I'm annoyed by everyone calling the wiki outdated!

[Blade]

I do think I am going to delete the MuWz guide of Kiku > Sif though. Even though I do sort of appreciate the work the author put into it, it recommends a clearly suboptimal strategy to achieve a goal similar to that my guide has, and a lot of work with bad results isn't worth all that much. Objections, anyone?

if you do that it will make the wiki less funny and therefore worse. I object.

[lucy_ferre]

If the guide is so bad and/or outdated, just delete it. The point of a wiki is that everyone can edit and improve it. Removing crap is improving. If the author disagrees and reverts the deletion, discussion an/or moderation can follow. Sure, it's possible that he is stubborn and insists that his crappy guide stays, and we won't fight him because we don't care enough. But my guess is that it's more likely that he won't care or he's not around anymore. So I'd suggest deletion.

Only mods can delete articles. I tried to purge the guides from the wiki, but all the editors complained about it. And the new mods undeleted them.

[cerebovssquire]

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... zard_guide

makeshift but functional

If the Chaosforge wiki is to be taken seriously as a community project in any way, the mods shouldn't listen to people who wrote crap bitching about the work they put into said crap, in my opinion.

[Blade]

some wiki mod dude in response to Elynae:

Dear sir/madam,

While contributing to the wiki is appreciated, the general tone and nature of your edits thus far do not meet the standards present in the rest of the articles. Two issues stick out:

Writing guides is encouraged; we're actually having a discussion on this topic at the Talk:Character guides page, feel free to join in. However, your guides lack detail and polish. Your DsFE guide, for example, doesn't once mention anything about playing Demonspawn.

You completely deleted the original Mummy Wizard guide article and replaced it with a link to your own shorter, incomplete guide. This is not acceptable in a community-driven wiki. Respect the work of others, and instead of creating new, competing articles, merge your insights and knowledge into the existing ones.

Take this as constructive criticism. We want people to contribute to the wiki. Just not like this. --Mr. K 21:43, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, guys, but give it up. The wiki would obviously prefer to remain terrible.

[KoboldLord]

That's downright depressing. The old mummy wizard guide was terrible, and very obviously so even to a casual player. 'Community-driven' is not an acceptable excuse for feeding newbies borderline troll advice.

Who is in charge of moderating the wiki, and how did they end up in charge? Is there likely to be any way to convince them to see reason, or would it ultimately be more viable to start a whole new non-crazy wiki from scratch?

[Grimm]

And why is there so little overlap between the wiki community and the Tavern community? Who are those people who don't know cerebovssquire is a top player?

[lucy_ferre]

@Blade

He's not a mod.

That's downright depressing. The old mummy wizard guide was terrible, and very obviously so even to a casual player. 'Community-driven' is not an acceptable excuse for feeding newbies borderline troll advice.

Who is in charge of moderating the wiki, and how did they end up in charge? Is there likely to be any way to convince them to see reason, or would it ultimately be more viable to start a whole new non-crazy wiki from scratch?

Flun and MoogleDan are the active mods. I left, so they were promoted. They think the guides are good for the wiki.

[cerebovssquire]

Not meaning to blow my own horn here but
1) the fact that my own mummy wizard guide was shorter just meant it had a lot less subjective information
2) the old mummy wizard guide, as KoboldLord said, was terrible and
3) when I do write a guide, I generally know what I'm talking about.
I'm going to write this Mr. K a message (no expectations here) and if it doesn't help it's either a new wiki or just "I give up".

[cerebovssquire]

==In regards to your "constructive criticism"==

Dear Mr. K,

as you may have noticed, the old Mummy Wizard guide maybe met your standards of quantity but not any reasonable standard of quality. For instance, the strategy it recommended involved going Kikubaaqudgha for guaranteed Haunt, it did not consider that

-channeling is an extremely useful ability for a mummy early on, and worth a lot more than some books that, granted, aren't bad, but noticably inferior to dozens of imps killing everyone on screen while you never run out of MP (this is not an exaggeration).

-Haunt is a decent summoning spell, but the MuWz recommended will have a hard time getting there (including a period of training Summonings for no immediately return), so MuWz*Sif has a much smoother progression

-and finally, Summon Dragon is superior to Haunt in basically every way conceivable when combined with channeling.

If you like you can look up the different MuWz wins, allrune wins and highscores on CDO and CAO. You will see that the strategy I propose if both more popular and more successful.

As to a "lack of detail": have you considered that a guide that has too much detail will always contain too much *subjective* detail? If you have a recommendation such as "if you win the game, write a guide" at the heading of your wiki it will lead to

1) A lot of players who don't have the foggiest idea of optimal play writing guides. This is what we have Diary of a Crawler for - most are terrible, but one shouldn't take them seriously as guides so it's fine and entertaining.

2) A lot of players, though they played their game well, tailoring their guide to the gear and monsters their character encountered and not to a generally expectable course of the game.
And the MuWz guide definitely suffered from both.

My DsFE guide tells people how to skill a DsFE and some basic strategy. It doesn't tell them about mutations beause we have the demonspawn mutations page for that. I am not here to tell players how I win my DsFEs but how they will easily win any DsFE.

Since, rather than being a "completely new way" to play MuWz, it recommended an obviously suboptimal strategy to very similar means, the only reasonable thing to do would be to delete it.
A new player presented with two different guides will not have many means to distinguish between a good guide and a bad guide (and who is to blame him?), so bad guides need to go even if they look nice.

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/elynae.html
Here are my online stats. As you can see I have 71 wins, am in the Trunk highscore list, have a four-win streak, multiple two-win streaks, hold multiple species realtime records, 5 wins in 1 day, and the realtime record for the fastest 15-rune win ever played. I think this makes me a better player than someone who won 1 MuWz with a bad strategy, and I have been described as a "top-end" player at many occasions. And in addition, mikee and elliptic (both players which are top 5, probably top 3) approved of the new guide after reading it.

(the Elynae account doesn't have all 71, check hyperelynae, mossforestblossombat, dwarfmountainbat and elynaeandxom for the remaining 10 or so)

If you want to be taken seriously as a community project (no established player does currently, and a lot of people think that this isn't a good thing) you will have to distinguish between good information and bad information. Of course the writer of the old MuWz guide put a lot of work into his, but a lot of work put into rubbish does not stop it from being rubbish. And if you're afraid that someone who put in a lot of work comes along bitching, tell him that you appreciate good work, not effort that leads to nothing.


viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4338

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4338&start=50

some other players on this behaviour ^

"lack polish"? What does that even mean? I already handled the issue of detail, and if by "polish" you mean "writing style" feel free to improve, though I think both meet standards of clarity.

"is not appreciated" is also a good thing to say. The fact that you and maybe some other wiki users don't appreciate doesn't mean that basicaly the whole Tavern and most of IRC will appreciate these changes, and they form a larger part of the playerbase than you do. If you want to segregate yourself from the rest of your community and shut out a lot of knowledge that could come from players better than you are and players who know the code, just say. But do consider that it would help your project in every way I can think of.

--Elynae, 29.04.2012 8:19 AM

[rchandra]

cerebovssquire, I think your politeness level is fine, and I believe I'm on the sensitive side when it comes to that.

Also, your Diary of a Crawler pages were quite enjoyable.

[flun]

Only mods can delete articles. I tried to purge the guides from the wiki, but all the editors complained about it. And the new mods undeleted them.

I undeleted the guides that were purged. I actually agree with you and think some of the guides should be deleted. However deleting them without any input from the other editors does not go with the cooperative nature of the wiki.

Who is in charge of moderating the wiki, and how did they end up in charge? Is there likely to be any way to convince them to see reason, or would it ultimately be more viable to start a whole new non-crazy wiki from scratch?

I am a relatively new player (started with 0.9) and started contributing to the wiki at a time when lucy_ferre/Demos was away and there was nobody to take care of the spam issues. Kornel gave me mod-priviledges to take care of these problems. MoogleDan was also given mod-priviledges in order to deal with the spam and has been a constant contributor in the last few months.

I hope that I am open to see reason, and MoogleDan as well. Lucy_ferre/Demos is still a mod and so he still has the same moderating powers that we do. If, you believe that any of us are not reasonable in our positions, it is always possible to appeal to Kornel to reconsider our status as mods.

At the moment, I am not convinced that directly deleting or replacing already established guides is the right thing to do. I see both sides of the argument about replacing the guides. One one side, it is better to keep them short and factual. On the other side, many people enjoy reading a lenghty guide that is full of subjective and likely non-optimal advice. Why can't we have both on the wiki?

For example, cerebovssquire posted his new "The Better MuWz Guide" and I think it is a concise guide with great advice. Why, on the other hand, does the lengthy guide have to be outright deleted as well? Can't they both co-exist? They are two different interpretations on how to play a MuWz. Are we all supposed to play MuWz the same way? I am open to people convincing me that it is better to only have one guide for each character.

[BlackSheep]

You seem to be making the argument about lengthy, colorful guides versus concise, clear guides. Elynae and most of the rest of the folks here are not against length or color in crawl articles. What they're against is bad advice. As was pointed out, there's a Diary of a Crawler section if people want to post in depth descriptions of their runs. However, if you're going to label something as a 'Guide' it should actually guide players toward success.

[KoboldLord]

For example, cerebovssquire posted his new "The Better MuWz Guide" and I think it is a concise guide with great advice. Why, on the other hand, does the lengthy guide have to be outright deleted as well? Can't they both co-exist? They are two different interpretations on how to play a MuWz. Are we all supposed to play MuWz the same way? I am open to people convincing me that it is better to only have one guide for each character.

The old Mummy Wizard guide is a bad guide, full stop. Let's take it in bits:

#1: The guide strongly pushes Kiku as a deity choice for a mummy. Mummy is the worst possible species for a Kiku follower to be, since one of Kiku's two primary draws is the necromancy books. The guide pushes Kiku because mummies get a necromancy bonus, but this does not compensate sufficiently for the drawback of many of Kiku's most valuable spells not working on mummies. The unusable status of many of the spells in Kiku's books is aggravated by not choosing the pain weapon later, since many of Kiku's other prized spells are useful mostly for melee hybrid builds.

#2: The guide strongly pushes choosing the Necronomicon over the pain-branded weapon as the final gift, which is a terrible choice for any Kiku follower who does not find a random pain weapon sitting on the floor. That gift is Kiku's other primary draw because it comes very early in the game, where it is most valuable, and none of the Necronomicon spells will be castable for any character until late game. By the time Haunt is usable, Sif Muna or Vehumet would have already gifted a whole line of summoning spells, providing additional active and passive abilities at the same time that actually provide a benefit.

#3: The guide pushes the player into investing in a wide variety of skills that mummies don't have the aptitudes to support in the early game. Large spans of game pass in which the player is grinding skill for some distant goal without gaining any immediate returns.

#4: The guide gives absolutely no assistance for handling common threats for a mummy character. You grind for the eventual goal of Haunt which you won't be able to actually cast before the hard parts of the game are already done, with common threats like orc priests, centaurs with flaming bows, and poison-resistant Lair monsters basically ignored.

Ultimately we have a guide that, if actually followed by a newbie, would make the game harder for them. While there is a legitimate place for challenge builds, they should not be sitting unlabeled in the character guide section suckering hapless newbies into trying them out.

[Grimm]

One one side, it is better to keep them short and factual. On the other side, many people enjoy reading a lenghty guide that is full of subjective and likely non-optimal advice. Why can't we have both on the wiki?

It's very simple. Have two different classifications:

1) MuWz Strategy Guide (subtitle: Recommendations for Optimal Play)
2) MuWz: One Player's Opinion

[cerebovssquire]

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... edirect=no

Well, discussion with Mr. K isn't going to lead anywhere. However, as I understand it he isn't a mod and his isolative stance isn't something that we have in all or most Chaosforge members. Also, talking with him is fun so I think I will continue this debate.

@flun: I appreciate that some people will enjoy reading lengthy, colourful stuff (though I don't really understand why they don't read books in that case, but each to his own...). However, I do think that Diary of a Crawler is a much better place for this than guides, don't you agree?

[Blade]

By the way:

In response to Elynae's statement, Mr. K basically said "screw you this isn't how things are done." He brought things down to the level of personal insults, pulling the "Is English your first language?" card. In general, he acted like an entitled jerk who's used to one way of doing things and doesn't want change.

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I see this, it does not make me want to contribute to the wiki. It does not make me want to help maintain standards. It does not make me think "oh, I should go write guides that aren't terrible and can actually help people win."

Instead, it makes me think, "An excellent crawl player tried to help bring the low standards of a terrible wiki up and was CRITICIZED FOR IT. This passes beyond pathetic and becomes morbidly humorous."

Frankly, I don't want to see the wiki improved at this point. It seems like a system of mediocrity is in place, and it's not worth the effort needed to change that. I don't know what the best system is, but this...this is not it.

Badwiki indeed.

[njvack]

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I see this, it does not make me want to contribute to the wiki. It does not make me want to help maintain standards. It does not make me think "oh, I should go write guides that aren't terrible and can actually help people win."

Instead, it makes me think, "An excellent crawl player tried to help bring the low standards of a terrible wiki up and was CRITICIZED FOR IT. This passes beyond pathetic and becomes morbidly humorous."

It makes me think "who the hell is moderating the wiki and why do they allow this level of bullshit?" The old MuWz guide steered me wrong for months, and the fact that posting a better guide gets smacked down makes me seethe a little. Sigh.

Do the wiki's mods & frequent editors frequent the Tavern? IRC?

[KoboldLord]

If you want some actual constructive criticism, cerebovssquire, I've got two things for your DsFE guide:

#1: There isn't really any reason for this to be a DsFE guide, rather than just a FE guide. The advice is perfectly serviceable for half orcs or humans or high elves, with at most a slight tilt towards developing melee or towards hammering 4mp Fireballs depending on which way the aptitude lies. You don't want a guide that is too broad to be useful, but the costs involved here for applying the same guide to other species are pretty minimal and the benefits for newbies pretty significant, since otherwise they might end up looking in one of the terrible guides.

#2: It's probably worth another paragraph at the beginning, before getting Sticky Flame, to cover that section of the game. Sticky Flame is the big obvious goal early on, but new players are likely to struggle before they can get that far. The utility of Conjure Flame is a big point of interest for them, as is the subtle difference between Flame Tongue and Throw Flame.

[cerebovssquire]

@KoboldLord: Both of these points seem pretty reasonable. The DsFE thing is a largely unedited post of mine on here so it is pretty rough, but I'll go and edit them in now. Thanks for the help.

It makes me think "who the hell is moderating the wiki and why do they allow this level of bullshit?" The old MuWz guide steered me wrong for months, and the fact that posting a better guide gets smacked down makes me seethe a little. Sigh.

Well, flun has already approved of the new MuWz guide. Mr. K is the more conservative one here and he's not a moderator even though he sounds a bit like one.

[cerebovssquire]

OK, done. http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... list_guide
I generalised some Ds apt-specific information further but I still find the guide has utility. Feel free to give feedback.

If the guide gets much longer I will start worrying about objectivity... but I think it is still decently sized right now.

The DsFE guide still exists - if this guide is criticised convincingly I can just put the old link back in the lists.

(Sorry for doubleposting - I just don't want my updates here to be overlooked. If it is a big problem tell me. I'll try to reduce it.)

[XuaXua]

The DsFE guide still exists - if this guide is criticised convincingly I can just put the old link back in the lists.

If there are many parallels, why not create a race-specific section where you detail optimizations for Demonspawn?

[cerebovssquire]

The DsFE guide still exists - if this guide is criticised convincingly I can just put the old link back in the lists.

If there are many parallels, why not create a race-specific section where you detail optimizations for Demonspawn?

Because Ds strategy is so similar to Hu strategy or HO strategy that it isn't worth specifying without going into unneccesary detail. I want to keep largely unimportant clutter out of my guides (the DEFE guide is an example of a mediocre FE guide, for instance).

[mikee]

For example, cerebovssquire posted his new "The Better MuWz Guide" and I think it is a concise guide with great advice. Why, on the other hand, does the lengthy guide have to be outright deleted as well? Can't they both co-exist? They are two different interpretations on how to play a MuWz. Are we all supposed to play MuWz the same way? I am open to people convincing me that it is better to only have one guide for each character.

Well, the guides that are obviously bad should just be removed, despite the feelings that may be temporarily hurt by this. Contributors to the wiki should have some concern for its image...

I do most of my discussion on IRC (I think you may know me from there), and most of us consider the wiki to be a joke. The guides are the biggest reason for this. So it's probably difficult for the wiki to attract players who are both knowledgeable and cooperative.

There is definitely not only one way to play any given combo, which is why I don't believe there should be character guides at all - or if there are, that they should be as concise and open-minded as possible. Maybe there should only be guides for certain strategies - how to use summons, how to use unarmed combat, what to do against an ogre, etc.

[cerebovssquire]

For example, cerebovssquire posted his new "The Better MuWz Guide" and I think it is a concise guide with great advice. Why, on the other hand, does the lengthy guide have to be outright deleted as well? Can't they both co-exist? They are two different interpretations on how to play a MuWz. Are we all supposed to play MuWz the same way? I am open to people convincing me that it is better to only have one guide for each character.

Well, the guides that are obviously bad should just be removed, despite the feelings that may be temporarily hurt by this. Contributors to the wiki should have some concern for its image...

I do most of my discussion on IRC (I think you may know me from there), and most of us consider the wiki to be a joke. The guides are the biggest reason for this. So it's probably difficult for the wiki to attract players who are both knowledgeable and cooperative.

There is definitely not only one way to play any given combo, which is why I don't believe there should be character guides at all - or if there are, that they should be as concise and open-minded as possible. Maybe there should only be guides for certain strategies - how to use summons, how to use unarmed combat, what to do against an ogre, etc.

Well, no guide implied that it is the only way. One says "this is a good way to play MuWz" (and that isn't exactly obvious because it is a playing style one would attribute to MuSu and not to MuWz, as a newbie) and another says "this is a good way to play FE" - they give people who don't know much about a combo an idea what they could do to be successful with it. The moment a guide claims "THIS IS THE ONLY WAY" it isn't a bad guide but "THIS IS THE ONLY WAY" should be edited out of course.
Though I am not opposed to writing Summonings, UC etc. guides as opposed to character guides, their respective pages do or should explain this already. For instance, I see no reason for the Summonings page not to say something about "tw" if it doesn't currently.

Anyway, my project for the day is replacing the "difficulty bar" with a short text for each race that states advantages and disadvantages of it - that is a lot more objective.

[cerebovssquire]

(non-diary related and important stuff below the _____________)
I'm keeping a diary! The Diary of a Crawler section is particularily "entertaining" (hilariously bad) so I thought I'd maybe contribute in a way that can be taken more seriously. I also don't like the way that all successful diaries are with pretty standard builds, so I decided to try something a bit more unconventional when I rolled MuWr on hyperelynae:
Elynae's Mummy Warper

Samples:
"The troll Purgy! I have good AC and a venom weapon, and a scroll of blinking should things go badly, so I confront him and he dies without much difficulty. 2 levels gained! Grinder! Mummies are immune to his Pain spell and his pain-branded claws so I just whip at him. He quaffs a healing potion but eventually dies. Level 6!"

"A cap of spirit shield for 90 gold. Since I don't actually use my MP for anything other than buffing pre-combat, I buy and wear it. Also, a ring of regeneration for 540 gold. Very useful for mummies in particular - no access to potion healing or Regeneration, no hunger costs. The rest of the level is a heap of dead slime creatures and yaks, Maurice's body parts and beetle legs once I am done with it. "

"A centaur warrior and Jozef with a holy wrath battleaxe would have been a challenge for a normal mummy, but +8 plate armour, +8 katana, Heroism and Finesse remove their "threat" status and intestines quite effectively."

"Okawaru gifts the +6,+5 double sword of Wunaeb {god gift, drain, -TELE +Rage rElec rC+ Stlth++}. Not half bad, not half as good as the autumn katana. However, -TELE can come in handy (for walking over teleport traps) and rElec too, so I keep it as a swap. An orc high priest surrounds me with summons. I foolishy try to kill him and foolishly don't swap in cTele as I teleport, resulting in me being surrounded by orcs at 19 HP. I read ?fear, sending them running, and controlled teleport back to the stairs. Note to self: you're not quite invulnerable. I swap in the ring of fire for rF++ to kill Harold. The old joker Okawaru grants me, in infinite benevolence, the -7 pair of boots of Jeshisk {god gift, Str-2 Dex+5}."

As you can see I don't really like an in-character style. It also contains some tips and hints but is more or less just a log of a heavy-armour mummy of Okawaru.

________________________

In regards to my "race description" project: it's going pretty well. I hope I can finish it tonight or tomorrow but I have some revision to do for an exam on Friday, which is obviously the moment's priority. Feedback especially concerning objectivity welcomed. I have about 15 races to go.

Some samples:

Human
Humans are defined by their lack of special aptitudes or perks that speak for or against them. However, it should be noted that the high rate they gain experience levels at will have noticable and positive effects on their HP on early dungeon levels, before it becomes less important later.

Vampire
The Vampire's food clock removes the usual tactical implications - even at Bloodless, you can cast any spell or invoke any god ability. This gives Vampire high-hunger casters a certain edge over other races' high-hunger casters. However, it adds other restrictions: you cannot berserk or transmute below Full, which is annoying for some Vampire character types.
Bat Form is highly useful, and allows you to escape even most monsters faster than a Vampire in normal form. It is also very handy for escaping the Abyss.
Their numerous perks are useful but not game-changing, usually - immunity to curare and Mephitic Cloud, sInv, undead resistances at low hunger and their vampiric auxiliary attack are situationally helpful but do not consistently affect most characters' strength.
They have rather low HP.
The fact that they do not regenerate at Bloodless makes playing the extended endgame without Makhleb or Kikubaaqudgha more difficult.


tl;dr: diary in link, race descriptions coming soon

[cerebovssquire]

Sorry guys for being a horrible spammer, but, important update:

1) I have continued my attempts to improve the general quality of the Character Guides section with a Sludge Elf/Merfolk Transmuter guide! It's only 30 minutes' work and accordingly may have some problems. Feel free to give feedback!
2) The diary is coming towards its end - it features a successful Tomb of Ancients raid beginning at XL 21 now, and I only have to get 2 runes and the Orb! If you want me to all-rune or do some zig levels with the Sceptre of Torment, please tell me. I'm easy.

[KoboldLord]

Anyway, my project for the day is replacing the "difficulty bar" with a short text for each race that states advantages and disadvantages of it - that is a lot more objective.

This seems like a good idea to me. Honestly, assuming you're confining yourself to recommended combos there isn't all that much of a gap between the easiest and the hardest species anyway, so reducing the question to a five-word scale ends up being fairly misleading to a person who doesn't know the context, who are exactly the sort of people who are most likely to want to know in the first place. It gets worse when several quirky species are hard for beginners to properly utilize, but very powerful in the hands of a skilled player.

Human
Humans are defined by their lack of special aptitudes or perks that speak for or against them. However, it should be noted that the high rate they gain experience levels at will have noticable and positive effects on their HP on early dungeon levels, before it becomes less important later.

One overlooked advantage for humans is adaptability. They have no exceptionally good aptitudes that push them toward particular starting backgrounds, but on the other hand the fact that they have no bad aptitudes means that they can safely choose a starting background based on any criteria they like, and still reasonably expect to find some early equipment or spellbooks that they can develop for the raw power to continue exploring the dungeon. Unlike most other species, they will never find loot that requires them to develop their worst aptitude in order to be of use.

I don't think I have any useful comments for vampires or the transmuter guide.

[Rast]

The old mummy wizard guide was terrible, and very obviously so even to a casual player.

Not obviously enough. When I was noob -- er, when I was even more of a noob than I am now-- I splatted over 50 mummy wizards thanks to that guide.

[sir_laser]

The old mummy wizard guide was terrible, and very obviously so even to a casual player.

Not obviously enough. When I was noob -- er, when I was even more of a noob than I am now-- I splatted over 50 mummy wizards thanks to that guide.

I second that motion. Same here.

[tasonir]

Apparently 0 skill is the best way to go!

I fixed a bug in trunk where skill 0 damage was boosted by distraction stabbing bonus. But it's not enough to do 472 damage! Anyway the fight simulator has been mostly rewritten in trunk so you should really switch to it if you want to play with fsim.

Actually that seems like it could have been sort of reasonable. it was a let's play with wizmode character - he had all skills to 27...including stabbing, fighting...472 damage? Could work. I'll certainly use trunk fsim before doing any other testing, although I'm not sure if I'll get around to doing such testing for a while. For now, let's call that solved.

[tasonir]

So I've caught up on the thread, it seems to have massively exploded since I last checked I try to avoid drama. I see there has been a caveat section added to the long mummy wiz guide, which is probably good. I'd be for amending it, or replacing it, not because of length (my naga melee guide is Looooooooooooooong) but because of bad info (suggesting kiku, etc).

I think it's useful for newbies to have relevant general info included in the guide. For example, suggested spell lists/light vs heavy armor suggestions. These could be found on other pages (all spell pages, the various armor tables) but it's good for newbies to have it discussed in the guide. If you want to leave it out of your very short guide, that's fine, but I like it in mine. It does make updating hard, but I have updated my guide a lot, and should I eventually get hit by a bus, feel free to tag it version 0.12 or whenever I finally die. I'll be around for a while though

That said, I have some feedback for CS's better MuWz guide I'd like to throw in here just as an example of how a newbie might read it. The exact version I read is http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... ldid=34996 which may have changed by whenever you read this. Yes, you, dear reader, not all those other fools

Inconsistent use of bulleting. This is a minor problem which I wouldn't really mention except for there's a part where you say "repeat 3)" and I'm frankly not sure which step is 3. In that second block of bullets, it is in step 3 itself that it says to repeat step 3...I suppose you should keep repeating getting sif gifts, but there isn't much way to stop them unless you go pure melee Similiarly, I'm not sure what "the last 4 tips" are, the second area of bullets has 6 bullets, of which the last one is "how have you not won the game yet?" which could be a bit insulting to all those who haven't won yet

A large part of beating the game is memorizing the extent to which a specific monster is dangerous. Once you accurately know everything all that mobs can do, winning is much easier. So if you have a good knowledge of mobs from your first 15 rune win, then another 15 rune win is easier. But this is a major stumbling block for new players and saying "haven't you won yet" is overlooking that people might not realize ettins can attack twice a turn and with enough damage to splat casters in two turns, or even one in some extreme cases.

"Do never spam summons in corridors" should be "do not spam summons in corridors" or try to avoid fights in corridors, etc.

if you'd like me to, I'd be glad to edit all of these corrections in, I just wanted to run them by you. I'm not a mod on the wiki, just a crusader of updated documentation

[tasonir]

Also I forgot on the topic of "this guide written by a badass" notices, I (obviously) like the solution I came up with: Link to your morgue files of winning with the build. Preferably 2-3 of them. This takes a long time, but hey if you're writing a guide about a combo, you clearly have played it, right? Hopefully twice? You don't have to link to only yours - I'd love to have morgue files of other people doing melee nagas included in my guide. If you do include only yours, or several of yours, it's also a nice subtle way to claim authorship of the guide without being too obvious about it

I don't think I suggest any sub-optimal info in my guide to the degree of the mummy wiz of kiku guide. I realize a fair amount of people will say recommending chei is, but if you wanted to I could rename the guide to Naga Melee of Chei and circumvent the problem by definition

[cerebovssquire]

From glancing over it, your guide has more problems than just suggesting Chei as a god for a melee naga and an extreme case of grandiloquence along the lines of "extremly powerful fighters", "durable fighters with incredible damage output", etc. I don't have much time for anything tonight because History tomorrow and Maths on Friday, but if I have the time on Saturday I'll have a closer look and give some more detailled feedback.

I find it a lot more helpful to not lose myself in a wall of text. Your suggestions for reformatting mostly make sense to me and therefore I changed the formatting slightly (it is also consistent with my other two guides now) and made everything clear. What my guide style, in my opinion, does better than many others is a step-by-step formatting. Compare:

1) This is your strategy in combat progressing from early game to lategame.
2) These are good items " " ".
3) These are good spells " " ".
4) These are good skills " " ".

to

1) Early on, this is your strategy, these are good items, these are good spells, these are good skills.
2) Once you reach the Temple, " " ".
3) After your god starts gifting, " " ".

- the second style is much easier to follow by just reading it as you go along. You don't need to jump about. This is one of my major problems with many guides that have seperate Items! Skills! Gods! etc. sections.

I don't see how anyone could interpret "how have you not won yet" as remotely insulting. "New player" does not mean "ignorant of slightly humourous comments".
My guide has a spell list: strong summons, Haste, Demonic Horde. I guess you want low-level charms but these are pretty obvious. I want to keep this lightweight. The guide tells you not to stand next to anyone if possible. Enclosing a list of monsters dangerous to MuWz would turn the guide into a horrible wall of text, and which monsters are dangerous to which MuWz is very variable anyway.

[KoboldLord]

Not obviously enough. When I was noob -- er, when I was even more of a noob than I am now-- I splatted over 50 mummy wizards thanks to that guide.

I second that motion. Same here.

Does the explanation I posted help? I'll try to elaborate if there's any part that needs it.

I think it's useful for newbies to have relevant general info included in the guide. For example, suggested spell lists/light vs heavy armor suggestions. These could be found on other pages (all spell pages, the various armor tables) but it's good for newbies to have it discussed in the guide.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. For a beginner who is reading a character guide, clarity is vitally important. A beginner cannot be presumed to understand what parts of your guide are always going to be important, and what parts are only going to be important in certain circumstances or based on previous choices or lucky drops. If you don't yet have any criteria to judge what's important, everything looks important, so you start memorizing that big old wall o' text and start gearing up your naga for Statue Form when you're actually still on D3 looking for the Temple. Because there's a whole lot of text on Statue Form, and poison spit only got a single mention as a way to 'waste turns' while things approach to melee range instead of extensive emphasis as one of your essential early-game survival abilities.

Ultimately, the stuff that's most important to know comes in these categories:

#1: How does this combo manage the early game? The early game is deadly, and you have predictable resources that you can plan for. You aren't guaranteed most things, but you are guaranteed your starting equipment and your choice of deity.
#2: How does this combo differ from other, similar combos? A melee Chei-worshipper can't run away, but what strategic and tactical impact does this actually have, and how do you compensate for those disadvantages? What advantages are most important to use for leverage?
#3: What broad goals should guide the combo's development, and what sort of backup plan works in case the RNG is not kind? Suppose the RNG sees fit to deny you any source of Blink or Controlled Blink, for instance. Or suppose you never see a transmutations-oriented book for the rest of the game.

Generally speaking, extra detail is wasted. Roguelike play tends not to follow a pre-existing plan too closely.

Also I forgot on the topic of "this guide written by a badass" notices, I (obviously) like the solution I came up with: Link to your morgue files of winning with the build. Preferably 2-3 of them. This takes a long time, but hey if you're writing a guide about a combo, you clearly have played it, right? Hopefully twice? You don't have to link to only yours - I'd love to have morgue files of other people doing melee nagas included in my guide. If you do include only yours, or several of yours, it's also a nice subtle way to claim authorship of the guide without being too obvious about it

Unfortunately, I don't think that would do much good, on account of confirmation bias. If you throw enough splats at the wall, eventually you're going to pull off a win or two just by dumb luck. A sufficiently persistent player will eventually rack up a couple wins with their Felid Chaos Knight that remains loyal to Xom no matter what, but that doesn't change the fact that felids are terrible and Xom is terrible and they aren't any better when you put them together.

I don't think I suggest any sub-optimal info in my guide to the degree of the mummy wiz of kiku guide. I realize a fair amount of people will say recommending chei is, but if you wanted to I could rename the guide to Naga Melee of Chei and circumvent the problem by definition

Chei is indeed kind of terrible, but she's a legitimate part of the game so I don't see any problem having a guide for characters following her. She seems to actually be pretty popular, too, for some reason or other. I do think it's probably a good idea to make the theme of the guide clear in the title, though, as you mentioned. Certainly there's no drawback to making clear from the start that you only talk about Chei and never talk about anybody else.

1) Early on, this is your strategy, these are good items, these are good spells, these are good skills.
2) Once you reach the Temple, " " ".
3) After your god starts gifting, " " ".

Fully agreed. This is an ideal guide format, because a beginner who needs a guide like this is probably going to follow along with the guide while playing. The intended user can easily keep their place in the guide while playing naturally, and every time they need to come back to the guide it naturally flows from where they left off. They never have to comb through a 17kb wall of text to find the one sentence that matters to the situation at hand.

[tasonir]

1) This is your strategy in combat progressing from early game to lategame.
2) These are good items " " ".
3) These are good spells " " ".
4) These are good skills " " ".

to

1) Early on, this is your strategy, these are good items, these are good spells, these are good skills.
2) Once you reach the Temple, " " ".
3) After your god starts gifting, " " ".

I tend to go to a guide with a question (if it isn't my first time reading it): Which armor is better, what spell should I learn, what branch should I do next. Having those in sections just makes more logical sense to me. I suppose it's just a different way of thinking about the game.

[tasonir]

In an attempt to bring the thread somewhat back towards the wiki, the now much better formatted better MuWz guide is very clear, and an excellent guide

I have updated the link from the bottom of the merfolk page to no longer say crusader (it was already redirected to the skald guide), and I added a brief entry for merfolks on the skald guide. Someone with more merfolk experience should probably write a bit more about them, they make excellent skalds! The spell table listed there was based off a merfolk skald, and yet they weren't mentioned as a core race...I found that funny

[galehar]

Repost because this was moved to the chei thread when I split them.

I'll make a point of emphasizing early poison spit more - it is useful early on but by the mid-late game the damage is really fairly negligible against anything dangerous.

I think the guides should be detailled for the early game and progressively less so for the later parts. Especially if it's focused on a certain background. But even when not, it must not give too specific advices about how to tackle late-game. General guidelines about skills and spells are good, but a focus on one spell is problematic. What if the player don't find it?

[Grildrak]

Was thinking of giving some help with updating the wiki by fixing the staff of fire's page claiming it to be a quarterstaff but cant figure out how you create an account :S
After messing around I get to a page saying:

"Permissions Errors

You do not have permission to create this user account, for the following reason:
The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators."

[Wark]

After messing around I get to a page saying:

"Permissions Errors

You do not have permission to create this user account, for the following reason:
The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators."

Wiki's main page has the following announcement, which probably explains the cause of your problem:

Automatic account registration has been closed temporarily due to spam issues. We still are open to, and appreciate, new contributors. If you would like to register to contribute, please send us an email with your preferred username.

[hermbot]

Hey guys, just a heads up to let you know that it actually happens: I am a hapless noob that took everything I read in the wiki as gospel. I have no way of knowing any better. In particular, I've tried following the aforementioned Mummy Wizard guide. Now I don't know what to believe.

[KoboldLord]

Hey guys, just a heads up to let you know that it actually happens: I am a hapless noob that took everything I read in the wiki as gospel. I have no way of knowing any better. In particular, I've tried following the aforementioned Mummy Wizard guide. Now I don't know what to believe.

I'm sorry to say that the wiki will definitely take some time to sort out, even if it keeps moving in the right direction. Feel free to ask questions here in the Tavern, and we'll do our best to answer them properly. If there's a reasonable level of disagreement on the subject, that should become clear enough after a few posts.

[Blade]

If there's a reasonable level of disagreement, there are several people you should trust above others. You can almost always trust the advice of mikee, KoboldLord, cerebovssquire, and crate (these are just the ones off the top of my head); a few others also generally know what they're talking about.

[crate]

You should probably try to figure out why people suggest what they suggest and make a decision on your own.

[tasonir]

There's still improvements to be made to the wiki! So...yes, I editted the naga guide again, but I think people will like these changes:

It's now 2kb shorter! I also moved up the benefits of cheibriados section to nearly the top and included a warning there about the loss of haste and many players considering cheibriados to be a weak deity. I might reduce the size a bit further later on, but I do generally want to have details in there and won't be as short as CS's guides. Added poison spit to the list of pro's.

I'm sure that people will still be entirely disappointed in the guide but I think it's a reasonable compromise

[rebthor]

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=The_Better_MuWz_Guide

(it's better)

Best guide on the site Elynae. I'd just emphasize the tedium more and give one caveat about going down stairs that your meatshield summons will be displaced by anything next to the stairs already which means that stair dancing can get you killed easily.

I also edited your Tm guide to add a small bit of lair strategy. It didn't seem significant enough to move to its own section, but I felt it was useful to add that Ice Form is very useful in Lair and that Blade Hands shouldn't be used against Hydrae.

[Grimm]

The guide says "Repeat step 3)" but the steps are not numbered.

[ddubois]

The guide says "Repeat step 3)" but the steps are not numbered.

Same thing with the FE guide. Dude needs an editor.

[rosstin]

Deleting bad guides is vindictive, but the disclaimers for iffy guides are a great idea and work well.

I also want to add that I love the wiki. I find it useful and fun to use. It's a great reference. It might not always have perfect information, but I refer to it far more often than I refer to the knowledge bots. We should make an effort to update it. Rather than complaining about it, the forumites should all become admins and correct the bad information. Making new guides is a great step.

[wolloloo]

Wikis with access control don't work.

Relying on infromation from the Wiki has killed my characters so often ...

For example this advice

Berserk, which will haste you and add 50% temporary HP... but when it runs out, you will be slowed instead, and you won't be able to berserk again for a while! It can be used either to kill the monsters or run away. To run away or if you are not sure about the outcome, only use when near stairs.

(Never managed to escape by going berserk, but killed a number of characters trying.)

or this

Don't explore without having swiftness on at all times, if you have the MP for it.

(Found out that swiftness nowadays halves your Stealth and T&D only after blundering into three Zot traps in Zot.)

or this

If it is a statue or Roxanne, leave it be and return to kill it once you have cleared the level, assuming you have the tools to do so (a wand of disintegration works great against statues).

(The link to the article about Roxanne even says she's immune to disintegration while actually both bits of "information" are wrong. She's neither immune nor especially vulnerable. (Use the source, Luke!))

[mikee]

Deleting bad guides is vindictive, but the disclaimers for iffy guides are a great idea and work well.

I also want to add that I love the wiki. I find it useful and fun to use. It's a great reference. It might not always have perfect information, but I refer to it far more often than I refer to the knowledge bots. We should make an effort to update it. Rather than complaining about it, the forumites should all become admins and correct the bad information. Making new guides is a great step.

It's not just that the information is not perfect - that is not the problem. The real problem is that there is a reigning philosophy on the wiki that giving bad or questionable advice is better than giving no advice. I cannot agree with this. At least with no advice, a player can discover for himself.

A result is that people end up developing a lot of bad habits and unnecessary concern about mechanics like str/dex weighting of weapons or the popular off-hand punch. Many times I have read a help request from someone who states he has been using information from the wiki, and when he explains the choices he has made in his game and his reasoning for it, I don't know what to say. I want to help such a person, but the first thing I need to do is make him unlearn all the crap that the wiki taught him (and this can be more difficult than it sounds). In contrast, someone who has not read any advice at all, good nor bad, is extremely easy for me to help. I can start at the beginning and introduce him to basic mechanics, help him set some goals to meet within his game, and encourage good habits. If we could all just err on the side of caution and try not to tell people things we cannot confirm to be true, we wouldn't have problems like what is going on on the wiki.

Also: the main advantage of the wiki over the learndb is not the quality of its information. This will never be the case, simply because the learndb has dozens of times more contributors and real-time oversight (i.e., it is not possible to add to the learndb without a large number of people seeing the addition the moment you are making it). The wiki's advantage is its format, which makes it more likely to find something that you were not originally looking for. You might find that some entries in the learndb are shorter than you think they should be, but try to imagine how much ambiguous information was deliberately left out and would not have been left out in the wiki.