Tamriel Rebuilt talk:Factions

Making these pages work

Okay, having made the first of these, I'm just going to list off a few things that need to be done to make them work properly.

• Faction Summary template: Needs to be able to recognize that the Trail should come from the sub-page, not the namespace.
• Trail: This trail would of course have to be created, and it should be designed to generate the correct category.
• FacReact template: Needs to be able to link to the sub-page faction pages as an option, and also still be able to link to the Morrowind namespace faction pages. There should be some way of visibly distinguishing them as well. I've gone with asterisks and daggers, and a note below the infobox, but I'm not sure how well that reads.
• Lore article: Has some namespace-dependant links in it, I'm not even sure if it makes sense to transclude it for these pages. Maybe better just to link to the Lore and Morrowind pages and leave it at that. However, for factions which don't exist in Vvardenfell (House Dres and House Indoril), there might be an argument for including the Lore articles. (I have to assume these Houses will be joinable in future releases of Maps 2-6, along with some which exist but aren't joinable on the Mainland - Houses Hlaalu and Redoran, The Imperial Cult and Legion, the Morag Tong, the East Empire Company, etc.)
• A people chart: I didn't do it here because it would be insanely long - House Telvanni in just these two maps contains almost 300 members, and Map#2 isn't necessarily finished, and there's four more maps we don't have yet. Maybe on a separate page, or maybe six separate pages (one per map) if it comes to that.
• Quests: Presumably there will be more quests, at least in Map#2, and possibly in the others. Does it make sense to have up to six Quest charts on the page? Or combine them all into one?
• Somewhere, we have to detail the relationship between the Mainland and Vvardenfell versions of these factions. For instance, I don't think there's anything stopping you from joining House Hlaalu or Redoran on Vvardenfell, and House Telvanni on the Mainland. They don't like the other Vvardenfell Great Houses much, but it doesn't seem like you're prevented from joining like the Vvardenfell Houses are with eachother. Also, while membership in vTelvanni might help a little with mTelvanni, your rank doesn't carry over - even if you're Archmagister of one, you still have to work your way up the ranks with the other. More work needs to be done to look into these intricacies before adding it to the article.

--TheRealLurlock ^Talk 22:07, 1 February 2009 (EST)

Consistency of Naming

I think we need to decide how important it is that we keep to the exact names of the factions as seen in the game. With the addition of "Mainland" to many of the previously existing factions, some of them become quite long e.g.: "Mainland Great House Telvanni". I think it's a safe bet that any NPC added by TR who's in a faction that can also be seen on Vvardenfell is going to be in the "Mainland" version of that faction. Also, the word "Great" is not used in the Morrowind namespace article: House Telvanni. (Likewise for Hlaalu and Redoran) Granted, this represents an inconsistancy already present on our Morrowind pages, but it's not the only one. The "Temple" faction page is located at Tribunal Temple. (This makes sense because there are at least 3 major religions in Morrowind, all of which have "temples", so it helps to distinguish that this is the temple of the Tribunal, a religion which incidentally has almost no significance outside of Morrowind.) TR evidently agrees with this assessment, as their Temple faction also includes the word "Tribunal": "Mainland Tribunal Temple". The "Census and Excise Office" faction leaves off the word "Office" in the article title. (There's also some inconsistancy between the editor-names and in-game names in some cases. The three vampire clans are listed as "Clan X" in the editor, but "X Clan" in the game. The great houses' editor names are just "Hlaalu", "Redoran", and "Telvanni", without the words "Great" or "House" at all.)

So, given the number of links that will be made to these faction pages, my proposal is to keep it simple - leave off "Mainland", because it should be assumed for all TR NPCs, and leave off "Great", just because it's unnecessary, and makes the pages inconsistant with the existing Great House pages. Either that, or we vote for 100% naming consistancy, which means moving all of the Morrowind faction pages, and changing the parameter on every single NPC page within those factions. This seems to me like a lot of unnecessary work (even if done by a bot), and just makes the pages harder to find. (Well, admittedly not much due to redirects - both Great House Telvanni and Telvanni are redirects to House Telvanni.) But anyhow, I think we should decide this before we create a lot of NPC pages linking to these, as it'll be a pain to change later. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:10, 3 February 2009 (EST)

I'd never noticed that so many Morrowind pages were incorrect. Of course we should be using the in-game versions of the name. We do for everything else, so I don't see why faction names should be an exception. One of the bots should correct that as soon as possible. As for the TR3 factions, they have to have "Mainland" in because otherwise it's misleading. "House Telvanni" in TR3 doesn't mean the same thing as "House Telvanni" in Vvardenfell. Ditto the other guilds. When you join a guild in TR3 you are explicitly told that it's a different organisation from the island equivalent; naming them both the same thing is plain wrong. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 10:53, 3 February 2009 (EST)

Of course, if we do this, we'll have some minor inconsistency still within TR, as Great Houses Dres and Indoril do not have the "Mainland" prefix, since there are no Vvardenfell-equivalent factions. I guess it doesn't matter too much, as long as all of the wording-variants have redirects to the articles. Where it gets a bit annoying, however, is on places like the Factions pages, where a name like "Mainland Great House Telvanni" in the "Friends & Foes" section of the infoBox would either wrap onto two lines or widen the box in order to fit it. (Which I believe may have been the justification for using the shorter names in the first place.) It may be that we should alter the FacReact template to have an altname parameter that allows a shorter name to be displayed. (We need to alter it anyhow in order to accomodate the TR subpages, as I stated above.) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 11:51, 3 February 2009 (EST)

Mystery Factions

This is odd - the CS has 11 NPCs listed in factions which do not appear to exist. I have 10 NPCs in the "TR_MP1_Imperial_Legion" faction, with no rank. (Actually 5, because each is duplicated with a different ID.) None of these NPCs is located in the world anywhere, but they seem to be activated via scripts somehow. (I haven't gone into the scripts in detail to figure out how.) In addition, there's one NPC in the "TR_MP1_Mages_Guild" faction, and he is found in the game, in the Molagreahd Region. Again, no rank, and neither faction shows up in the Factions window in the CS, so I don't know how it's even possible that they exist. My instinct is to just include them with the regular "TR_ImperialLegion" and "TR_MagesGuild" respectively. For the record, the names of the NPCs in these mystery factions are:

TR_MP1_Imperial_Legion

• Agurz gra-Murzum
• Dashel gro-Khazor
• Olor gro-Matamph
• Urob gro-Narob
• Yazorku gra-Shuarg

TR_MP1_Mages_Guild

• Domlin

--TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:37, 8 February 2009 (EST)

I'd leave them out for the moment. Including them in the standard factions will be misleading as they quite simply aren't members so won't have the dialogue / reactions that would be expected. So far none of those are documented NPCs so there's no problem there. Let's wait and see what happens to them. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 13:22, 8 February 2009 (EST)

All the orcs from the imperial legion are from a quest called Highway robbery; we had to remove that quest in our latest release because it had many flaws. It will be back in the final release, but I'd leave them out too for now. I don't know the mages guild member. --Theviking ^Talk

Ah, that would explain it - I'm guessing that the factions in question were deleted, but NPCs that were in the faction remained, which caused a bug in the CS. Hopefully that won't cause you problems later, but at least I think I now know how it happened. Incidentally, we do have a page for that quest, which I ran into because I was using an older version. I was thinking of deleting it, but I guessed (correctly it seems) that it would be put back in later. I think we can just leave it until such time as you get the kinks worked out and release a fixed version of it. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 13:38, 8 February 2009 (EST)

Faction Reactions redundancy

Okay, since this was brought up on User talk:Theviking, I figured we should hash it out somewhere more approriate. Faction Reactions in the Friends & Foes section: If the values are the same for both the Mainland and Vvardenfell faction, my practice has been to put only one entry, with an * and footnote to indicate that this means both versions of the faction have the same reaction. (In contrast to the † for just Mainland and ‡ for just Vvardenfell). I think this is much more efficient in that it keeps some of those tables from becoming unusually long. (And generally if the values are the same, it's for factions with fairly little dealings with the given faction - the value is almost invariably only 1 or -1, never the more extreme values.) Rpeh evidently disagrees with me (yet again), and so I thought I'd put it to a vote. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 14:24, 8 February 2009 (EST)

And while we're at it - using the entire long names makes them wrap onto a second line and makes the tables ugly, as the last edit to Mainland Mages Guild has just done. The shortened names are easy enough to understand without breaking the table. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 14:27, 8 February 2009 (EST)

I'll say this again: we have to use the full names because otherwise the information is incorrect and worse, potentially confusing. The Mages Guild and Mainland Mages Guild (to pick one example) are not the same. The only link is that when you join the latter, your rank in the former is taken into account. You are being taken in by the similarity in name and purpose and ignoring the game mechanics, which is what's important. If Morrowind had called the MG "Uncle Trebonius' Fun and Happy Magic Time" and TR had gone for "Mages Guild", there wouldn't be a problem. As it is we have to use the full, correct, in-game names.

Wrapping? You're making massive, unsupportable assumptions here. I have two monitors on two different PCs and the original names can wrap on both. On one, I happen to use "Large Fonts" in Windows, making text that little bit larger. On the other, I don't use Arial but Gill Sans as my sans font, and that wraps. In both cases, switching back to standard Arial causes some wrap anyway. All you've done is to pick a width of infobox and state that "It doesn't wrap for me so it won't wrap for anybody else". There is no way to ensure that wrapping doesn't take place so just give up on that score. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 14:38, 8 February 2009 (EST)

So... Based on your non-standard browser settings, we're switching from a format that will look good to the majority of users with default settings to one which looks ugly for everybody. Sure, we can't make things look good for everyone, but we can make them look good for most people, which has got to be better than looking good for nobody. It's also not like the screen resolution or monitor size will have any effect, since the table is a fixed width, not a percentage. I see no problem with abbreviating the longer faction names to make them fit better, provided it's made clear which is which. You may have a case for not combining mainland + Vvardenfell factions into a single line, but even that's a tenuous one. I think it's pretty clear that House Telvanni is House Telvanni by any name. Even though mechanically they're separate, the clear intent is that they are the same faction, kept separate solely for the purpose of keeping the quests from conflicting with eachother. I don't think that too many people would be confused by the †‡ system I was using, as the notes are displayed nearby explaining exactly what they mean. But your draconian insistance that the names be displayed exactly as seen in-game with no room for variation, thus causing some to wrap onto 2 or even 3 lines just kills the formatting of the page, in some cases, the Friends & Foes section alone won't even fit on one screen's height for me, and also adds a huge blank space since the rest of the article is pushed down below the infobox. And rather than this being a problem only for the few people who use non-standard fonts or the "Large Fonts" feature, you've made it look bad no matter what settings you use. Can you honestly say even with your settings that this looks better than this? --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 13:36, 9 February 2009 (EST)

I'm simply trying to apply the same rules we use everywhere else on the site: that we use the name as seen in-game. That's not Draconian, it's common sense. You can't start to choose your own names based on a private aesthetic theory about what looks nice. Your theory that the mainland guilds are supposed to be the same as the Vvardenfell guild is clearly wrong. Take the dialogue on joining the Mainland Mages Guild for instance: "As a member-in-standing of the Mages Guild on Vvardenfell, you gain automatic entry to the Guild on the mainland." - it's a separate guild. As for my supposedly non-standard settings. I was trying to make the point that you're assuming everybody has settings friendly to your template, which simply isn't going to be true. Plenty of people customise their browser and desktop settings and all you're doing is assuming that because you have your browser configured a certain way, most people will have it the same way. Do I really need to point out how absurd that is? Lastly, we have an established site policy of Content Over Style. That means that even if using the correct information makes the page look slightly worse, that's what we use. We have a well-deserved reputation for accuracy and it's things like this that help. A little wrapping is nothing that can't be fixed by tweaking the template so we will be using the correvt names. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 14:41, 9 February 2009 (EST)