User:Tennessee Ernie Ford/Rants

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Rants

GW2 Wiki

There are several reasons why I'm not contributing to GW2's official wiki:

• I'm having fun playing the game.
• I ended up leading a guild...and contributing to its website takes priority.
• I've always enjoyed validating claims, copy editing, and rewriting to make things more accessible to more people...and I've never been a big fan of being first to create content. That is, I like plugging holes better than digging them.

However, the biggest thing is I wasn't enjoying myself much ...for too many reasons to list. Maybe when things settle down, I'll be back.

The 21 Salute

A lot of (otherwise honest) people are wondering whether they are at risk for selling stuff they bought from karma vendors. That's a needless concern, in my strong opinion. What happened is that ANet took a zero-tolerance approach to the discovery that 4,000 players (out of over a million) converted their karma directly into gold by one of the following methods:

1. (a) Purchasing weapons that were priced at 21 instead of 21,000 and then (b) laundering their gains via the Mystic Forge and selling the resulting weapons. and/or
2. Purchasing Chili Peppers in Bulk and creating Chilli Pepper Poppers, which could be merch'd for some quick cash.

In addition, many of the people involved also exploited a quickly-respawning event to farm karma, to power their business model.

Here's who was suspended: people who bought 50+ weapons (i.e. spent over 1,000 karma on weapons that they sold). Here's who got a longer time out: people who bought hundreds of weapons or publicized the price glitch or who AFK'd the karma farm. Here's who didn't get suspended or banned: everyone else who bought a few weapons on the cheap or simply spent karma they earned normally on the poppers thinking it was a reasonable deal.

Did ANet over-react? Well, that's eye-of-the-beholder, isn't it? I have no sympathy for those that were banned. Literally hundreds of the banned complained on Reddit that they didn't buy that many weapons...and ANet responded to every single one of them with the exact count...in the 100s of weapons. On the other hand, ANet also needless made a lot of otherwise reasonable people think twice about looking for good deals by converting cheap materials into marketable goods, the same as any entrepreneur.

But there are two major reasons why people shouldn't worry about accidentally getting themselves into hot water:

1. Closed loophole. ANet has temporarily addressed the potential for abuse by eliminating value from karma foods (and I believe from weapons as well); they also prevented people from merch'ing chef-crafted foods (which sucks for people working on that discipline; even 1 per item would have made it easier for cooks to manage inventory better).
2. Volume. ANet doesn't care about anyone buying a few of this or that. You have to be involved in producing 100s or 1,000s of items to merch...and most players just never get to that point.

GW2 Wiki Rants

"We don't have policies"

• Of course this wiki has policies; we just don't refer to them by that term.
  • We have a policy about talk pages (you're only supposed to use them to discuss content), although anyone who is an infrequent contributor is unlikely to know about it.
  • We have a policy about user talk pages (you're supposed to maintain them for an undefined period of time, otherwise people will yell at you).
  • We have a policy about capitalization. No, we don't. Yes, we do. No... well, you can see the problem if we pretend that we don't have rules.
• Somehow, policy has become a bad word, but it's the tool through which the community avoids arguing about the same non-content issues over and over again.

→ There's nothing wrong with having policies. The problem that some wikis have had is that

(a) they create policies that are unenforceable (talk page rules) or require extra work by the community (guild space rules) or

(b) you get people wikilawyering over the details, instead of admins who step in and (politely) enforce the spirit.

→ Let's stop pretending that we don't have rules.

GW2 Wiki Goals

Related to the above, I'm tired of discussing the same issues previously "resolved" at GWW and GuildWiki — if it worked at GWW, GW2W should follow the same idea/practice unless there's a good reason not to. That goes for capitalization, talk pages, Guild space, and so on. Apparently, however, the early community (i.e. those interested enough in the game when it was only vaporware) decided early to reinvent the wheel. I think that makes things harder on everyone, especially given the accelerated interested in GWW since the first public stress testing (AKA the Beta Weekend Event).

In some cases, I'll feel strongly enough to make my argument once (and perhaps reiterate it, if I believe it is misunderstood)...and then let people with stronger bladders decide.

That will mean that, sometimes, the community will decide things I believe to be bad for the wiki (and sometimes, those things will be bad for the wiki).