Spiral Knights - Help for New Players: A Design Thread

Help for New Players: A Design Thread

14 replies [Last post]

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 19:08

chitselb

Legacy Username

As a relatively new player myself, it took some stumbling around in the game to find out the following;
-Recipes can create unique variants
-Equipment gets buffed after heat level 5

Apart from those two things, the devs seem to want to keep the secrets of minerals, alloys and gate creation behind the curtain.
I also think the tooltips on equipment descriptions are somewhat vague.
For example, the Frost Gun or the Searing Edge should have a little box that looks like the "Health Bonus +x" or "Charge Time Reduction: X" that would say the percentage chance on hit to inflict Freeze or Fire status, respectively. (x% Chance on Hit: Inflict Freeze/Fire/Stun)
I come from WoW, which had some nice looking tooltips.
The charge effect can still be secret and not placed on the tooltip, only to be found as a result of experimentation with the weapon to keep it fresh and new.

This thread is for anything the devs should tell new players up front in the rescue camp. Post those things here.

PS: The wiki sucks. Needs more templates.

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 21:32

Chronus

There are very little of us contributing to the Wiki.

Just so you know, there are very little of us contributing to the Wiki (maybe 3?) on a regular basis. I myself need to get back into that habit once I get back from my break. The Wiki doesn't suck, it's just somewhat disorganized at the moment because new designs are being created for displaying certain types of information, plus the lack of overall information due to the constant releases.

PS: Why don't you help?

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 22:20

chitselb

Legacy Username

not the point of the thread

I don't have the time to make templates for the wiki. For all I know people have been posting items and such using Paint.

PS: You are very snarky.

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 22:57

Chronus

Yeah, the Devs haven't given us much info at all...

If it's not the point of the thread, then why bring it up (as useless as it is) in the first place? Regardless of your "time", it's pretty rude to make a sort of statement like that, especially if you don't even plan on helping yourself. Some of us have done some hard work on the Wiki, very few of us actually, and to hear such comments is not going to boost our motivation any. Plus the fact it's just outright rude to begin with.

As for the images... our friend d0gr0ck had the great idea of recolouring the item-icon templates to match certain items, which ended up creating some nice looking icons when re-sized (GIMP works well [and is affordable] for transparency, I find Paint easier for recolouring). You're welcome to do this if you wish, it's not very complicated or time consuming. Once you get used to it, you can become pretty pro, finishing off a whole icon in less than a minute.

Anyways, to get back on track: Yeah, the Devs haven't given us much info at all behind the mechanics for these sorts of things. Believe me, we've tried asking for the secrets of gate creation and numeric stats (for example), but we've never got straight answers.

PS: If you think I'm snarky, you're in for a surprise. :P

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 22:57

Dwyn

templates

I can't speak for everyone, but it is generally helpful to hear suggestions on how to improve the wiki. You say it needs more templates, but that's such a broad blanketed statement that it's far from helpful. I'm sure the few people who write our templates would be more than willing to hear your suggestions on what sorts of templates we need, since right now, they're working on what they see as priority and not, perhaps, what others think needs to be.

Until people with better capabilities and time on their hands come along to fix up whatever you take issue with the pictures, then, and this is probably harsher than it should be, you'll just have to take what you're given, it's better than nothing and requires more time and energy (literal and gamewise) than you think.

Though, honestly, on the point of your thread before your postscript, it would be nicer if podlings were somehow bashed over the head with the existence of the wiki.

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 23:22

Dogrock

... it would be nicer if

... it would be nicer if podlings were somehow bashed over the head with the existence of the wiki.

THIS

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 23:30

chitselb

Legacy Username

Sorrryyyyy

I derailed my own thread, lol.
I'd like to know exactly what it is I can do to contribute items to the wiki. There isn't a guide written anywhere or any set procedure that I could find.
Any help would be great.
This is a dual-purpose thread. :s

Sat, 12/25/2010 - 23:56

Dwyn

Wiki Help

Note: I don't even begin to know how to do templates...so I tend to stick to implementing things and going on my merry way fixing pages up (whether it be formatting, grammar, adding information), from my point of view the following are things that everyone can do:

I suppose one of the biggest helps is documenting equipment--and even in that, switching every equipment page over to the archetypes found here (a good deal of pages aren't set up that way, and even more are missing the recipe section template): http://wiki.spiralknights.com/User:Pauling

AND updating monster pages. Many of them are missing locations of which you find x,y, or z (we should also look into spelling out that certain things are only found in certain tiers...), as well as strategies, and what loot they drop.

Screenshots of equipment (and monsters) that aren't in the wiki yet are nice--though, there's always the possibility that it'll change look, especially with series weapons (ex. the blaster, super blaster, and master blaster all look the same currently, that could change). The best way we've found (I say this from being led by example) is to take a screenshot while on the character status box, though I've been using the log in screen to take pictures of armour. I suspect that you have issue with these images, since they often include the white triangles...

Adding descriptions to equipment and items as they become available, for example, last tuesday we had a nice update that added descriptions to quite a few items (always nice to see something other than "description coming soon...").

Keeping a close eye on pages that you have recipes for. Recipes are still influx, and we don't always know when something's changed--there are some recipes that we've traded items JUST for the information contained in them and have never actually looked at the recipe. When a release happens that mentions changes, it's nice if you check them.

From what I've seen, the wiki basically consists of people adding what they think needs to be added for podlings to understand and general players to utilize. I'd been toying with writing up the "help editing" page...but it'd prolly be left to someone who's been building the wiki longer than I have (and of whom I emulate style/format/use templates etc).

There's a wiki suggestion thread around, it's always nice to hear what you think needs to be added. It's also where often template ideas are placed...with no one voicing serious opinions of yes or no.

I'm sure there are other things that need to be done, and that other people will come along and voice them.

Sun, 12/26/2010 - 09:52

Pauling

This is Beta.

Indeed: there's still a ton of basic recipes missing from the wiki, and many existing pages don't actually tell you what a given item can be upgraded into. The "required to craft" section is all too often blank)

The "archetype" pages under http://wiki.spiralknights.com/User:Pauling are mainly to help with the creation of new item listings- I set them up to include all the categories, templates, and cool formatting tricks you would need. Just copy the wiki code from that page and paste/edit it to fit whatever new page you're creating. It's always nice to see old, incomplete pages adjusted to fit that layout, but I have to admit that prettifying the format is just a bonus- mostly my focus has been adding the missing information for now. You can go back to fill in all the blanks on existing pages, or browse the http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Category:Weapons and http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Category:Gear categories for things that haven't yet been filtered as weapons/armor. There's a lot of pages that are missing more specific category tags ("swords" vs "weapons"). (Once we have a good list of swords, guns, bombs, etc, we can fill in the missing items on the summary tables like http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Swords ).

As for bashing podlings over the head with the wiki? It'd be nice, but I'd be hesitant to give it to a new player just yet- they might take it as an authoritative resource, when really it's in a state of constant flux, with lots of surprising and basic gaps. (We don't even have the recipe for the seraphic set, despite how popular it is!!) Once the game info settles down so that recipes stop changing every few days, it may be safer to promote this resource more heavily.

Also, I completely agree with your comment about the tooltips: at the moment, the stat bars are so massively confusing as to be meaningless. My Swiftstrike buckler does just as good a job at absorbing damage as a heavy plate shield, despite having much lower defense. Likewise, my vile striker does less damage per swing than a khorovod, even though the stat bar is the same or larger. My virulisk suit gives me a 500% damage multipler (slime damage bonus: low), while my wolver cap barely changes anything (sword damage bonus: low). This is one reason we've left stat bars off the wiki- currently, the game display is rather broken, and makes it very hard to garner reliable and consistent numbers. Hopefully this will be fixed soon...

Sun, 12/26/2010 - 12:03

chitselb

Legacy Username

hey devs check out my post

Perhaps the devs will consider making changes to the tooltips and adding numbers instead of stat bars.

Sun, 12/26/2010 - 14:30

#10

Chronus

What we need is rock-solid information.

Yeah, we've discussed wanting numbers over visual bars quite a bit in the past... the only way to check the numbers is to fiddle with defense values by equipping different pieces and seeing how much it gets raised/lowered by. This isn't very use friendly, not to mention impossible for weapons. To be honest, I would rather see numbers over bars regardless of how "pretty" they are, as it's easy to compare a solid numeric value, whereas for bars you can't look back and fourth with as much ease, if you know what I mean.

As Pauling said, the tooltips are not very accurate either. I have heard the Devs state that they compile the tooltip images separately. In otherwords, this leaves room on every bar for more (human) error. I would very much like to see numbers, as I'm sure most of us would. I'm just not going to get my hopes up (as I have in the past), because this suggestion has been brought up quite a few times. (Though I'm not sure if we've ever really shoved it into the Devs faces.)

It would be absolutely simple (for them and for us) if they just spat out the actual numbers at us for each value that is non-zero: for defense values, attack values, and even bonus values. The tooltips may be aesthetically pleasing, but until the game is ready to take flight, we don't need pretty bars and shiny boxes; what we need is rock-solid information.

Sun, 12/26/2010 - 14:49

#11

Dogrock

The only weapon that there

The only weapon that there was ever had number for was the Proto Gun that charted how it became better as it leveled up. However that was written by Cory back in June, so it's unlikely that the chart is accurate any more.

I used to do a lot of the stat bar posting for various weapons. However, I received the nod that this was a bit fruitless as the weapons stats are still in flux.

Sun, 12/26/2010 - 22:14

#12

Pauling

Since when did programmers do things the hard way?

I'm a little surprised that the tooltips don't derive their information from the weapon info directly. It would save a lot of headaches with incorrect tooltips, missing (or misleading) bonus info, and general need for case-by-case fixing.

(Not to mention that it's really very difficult to convince anyone when a tooltip is incorrect, and so these bugs, when reported, tend to be ignored for weeks on end. Regardless of what numbers and comparisons you compile, people just insist that you misread something, or that the game has changed recently and thus all your assumptions were wrong- but only in the case of that one item. This is one case where the needs and interface requirements of beta testers are radically different than the needs of general players)

Mon, 12/27/2010 - 00:39

#13

Pupu

Legacy Username

Maybe we should record whatever questions the newbies ask and make a FAQ with them?

Mon, 12/27/2010 - 03:00

#14

Kaybol

Legacy Username

@pauling

Pauling: as far as programming goes, from the looks of it a lot of information is stored in config (xml?) files rather than a database. That makes information a lot harder to link and/or update. It wouldn't surprise me if this is the case, as it is a popular style in Java programming. It does however prevent you from ironing out inconsistencies by simply running an UPDATE query on your tables (say, to set all 5* recipe prices to 16500 crowns = UPDATE recipe SET price=16500 WHERE stars=5; --incredibly simple!) or checking for inconsistencies by saving a few SELECT statements somewhere. But I've never seen a Java programmer get discouraged by such complications... it's seriously common. I don't know what's up with that. :)

I'm making this assumption based on the number of inconsistencies found in the game and the response time to reports on inconsistencies (item price fixes, bugged recipe fixes, item stats).

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Help for New Players: A Design Thread