GuildWiki talk:Suggestions/skills history

When you click the "[edit skill details]" button above the skillbox (the box on the right with the icon and such), you will go to a different page (Template: ). From there, you can click te "History" tab. If you then click a date, you will see how the skill functioned on that day. That is, imo, enough of a history.

Also, Shockwave was nerfed because it was overpowered in PvP. --- -- (s)talkpage  09:23, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

This can be done retroactively, i.e. you can NOW archive the talk up the update dates.
 * Yes, the difficulty is in that you can't recreate the skill page as it was at the time because the old version of the page use the new version of the template.
 * My suggestions for reducing confusion on skill talkpages:
 * archive the skill talk whenever a major update appears (see Archiving help)
 * Placing at relevant points in the talk (first time at the top) and using  to indicate where talk about the current version starts.
 * Of course, if "lazy" is too lazy to register, he/she is possibly too lazy to do one of these - so there's just the off-chance that somebody else cares. --◄mendel► 10:44, 12 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I like this idea not necessarily because it would be useful, but because it is interesting to read and provides some insight to why such-and-such nerf or buff happened. Would go well with a history of the metagame (cheers for impossible project). [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 22:50, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I LOVE this idea. I am always interested in reading about how stuff has changed. I am always adding that kind of info to various pages when I can and was thinking of adding a project for doing stuff for all the recently changed skills. While we do document only the current game technically, this sort of information is awalys facinating. The downside of such a project is that it can be very time consuming. The upside is that most of the info we need on teh project is already available in the update notes and edit histories of teh pages so ppl can do it from work when they are avoiding work. &mdash;♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥ 04:33, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I like this idea, but I don't think it's worth doing unless it was a big update, like gaining/losing spell range or functionality changes. Nobody really cares if damage went from 45-125 to 35-105, or if recharge was increased from 4 to 8 seconds or something. The problem is that this opens up debate does losing 30s recharge qualify as large enough, etc... ideas? --Shadowcrest  20:45, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * What's wrong with including all changes to a skill? Most haven't been changed much, so I don't see the problem.  Just use a little "Skill history" section, with a list like:


 * - recharge reduced from 8 to 4 seconds.
 * - damage increased to 42...47, only interrupts if target is Dazed and Confused
 * - functionality changed to: "For each enchantment on you, a large anvil is dropped on a random nearby foe (the same foe cannot be hit by more than one anvil)."
 * &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 21:09, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Nothing is "wrong" with listing all of them. It will just take ages to do them all. Even with just looking for big changes, this is going to take forever. If we list all the changes, then it will take even longer. Not to mention unless you're writing the changes down or something, you're going to me making a bunch of changes to the same article. --Shadowcrest 21:13, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh, I see what you were getting at now. Still, it seems like it would be nearly as much work to go through the game updates and pick out the "major" skill changes as it would be to get all of them, so I'd say go ahead and document everything.
 * And yes, we'd have to use the game updates rather than individual skill histories, for a couple reasons - 1) Sometimes changes aren't propogated to the skill template for a day or two, so you couldn't know exactly what day it was changed; 2) Not all changes are made "cleanly" to the template in a single edit, so it might be confusing to pick out what actually changed; 3) Non-update edits to the template (vandalism or edits to the extra "skill box *" parameters) will make it difficult to actually find the updates in the first place, as not everyone notes the game update in the edit summary. &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 21:45, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

(Reset indent) I can't wait to get a current pages dump agan and soem time on my hands. It's going to be simple to grope through the game game updates and pick out all links to skills, and then build a list of affected skills with a list of game updates for each of those. One could even extract the paragraph that the skill link was in. --◄mendel► 22:30, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

use "what links here"
The Whatlinkshere page can be used to find game updates that affected a particular skill. You limit the result set to the main namespace and look for game update pages (and hope all of these updates have been properly linked). Is there a reason to get more convenient and/or detailed than that, and will it involve more work than checking that all updates are properly linked? --◄mendel► 18:24, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

old skill versions
You can view the old ones, just check the template history of the skill. Silver Sunlight 11:33, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Not all of the changes in the template histories are for function. Anyway, I was hoping to discuss this with Suggestions/skills history, where your suggestion has already been made and discussed. --◄mendel► 12:28, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Independent development of same idea
lol, hi. It seems I basically was thinking along the same lines after a discussion on Sun and Moon Slash's talk page, but didn't realize the Suggestions area existed yet. Anyway, I'm moving my idea from there to here since this seems like the appropriate location for it and any further discussion pertaining to it: -- AudreyChandler 20:58, 4 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the long delay, busy etc. Anyway I've been thinking about this and I have to agree, people coming to the Wiki just to look up skill info probably don't need to learn about what it used to do since that's trivia (although we do have Trivia... lol). On the other hand there are strange individuals who find the lifespan and development of skills very interesting, or just useful to know when its past forms come up in discussions. So I believe there's value to cataloguing a skill's history somehow, but also agree that it may just form needless clutter on the skill's main page. Two ideas spring to mind:
 * Create a "History" section header to go along with "Trivia", "Notes", "Related skills", "Related articles". This way anyone curious can scan through a skill's lifespan but anyone who doesn't care finds it safely segregated away in its own clearly-labelled area. This has the downside of possibly producing extensive clutter for certain heavily-modified skills.
 * Create a set of pages devoted to concisely listing every skill along with a summary of each update made to it and the date it was done. This could have a simple picture of the skill, and its current description/stats (very cursory), and then next to it a list of changes from inception to present for reference. Then, add a "History" link to the skill box template. This has the advantage of keeping it thoroughly relegated to its own little world, but the downside of making it harder for people just browsing through to see the history.


 * I'd be happy to perform the actual cataloguing (...over the course of a year) if either of these ideas sound workable. Let me know. And feel free to move this discussion to a more appropriate page, if there is one. oO -- AudreyChandler 19:23, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, well golly -- here seems like a dandy place for it. What's the process to move a discussion? -- AudreyChandler 20:40, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Just cut/paste and use Template:moved. [[Image:Felix_Omni_Signature.png]] 20:43, 4 April 2009 (UTC)