EQ2i is the Official EQ2 Community Wiki

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With SOE recently awarding EQ2i "official community wiki" status, there's a wide open channel of communication that wasn't available to us before. Uberfuzzy and I will be headed to SOE Live (Fanfaire for you old farts like me) to brainstorm with the devs and community managers about what the community needs help them continue to make this wiki great. Sky's the limit, folks. What do you need? Even a monkey. (But not a real monkey. That'd be cruel.) Seriously, what would make this wiki leap forward in your mind?-- Kodia ( talk ) 20:03, October 12, 2012 (UTC)

Now that we're back I'm going to go through and very briefly touch on each comment based on some of what we talked about with Devs/Producers and some of what we learned in general.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

Competing adverts Edit

• It would be helpful, if EQ2i didn't display a World of Warcraft advertisment right on the first page when you load it in the in-game browser.

For the most part, we can't control the ads that appear. These are controlled through Wikia. We added a report bad ads link for people and we strongly recommend it get used because we can only offer complaints like you. We're especially concerned with plat-selling ads as those directly break the EULA.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

/browser reloading issue Edit

• The in-game browser does a very nasty page reload like 5 seconds after it initially loads the first page. This is VERY annoying because if you already scrolled down or marked a waypoint, you have to do it all over again.

This may not be exclusive to the in-game browser. I've had this problem on my regular browsers as well recently. It's particularly frustrating when you've already entered text into a field. We'll mention this one to the devs.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

• The in-game browser doesn't remember my EQ2i login EVER.

I don't think it's meant to, to be honest. Caching, cookies, voodoo magic may all be beyond the simple browser that was intended. However, who knows. We'll mention this.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

This is EQ2 and/or Wikia issue, not a EQ2i issue. /bug it. Make sure to include if you are running the game as an admin or not (if it applies to your OS). The ingame browser is an embedded version of Chrome now. If there are bugs in eq2's version, there are bugs in other games that use it, like EVEonline.

new wiki skin/theme Edit

• EQ2i needs a modern but still practical default skin. I dont know which is default now, I use the ancient white one. I just know I like the blue ZAM look. I'm also a bit confused about how to upload pictures to the wiki and implement them into pages. maybe you can make that easier somehow. Rittmeister64 ( talk ) 04:46, October 16, 2012 (UTC)

Agreed on the skin. We'll be working on this and would love help. As for uploading pictures, have you used the upload page?

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Upload

As for implementing them, we have some basic instructions on the Editor's FAQ:

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/EverQuest_2_Wiki:Editor%27s_FAQ

Note that I'm copying the entire link here so people can see the paths. One thing we're particularly weak on right now is that we have a slew of FAQ information like that editing FAQ and it's the very devil to find it. There's no big CLICK HERE on the front page that gets you to it. We need to correct that.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

For images, click the icon. follow the instructions.

For what we can/cant change in the skin, why not click the big (Start a Wiki) button, and make your own wiki, its free and take like 30 seconds tops. Then you can see what tools we have to work with, and how limited we are. If you come up with a good design, post us a link

Raid zone timer changes Edit

• the upcoming change with the patch tomorrow hurts the non hardcore raid guilds quite a lot since you have to finish a zone within 2days20hours which is nothing if you raid only twice a week :(

I think SOE has addressed this. FWIW, I agree with you. -- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

connecting ingame ui to wiki Edit

• how about ui change from soe to seach on eq2i with the default ui, not everyone spends the time to get a costum ui runing so it would be great help for quite a few ppl outthere i think. :D

-- ( Talk ) 18:11, October 16, 2012 (UTC)

We talked to Holly Windstalker about this and she put it on her priority list. I think we also mentioned this to several other devs (Uberfuzzy can correct me).-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

Holly LOVED the idea of making a "look this up on the wiki" button part of the default UI, as did the quest dev and some others. It was written down, and taken back to San Diego. We can only hope. -- Uberfuzzy ( talk ) 17:04, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

external chat interface Edit

From an anonymous user who asked me privately (I'm trying to keep this in one location):

• Will there be an external chat interface available?
• Details? What kind of interface?
• When will it be available?
• Will it be able to contact world chat channels as well as Guild Chat? (Previous XMPP interface was restricted to GuildChat)

-- Kodia ( talk ) 19:48, October 17, 2012 (UTC)

The answer to these questions was a very cagey "not any time soon".-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

This anonymous user should catch me ingame/aim/irc/skype. I have more details other then "no" that will make him soil his froggy britches with glee. -- Uberfuzzy ( talk ) 17:04, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

useless menu cruft Edit

• The EQ2i menu has too many useless entries! Nobody needs "Items, Monsters, Spells, NPCs, Equipment, Quests". These topics are too generic. you can scrap these since they don't link to a useful subpage but a plethora of alphabetically sorted stuff - not handy if you wanna look up something for your class at all.

I disagree about the information being useless. No knowledge is wasted and that's one of the benefits of this wiki. There are a number of people I know who specifically use these categories as research lists. Example, "Hey, Bob, how many dragons can you name from EQ2?". We heard questions like this often at SOELive and we hear it in chat constantly. However, if you have suggestions on additionally useful ways to organize the information we'd love to hear them as we're always interested in making information accessible.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

well, I didn't mean the info is totally useless, but it doesn't warrant to be in the main menu. the menu should be condensed to the most useful and needed stuff, and the rest should all go into some subcategory - for more oversight. Rittmeister64 ( talk ) 16:27, October 28, 2012 (UTC)

MOAR GUIDES!!!!111 Edit

• GUIDES! we need more, and UP TO DATE GUIDES. Also, rename User Guides into simply "Guides" since it's all by users anyway.

Agreed. Thank you for the rename suggestion. If you have updates you'd like to make to the guides, please feel free. There's also the {{FactCheck|what you think may be wrong}} tag you can place on any page where you think the information is incorrect if you don't have time to update it yourself. Additionally, a note on the talk page would work, saying what you don't think is correct and how you might like to see the page updated. This wiki only survives because of great contributions like the ones you can offer. As much as we want to be mind-readers, we're not (boy wouldn't that be awesome, eh?). We'll parrot SOE's line here: We're gamers too. We also have day jobs like everyone else. EQ2i is a labor of love, not a paying gig, unfortunately. :)-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

new wiki theme colors and menu gripes Edit

• The standard Wikia skin menu simply sucks with it's Java(script) menu. It's confusing and unclear to have to mouseover several topics to even see the subentries. I suggest making a new skin in SOE color scheme (amber) or blue. That's looks more gamy than the sterile doctor's white.

We're taking suggestions for new skin ideas. THank you for the suggestion.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

why on stay wikia Edit

• Personally I dont know why this is hosted on wikia anyway with all their ads, maybe you get royalties? If not you should think of migrating the wiki to another host, maybe privately hosted, that doesn't have the intrusive wikia top-bar.
• Maybe SOE can provide you with serverspace to host a better wiki, more customizeable, and better ad deals.

Rittmeister64 ( talk ) 01:54, October 22, 2012 (UTC)

The wiki used to be hosted privately in someone's basement when it first began. Wikia purchased a fork of that information as a seed wiki when it was growing its gaming industry. As an admin at that time I can say we honestly had no idea that the move would happen. Once the move occurred, many admins left. Only a few still remain. The information is now on Wikia to stay. We can't move it *off* Wikia, though if some enterprising user wanted to start their own wiki, they could. But this one wouldn't go away as a result. Their information would merely fork the wiki again and two wikis would exist. SOE will not be providing server space. That was the big reason why they named us their official wiki. However we're always hoping users will jump in to help with ideas on customization. We're doing what we can to work with Wikia on offensive and inappropriate ads too. Please remember to report the bad ones using the link on the front page.-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

I'll be blunt here. Money. Thats why. We did seriously look at moving away to private hosting when the whole mass-exodus-from-wikia-because-of-the-forced-skin happened, and the options were slim, and expensive. We're a large wiki (database+images), and far more traffic then you think. Neither of those are cheap. Also it takes time, and expertise to maintain a wiki. There are database backups, query pruning, software upgrades (not just mediawiki, but apache, mysql, all sort of linux stuff) to keep it from getting hacked. Wikia offers all of those and has dedicated people to do these. Remember that the admins dont get any of the ad money, or anything BACK from Wikia, at all. We're just normal people (with lives, familys, and dayjobs) that do wiki stuff as a hobby. We could move. We could shell it out of our own pockets. We could start donation drives (like wikipedia). We could put up paywalls on certain features (like allakhazam used to do). None of which would make for a stable platform. If who ever was maintaining all of these things decided they didnt like the game anymore, how long till it would lapse, and disappear from the net (ala eq2achieve.com)? Funny, thats how we got to wikia to start. -- Uberfuzzy ( talk ) 16:54, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

As to the "maybe soe can provide", for many of the same reasons I listed above, SOE didnt want to try to half-ass maintain a project that was out of their "core-competency". They dont want to get into the business of running wiki software, so they looked for an already established platform (ie, Wikia) for both their PS2, EQ2, and (future/past products). Do you really want the same team (soe's platform team) that is already stretched thin, who does an awesome job keeping their forums up, running your wiki's backend? -- Uberfuzzy ( talk ) 17:08, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

more data api usage Edit

• SOE is now making a lot information available via their data feeds. One of these items, in particular, is the information previously only available via an in-game examine of an item (house item, equipment, etc). As EQ2i has a page for most in-game items, why can't each of those pages pull the stats directly from the SOE data feed, instead of relying on (often out-of-date) player submitted data? EQ2U is able to pull that information, however they don't have the information on how to obtain said item, which is where EQ2i is very handy.

-- Donhead ( talk ) 14:40, October 22, 2012 (UTC)

I second that. All information about spells and equipment is added manually, even with the templates it is a HUGE work to add and maintain these, especially once they get changed on SOE side. -- Alinor ( talk ) 11:16, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. Uberfuzzy has a base system working right now that takes advantage of that data feed. I'll let him chime in on it on his own. I'm the idea girl. He's the professional geek. :)-- Kodia ( talk ) 12:58, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

I have a crude tool to spit out an equipment template pre-filled with data from the API, but there are a few issues. One is some of the data is outright missing across the gama , (to be fair, some of it gets fixed ). The largest bug (for us) is the lack of detail to item/weapon type , which we NEED for sorting and template wiki-magic. I poked devs about this at LIVE!, and they are going to get back to me shortly (and before anyone asks, EQ2U just sort of ignores these missing bits). Spell info isnt in the API (yet). But spells, quests, and drops are all coming in the near future to the data feed API (i've seen it) -- Uberfuzzy ( talk ) 16:45, October 24, 2012 (UTC)

Some sort of organized info drive Edit

I've noticed a few messages on various talk pages complaining about obsolete information, and it's really getting to be a problem. Here are some things I can think of, just off the top of my head, that we're outdated on.

• Old world zones still have their monsters improperly named (without the a's and an's).
• Most zones haven't had the LU61/64 reitemization drops added
• A lot of classes still need their spells updated from LU51/52 (can't remember which) and their post level 80 spells added.
• The City of Freeport needs its NPC articles written and updated.
• Tradeskilling is a mess, most articles haven't been updated since before they did away with the crude/standard/pristine versions of an item.

What I think this wiki needs is two part.

One, a way to make the website easier for newbies to participate in. The code gets complicated and there often isn't a readily observable place for them to jump into and start helping. This is getting worse. For example, look how barren Category:Eastern Wastes Monsters is.

Two, a wiki-wide way of organizing improvements. Before I even got here the wiki used to do things like The Feerrott/Audit . Maybe it's time to bring zone audits back? And possibly set up a similar system to help direct people to the work that needs to be done for updating old zones and the like? Jeff ( talk | stalk ) 21:05, November 2, 2012 (UTC)

The outdated information is most definitely something we've struggled with all along. I don't personally think it's worse than before given the size of the expansions that have been released since we started. Could we improve? Heck yes. I think that an organized "drive" like the zone audits would be an idea if we could do it, yes. In order for people to jump in and start helping, I think you're correct. We need an easy way for people to know which areas we're targeting and additional instruction or reassurance that they don't have to know how to do anything other than type. That's fairly clearly spelled out in the help files, but...do you know how to get to those? One would think it would be easy and it's not. *I* have trouble finding them now and I wrote some of them.

I also think that the templates we have been using for so long are to difficult for people to understand. We do need some of the advanced templates though in order to manipulate things the way we want them to appear. HOWEVER, the real question is now, "Is this how we want them to appear?" I think we need to answer that before we even continue.

My personal opinion, now that we have the data feed is that we should swing the entire wiki more towards a Wikipedia style of wiki, making strong use of the lore, the pictures (these are our strengths when stuff is hard to find in a quest), and people's opinions on how to beat/conquer particularly difficult mobs or areas of the game.-- Kodia ( talk ) 14:04, November 4, 2012 (UTC)

Outdated info has always been a problem, especially since SOE did wave after wave of reitemization and zone change. For items, a lot of that can be fixed if we get a good system going to use the data feed from SOE to automatically check and update item pages with new information; even a one-time pass to bring all older items up to date would clear up the majority of the old outdated stuff. With that level of data on our hands, there should be little reason for people to have to enter basic item data; complex effects and whatnot would obviously require a user but all the basics should be something we can do with the data feed. (NB: I haven't seen the data feed myself, but going from experience if there fields are there they can be parsed into the format we need).

One of the easiest things we could try to do to make things more accessible would be to change our preloads around a little. As it is now, a typical line looks like field= | which is a lot for the new user to figure out what goes where. In many cases I've seen them try to put it in the comment or other places. If we change it so that the lines always end with the = then users can just put the info at the end. For example, |name= . Here the line starts with the close of the previous parameter, gives a comment saying what the new line is, and ends with the actual parameter so the user simply puts the info in at the end. I've seen this style used on other wikis quite a bit to make things more intuitive, and if we add a comment at the top (say, at the top of each preload it should make it clear where the information goes.

Something else I'd like to see would be a focus on having actual relevant drop/upgrade lists, similar to the old armor set drop tables but for a single slot from the low end (solo quest reward) to the highest end raid. As it is now that information is hard to find even on content that's been out for a long time, and I think it'd be quite useful for folks who want to know, for example, what kind of charm they can upgrade to and where to find it.

Strategy information is good but I've always felt it's an odd place in the wiki. The article pages should be authoritative, while people's strategy suggestions are speculative and often (for harder encounters) can vary by personal choice or even be mistaken when there's complex scripting. I originally wrote up the strategy policy to try to address that by giving clear definitions of what belongs where, but it's never really been used and in general the talk page becomes the easiest place for people to go for individual strategies.

Coming back around to the topic of this section, I think the zone audits are a good way to go if we can get them done. The problem in the past has been it generally being a single user trying to audit a zone and often stopping partway through once they realize the size of the task. It's the nature of this being a volunteer wiki, we don't have someone to go and do zone audits and other tedious but important work 9-5, 5 days a week. Most folks focus on new content, since it's what everyone is most interested in. We have the depth of info when it comes to older quests and such, but it can get out of date when changes get made down the line. I think part of the problem there is knowing it's out of date... folks might comment on the article or the talk page saying that, but they usually don't know to flag it with a template so it can be categorized and found later. Maybe what we need there is a "flag as outdated" button or link that would append the template (and maybe ask the user for what is outdated with a java prompt box?).

We obviously want to stay competitive and innovative (which is tricky in a wiki) and I think making it easier for the non-editing user to make constructive edits and notices can go a long way to keeping things up to date, especially if we combine it with the data feeds. -- lordebon ( talk ) 16:21, November 4, 2012 (UTC)

I know this is responding to something over a month old, but would it be possible to alter the default editing tools to have a button that could bracket highlighted text with a tag? And then have a bot that looks through the articles and adds a link to any article containing those tags to a single article, which could then be linked to the front page? Necrotherian ( talk ) 17:02, December 8, 2012 (UTC)

We already have an {{Update}} template for that; it adds articles to Category:Articles needing to be updated . There are no continuously-operating bots on EQ2i as well, so adding a nonstandard tag for a bot to see just to replace it with the same template is a bit of an unnecessary workaround. -- lordebon ( talk ) 17:11, December 8, 2012 (UTC)