GuildWiki talk:Suggestions/Named Skills History

A wastrel, to my knowledge is someone who does nothing, so the wastrel skills punish you for not using skills. Lord of all tyria 16:21, 30 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Correct. There used to be trivia notes of that on WWorry's page, iirc. --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG|Ohaider!]] -- (contribs) &emsp;(talk)  17:20, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

My 2 Cents
Not sure what you mean by "named", but I hope this helps.--El_Nazgir 18:18, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Jaizhenju Strike most likely comes from Jaizhanju (but one of them has a spelling mistake, and I seem to recall something similar happening to something else, but I can't remember where.
 * A Dolyak is a type of creature, and if Angorodon's Gaze is put in so should this (Angorodons are a type of dinosaur here).
 * Similarly, Ntouka are beasts too.

Also, back on Wastrel; we shouldn't make up some backstory or something, if that's what you're pointing at. --- -- (contribs)  &emsp;(talk)  18:41, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Alkar
 * "a religious hermit living alone, often in the desert. " <-- Eremite (or)
 * "Any of various slender, narrow-winged hawks of the genus Circus, such as the marsh hawk, that prey on small animals." <-- Harrier (or)

Move
The page is nice, maybe we can put it in mainspace? It could be categorized as Lore and Lists? -- ◄mendel► 20:26, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Mainspace when it's useless? Most of it is waffle, some of it is plain wrong, and it's written like crap (first person POV). All that aside, I have to mirror entropy's thoughts below. Balthazar's Aura is named after the god Balthazar? Holy shit, good thing this list points that out. I wouldn't have seen that one at all :/
 * And the notes about wastrel skills make me cry. It's just a word. It isn't a specific person, no matter how much the writer wants it to be, yet the writer ignores that it's just another word throughout pretty much the entire thing (even at the bottom, "I mean, who was "Wastrel"? And why did they 'worry', 'collapse' and have there 'demise' made into skills?" is just absolute lunacy). It needs a complete rewrite to be not first-person POV and more importantly not insane. If I trimmed the wrong notes and the useless notes, this page would be about a third its current length. - Auron 02:13, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The last time I overhauled an article the original writer got angry at me. Screw feelings.--Łô√ë [[Image:Gigathrash_sig_G.jpg|Roar.]]îğá†ħŕášħ  02:51, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

One fundamental flaw
GuildWiki is not a place for fanfiction. It goes counter to our mission of documenting the game if we are going to make up fictitious lore just for the purpose of making trivia interesting. Trivia* is never about "made-up backstory"; it's all verifiable in-game, from a dictionary, or from the ANet staff.

It seems pretty obvious to me that "Balthazar's Aura is named after Balthazar". I don't think something like that should be noted. The line gets a bit fuzzier for skills like Angorodon's Gaze, named after the Angorodon, or Jaizhenju Strike, named after Jaizhanju. Depending on what campaigns you have, you may not be familiar with those creatures/persons in-game. But even if you have those campaigns, who bothers to read the lore? And when it comes to skills that use uncommon words like Wastrel's Worry (see a dictionary for definition), that is entirely subjective. Some people may be familiar with the word, others not.

But regardless of that, one must also consider that we are not Wikipedia, nor a dictionary, nor Google. We are a Guild Wars fansite, and our content is about Guild Wars and Guild Wars-related things. Is it really our place to define words for people, such as "wastrel", or "harrier" (which, by the way, refers to a specific kind of bird)? I don't think so, and the community has in the past shown repeatedly that they don't support having that kind of trivia on the page. I think that consensus still stands.

* Footnote: There probably is still some bad trivia out there, somewhere, but most of it has been purged by now; it's the exception, not the rule.

(T/C) 21:27, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

"I guess it is up to us, the community, to decide what skills were developed by important/legendary figures in the GW Universe and fill in the blanks as necessary."

There are no blanks to fill in...


 * 1) Wastrel - see a dictionary.
 * 2) Almost all item spells - named after people that we will never know, because there is no information anywhere about them, and ANet has not provided any. People that we do know about include Lady Glaive, Kaolai, Sogolon the Protector, and Saidra.
 * 3) Bonetti - see Bonetti for explanation of this trivia.
 * 4) Eremite - see a dictionary.
 * 5) Harrier - see a dictionary or Wikipedia.
 * 6) Alkar, Jamei, Karei, Kitah, Zojun, Angorodon, Kirin, Heket, Deldrimor - see relevant article.

Have any more?

(T/C) 21:45, 30 March 2009 (UTC)


 * GuildWiki does have Fanfiction, in user space. Character backstories, made-up skills, all that is fiction, and its proper place is user space.
 * "Who reads it?" is a spurious argument; the OP finds it interesting, and I could counter "Who reads our lore, anyway?" and delete a whole bunch of articles. If it's in-game, we document it, and to see at a glance which skills are named after documented persons and which are not is valuable in my eyes, at least for some, and those who like to really roleplay this MMOroleplayingG. -- ◄mendel► 00:19, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm aware of that. The userspace is exempt from most things. I mean, we've had beauty pageants, Mafia games, userbox contests, and all sorts of stuff. Even moreso at this point in time when we're hardly a busy busy wiki, I don't really care what people do in their personal userspace as long as it doesn't disrupt the rest of the wiki.
 * You misinterpreted "Who reads it?" It was not an argument, but rather a statement of fact. Have you personally read all of the plaques in Tahnnakai Temple, or the lore articles for each of the Canthan heroes? I bet most people haven't. And even if we expand that beyond the GuildWiki community to the actual playerbase, the percentage would be far fewer still. And thus one concludes that trivia like "Teinai's Heat is named after Teinai, a legendary Canthan elementalist" is not in the same level of obviousness as "Grenth's Grasp is named after Grenth", because I bet there are a lot of people who would see the skill and wonder "Who the hell is Teinai?" It's pretty easy to ignore the lore of Cantha, even if you do all the missions and quests of that campaign. Now, on the other hand, it's very hard to play Guild Wars and be completely ignorant of the Gods. No matter what campaign you have, their influence is always big. (Less so in Factions, but still there.) So it's pretty unlikely that someone would be using Balthazar's Aura and wonder who the hell Balthazar is.
 * I also don't understand what point you are trying to make. I just said that all trivia is stuff which is verifiable in-game, etc. If I understand the suggestion given, we are supposed to invent "backstory" for unknown people like Daoshen and Xiko and Xinrae. That isn't anything documented in-game, or information from ANet, or even potential real-world trivia. Vorizun is the one possible exception, but that is still quite a stretch.
 * A list of "Trivia related to skill names" would be fine, although I would then argue that it opens the door to more articles... "Trivia related to quests", "Trivia related to monsters", "Trivia related to quotes", "Trivia from inscriptions"...... I don't know if you were around when it happened, but we made a decision against having individual articles for inscriptions, and we also decided not to make a trivia listing for them because a lot of them are very vague in origin and wildly speculative. From that precedent, I would say that trivia lists are generally frowned upon, at least in the mainspace. [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 05:17, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

I have overhauled this article
I tore out all the "fanfiction" and set it up with visual refrence as well. The main thing to change is figuring out which rit item skills are just random person, instead of actually named after someone we can link to and give information about. EX: Not:  The skill _______ was named after this person. (stub). Also, I never did find that assassin naming thing.--Łô√ë îğá†ħŕášħ 04:00, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
 * At one point, I had a poll on my talk that went something like: "you see a bad article. Do you a) delete it, b) make it better?" and of course, phrased like that, nobody owned up to option a) pretty much, but you've been demonstrating b) nicely. :) -- ◄mendel► 09:05, 31 March 2009 (UTC)