Guide: The Artifact Tier List

[OmikronWarrior]

Originally Posted by Fantomen

But why replace it rather than add your own list as well? Easily separated as: CBM / VANILLA or the like. Or post your suggestion to the authors and ask for their opinion?

I'd be pretty upset if someone replaced my Agartha guide with their own on the wiki for example, even if I myself thought it was more up to date or better I'd feel belittled if not asked.

I do agree your way to organise it is better though (exept I beleive CBM is dominant enough to be considered the norm these days, but that's a whole different discussion), so the issue isn't the quality of your work but rather the insensitivity in it's execution.

Since you asked nicely...

Simply put, I did not see the list as a "guide," or even a personal work that somebody might have pride in it. It was just to basic in purpose, only slightly above a page that discusses various magic paths, which are open season for anyone who wants to edit to improve them. Sorry, Priestly, thats just how it came across. When I linked to it from the front page, I thought of ways to improve it, and did so. I guess I could have asked, but I had the time then and quite frankly, nothing was lost. I then linked to my changes from this message board to get feedback. Now, the original list is still there on the wiki in edit histories. So, if people thought that the board was best served by having 2 separate lists, that would be easy to accomplish. I certainly did not see my changes as being the end game. I saw them as...

original index...> my improvements...> Further improvements.

I disagree with CBM being dominate, but that is another discussion. However, the real reason for making the front-page linked articles relevant to unmodded Dominions is stability. CBM updates, sometimes drastically, roughly every 6 months. Players do not always use the latest version. While there is certainly a place for CBM notes throughout, I think trying to keep up with the various changes from version to version is losing battle. Take Baalz's CBM focused guide on Machaka. He recommends a Pretender strategy of getting Earth-3 on a pretender to build a Dwarven hammer as soon as construction-2 is reached to start spamming Fever Fetishes. Ooops. Contributors to the wiki just cannot keep up with the changes to say nothing of trying to document the many different iterations of CBM. They can build a database around the base game, with supplementary content for those who use CBM. Maybe the original index is such content.

Well, my relatives just arrived for holidays, so I have to go entertain, but I hope this sort of answered your query.

[Fantomen]

Certainly. I see the logic of it (though I also see a grudge that could have been avoided by a short PM), and in general I agree with your approach to the wiki concept.

[CthulhuDreams]

If you're on a wiki and your getting uptight about your work being edited and improved, you need to go to NotAWiki and post there because you are missing the point.

@PriestyMan:

You gave permission when you posted on a collaborative editing project ;P

@Omnikon

Your intro was amazingly bad - why bother claiming personal credit?

[OmikronWarrior]

Originally Posted by CthulhuDreams

@Omnikon

Your intro was amazingly bad - why bother claiming personal credit?

Hey, they all cannot be winners. First off, do not single me out for claiming personal credit. The original article had Frozen Lama and Turmantor's names on it. It still does. Admittedly, that was Maerlande's doing, but the point remains. I kept the original names to give them credit for the original list which despite my many reworkings was still the basis for my improvements and deserved the mention and threw on my own so people would know who did the improvements. At least that was my thinking at the time. If names truly had no place on the list, they are easy enough to remove.

Neither of you seem really interested in doing that - blanking the page when someone edits it is just silly, but so is the intro claiming moral superiority over all comers.

I never claimed moral superiority, just plain old fashioned improvements. Like I stated earlier, I was not doing it for credit. My intro was to explain why I made the changes and who made them. Admittedly, that probably should have gone into the discussion section. Ooops.

[Squirrelloid]

IMO: the problem wasn't adding descriptions. If you had just done that, it would be fine. The problem was making it vanilla instead of CBM.

Virtually every user contribution to the wiki is CBM (1.6 or later in most cases). The only vanilla content is the stuff that's *autogenerated* from the game code. (lch extracts game stats directly from the gamecode or equivalent as i understand it). If it was possible to make it do this for CBM instead, it probably would have been done. (Note, this is why capital only units don't show up on nation pages iirc, because the auto-extraction is failing to connect that those units belong to that nation since they're assigned to a site, not the nation).

Anyway, when virtually every actual contribution is CBM that tells you something about the wiki's userbase and about the 'suitability' of the wiki for CBM content.

[Gandalf Parker]

Wow. I use the wiki all the time and did not realize that it was CBM. I was fairly sure Ive used player provided content that wasnt. I took it for granted that everything was "vanilla unless specified otherwise".

If that is true though, that it will be a "cbm unless stated otherwise" then Id guess the "Official Dominions 3 Wiki" label might be rescinded.

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

The problem was making it vanilla instead of CBM.

Virtually every user contribution to the wiki is CBM (1.6 or later in most cases). The only vanilla content is the stuff that's *autogenerated* from the game code.

Utterly false.
Most content is vanilla, or just agnostic (modding advices or example).
Look at nation guides, which are imo the most interesting part and the one that is most impacted by mods:
EA: Abysia: Both are vanilla (see salamander cost, blood stones mentions)
Agartha; 2/3 vanilla, 1 is CBM.
Arco: Vanilla (Pretender cost)
etc. I won't list them all, but I counted 3 (maybe 4) out of 28 EA nation guides which are CBM-specific.
That is about 85% vanilla. So if 'virtually every' means about 1 in seven, then yes, you are right. But I think you're just totally wrong, sorry.

[PriestyMan]

Ok, well i'm less mad now than i was yesterday.

first of all, Omnikron, i can see what you were thinking, but it really really bothers me that you rewrote the entire thing. if you want to ADD to it, like the descriptions for example, be my guest. if you want to REWRITE it, make your own page. I clearly stated at the top that it was written for CBM 1.71. i wrote it for cbm, i do not see it as improvement if you remove my content.

Cthulu - so are all the nation guides that people have written and posted on the wiki fair game to be rewritten?

GP- I highly doubt shrapnel will bother to change anything. and 1ch certainly wont since she's a big supporter of CBM. and like was said above, all the stats and costs are vanilla since they are extracted automaticaly.

[CthulhuDreams]

Originally Posted by PriestyMan

Cthulu - so are all the nation guides that people have written and posted on the wiki fair game to be rewritten?

Sure, if you can make it better? Seriously, that's the idea of a wiki. People contribute collaboratively to make it better. You writing a guide, me writing a guide, my mum writing a guide, and my dog writing a guide isn't working collaboratively.

Neither of you seem really interested in doing that - blanking the page when someone edits it is just silly, but so is the intro claiming moral superiority over all comers.

An other point though: There are multiple strategies for a nation, and different strategies probably deserve separate listings, but only really room for one generic artifacts tier list. Adding multiple lists actually detracts from the benefit of posting something where new players can find it.

For the same reason, if you want to post the 5th Mictlan bless build, making building on something in that space that has already been done is a good idea.

[Gandalf Parker]

I was strongly leaning one direction on all this. Until the guides was brought up. That is an excellent point. There are guides which are considered jokes, but often for a reason such as the guide being (and saying) it was written for solo play but being used as a joke suggestion for mp play. Id hate to see solo guides to be "fixed" or made "more generally useful" by being rewritten for mp, or mp with cbm. Or vice versa.

I havent seen lch wade in on this yet, but I think the general wiki rules on the net are:
A) a wiki article is meant to be community edited (altho some wiki's specify only certain people to that community editing)
B) if you want to make a point that is not edited it should be a link to something outside of the wiki editing tools
The "advantage" (arguably) of wiki is that the back and forth editing is supposed to eventually settle into the middle with descriptions that are acceptable to both sides of a subject. That's why its a wiki and not a blog.

Guides on the wiki being wiki-edited might be interesting but I suspect they wouldnt settle into an agreement any more than the discussions about those nations do here on the forum. It might work better to switch to having a wiki page for each nation, which discusses the nation in general informational terms and LINKS to individual guides. That way the wiki page would swing back and forth eventually getting rid of words like "best" or "sucks" to describe a nation but the links to guides hosted elsewhere would reflect different peoples individual opinions about how a nation should be played.