User talk:Jerodast

Caching issues

Just thought I'd mention, regarding the recent issues with the healing effects listings, that this happens fairly regularly. I should probably speak to Eyes when he's less busy to see if there's a more permanent solution that can be found, but in the meanwhile the problem can be solved by resaving the card content and/or data pages. In some cases you need to resave the data page, then the content page afterward. You may also then need to resave the list page (e.g. Priest) in order to get the table/card list itself to update. In no case do you need to actually edit anything; just open up edit then click save, so the system re-processes the page. With the exception of bigger bugs, this will re-add that particular page to all relevant lists. When it happens on a larger scale, I tend to ask Eyes to force a refresh system-wide, since there are a lot of cards and it can take quite a while to resave them all! -- Taohinton (talk) 04:30, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Honestly I doubt I'll be on top of that much, since that's the only instance of the problem I've yet noticed and as you say an automated solution is most appropriate. Just wanted to make sure someone was aware of it is all.- jerodast (talk) 16:20, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

References

While I see where you're coming from, I've reverted your latter edit to Kezan Mystic, re: references. The wiki is frequently a source of unverified, unreferenced information. I'm trying to get sharper about providing references even for fairly obvious things, and might start tagging unsourced statements for clarity, too. We get a lot of good information added by IP addresses, but it's very rare any references are provided, and in some cases the info is false; in some cases this leads to readers being misled, and even losing games because of it, which may then get reported on Reddit, etc; this isn't good for the wiki or its readers, especially in terms of trust. As a result, clarity of sourcing, and which statements are verified, is important.

In the edit in question, you changed it so there was a single reference at the end of the paragraph, which itself contained two different sentences/statements. While I agree in general it's more aesthetically pleasing to have a single footnote, from an editor's (or reader's) point of view, this makes it much harder to know whether the first statement is verified or not. It forces you to open the reference itself, then read through to find out (and sometimes figure out) which statement/s were actually being sourced; alternatively it may mislead readers one way or other other. It's definitely a matter of judgement, but if I'm forced to choose, I much prefer transparency of which statements are sourced, rather than a slightly tidier page, especially when it comes down to tricky technical matters. -- Taohinton (talk) 17:24, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I have no qualms about comprehensive referencing, but I still disagree with that style. This is not about having vs missing a reference, it's about presentation of the reference. Granularity is arbitrary; I could argue that any compound sentence needs two footnotes, or even that two different qualifiers to the SAME NOUN need two footnotes to make it crystal clear that both adjectives were supported by the reference. That is only slightly more absurd than the idea that two short sentences in the same short bullet point need separate footnotes. Viewers can see that a bullet point packages those sentences into a single interconnected concept, and that the references at the end therefore apply to the whole. Sure, some anon can come in and add a bad sentence to a bullet point that until then was well-supported. But they can just as easily come in and add a bad clause or modifying word to a sentence that until then was well-supported. You can't protect the wiki from every little erroneous edit. At some point you have to trust readers to understand what a wiki is and how references work.

You call the bullet point a "paragraph", but it barely qualifies as one. A long paragraph, yes, you would want to footnote inside - though still not necessarily each sentence. You draw equivalence between sentences and statements, but in fact the second sentence flows so smoothly from the first when reading in sequence that they're practically a single thought - there's a reason it's one bullet point and not two. The multiple footnotes muddy the clarity of the writing by implying some disconnect between the two parts of the concept when it fact it works as a whole. The bullet point structure and the footnote structure work naturally in parallel since they are both meant to encapsulate a "chunk" of information; if they don't line up that makes me think that one or the other isn't being used properly.

But, it is just a matter of style. I won't take up any more time worrying about it. - jerodast (talk) 22:15, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Boss stuff in tables

See Talk:Intense Gaze (Heroic). -- Taohinton (talk) 23:39, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, kinda figured. I mean, I think there is room for it in some tables - I sure think it's interesting that some boss powers are actually ongoing for instance. And I'm having trouble thinking of a scenario where a player is trying to build a deck based on the list of cards with Ongoing effects, since it's such a broad category. But no biggie either way. - jerodast (talk) 23:43, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

New articles

A bit late, but I just wanted to say good job on writing up/expanding the new articles; Tempo, Burst, Drop, etc! It's great to fill out some of these missing articles, and I appreciate your attention to quality and division of content between the various pages :) -- Taohinton (talk) 19:07, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Unfortunately my follow through is not so great - my energy for such things is unpredictable as my RL work schedule varies. That's why I had to back out of involvement with the AR project, some of those new articles could use a second draft, etc. But, I edit when I can, and slowly things converge toward Quality. Tis the nature of wikis :) - jerodast (talk) 12:10, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

Somehow overlooked this edit! Yes, that is indeed the nature of wikis. We all have to decide for ourselves how much time and energy we can put into the project. In the end it's volunteering, so all contributions are appreciated :) My time is very unpredictable too, which is likewise why I never re-drafted the AR in the first place (or got into the rewrite in any depth), not to mention a few dozen other projects on the wiki; but luckily we have a growing team of editors, so hopefully the overlap can take some of the pressure off those of us who feel we 'should' be improving things when we simply don't have the time! This combination of delegation, collaboration and knowing your own limits is just one of the many life skills you can learn from editing a wiki such as this ;) -- Taohinton (talk) 18:36, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Refreshing

Re: your edit to Shadow Word: Death, just in case you were uncertain, there's no need to make any changes to articles to get them to refresh; just click 'edit' then save. I've also written up the basics here for future convenience. -- Taohinton (talk) 22:39, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Haha, I now see your original note about that at the top of this very page, thanks for the reminder. Testing the non-edit re-save here, I see no new entry in the page history, which I guess is why that's preferable to a whitepace edit. It's just so hard to make my instincts trust that that'll do anything :) - jerodast (talk) 12:07, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

Heh, guess I'm repeating myself :P Very occasionally we get a page which still doesn't correct itself despite all of the mentioned things to try, but that's very rare, so generally resaving and rechecking should allow your eyes to quickly confirm something has indeed changed :) -- Taohinton (talk) 18:39, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Questy Brawling

The topic of using Tavern Brawls to complete quests should really be covered in the Quest gold-making/quest-completing guide. They're now a top option for doing so, because they're quick, an easy way to get wins with classes you don't play, and you can play them casually without caring about messing up your MMR - not to mention being pretty fun! Since it's your work, I thought I'd put it to you ;) -- Taohinton (talk) 23:58, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

I don't follow. Unranked play mode is even quicker for me, since my opponents seem to know their decks. You may be right about MMR, but I win much more consistently in play mode then in the tavern brawl. What do you mean by "an easy way to get wins with classes you don't play"? Create a new deck and have a go at it.

Fun? To each his own. Hearthstone is already pretty random w/o brawls. I can pick e.g. leftmost card in the arena draft and have an experience similar to the current brawl. -- Karol007 (talk) 23:11, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

To be fair this appears to be a uniquely bad (and lazily designed) Brawl haha. But to each his own, indeed.

I wrote that section of the Questing guide because my point of view is basically "spend as much of my limited Hearthstone time as possible in the Arena without wasting any chances to earn gold and cards," which was clearly a different approach than the writeup at the time. Brawl hasn't really changed that on my end. I guess if the current Brawl is non-constructed, you don't have the collection to do well on the ladder, and you don't want to/can't afford/aren't getting the right classes in Arena, then Brawl is a good option, but that's a fairly small point, and it may be that the real implications of Brawl would be more obvious to someone with different play priorities than me. I'd be happy to see someone else add it in :) - jerodast (talk) 01:15, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

@Karol007: My experience is players take longer to play in Casual, since they're either testing new decks or just generally playing and thus trying to win. Brawls tend to be ultra-casual; players also seem to concede more readily, since there are no penalties. Your win-rate should be 50/50 in both Casual and Tavern Brawl, switching decks aside. It's true your matches might be quicker in Casual if you're playing something like Face Hunter, though. Re: Classes, right now for example you can just press 'rogue' and get a rogue deck, play with it, win with it (your opponent has a deck likely that's just as bad, rather than a polished and practised one) and complete a quest. A player with a good Casual MMR who tries a rogue deck for the very first time in Casual mode is likely to lose a lot of games before they level off. And again, the lack of concern over MMR and the general 'just for fun' nature of Brawls means players may feel much more inclined to try a new class there, rather than in serious games, requiring detailed class strategies and 'competitive' decks. That's just my perspective, though.

Off-topic, but it's a shame you don't enjoy Tavern Brawls. The current one is pretty much the most random setup imaginable, but the others are far less so. Your example is incorrect though - you can't simply choose to play Arena against a whole set of players who have also chosen the left-most card each pick ;)

@jerodast: I'll have to see if/when I have the time to edit it intelligently :) I definitely see it as a good way to hit various quests, for example the Summoner's Brawl was a *far* quicker way to complete the "Play 40 spells" quest than regular matches. In theory you could aim to complete that quest by making a special all-spell deck and loading a Casual match (assuming you had the spare deck slot), but who does that? Meanwhile in Brawl mode, *everyone* was doing it! Same with the Webspinner one for playing or destroying minions. Anyway, I'll see what I get round to. -- Taohinton (talk) 02:08, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Well, sure, if you have a quest perfectly tuned for that Brawl then great. But getting the "just right" 40 spells quest for Brawl X is even more unlikely than getting the "just right" 2/5 wins quest for Arena class Y. And unlike Arena, Brawl has no inherent reward other than the first win in the week and the super-slow 10/3 wins reward.

By the way, I think the way I wrote the current version of Quest#Maximizing gold per game played is unwieldy. I notice that the preceding section ("maximizing gold per day") actually makes no mention at all of what format to play. "My" section should be more like that; the parts about Arena choices and such should probably be in a separate section, as should most of the planned new material on Tavern Brawl. Basically, the strategy for GETTING quests by re-rolling is a different thing than the choosing/special considerations of which formats to COMPLETE quests. - jerodast (talk) 23:18, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Kezan Mystic

Looks like something went a bit wrong during your edit of Kezan Mystic. You've added {{GvG}}, called it 'upcoming', removed quotes, artist, gallery, strategy, many useful notes... etc. I've reverted the edit for now, so you can figure out what you meant to do and what you didn't ;) -- Taohinton (talk) 15:15, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Maybe he accidentally edited a previous state of the page. -- Karol007 (talk) 22:24, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

That is precisely what happened :) I was going through page history to see when a tag was added, and I must've accidentally edited from there instead of the current version. And then missed the warning. Blech. Thanks for catching it! - jerodast (talk) 00:24, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Haha no problem :P Re: Destroy, I'm in agreement. Same with return effects destroying, etc. -- Taohinton (talk) 15:02, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Champions' Table

You are hereby summoned to the 2015 Champions' Table. -- Taohinton (talk) 22:08, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Mulligan

D'oh, completely forgot to fix the much larger section about the stand-offs! I wasn't really wanting to have to do it anyway though, so I guess it worked out pretty well :P -- Taohinton (talk) 19:22, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Triggered effect

I haven't had any responses on whether to go ahead with the conversion of Triggered effect to a "master list", and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts? As usual I'd really like to have a community consensus on the matter, but that tends to be hard to muster; I'd still rather have input from other editors, though, especially as this is partly based on others' preferences.

My full write-up is on the talk page, but in summary my main concern with the conversion is the loading time, which is pretty long. Other than that it seems like it could be a solution to the terminology problems, and be useful enough. In terms of the individual topic pages a section linking to the list mightn't be such a bad idea, albeit still a compromise. Thoughts? -- Taohinton (talk) 10:26, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

I did read that at the time but didn't really have much to add beyond what either of us had already said. This time around I realized it didn't seem like the possibility of a separate page had been mentioned, but either way you want to go I am pretty much neutral on it :) - jerodast (talk) 15:47, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Your opinion is desired

Your opinion is desired on some upcoming style changes throughout the wiki. The changes are due to be implemented this Friday, so please add your thoughts now if you wish to have a say. -- Taohinton (talk) 03:49, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Abuse Filter

On the C'thun page, I attempted to edit as to at in the sentence, "Stealing your opponent's C'Thun will cause it to maintain its current buffs, as least if the stealing player has no C'Thun ritual buffs." However, having not edited on this wiki, I was blocked by abuse filter, which requested I contact you. Thank you for the assistance. Man son you (talk) 04:50, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Welcome to the wiki! To be honest I'm not sure what's happening, that's odd. I've asked some other admins to take a look at it but it might be a little while. In the meantime maybe you can see if there's another edit you'd want to make and see if you're getting blocked on all the pages. - jerodast (talk) 05:19, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately, some patterns of adding links are very common in spam edits and restricted to editors who have made a few edits. Our abuse filter system lacks any way for me to whitelist certain accounts, so I can only suggest making a few small edits elsewhere, without any links, and trying again. And you aren't blocked; it simply was preventing that specific edit. We apologize for the inconvenience. — oOeyes 07:13, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick answer! - jerodast (talk) 07:35, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Handling offensive changes

Being a fairly new kid on the block, I'm wondering if you can advise me on how to handle a situation.

On the Kripparian page, an anonymous user replaced a {fact} tag with a (poorly formatted) URL. I checked the URL and was confronted with hardcore gay porn. I immediately undid the change, with an NSFW warning in the comment, but I'd like to know if there are ways to completely and permanently remove that offensive link to ensure people going through the history are not unwillingly confronted with it.

After seeing this I also feel inclined to remove the single other change made from the same IP address (which, while not offensive, is an unverified fact and also on the Kripparian page). Perhaps these changes are coming from a Kripp hater?

Finally, I'm wondering if there is a way to get a user or an IP address banned from making future changes. (I believe in second chances so I would not do it now for this IP address, but a second attempt would get him banned if it were my call.)

-- BigHugger (talk) 12:02, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

I've escalated the request about hiding the revision to Gamepedia staff. There is a way.

There are ways to block users, as well as protect pages, yes. There are specific guidelines for using these tools, which I will follow if it's repeated too much. But when the vandalism is very infrequent sometimes it's best to revert and move on.

I agree that the normal benefit of the doubt we give to unverified edits should not be extended to vandals - nice catch, I wouldn't have caught that. - jerodast (talk) 17:30, 5 May 2017 (UTC)