GuildWiki talk:Style and formatting/Items

Expert Salvage Kit check it out. Could use a "money" image like the recharge image.

Items will be sort of weird. We'll probably want to add some kind of "Rare" identifier in the info box. What else am I missing? Gravewit


 * Hi, should have written here first really, but I already commented on Item cost entry talk. I don't think we should use the recharge icon to respresent uses. If we come up with another icon to represent uses fair enough, but I don't think we should use an icon that exists in the game to represent something other than the thing it currently represents in the game. Sorry if this paragraph seems badly written ;) hehe LordBiro/Talk 07:11, 10 Jun 2005 (EST)

Item Details
Just started a header to seperate this off, but it continues on from Gravewit's input. We have seperated skills into quite a few important details, let's see if we can do the same for items :)

As far as categories goes I thought something along these lines makes sense for the Items category:

+--+ Category:Items All Items in the game. Or thereabouts. |   +--+ Category:Weapons | |    |  +--+ Holy Rod or something |   +--+ Category:Armor | |    |  +--+ Ascestic's Armor or something |   +--+ Category:Upgrade Items | |    |  +--+ Category:Runes | |  |    |  |  +--+ Rune of Minor Vigor | |  |    |  |  +--+ Rune of Major Vigor | |    |  +--+ Category:Weapon Upgrades |    |    |     +--+ Vampiric Bowstring or something |   +--+ Category:Salvage Items | |    |  +--+ Mursaat Garment or something |   +--+ Category:Collector Items | |    |  +--+ Alpine Seed |   +--+ Category:Common Crafting Materials | |    |  +--+ Scale | |    |  +--+ Feather |   +--+ Category:Rare Crafting Materials | |    |  +--+ Lump of Charcoal | |    |  +--+ Parchment |   +--+ Category:Quest Items |      +--+ Beautiful Pearl

The only items that wouldn't fit into this system (in theory at least :P) are:
 * Salvage Kit
 * Expert Salvage Kit
 * Identification Kit
 * Bag
 * Belt Pouch
 * Dye (This could constitute its own category, but that might be a bit trivial)
 * Rune of Holding (the rune that increases bag size)
 * Celestial Sigil (added by Tanaric 22:10, 22 Jun 2005 (EST))
 * Dwarven Ale ;) (added by Tanaric 22:10, 22 Jun 2005 (EST))

Any suggestions on a category for these? Or should they just go in the Items top-level category?

So the item could say what category it is part of. It could also say the merchant value, and in the case of crafting/rune items we could consider putting a conservative estimate at the trader price, although obviously this is prone to fluctuations in the market.

With quest items we can say who gives or drops the item. With most items though, the number of mobs who drop it will be vast, or at least too numerous to list in the box and should really go in the article. LordBiro/Talk 03:23, 14 Jun 2005 (EST)

Those are what I'd call "General Use Items" or suchlike. Gravewit 04:11, 14 Jun 2005 (EST)

Added a mediocre weapon template. Someone with more of an eye for design, please look at it and make it nice (good example at Break Hammer). If someone wants to design templates for all item subcategories, I'm happy with that; it means I can finish porting the Massive Item Listing over sooner. Also note I added categories for salvagable materials (you'll see what I mean at Break Hammer). Maybe this can be expressed more elegantly, but something similar is essential for indexing later. Tanaric 04:50, 16 Jun 2005 (EST)

I like it Tanaric. I think really only weapons and armor should have a different template to all other items. I reckon all items should be blue except for weapons and armor which aren't really items in the same way as everything else. 20:59, 17 Jun 2005 (EST)

I messed up. It was half-brained of me to use the ranges I was using on the various weapon pages, as nobody else would ever think in that way (as confirmed by the recent edit of Fire Wand). I need to go through and exchange the last number in Min Damage with the first number in Max Damage on every page, and change the range delimiters from ... to –. If anyone disagrees, post now or forever hold your peace. :) &mdash;Tanaric 15:28, 13 Jul 2005 (EST)

I think I misunderstood your recommendation initially Tanaric judging from that edit :P I think it would be best to say Or something. I'm guessing that's what Jrr thought as well? hehe ;) If you want to give me a list of pages that need updating I will go through them and correct them. 23:02, 13 Jul 2005 (EST)
 * Worst wand does: 2–6
 * Best wand does: 14–22

Yeah, that's what Jrr thought, and it makes more sense than what I was doing. Everything in Category:Weapons needs to be fixed, except for Fire Wand, which I'll do. And yes, I do like &amp;ndash; (–) rather than the hyphen (-) for this, as it's grammatically correct! :) &mdash;Tanaric 23:14, 13 Jul 2005 (EST)

I notice that many Weapons only have 1 entry for min and max damage. I'm going to alter them so that both the min and max damage sections contain the same ranges, just to make sure anyone copying from them doesn't jump to conclusions. 00:42, 14 Jul 2005 (EST)


 * I also updated Weapon details to reflect the changes. 01:25, 14 Jul 2005 (EST)

I don't know if it is here, but seems to be good to have a section with some details about the prize of some item, in general, in order to make trade.(like gold started as 2k and if it is perfect add maybe 1k at the prize). Also add each items perfect it is in damage. Isn't is good or not ? 09:37, 13 sep 2005
 * Trade prices of items (I assume you mean with other players) will always change and we don't want to constantly update and try to keep track of it. The only prices we should mention are merchant (and not trader) prices, since they're constant.  --Fyren 02:32, 14 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * What can do a newbie to have some average of price of each type of materials (or, purple, blue with mods) ? Is there any area where iis it explain ? --stonebeard
 * For items, try the forums at guildwarsguru.com or guild-hall.net. Both have sections for trading, you can probably read and see what people are trying to sell and buy or ask for a "price check."  --Fyren 18:18, 14 Sep 2005 (EST)

Crafting Materials
I think the crafting materials pages are in need of a major makeover. While most of them have some basic information, there is no consistent structure or even template. Here is an example of what I have in mind:


 * Where to get
 * Dropped by some monsters
 * Salvaged from Weapons (most Bows andStaffs, some Axes, Hammers and Shields).
 * Salvaged from some misc. items (i.e. Stone Summit Badges).
 * Material Traders.


 * Usage
 * Crafting of some Weapons.
 * Crafting of some Rare Crafting Marerials.

Yes, that would be the Wood Plank. That's only an initial draft of course. The "Usage" section could be expanded with a little more detail information. Is there any vital information I missed? --84.175.85.254 22:53, 2 Aug 2005 (EST)

Salvage Items
We are sorely lacking in any sort of standard format for the Salvage Item articles. Yesterday I uploaded what I believe is a complete list of the graphics used for the salvage items (see Talk:Salvage Item). I've put two examples on my test page, the top half shows my idea for the "armor" type salvage items that have variable sell values, and the bottom half shows my idea for hides/webs/"meat" type, stackable salvage items. Any comments? --Rainith 23:23, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, I made one small edit and replaced the Template:SalvageItem template with the actual code so as not to include my test page in the list of Category:Salvage Items (because that's something I hate to see when I am looking in a category). --Rainith 11:52, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The page layout look fine. -PanSola 15:40, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I had brought up the topic before, since I had been going through item drops, but it wasn't a big deal. Page layout looks good and if you start implementing it, I'll standardize the salvage item pages that I've worked with. --71.246.44.39 16:56, 16 January 2006 (UTC) --Oops, that was me. Forgot to sign in. --TheSpectator 16:58, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Glad to hear people don't hate it. I'm going to annotate it a little bit with some notes on my suggestions for how to handle things like the variable values of the armors, listing the crafting materials, etc... Probably do that in the next couple of hours.  --Rainith 17:02, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, I added my notes in a hopefully non-offensive  Green  font. Take a look, and let me know your opinions please.  --Rainith 17:56, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Looks great :D --TheSpectator 02:38, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

BTW, I think Salvage Items should get its own sub-article and not be part of Items. Not a big issue now, but once we start coming up with style and formatting stuff for other type of items, many of which are using their own style and formatting, it'll really be too big a page to look at. -PanSola 21:59, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with the statement: 'The sell value should be without the item being identified. This will usually only increase the value by a small amount...'. I have seen items nearly double in value. Granted it's a small amount in absolute terms, but more than enough to pay for identifying the item on average. It would be more useful to have the post-identified range in the article than the pre-identified range, to help with deciding whether to bother identifying salvage items immediately prior to selling them to the merchant. The pre-identified value is basically useless.
 * Then what do you do about the items with runes? Especially the items that only are in the game with runes (only available from chests in the FoW or UW)?  --Rainith 22:27, 27 February 2007 (CST)
 * What's the point of listing a value for those anyway? Is there anyone who sells those before identifying them? Just a note that they always come with runes and so have no known non-rune base value is reasonable. Items that only come with runes are already exceptional, so it won't hurt to treat them as such. Eastwind 00:40, 1 March 2007 (CST)

Why NOTOC?
Is there any particular reason why all pages for collectable drops, salvage items and materials should make use of the   command? In my eyes such magic words for overriding the default layout (and maybe user CSS configuration, too?) should only be used if it is really, really necessary.

(To be honest, I just noticed this style and formatting rule while crusading through the Contains XXX categories and in that process, oblivious of this rule, removed several   commands before I started thinking and looked up here ... :-/ ) --MRA 14:36, 18 October 2006 (CDT)
 * For articles of those sizes (salvage items are what I'm thinking of here) the TOC just adds unnecessary garbage on the screen. You can with preferences remove all TOCs but on larger pages (and big talk pages) the are helpful, which is why I used the NOTOC option on the salvage items.  --Rainith 16:16, 18 October 2006 (CDT)

Use the Contains XXX categories
The wiki features the Category:Contains steel, Category:Contains wood, etc. since several month. I suggest adding these categories to the default style and formatting template for salvageable items. --MRA 14:36, 18 October 2006 (CDT)
 * I added this to the formatting guidelines accordingly. --MRA 16:11, 24 October 2006 (CDT)

page is screwed up
What is going on with this guide? It is completely screwed up. There are repeting sections all over the place with no logical structure. I tried fixing it but as I don't know what it's supposed to look like, I just edited myself into bewilderment. Biscuits 14:24, 28 August 2007 (CDT)


 * Looking at the history helped figuring it out. Fixed. -User:PanSola (talk to the [[Image:follower of Lyssa.png]]) 09:54, 29 August 2007 (CDT)
 * You have more resolve than me. ;) Biscuits [[Image:Biscuit.png]] 14:25, 29 August 2007 (CDT)

Now the page only has info about Salvage Items, rather than all kinds of items. Biscuits 06:44, 30 August 2007 (CDT)


 * This page ALWAYS only had information related to salvage items (compare the very first revision to current revision). You have to click on the links in the table of contents to get to templates for the other items.  Ahsen74 07:38, 30 August 2007 (CDT)
 * Oh, you mean the table of contents on the right? That's completely non-obvious, so I'll add a note. Biscuits [[Image:Biscuit.png]] 09:33, 30 August 2007 (CDT)
 * Actually it still doesn't make sense. Why should salvage Items be at the top of the tree, rather than just another article like the one for Armor or Weapons? It would be much clearer if there was one guide for all items, then sub-guides for each type. I think this just concentrates on Salvage Items because that was the first thing added to the article. Biscuits [[Image:Biscuit.png]] 09:35, 30 August 2007 (CDT)