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| - I liked them before, but I don't now that I've tried to actually use the skill list. The new boxes are pretty, but putting them in a list makes it exceedingly hard to actually read it: the icons are distracting, green/blue is too low contrast, and it difficult to quickly look at names when they are separated by descriptive text. A list that actually has all the names in a separate column would be much more user-friendly. — 130.58 (talk) (00:21, 11 June 2006 (CDT)) The green wasn't my idea. Pick something. -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 00:39, 11 June 2006 (CDT) Maybe a lighter (pastel) green that lets the black lettering stand out better? Yes, I too miss the ! for questable skills. -Pandelume It's not just the green, mostly (same color as the regular background would be ideal, though, if you're asking). It's the fact that there isn't a column that just has skill names and nothing else in it anymore. Your can't scroll through the list with your eyes very easily anymore. — 130.58 (talk) (00:45, 11 June 2006 (CDT)) Agreed. The previous lists were far more readable and informative. I miss the green "questable" exclamations. Seventy.twenty.x.x 00:43, 11 June 2006 (CDT) The question mark has its own problems, and has been discussed elsewhere with no one ever proposing a solution that they favor personally, muchless trying to reach a consensus on what to do. -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 01:14, 11 June 2006 (CDT) Ok I just gave skill name its own column, but I think the rest of the row looks worse now than it used to... -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 01:21, 11 June 2006 (CDT) You're right: it's a bit uglier but way more readable. I find it much easier to look through the list now, at least. — 130.58 (talk) (21:13, 11 June 2006 (CDT)) Might I suggest switching position of the Prophecies/Factions box and the skill stat box? It would be nice to see that skill stats near the skill name (all at a glance, so to speak :) Another possibility would be to use a narrow column on the right for the letters 'P', 'F' or 'C' since it's more a tag for searching skills. It would reduce some of the visual clutter in the main body (description area) -Pandelume There are only 26 letters in teh alphabet, and I wouldn't be surprised if by campaign 6 we are already running into duplicate letters. I personally would like to see numbers ("C1", "C2") etc, but that hasn't garnered much support from other ppl. As for location of the stats, it was placed there to mimick the location in hte in-game skill menu. If ppl are used to the skill menu layout, this would be pretty natural. -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 00:34, 13 June 2006 (CDT) If and when that becomes necessary, I'm sure commonly accepted two letter abbreviations can be used, like Mo and Me (for Monk and Mesmer) for professions. If the stats are moved to the left, I'd suggest not even boxing it, since the icons would be distinct from the description below them anyway. Simpler is always better, IMO; it makes it easier to see each skill as a single big description block. And surely there must be a way to restore the ! questable. Just some suggestions. -Pandelume The problem with the ! mark isn't not knowing a way, but that neither of the two ways to do it are supported by anyone. As for the stats, I am for keeping it boxed in order to keep them aligned between skills. -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 23:32, 13 June 2006 (CDT) In terms of usability, the Campaign vs. stats boxes should definitely switch location. The campaign is generally of very minor importance, while the stats are vital and essential to what people are looking for. I do like the current form with the names in a column. And frankly, I'm 100% about usability and readability, and overall "prettiness" is irrelevant. It's not ugly if I can read it easily. =) --JoDiamonds 09:42, 13 June 2006 (CDT) I love usability, too. Since most people seem to think the old one had more usability going for it, let's try this: everyone who cares, describe what works about the old boxes and what doesn't. Here's me starting...
* It's nice to have each entry on an individual column, as it makes it easy to scroll down visually. Though I think this is an ironclad requirement only for the name column.
* Having some visual cute to a skill's elite status is good, though it needn't be egregious.
* Factions/Prophecies/Core could've used some kind of symbol or color-coded letter. Just a word can be annoying sometimes.
* Giving casting/recast times is absolutely vital. — 130.58 (talk) (23:54, 13 June 2006 (CDT))
* Having skill stats be column-aligned is good. -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 23:59, 13 June 2006 (CDT)
* Green and Yellow Backgrounds to distinguish Elite from usual skills is not necessary - I find it distracting and it makes things harder to read. The yellow border around the Skill Icon is enough, just like on the skill pages.
* Factions / Prophecies / Core should go to its own column, and something else than just plain text would be easier to distinguish, maybe an Icon or an iconic Letter (F, P, C).
* The Information that a skill is questable (green exclamationmark) should be included in the skill template to be evaluated by the list. --Chi Li Image:Chi Li.gif 02:58, 14 June 2006 (CDT) See User talk:PanSola#new skill list template for a quick rundown on the quest marker issue. The issue came up probably 5 times in the past, and no one, to the best of my memory, every expressed favoring one solution over the other. Thus I never did anything with it. -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 03:22, 14 June 2006 (CDT) Thanks for that link, I havent thought that much about the issue yet, just saw the loss of information compared to the old pages. I'll do some testing in my User namespace and hopefully come up with a possible solution, but maybe not. --Chi Li Image:Chi Li.gif 03:51, 14 June 2006 (CDT) I personally have nothing against this new look (except the bold black border around the whole section which I think should be removed), however, might I suggest moving the Campaign link, something like this? Padding could be discussed, though I never realized why wikipedians are so afraid of space that they want the text right next to the border. Also re-introduced the quest-marker. Even though the confusion of multiple campaigns still remains, I still believe it's better to have a marker that it's available in any campaign rather than not marking it at all. The skill name column has a fixed width of 130 px + 6 px padding since GuildWiki is being run in standards compliance mode, so all skills would have the same width on all columns (icons taking up 64 px, skill names 136 px, attribute/campaign/etc as much as it needs, skill description the rest). Only suggestions though. Also, obviously the attribute wouldn't be shown in quick reference pages. But since it's in the template, I put it there in my suggestion too. — Galil Image:Ranger-icon-small.png 20:12, 21 June 2006 (CDT) After looking at the Mesmer skills quick reference page again, I saw it says this right after the quest icon: "This skill may be earned from a quest. See skill information for details.". Since it says in the description that you should check skill information for details related to skill quests, I do not think it matters if we have only one icon.— Galil Image:Ranger-icon-small.png 20:15, 21 June 2006 (CDT) Finally! Someone who at least have an opinion on this matter! BTW, I would put the quest marker by Campaign, instead of skill stats. And I would move the Skill Stats row to the top. I have no clue what this fixed width and standard compliance you are talking about though. What standard is it from? -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 02:39, 24 June 2006 (CDT) I seriously don't understand what people are using the exclamation mark for. Do Questable Mesmer skills (Prophecies), Questable Mesmer skills (Factions), Questable Mesmer skills (All), and Questable Core Mesmer skills (Factions) do whatever it is that exclamation marks do better? Here's the old standard array of skills in almost the same format. --Cloak of Letters 09:01, 24 June 2006 (CDT) How about moving the stack of stuff left of description? Like this: Compared to having the stack on the right, which one do you guys think work better in terms of ease of reference? -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 17:19, 24 June 2006 (CDT) Edit: I think I like it on the right (Cloak of Letter's example) more than moving it left, but just want to toss the idea out there. -User:PanSola (talk to the Image:Follower of Lyssa.png) 17:21, 24 June 2006 (CDT) Have to say I liked it more to the right too. Also, a quick search on google with the keywords "standards compliance vs quirky mode" led me to this. Basically, they are different modes in which web browsers render pages. Back when (X)HTML and CSS started getting standardized, web browsers needed to be able to draw the old pages which didn't follow the new shiny standards. So if a browser finds a page without a -tag at the top, it draws in quirky mode (old messy mode), if it does find it however, it draws in standards mode. This is also the reason most people used to hate browsers other than IE, cause other browsers drew a whole lot better in standard mode, but wasn't too good with quirky mode. That's beginning to change though as more pages becomes standardized. If you wanna see what mode a page is being rendered in, right-click it, click View Page Info, and it should state somewhere in the middle of that dialogue (Firefox, quickly translated due to me using a swedish version). Anyway, about the skills, I could live with the first of those 2 suggestions (if we switch to the small icons for professions eg. {{Mo}} , {{R}} , etc) and I really think some padding was good for the readability. Ohh, and by fixed width I meant that I had set the column with skill names to width="130", so all skill name columns have the same width. I did indeed like the skill cost, recharge, etc more at the bottom though, but will go with whatever is decided. — Galil Image:Ranger-icon-small.png 17:53, 25 June 2006 (CDT) Also, after looking again, I felt I had to add that I hope we aren't making the skill-boxes with that many links (as in the first suggestion with Unyielding Aura). One link to each page the first time it occurs would be enough. For example, enchantment. It's linked to twice. Once would be enough if it was at its first occurence. — Galil Image:Ranger-icon-small.png 18:01, 25 June 2006 (CDT) I think the questable ! marker should be there: If a skill is questable, you'll look into the skill description to see in which quest anyway, but opening lots of pages to find out "which skills could I quest?" is wasteful. Also, I strongly dislike the horizontal splits in the new templates, it makes scanning the list for skills with a certain desired property a lot harder. Personally, I'd even prefer a true table that forces horizontal scrolling onto my browser over the "5e 1s 30s / No Attribute /Core" vertical stacking in the examples above. (And while I'm writing here where knowledgaeble people might read it: is there an easy way to change the alt tag for images from "Image:whatever.jpeg" to just "whatever"? That'd be nice.) 134.130.4.46 23:46, 29 June 2006 (CDT) I use the quest mark to look for skills that can't be quested, which is a lot easier than opening up every skill trainer page, and the Questable Mesmer skills (Prophecies) page doesn't tell about them. As for their implementation, how about this: Image:QuestSkill.PNG = skills questable anywhere Image:QuestSkillProphecies.PNG = skills questable in Prophecies Image:QuestSkillFactions.PNG = skills questable in Factions That or make a "Non-Questable Mesmer skills" page. Also: Why do we need to see the skill pictures on the reference page? They can be seen on their own pages. And as I saw was said before, the green and yellow blocks of color aren't necessary, plus they're ugly. — Schnozzinkobenstein 15:47, 13 July 2006 (CDT) I'm not happy with the quick skills formatting such as on the Mesmer page and no-attribute monk skills. It's hard to use as a quick reference! The cell with the skill desciption should be the full height of the line for each skill, so one's eyes can easy scroll down the page just reading skill descriptions. As it is with the newer formatting, ones eyes have to skip the campaign and attribute box that have been forced in to your field of view. --71.240.46.46 12:08, 23 August 2006 (CDT) Finally. Some input. I strongly agree that the current quick references are bad design. Not only esthetically, but they are also confusing. I do believe the skill icons should still be there though, since sometimes you only remember skills by their icons. But perhaps smaller? Something like this: That seems to be about the best I can currently think of (it's 3 am). I tried without the images too, but it didn't look too good with that much inconsistency in line height. — Galil Image:Ranger-icon-small.png 20:02, 23 August 2006 (CDT) Pan made this one long ago, but I don't see it here (doesn't quite look right depending on browser window size since UY's description is so long): {{Unyielding Aura|qr}} {{Diversion|qr}} Here's something sort of based off a merger of Pan's immediately above and Cloak's from further above (might also look wrong): The wiki doesn't scale the exclamation mark properly since it's a PNG (it's too tall at the natural 8x20). Also unfortunately, while I can match the gold border on the elite, I can't match the black border on the normal skill. Anyone want to reupload all the normal skill images with a lightgreen border? Heh. Anyway, I really do think these need some color used in them, so I just went with the gold/lightgreen already used. I think it looks best with the color reaching all the way across, so there's not just a mass of white on the right side. --68.142.14.80 09:40, 24 August 2006 (CDT) I believe the colors were voted down upon a bit up though, and the biggest issue with these bars is stacked data, which also seems to have been dropped. Also, they're too big. Anyway, about the PNG-issue; nag away and perhaps something will be done for once. — Galil Image:Ranger-icon-small.png 10:41, 24 August 2006 (CDT) I remember the discussion actually, but I didn't say anything because I didn't think it mattered either way. Of course, I wasn't thinking of putting colored backgrounds on the icons then. In retrospect, it seems like it was a bad idea when we could have used HTML/CSS to get borders around them without fiddling with the images. I remember someone bringing that up, but maybe it was later for the template discussion. Back on topic, I'd agree that it'd be better if each skill used less vertical space, but I think it's worth using the space to get the color in there. Perhaps it could be arranged in a different way. But, I think the color is good for functionality, since it helps separate each skill more than a black border of a few pixels, and is good aesthetically, so we don't have so much white everywhere. Both make it easier to read, I think. About the stacked stuff, I dunno. I prefer it over all the horizontal arrangements. In my suggestion, there's two columns to scan down when perusing the skills. The name/description to find something "interesting" and then the right column when you want to look at the details. Kind of hard for me to think of what the user wants since I wouldn't really use a QR page since I play enough to know the skills. --68.142.14.80 11:05, 24 August 2006 (CDT) On the exclamation mark, I think the simplest method is to just use standard text such as '''!''' , which results in ! If you prefer an image, there are actually several available exclamation mark images. I listed several of them at Template_talk:%21. One of the others may work cleaner (I think there was a gif version - I didn't care for it much, but it exists). --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 11:12, 24 August 2006 (CDT) I strongly disagree with the use of these exclamation mark icons. The green exclamation mark makes sense, it means it's related to a quest. Anyone who has played Guild Wars could make this connection (you would hope). But the purple and cyan exclamation marks are pointless, what does purple or cyan have to do with prophecies or factions? It is important that icons portray a meaning, i.e. even though the Image:Sacrifice.png image is not in the game (as far as I'm aware? Maybe it is, my computer is broken atm so I can't check) it's clear what it relates to. This is not the case with these exclamation mark icons. Please don't use them. <LordBiro>/<Talk> 14:21, 24 August 2006 (CDT) We've been using the exclamation for this purpose on various skill pages for a while. I don't think you can make an icon that indicates "questable" or "quest." --68.142.14.80 05:13, 25 August 2006 (CDT) I don't think you've really understood my point 68.142.14.80. I like the green exclamation mark icon, because it does imply that it's a quest. Good work there. I don't like the other coloured exclamation mark icons. Having the same icon in a different colour does not imply Prophecies or Factions or Nightfall. It just implies quest. <LordBiro>/<Talk> 14:02, 25 August 2006 (CDT) I also like the idea of having the exclamation marks. See my suggestion below. --Image:Gem-icon-sm.png (talk) 19:26, 25 August 2006 (CDT)
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