Talk: Merchants (Origins)

Two Bits

I'm glad to see that Zoev came in and helped clarify some thoughts. She pointed out a few things that I also would like to reiterate. And a few points that I'd like to clarify.

As a wiki, its better to put up correct and complete information in an ugly format than incorrect or incomplete information in a pretty format. Hollowness has a point in that we want to make the pages look good. But I also like Tennessee Ernie Ford's point of view in that its better to have data there. Personally, I view the recent history and if I see that the author is currently working on the page, I don't start prettifying it until its clear its done. If I'm uncertain, I'd drop them a note letting them know that I plan on working on it - and seeing if there are any objections.

There's gonna be people working in the same space in a wiki - especially as we fill up most of the basic categories, items/gifts/companions, and have to delve deeper into the mechanics to find sections and articles to add. Just be respectful of your peer's work. They are as passionate as you are about your work.

Having said that, the Merchants are a section that I've wanted to update for a while and Pwr905 has agreed to take charge. Unfortunately, he got sidelined by school and hasn't been able to start. He has managed to do a complete data dump of the Merchants before he took his break. This is the data set that Project Bodahn will be working from. I have given the project a lot of thought and I have a clear vision of what I want the merchant page to be, what needs to be included in its transformer and how it needs to be linked for cross reference.

The merchant transformer absolutely needs to include the buy and sell values and the merchants name.

The merchant article needs to include everything the merchant sells by default - and this will be done via transclusion of two pages - the item page which contains the item value. And the merchant page which includes the merchant buy and sell price. Together, this will allow a transform into what we currently see - a buy/sell list. I will do this technical part so that the editor only needs to worry about including the items and default quantities.

When that is done, we can revise Merchants so that it is a simple list linking to the comprehensive merchant pages. There may be a short blurb about the merchant after the name, but this page will essentially be a list of merchants in Dragon Age: Origins.

The style of the page will be in the format of the Potent_Health_Poultice_Recipe. There will be an InfoBox, Background, Inventory, Quests (if applicable), Quotes, Tips, and other smaller optional headers as necessary. There will not be a Notable Item section as the merchant list will be comprehensive and covers everything he sells.

The Inventory will be a table to allow sorting and lookups.

So if you're interested in this, drop me a line at my talk page and we can get started. -- tierrie talk contr 19:32, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

I have one concern that I didn't see you mention, weapons and armors level with the player and cost ratios as well, how will this effect Project Bodahn?

Also, I never had a qualm about the info, here, I noticed the editing being live and offered the user to use the sandbox, afterwards, put up a clean up and made mention of project Bodahn, Zoev suggested the tag be removed because it will probably be changed soon anyways, and I advised the user that sortable tables were getting a face-lift, as per my talk page. I'd just like to confirm I had no problems with the information inputted here.  Hollowness | Talk | Contr 19:41, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

The question about how to deal with nonstatic/scalable items is a very good one. I have not yet decided how to show scalable items. And if anyone has a suggestion on how it should be shown, I would very much like to hear it.

I did a quick mockup to show how I want to deal with merchant items. View the code and you will see that there is no value, buy or sell price stated anywhere. That's because the values are transcluded from the item itself, the markup and markdown is transcluded from the merchant. A quick mathematical expression later and you have easy to include values anywhere in the merchant pages. -- tierrie talk contr 21:41, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

The drawback is that every item page needs to be updated to include an "arg" argument variable. There's another method I can use to omit it, but that will be even more taxing on the wiki. I will give the tradeoff some thought and decide on the technical pros and cons of each method. -- tierrie talk contr 21:43, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

at a glance table

It is a bit unruly and may want to be considered reformatted. Hollowness | Talk | Contr 00:22, January 20, 2010 (UTC)

Naturally it's unruly since it's attempting to present all the merchants in a standard format...and we don't have all of the data yet. As more people play and add to the wiki, we should expect improved quality of the data. At that point, we should consider removing some columns in favor of others. Until then, it helps everyone keep an eye out for useful info that's otherwise missing or hard-to-find.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 00:29, January 20, 2010 (UTC)

Oh, I just left you a message suggesting you do that in Sandbox instead. Hollowness | Talk | Contr 00:40, January 20, 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I still believe this table is unruly and not due to any missing information. The uneven cells and columns take away from the information and can be improved. This clean up tag does not obligate you to clean it but I believe this article should have a clean up tag until it meets a higher standard of quality.  Hollowness | Talk | Contr 17:36, January 28, 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone else have the same concern about format of the table? I'm viewing widescreen and narrow screen in firefox and I'm not seeing unruly columns or cells.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 05:11, January 29, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, in fact me and another editor have decided once we cleanup our current project to redo all sortable lists, he was the one who complained to me about the sortable lists and asked what my plans were. And have the guidelines from the admins what they want from our changes. Also one of the main requests from the admins was that the lists look good on both wide and regular screens. I personally have a wide screen and go between sizes to make sure it is desirable to both. And I believe the admins want me to take over the in-progress merchant list project. I am trying to leave tags for myself or another editors on what needs looked over.  Hollowness | Talk | Contr 05:23, January 29, 2010 (UTC)

In that case, I'll stop adding information to this page. For what it's worth, I'd like to see this page work the same as armor sets and so forth, i.e. that the data is stored on the individual merchant pages and this page simply collates it all. That way, when peeps update the specific merchants, there's no need to update this one again. Good luck.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 05:45, January 29, 2010 (UTC)

You can read my talk page its under gifts, its there but obviously you made you decision. I honestly after your reaction from my suggestion before, didn't want to touch this, but merchant lists (until User:Pwr905/Project Bodahn) was already a project I had going and finally was told that sortable lists needed a face lift, at the request of another editor and the ok from an admin. I don't plan confrontations, I don't like them, I am sorry this had a negative impact on you.  Hollowness | Talk | Contr 06:06, January 29, 2010 (UTC)

You have a plan for the formatting and I don't understand it, so I am leaving things alone rather than adding things that will make your future edits more difficult. I fear you perceive an issue where none exists.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 23:51, January 30, 2010 (UTC)

If making the wiki better visually and comprehensively, isn't something you understand then will will never meet eye to eye. Since you have not even bothered to research it I will quote it for you.

Quote: "Are you going to make a new table for the master list of gifts that looks prettier?" Polexian 03:41, January 28, 2010 (UTC) Source
Quote: "Your right, I'm going to continue to work on my quest pages, and then when I am done we can brainstorm on this gift thing. Gray and black tables do nothing for me. :)" Polexian 16:10, January 28, 2010 (UTC) Source

If 2 of the some most active editors, who work with the admins, still give you this is a justified confrontation and attack on change for the better, then make a formal complaint to the admins. I originally was trying to be helpful, now I just feel like this is a personal qualm, which I have no desire to take part in.  Hollowness | Talk | Contr 07:55, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

First, thanks so much for pulling this information together, Tennessee Ernie Ford! Merchant info is certainly one of the major gaps in this wiki - as Hollowness also spotted - and it's good to see it start to get filled. I completely agree that at the end point should be an approach something like that used for items, with information stored in one place but included in different formats on various summary pages where it's relevant/helpful. As Hollowness has mentioned, Pwr905 did start to pull together a project (User:Pwr905/Project Bodahn) to address this at the beginning of the year. He was aiming to farm merchant info from the toolset in the same way as he and User:Tierrie did for the items, but unfortunately has had to be away from the wiki in the past couple of weeks with the project still at the inception/proof of concept stage. As Hollowness warns, if the Project Bodhan approach is taken, then any manually entered info will get overwritten/made obsolete as the merchant pages will be automatically generated from the toolset, and I'd hate for you to do a massive amount of work that later gets replaced. On the other hand, I'm very glad you did the work you have so far, as it's great not to have a gap sitting there waiting for a grand scheme to come together! My feeling is that, now that the initial table has been created, it would be a good thing to take a step back and agree a long-term approach to merchant info and, as I think various people have suggested, treat it a bit more like a formal project. I think Tierrie has already said to Hollowness that, whilst Pwr905 currently has ownership of this (as he started it!), if others are interested then he may be willing to hand it over. I'll ask Tierrie to drop by this page and give an update as he has a much clearer understanding of Project Bodhan than I do. Perhaps we do then need to have a think about how best to manage this project, as I think TEF mentions. It's great that there are a number of folk interested in getting involved and it would be dreadful if it all went pear-shaped because we don't provide mechanisms to facilitate collaboration on this wiki. Suggestions would be gratefully received ... in fact, I'm going to start a forum topic on this so I really hope you'll all drop by Forum:Management of wiki projects once I've created it. ♦ Zoev ^talk 12:03, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

PS I've been dithering about this, but I've decided to remove the cleanup tag from this article. Whilst I agree that the table formatting would need to be brought into line with wiki standards, the wiki standards for multi-row tables are likely to be changing in the nearish future, so that's a moveable feast. The issue with cleanup tags is that they pull in editors and perhaps that's something we don't want to do until we have a clearer idea of the endpoint we're aiming for. ♦ Zoev ^talk 12:08, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

I encourage folks to add projects to the the public projects page. That will allow any contributor to join in the project and enable the original organizers to set the direction (including goals, data standards, and style guidelines).   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 22:47, January 31, 2010 (UTC)

Buy back notes

Although I have only made one run through the game, from what I have seen the items you sell back to Merchants have a constant price. (ex: a Metal Shard is 25C no matter who you go to.) However, there may be some variations in price I haven't seen yet that appear to be changable. (ex:Gorim's discount for Dwarf Nobles)

It would be nice if this table included any items where merchant has an infinite supply —Preceding unsigned comment added by Grimtoothy (talk • contribs) 20:05, 21 January 2010

Feel free to add it into the Notable Items column.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 07:50, January 24, 2010 (UTC)

Levi Dryden note incorrect

The note for Levi Dryden says he is available as a merchant until the quest is complete. Should this not read "after the quest is complete?" Or am I misunderstanding? I took that to refer to the associated DLC quest. -- DeJuanNOnley (talk) 10:47, September 19, 2014 (UTC)