Turning the "Useful Links for New Knights" thread into a wiki page

It's a good idea (and I've also noticed the very outdated guides on that thread). Check the Main Page on the wiki - in the top two blocks, "basic training" and "clockworks handbook." There's a ton of links/guides in there - including links directly to category pages, which function in a similar way to Eury's thread. We don't want to be overly repetitive on the wiki (like making pages that already pretty much exist, but with slightly different titles). Anyway, check over those - if you feel anything is missing, inaccurate, and so on...then add to/edit existing pages, or make a new page if you absolutely can't find what your target subject happens to be. For example, a wiki page linking to forum threads has been discussed before, but never heavily considered as far as I know due to standardization issues and blah blah blah.

IMO, having guides that are outdated is very harmful to new players - we don't have the same "sharing and caring" dungeons we used to, as outlined in that previously useful guide - this is now bad info. We really should get some GMs to update that thread.

I've been thinking about a furniture guide for some time now, but some recent threads have put the breaks on that. It's always important to discuss large projects, or at least state that you're about to go skydiving into one.

As always, if you make a page (or pages), put an appropriate category tag on it/them.

The stickied thread links to the New Player Briefing on the wiki. This page appears to be un-protected, so we can edit it. I think that it could serve your intended purpose. I propose it specifically for these reasons:

A. It is already at the top of the stickied thread. So we wouldn't need to edit the thread (which we couldn't).

B. Many new players don't want to read wiki pages (or explanatory missions) at all. Those who do want to read have a limit of around one moderately sized wiki page. So we should make it obvious, which one page the newbies should read.

As with other wikis on other games, the information is always overwhelming. It is all there, and sometimes I don't even know where to look and what is important. Making it clear where to go to start out is often covered very well by the missions in game. However, setting up a page to be read seems like we are just copying the information from the early missions that players don't want to read. I've been hesitant towards putting effort towards helping players that choose to ignore information.

That being said, Bopp (or someone copying Bopp's general post) usually answers questions sufficiently by giving the tools to allow the reader to find the answer (because the almost all the information already exists somewhere). It would be a great idea to include the google site-restricted searching trick in a very easy-to-find place (even though it is already plastered on the majority of new recruit threads).

Most of my posts in the forums nowadays tend to be clarification, questions, updated information, or other comments on topics that tend to not be easily found through searching for the answer or are not put in a form that can currently be searched.

I feel like New Player Briefing isn't really what we're looking for. It contains information, while the suggested page would merely link to information. Additionally, the page is called New Player Briefing. A page with links like that wouldn't be very brief. If the page would expand enough, it could take hours to read all the information linked from it. How about making a new page and adding it to the Guides template?

I'm not opposed to your plan to write a new guide from scratch. If Eurydice would replace the old thread/guide as you said, then that would help us get new players to actually read it. I wonder whether we could get preliminary approval from her, before going to all of this work.

I've sent a mail to her through the SK support. Hopefully she'll reply here sooner or later!

Hi, all! Thanks for poking about this. I'd be happy to update the sticky thread with fresher links, or simply link to a player-made page. Whatever you think would be most welcoming. I agree that the current situation is stale.

Yo Eurydice! Haven't seen you post on the non-announcements forums in a while! What happened!

On-topic: Thanks Eurydice! Those stickies were bothersome

If I could put in my two cents (regarding what we should ultimately do):

I'm in favor of a wiki page for these reasons:

1) It would encourage people to use the wiki, which is wonderful. Some people love forums, and don't even know the wiki is there! *gasps*
2) It's easier for users to update guides for users, vs. in a forum post (just more convenient- admin or user, only one person can edit the original post, no so on the wiki!)
3) We can periodically clean out the nonsense, unlike with forum comments potentially generated by trolls. Obviously, people only need to look at the original post and not comments, but that brings me back to #2.

Problems:
1) format? hmm. I'd make a list, honestly. Make it look just like the forum post itself, or as much like it as possible, since we're trying to be as user-friendly as possible - a nice fusion between the forums and the wiki would be ideal.
2) All other problems discussed in this thread and others.

Hey all! I had an unfortunate case of the BSoDs on my PC so I couldn't make the page. Now it's fixed, though. Hopefully I can make the page today or tomorrow, if no one else feels like it.

Make that page, link to it here, I'm sure we have lots of things we can add to it.

I'm wondering what the general style of the page should be - I would do ToC sections for "gameplay" (subsections: gear/missions/etc.) "economics," and so on - with the most important links at the top. IMO the most important links are the admin announcements, news blog, support, billing, and gear guide pages. Repeats from the main wiki page, but arranged differently I suppose.

Don't forget them steam guides, if anyone knows of any good ones - I know they're around, but I never really looked into those. I started off outside of steam, then integrated - so, we should be mindful of non steam users. But guides are guides, so as long as they're accessible and up-to-date, we should be good.

I set up a "news" page a while back that is similar - nothing fancy, just links. Krakob's page probably won't use show/hide templates.

I tend to overword things, so I don't want to butt in too much on this one.

http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Useful_Links

The page has now been created! Hooray!
Sadly, I haven't finished going through all the things linked by Eury in the original thread because that's a lot of work, but I've gone through the Gameplay and Strategy and the Equipment sections. Also made a PvP section as well, because we should definitely add information there.

If anyone else fancies going through at least some of the links and seeing which ones are still relevant/not misleading, that'd be great. Also make sure to add more links!

Lastly, I've added the page to the Guides template and put it on the bottom of the page.

added several links to news. There are many more feeds, but quite a few of them have not updated recently - even the SEGA Blog is pretty out of date (last post I can see is Thursday Apr 04, 2013), so I left those out.

The Steam one seems out of date, but it's designed to be a % relevance search for all "Spiral Knights News Posts on Steam" - so things might show up differently over time and for w/e browser people are using. Linking to steam feeds can be pretty tricky, so if someone has a better link, fix please! (like I had to go through and fix the snowglobe links around the wiki, cause after the steam event ended those links just led to an irrelevant page). I should mention to use the "archive" tool that's on that steam page.

Looking good so far!

By the way, I'm interested in making this work, but I can't contribute this week. Let's not let it die.

Terribly sorry for not working on this more. School started and I've been really busy with guild business. Would anyone else mind completing the page, or at least doing some of it?

I'll try. It's on my list. But I consciously limit the time I spend writing unpaid copy for Three Rings.