Chain quests

[Antitrust 32]

From what I've seen so far, you've been adding chain sub-quests as separate pages, linking them together as "previous/next" quests. Like this Hunting Highwaymen quest.

 

I think that this is inefficient. Why would they get their own pages? That makes it too complicated and harder to maintain.

 

I suggest we keep the sub-quests on a single page as sections, while linking to them with the # link type. Like I did this The Third Sacrifice quest.

 

 

 

The main quest page could then look like this, indicating a chain:

 

Hops and Barley -> The One Who Made It -> Victims First

 

Significantly less clicking around in a maze of pages. Check it out on wiki quests (go to chapter five side quests).

 

I guess this could be a little harder for long chains like the Undead Legion, but we could do that one as a list (with * formatting).

 

 

Any opinions?

Edited January 15, 2009 by Antitrust

[Schot 407]

I like the way you think trust. It's something I prefer to do as well which is to make the information as concise and accessible as possible. Laying a chain quest out on a single page is definitely convenient for the reader. Probably in most cases even. In terms of the navigation that we are making as we go along adding quests your suggestions is a great one but in terms of using the wiki search function it may not be as much so. Take your examples for instance. If I'm playing the Hunting Highwaymen chain and I'm on the third part, Leader of the Pack, I may want to look up information on that part. If I use the wiki search function for Leader of the Pack it'll be right there at the top of the page. This is because wiki search places page title results first in the results page. by the same token if I search for the last step in the The Third Sacrifice chain, Victims First, it will appear as the last result on the page. For other quests it could happen that what the reader is looking for may end up on a second or even third search results page. This is a big part of why just about everything gets it's own page.

 

To add to that it's important that one formula is followed so that contributers know what system is in use otherwise to great a deviation to a standard may occur. Guaranteed that many chain quests will be much too long to put on one page as you say. But maybe we could add to the existing template? A breadcrumb of sorts to the top of chain quests and campaign? Just as you did in your example "Hops and Barley -> The One Who Made It -> Victims First". That could go at the top of all three pages. Maybe at a slightly smaller font like breadcrumbs are generated on some S1 pages like Fireball has. The breadcrumb on the Fireball page and other S1 combat art pages are to a degree auto generated. Essentially, any page on the wiki with the category of "Battle Mage Combat Arts" will have that breadcrumb auto inserted into the top of the page. We could do something like that for quests as well. I'm not sure how well it could work but it's an idea.

 

Oh and back to search results, having a page for each link in a chain quest is also wonderful for google search results.

[gial 2]

You could have a page for each subquest and a page for the chain: by using includes, each sub quest could be part of the linked quest page, as in:

 

== Overall Quest Chain page ==

 

{{:quest1}}

 

{{:quest2}}

 

etc.

 

With judicious use of /noincludes, this could look reasonably nice (see how the Combat Arts for each character were set up in the Sacred 1 wiki for an example of this)

[Antitrust 32]

If search is the only problem, we could have a basic page for the sub-quests that has just a link to the main page, like "This is the third step of the Hunting Highwaymen quest". The searcher gets redirected to the main page.

 

Easier for maintenance purposes, I think.

 

I need to go learn a few things to understand gial's suggestion, that's like chinese to me right now

[Llama8 8]

The Guild Wars Wiki had (IMO) quite a good way of doing this (for their "main quest" quests), it's similar to what Schot suggested, in that on each page (at the bottom in the GWW example) there was a section which gave an overview of the whole quest chain: http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Great_...l_%28mission%29

 

Scroll down to the bottom & you get links to each quest in the chain in order.

[Antitrust 32]

Ok I'll fix it sometime later.

[Schot 407]

Argh, I try my best not to contradict myself but after doing some careful consideration of your point trust it seems I did in fact contradict myself. The way we did the Mount quest and Christmas quest is, I believe, exactly as you are suggesting that we do. It does work perfectly well but we did it that way because we wanted to get it done fast. gogo and I really do want to have each chain quest's sub quest maintained on independant pages but for the sake of simply "getting it done" we think what you are suggesting will be just fine.

 

So we'll have two approaches to writing quests.

 

Enter an entire chain quest on a single page

Enter each chain quest's sub quest on independant pages and then create a main page for the Chain quest that links to each of the sub quests.

 

The ultimate intention is that we would like to have both. The chain quest written fully on the chain quest's main page as well as giving related sub quests to the chain their own page and write up.

 

Now that I think of it this might work very well... Put a Quick Walkthrough on the chain quests title page with links to sub quests of the chain and put the Detailed Walkthrough on the chain's sub quest description pages.

 

gials suggestion is a great if detailed walkthroughs were to be maintained on the Chain quest's title page. It's a very simple and convenient way of embedding content from one page into another. The simplest example I can think of for this is the set item pages and how embedding is used. Have a look at Headgear of the Forest. Basically, whatever you want embedded on whatever page you just enclose the content within:

<onlyinclude>
CONTENT
</onlyinclude>

 

Llama, that is a fantastic idea. That would be perfect I think. I could create a {{questnav}} to be used on quest pages which would contain a link to the parent page first and then related sub quests of said chain in order afterwards. For anyone to apply this menu system it would be a matter of using the quest navigation template somethig like the below:

{{questnav|Hops and Barley|The One Who Made It|Victims First}}

[Antitrust 32]

Ok I fixed it. I kept the quest template and the quick walkthrough for the main page though. If you prefer I can remove them.

 

The Third Sacrifice