• No hard feelings. I DO appreciate your comments - insight into how this wiki works is good stuff.
• Take care and stay safe.

talk Sun, Nov 22, 2020 11:01 EST US

o/.

Drebin 679 here, one of the curators. You've been putting a lot of work into the wiki as of late, which is greatly appreciated. The Game Settings page in particular was one that I hadn't been aware that this wiki was missing and also ought to have.

You have been working on a lot of core game mechanics pages, and there I am a bit more iffy on the changes that have been made.

• While I appreciate the spirit of the addition of sample fits in the Tanking page to explain what a tanked ship would look like, I'm unsure if mixing them in the way they are is the best way for people to get tanking info. As is, the page is already fairly long, and the fits are listed before the respective tank modules are. Perhaps putting all of them in their own section in the bottom?
  • Also unsure if you're aware, since wikifits got dunked back in July, but the UniWiki has its own template for listing fits, Template:ShipFitting. It can be used in lieu of linking EWB fits (the linked Maller is active tanked, while the listed one is passive), and tailored exactly to what you actually want the fit to be. A bit of a pain to work with without Hirmuolio's template creator tool, admittedly.
• In the Weapons overview page, I'm unsure of the choice to include EWar, cap warfare, and tackle, which while offensive, do no damage whatsoever. I guess it makes sense, but I'm getting twirled by tradition at the moment. By the same nature, Entropic Disintegrators, Vorton Projectors, Smartbombs, and Bombs all lack representation in the current page. I'd like to first like to get a feel for what should and shouldn't be in the page before making any edits on top of yours, though.
• While I can get moving Scanning to be a generic scanning page, it does create a lot of baggage due to all of the pages that have linked to it, expecting it to be the "probe scanning page". As of the time of writing, dozens of pages link there, and unless you want to change each and every one of those redirects, I am reticent on keeping this setup. It also misses ship and cargo scanning, which admittedly is fine, considering the wiki has no page on them at all.
• The prose used does gloss over some intricacies or specifics in places:
  • The weapons page simply notes that energy and hybrid turrets deal two types of damage, but outside of dev ammo both are also damage locked.
  • The drone page suggests that drones of each faction only deal one type of damage. While true for regular drones, 'Integrated' and 'Augmented' drones deal two.
  • The weapons page summarizes missiles, in part, as "soooo slow". While torpedos certainly are, frigate-sized missile launchers, and any Mordu's Legion ship lob missiles at a speed I would consider quite fast. Also, whether a turret "misses a lot" really depends on the situation, and I'm not comfortable giving a blanket statement like that.
• While not harmful by any means, making a lot of small edits does make page history harder to read compared to fewer, larger edits. The drone page changes took 55 edits.

Oh, and User:Noemie belacqua hasn't made an edit to the wiki for over three years. We stand on shoulders of giants, metaphorically speaking, with much of the heavy lifting done by those who are no longer active either in the wiki or in this game. As a consequence, many of the problems that existed back, say, in 2017, still exist today.

Now, I complained a lot, but I know your heart's in the right place, and that you clearly have the acumen to make good pages. I'd recommend getting hooked up with other wiki editors when you want to make major structural changes to pages, to give peer review before they go live. The Wiki subforum, #wiki channel on Discord, and talk pages are all ways to request feedback. We haven't had the largest wiki team for quite a while, but the pace has stepped up this year, and with your help, we can get through them.

Best regards. Drebin 679 (talk) 07:27, 22 November 2020 (UTC)