Unique Tenant Merchant pages / Tenant page revamp

http://starbounder.org/UserWiki:MSipher

Test-page, I'm sure there's a way to make that shop table look better.

But it was bothering me that the Tenant page lists these Merchants, but doesn't really offer any information on why you might wanna summon them. These NPCs sell unique stuff! You can't get that Random Fountain anywhere else. And these merchants are a viable alternative to crafting certain items as well.

Maybe that Tenant data table can be incorporated into the "navbox". I dunno.

 

I mean while I'm vaguely on the subject I'm not a fan of how the Tenant page is organized. "By vague theme that is never directly communicated to the player in-game" isn't terribly helpful. I feel like dividing them up by what they DO would be more useful: Villagers, Merchants, and Guards. If you want a fighting Tenant, wouldn't it be nicer to have them all in one place rather than to go hunting through a bunch of other tables split by a pseudo-theme?

...dammit I'm gonna draft that up now ain't I

 

Okay so I did a rework of the Tenant page too because I'm like that, both are on the same page linked to up top. I think this is tighter and more useful to readers, having Tenants sorted by "function" rather than "theme". I also wanted to rework a lot of the text, to get rid of redundancies and fill out some vague stuff.

But I still don't know what the Tenant "priorities" are RE: spawning chances, and I dunno how many non-Quest-giving tenants there are. That'll tkae some experimenting and any help on that score I'd deeply appreciate.

 

I'd sooner put that under a "read more" collapsible as is done with the Tenant sections of the individual race pages than come up with a rather arbitrary sub-sorting. But as it is, the Villager list is only roughly 3 screens tall, which isn't terrible. Actually having a Table of Contents up top for long pages mitigates a lot of that "long section" hassle since you can just jump to whatever's below it from the top of the page.

(Why DO so many huge pages deliberately omit the TOC? That's not reader-friendly at all.)

 

The themed merchants should all get a page for them as a collective, as a page for each individual one would be too small to be worth making a page.

 

Oh, there's absolutely no reason to make sub-pages for Tenant guards and villagers since there's not really any notable differences in what they do. With guards, the only real difference is "do they use guns or not" and eehhhhhnnnn. (Besides, a few of those cases are covered on their race pages anyway.)

I'm not married to themed merchants being individually-paged and wouldn't argue hard against putting them all on one "Themed Merchant Wares" or whatever page, though I'm not very swayed by the "their pages are too small" argument. Of course, this is my TFWIKI experience talking, where just about anything named gets a page and a rigorous Category system helps people find them easier (that's something else I kinda wanna workshop, but later, since it's slightly redundant... but I LIKE having redundant search methods).

If the "priority" data isn't gonna be on the page, it's probably not worth bringing it up at all, especially since the text largely points the player to methods of getting exactly who they want... outside of noting that the common villager is the "default" and will only spawn if absolutely no other requirements are met. (Or a short semisnarky note about how there is a priority system but it's not terribly important since we can help you get the Tenant you want anyway and you can just keep re-applying a Deed over and over.)

 

Oh, if anyone knows how to dig in game files and get the Tiers for some of those themed guards, that'd be smurfy.

 

1) Any objections/notes on the Tenant revamp before I take it live?

2) Is there some way to have that infobox dealy WITHOUT putting the page into the "Unique Monster" category? I didn't even notice that, but Nuru's page uses that infobox and she's under that Category too, which is... not right.

 

That parameter thing would be much more beneficial in the long run, I think, EITHER as a part of new similar template that we then apply to everything applicable or if it's just an alteration to the "Monster" one and we use that for whatever. I think a single versatile template beats out a ton of different very similar ones.

As it stands, just using the "monster" template for anything that might need that style of box and having some extra parameters would be fine, I think.

(We should probably have some kind of hub or category for all the templates easily found, as I've had one HELL of a time trying to find templates that might do what I'd like. Honestly, the wiki's heavy use of templates and difficulty in finding them and minimal documentation of their proper use probably is a major factor behind its "high signup rate/low editing user" ratio.)