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Admin Help Needed ~ Why We need This Category Edit

Now that I created this incorrectly, I think I know how I should have gone about it. Is it a matter of using Category:Name of Category when I create the page? Do I need to make it a sub category while making it? Sorry for the hassle. I thought the template CatAZ would automatically flag it as such, but it seems I was wrong. In any case, I'll explain why I created it, so it'll make sense. Given all of the changes to housing, we have a whole, fat mess of really outdated and misleading pages all over the place. Some are worth retaining, but some (the categories referring to vendor/broker or vault slots and the categories by the number of rooms as well. If you have no interest in housing, I think the shortest, sweetest explanation is on the updated version of Housing: Availability by City that I took on in the past week.

While I am thinking of it (and in case I forget to hunt down an admin and ask, can we have a change to the template for the housing pages? They also list by room quantity. It would be better to either cut the line for # of rooms out completely (since so many new houses are roomless and based on zones all over the game world or to switch it to zoom size, relative to the categories on the Housing & Leaderboards . —Preceding unsigned comment added by Yasuewho ( talk • contribs ) 19:31, March 19, 2014‎ (UTC)

The first bit is correct; the short answer is a category must be named "Category:Suchandsuch." The longer answer is the mediawiki software uses what is called namespaces, and pages follow a Namespace:PageName format. The main namespace is for articles and uses nothing for the namespace name. To work as a category, it has to be in the Category: namespace; if not, it's just treated as an article. Files are kept in the File: namespace these days, as another example. Some wikis even use custom namespaces to organize articles (I believe ZAM uses a custom implementation with namespaces like EQ2_Mob: etc.). I hope that makes sense, if not let me know and I can try to explain it a different way.
With that said, I believe the categories you are talking to may still play a role, I'll respond there to keep the discussion there. On another note, when commenting on talk pages please remember to sign with ~~~~; you can use the little signature button at the top to add it in 1 click. -- lordebon ( talk ) 23:57, March 19, 2014 (UTC)
I've moved the content manually to the category page (you can't move a page into the category namespace) and moved this talk to the new corresponding spot. -- lordebon ( talk ) 13:24, March 20, 2014 (UTC)

Explanation of Purposed Category Changes for 2014 Edit

Thanks, Lordbon that makes a lot of sense. I should have figured something like that, since I've created both a To-do and Sandbox page for myself. It was certainly a bit of a flake-out after a very long and exhausting day. My summary earlier was somewhat vague unless people really want to go to the Overview on Housing: Availability by City , so I'll sum it up here too. I'm also passionate enough about the idea of the change that I made a flow chart of sorts, so the changes I'm talking about and the updates I'm purposing will make better sense to those who may want to pipe up, but don't pay much attention to housing-related topics. I posted the flow chart thingamajig on my own website linked it. Yes, I am that into housing. Yes, I do like making documents that much. ;)

I'll reiterate that not all of the old categories need to go, just the outdated handling of the Housing template that uses # of rooms, any category that refers to any less than six broker slots and house vaults should have a redirect back to the 6 slot category, and any category that refers to room size/floorplans should point to (new) Size category pages (in my spends-80%-of-my-game-time-doing-housing-things opinion :D ).

Please understand that I literally (in the traditional use of the word, not figuratively! Literally for real!) entered every house address, at every door in Qeynos, Freeport, Gorowyn, New Halas, Neriak, and Kelethin. Every. Single door. Seriously. I wanted to see if there was a new standardized naming convention established before I wrote any more info on Standard Housing and the related info on Housing: Availability by City pages. More details on everything I learned is summed up and I copied/pasted it here to save time--with a few changes below are in italics to explain what both standard and prestige housing have in common now, I used double parenthesis when referring to the page it was/is on or if I am added an additional note for this explaination in some cases. Some bold text was also added to the copied-over info for extra emphasis here. Get coffee. All of this represents many, many hours of research and testing...

First, here is the updated info I put on the page Housing: Availability by City after all of my testing, to spare me from writing it again:

To say a great deal has changed with housing since launch would be a huge understatement.

NONE of the houses have ANY mention of room count, vendor or broker slot numbers on the exterior door when you open that mini-window in the UI

All houses have 6 broker slots and 6 house-vault slots (like a mini bank in your house), no matter what size, location and without regard to the cost to buy and upkeep a house may be. This and the bullet points below are true of Prestige housing too

  • The above is the maximum, no matter how many houses you own.
  • The change to the number of broker slots and house vaults is due to many factors, but the most common change is described in the section here, titled About Size and Room Count, since room count was the best-known (and often sited) indicator for slots and vault space in the past by those in the decorating and tradeskill comminities.

There are now two types of housing that have their own dedicated articles.

  • The housing listed ((on page copied from)) is only those which can be purchased in-game with normal ((standard, in-game)) coin currency, known as Standard Housing .
  • Only standard housing is listed in the tables on ((page copied from)) because they are easy to obtain with a little time and effort by any character, no matter when it was created and independent of the membership level (paid subscriptions or free) players choose.
  • A new type, that players can get by various means and that function very differently is Prestige Housing and all of those can be accessed from ((from a single entry point in either)) Qeynos and Freeport. A list of those houses is on the page about Prestige Housing.

Item count is not listed on the tables on ((page copied from)) for a reason. Prestige Housing has also had a blanket increase to a minimum of 900 items

  • Over the course of several years, we've seen massive increases in item limits, what does and doesn't count toward it, and many things can be used to increase item count. See the article on housing item limits (also commonly called "item count") for details.

About Size and Room Count

Prestige housing is a HUGE part of this too, since most don't even have countable rooms/they are based on zones of various sizes.
The introduction of Housing & Leaderboards rendered room count moot as well ; everything on the Leaderboard is Categorized by SIZE and anyone who has spent time publishing homes can tell you, though it's often hard to guess which category they will show up in until the first time a new one is added. The Leaderbaord UI window also changed travel to housing radically, but I won't go into it here.

Floorplans and room counts have changed in older cities. As a result, the old system of counting rooms is confusing at the least and completely misleading if you're looking for a house with the maximum space for decorating. Instead, Size is used ((on page copied from)) to indicate a relative size compared to other housing. Room count may always be somewhat debatable, but the counts listed in the tables below list interior rooms separate from any outdoor areas.

As balconies were added to older housing, they were often added to the room count when you zone into housing; in newer housing, this is not the case. Due to the rather random nature by which the game developers count balconies in some houses as a room and do not do so in others , balconies have a separate column (since they are a desired feature) and are not included in any of the room counts ((on page copied from)). Other details vary by the cities of each alignment and a table (Housing Versions and Key Features) that can be opened and closed has been added to prevent page clutter on an already long page. To open the table that describes such info, click on the word Show above each table for "good", "evil," and "neutral" housing.

Hopefully, taking all of the above into account will make this easier to follow; below, the flow chart image (a link to my website) and a descriptions of connections/why, summarized...

"Flow Chart" to help explain changes to housing/suggested flow of categories in 2014 Let me state again, there are other categories that can stay where they are. What I show in the chart/describe below is what I purpose as a change to outdated info or misleading info. I used yellow lines to connect some sections that may not be noted as obvious overlaps in categorization or connections. Otherwise, categories are grouped in a downward style as top level category (Housing) and descending subcategories. SIZE suggestions below match the exact wording of the newly-published sections of the Housing & Leaderboards before they move to Hall of Fame or Dev Picks. Read the info below first if you really want to "get" it. :)

The written explanation to go with the "flow chart" link in the section above (and this would be longer without the image. Just imagine that. O.o)

Top, Center: The top level of the Housing Category that we all know and love. At least we can still call it all housing, eh?

Left Side Columns:

  • Housing with Upkeep Costs (refers to Standard Housing , but the mention of cost is worth retaining/describing in case new houses are added in the future.
  • By Alignment
Split into Good and Evil (because you can buy a house ANYWHERE as long as you have the same alignment. There is no need to change citizenship. Everyone can own a max of 25 houses)
  • (What they have in common on the Left Side, with Upkeep)

ALL have actual Addresses

(after buying any house though, the Housing & Leaderboard can be used to go there)
  • Good
Qeynos, New Halas, Kelethin
  • Evil
Freeport, Gorowyn, Neriak


Middle Column:

  • Both with and without Upkeep fit here because...
All housing show on the Housing & Leaderboards by relative sizes, NOT by the number of rooms. As described earlier, the old room-based naming convention was apparently dropped by the game devs and (generally) replaced with descriptions like "Villa". In the following ways, it can be said that size doesn't matter...the (random dev description of) number of rooms is not shown on exterior "doors" of any kind. All houses have 6 broker slots/6 house vaults.


Right Side Columns:

  • Housing Without Upkeep Costs (refers to Prestige Housing most of this is from the Marketplace , but not all. For example, some players may just search for "Tax Free" and even if they are unaware of the concept of Prestige Housing, Tax-Free were technically the first that had the no-upkeep feature)
  • By Alignment
Split into Good and Evil (because you can buy a house ANYWHERE as long as you have the same alignment. There is no need to change citizenship. Everyone can own a max of 25 houses)
  • (What they have in common on the Right Side, Without Upkeep)

Only ONE entry point (a single /loc) that acts like a door in each of the following cities:

individual address pages are frivolous for this category, due to the above
(after buying any house though, the Housing & Leaderboard can be used to go there)
  • Good
  • Qyenos (a single loc, in the S Qey region)
  • Evil
  • Freeport (asingle loc, in the W FP region


Well, if that doesn't make my case, I'd love some feedback. I also have a breakdown of/table I will complete soon (currently a mess) that deals with item count info on my sandbox . I just had to get away from those annoying acorn houses for awhile. If it's not too much trouble for anyone who has a suggestion, please stop by my Personal talk page and make a post there.

Yasuewho ( talk ) 07:10, March 20, 2014 (UTC)Yasuewho


Comments on the Proposed Edit

Okay, first forgive me if I've missed something you proposed, it's a lot to read in the morning ;).

I agree with dropping Housing by Rooms and going to Housing by Size; it's what SOE uses for the leaderboards and such and the "rooms" concept lost most of its meaning when they bumped them all up and then starting adding prestige houses like they were going out of style. That's something I/we can change in the housing template easily enough, just drop the rooms field and put a validated size in its stead. We can similarly drop broker slots (since they're all 6 now) and perhaps add in its stead the base item count allowed, I know that's very important to decorators and the base number is fixed at any given time.

I don't have a problem with "By Alignment," since I believe that while you can own a house in a different alignment city (e.g., you keep it after you betray) but you can't buy one in a currently non-aligned city. One thing I'm not sure on there is whether the neutral cities can be bought cross-alignment (e.g., if an "evil" citizen can buy a house in Kelethin or a "good" in Gorowyn). You might need a third "Neutral" subcat there, at minimum to handle Maj'Dul and potentially the more neutral other cities. With that said, I don't think we need two separate series of "by alignment" categories if thats what your image is showing; instead it's just a different variable for both of them. All prestige housing will fall into either "Good" or "Evil" alignment.

Now I'm not sure what you're going for when it comes to "by address." I don't think that's something that needs to be categorized; all prestige homes have one of two addresses, and aside from the bundled moved newbie housing standard housing in general is 1 house per address, meaning you'd just have a pile of single-entries.

Based on that, what I see the new category tree looking like is roughly this:

  • Housing Zones
    • Housing by City (with its 7 subcats)
    • Housing by Alignment (with 3 subcats: good, neutral, evil)
    • Housing by Size (with 4 subcats)
    • Housing by Zone (with X subcats; cleaned up to remove the old, nonexistent zones)
    • Housing with Upkeep Costs
    • Housing without Upkeep Costs
    • Housing by Max Sales Displays (leave this for now, if we determine it's all the same then we can nuke it later).

How does that line up with what you've proposed? -- lordebon ( talk ) 13:43, March 20, 2014 (UTC)

Category Name Edit

I agree with Yasuewho that it would make sense to have some sort of housing category. I'm not sure what the Housing category organization looks like at the moment or how it would fit into the overall scheme of it, but I think an arrangement like this would make sense for house category sorting. Maybe just call the category Category:Housing or Category:Houses . I'm pretty sure all houses have upkeep so making an upkeep category wouldn't make sense, but that doesn't mean an upkeep chart couldn't be added to the root Housing category. The root housing category could be an article talking about general housing information, describe the organization of all the subcategories, and provide links to sorted houses by user preference. Maybe something like this:

It might look like a daunting task but I don't think it would be that difficult to make an arrangement like this. There aren't really too many zones with houses in them. The most tedious part would probably be making the status upkeep vs coin only upkeep category but it'd probably be worth while. This is just a suggestion on my part and and feel free to modify it (add categories, change names, etc.) however you wish :)

Reply about House categories - Some don't have Upkeep at all Edit

The reason I suggest upkeep vs without is that the Prestige homes never have any upkeep at all. In theory, we could just make Standard (those with) and Prestige (without) into the main categories. The main reason I recommend otherwise was that it (seems) to me like it would help new and returning players understand what the number one benefit of Prestige housing over the (older style) Standard housing. I think I mentioned in my book-sized post prior that Tax-Free LoN houses function just like Prestige housing (they started it all, really before SOE sold them outright after much begging from housing nuts like me) and I think it might simplify the process of housing searches when people don't know the difference between the two yet--it's a descriptive term and sometimes those are easier to recognize as the info you want, until you know what you want. Perhaps even more so, if a new house comes out and a category tag is being added it would simplify things a great deal. That way, typing "Housing..." will pull up "with upkeep costs" and "without upkeep costs" right away and the difference in the categories is more obvious. OK...time for coffee, getting the brain started again, and back to writing. I'll pop in. Now that I know how to make categories I have no issue with being the one to do so, if everyone wants to tell me I started it/agrees ;) Yasuewho ( talk ) 18:29, March 20, 2014 (UTC)Yasuewho

ahh I see what you mean. Don't some of the standard houses require Status Point upkeep as well though? Maybe you could just make a third housing category for Houses without Rent / Tax / Upkeep. I'll put a couple examples above. You could potentially rearrange the 3 types of upkeep houses into the standard / prestige subcategories also but I thought it'd look cleaner as a category on its own since there aren't hundreds of house types, well that I know of at least, I haven't looked at them all ;p

edit.. oh, I see, then a free upkeep category isn't need. It'd still make sense to have a status point required vs coin only category though. You could probably combine the houses with status upkeep and coin only upkeep into the standard housing categories, but it would be more complicated I'd think. Jado818 ( talk ) 18:43, March 20, 2014 (UTC)

We def. could have a separate status sub category, but in terms of upkeep, both coin and status are technically part of upkeep (if the house purchased had both costs to begin with) unless you reduce the status upkeep to zero with furniture, which is why the overarching category I suggest is a more general term. I think I'll try to finish up the pages connected to housing first and then look at how they fit into a puzzle one more time. I've been juggling several, since I find it easier to not repeat the same thing in as much detail on one page > point to another or grab the bare minimum info to intro a concept on one page that covers both. Believe it or not, all of this is actually tied to the travel updates. As I was working on that too, I realized just how often I find it easy to use the Housing & Leaderboards UI window to go to and from cities I have houses in. Or how often I use a housing portal (the "furniture" kind) in one place to get to another. Who knew housing would be such a big travel hub when they into'd it years ago and it was a pain to find all the doors lol. 50.106.200.194 22:05, March 20, 2014 (UTC)Yasuewho
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