An AoE3 wiki?

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United States of America musketeer925
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An AoE3 wiki?

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Post by musketeer925 »

Some games maintain extensive wikis covering everything from game stats to strategy, a prime example of this being EU4's wiki:

https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki

There are some AoE3 wikis around, but they have limited and out-of-date information and very little strategy content. Do you think the AoE3 community could be encouraged to maintain a community-editable wiki? Would it be a better way to organize strategy information, patch differences (i.e., sections on each civ outlining differences between EP versions, RE, etc), than with forum threads?

This is always something I've wondered about -- I've never particularly felt forums were the best format for organizing information. In fact, I feel forums are a confused mix of many communication formats that basically brings out the worst features of all of them, without too many of the pros (vs. real-time chats like Discord which is great for casual community-building and pick-up games, Wikis which are better for organizing info than weird pinned threads and "strategy walls", etc).

This isn't necessary a reflection of anything the ESOC team is thinking about doing right now, I just personally wanted to see a discussion on it.
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Czech Republic siderit
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by siderit »

I would like such source of information :)
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by Kaiserklein »

We could just work on updating the existing wiki I guess, to keep it accurate
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by musketeer925 »

Kaiserklein wrote:We could just work on updating the existing wiki I guess, to keep it accurate

That's definitely a possibility.

I would say that if the community was really gung-ho about a wiki, an ESOC one could be integrated into the site in interesting ways to encourage using it more. I would imagine some kind of integrated side-by-side article and discussion thread view that could fuse forum discussions and updates to the wiki in a more community-oriented and friendly way than wiki talk pages do. You could alsointegrate things like the article on a civ having quick links to recs played by high level players with those civs from our rec database, etc.

The current wiki is also on the whole series, and I'm not sure if they condone fan-made content information, so EP patch info may not be welcome there.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by Kaiserklein »

Yeah that would definitely be cool, but isn't it too much work? Both the coding and writing the articles
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by Ashvin »

I thought about that, but with every EP iteration someone needs to update it. It can be made dynamic tho, but well...
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by musketeer925 »

Kaiserklein wrote:Yeah that would definitely be cool, but isn't it too much work? Both the coding and writing the articles


From a coding standpoint, there's lots of existing open source wiki software -- spinning that up wouldn't take much I don't think. From there, any cool integration features would definitely be work after that, but can always be incrementally added like we do most ESOC features.

From a writing standpoint, yes, it would take an orchestrated community effort to get stuff put together. However, I'm not sure that the existing wiki really provides enough for it to make much difference whether you start with that or start from scratch (and the risk of stuff being outdated means less useful). The strategy info there looks pretty much worthless - I don't see anything in the way of build orders, good example decks, or anything like that, just general prose of "strengths" and "weaknesses" of each civ. Establishing the basic page for each civ, allowing for BO subpages, and a general beginner's strategy guide are really the only things you need for it to start being useful.

The content from our strategy wall (viewtopic.php?f=29&t=9169) is probably already a much bigger source of good info than the content on the existing wiki.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by musketeer925 »

Ashvin wrote:I thought about that, but with every EP iteration someone needs to update it. It can be made dynamic tho, but well...

I don't think it'd be particularly prohibitive. We already write patch notes, sorted with changes by-civ, putting them in a wiki instead of a google doc seems about the same.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

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Post by edeholland »

I think this would be very attractive for people new to AoE3/ESOC and would be a great foundation for when AoE3:DE comes out. Because of that second point I think it's actually worth the effort.

I would much rather see it hosted on ESOC itself (so on a subforum or subpage on our domain) and not on aoe3.wiki.com or something like that. It sends more people to us, makes it easier for us to control & discuss and probably improves our ranking at search engines etc. Might also be more incentive for lower-level players to come on our website, since a wiki is interesting for everyone, while a community is, generally speaking, more catered towards competitive players.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by Papist »

I don’t think a full-on wiki is necessary, but we can definitely do a better job organizing the resources we have and creating new ones. I think it would be cool to have a page in the strategy section linking to a breakdown for each civ. These breakdowns could spell out the basic philosophy of each civ, show a couple sample decks, and list out the common build orders. Similar posts could be made for some of the more transcendent topics in AoE3, such as water, walling, unit management, etc. Putting all of this together would take a ton of work, but considerably less than making a comprehensive wiki (with a page for each unit, etc.) from scratch.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by tabben »

The current aoe3 wiki is decent although some unit descriptions etc. are written with too much personal touch. I still find it very useful for looking up unit stats though.

Somewhat related, I feel like the Esoc Patch notes could be presented in a much more accessible way. Right now there seems to only be a google doc that sucks ass to scroll through. The information is presented chronologically which is a bit awkward since usually you want to read about a certain civ or unit at a time. Sure, I can use the doc search function and type let's say "Indians" but when I see for example Sepoy HP change - I have to scroll up again to be certain it wasn't changed again afterwards. Just takes alot of time to digest the EP changes through this document.

I think all patch notes should be directly presented on the website, and also it should be possible to search for a unit or a civ and see all the changes that's been made since the original patch.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by momuuu »

I actually use the wiki sometimes too check unit stats. An ESOC wiki would be something that fits for the biggest (only) community site, but it depends on how much effort it is (and how much you'd enjoy making it) to determine if its worth it. Realistically, a starting point would be to copy paste most articles of the other wiki, and then slowly update them. Also, it could replace the tournament history tab and then include tournament history. This is what sc2's liquipedia is like.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by edeholland »

I think it would be possible to make this a community effort. We could start out with pages revelant to ESOC (about tournaments, the patch etc) and slowly integrate everything AoE3-related.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by Ashvin »

yeah this thing doesn't require direct staff involvement. People can write wikis and send to comm team for review, most submits can get a badge or recognition for motivation. or badges for 5, 10, 15 wikis.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by BrookG »

I could write some, especially during August
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by Hidddy_ »

I for one would not mind contributing to this. Also, fishing out top-player quotes from strategy forums to include in the strategy section would be a cool possibility
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by edeholland »

Another thing I want to add. Right now, we have 5 threads stickied/pinned in the General section and in every other board also 1-5 threads. While some of those are just for long-term discussions, a lot of them are for information or referencing only. All these resources could be included on a nice Wiki-like page with search function, FAQ, sorted by subject and easily accessible for newer players.

In the recently added FAQ section in the public Discord server, I had to link to 4 different places in the "New to the game?" section. Ideally, you want newer players to have 1 page/place for all their resources, not an entire forum to search in.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by musketeer925 »

Yeah @tabben I agree, the google docs are an awful format, I don't know why we still do it that way. No one every complained enough I guess.

@edeholland agree totally that a wiki would be a better place for most pinned threads.

@Ashvin badges are a good idea for it, although maybe we could do something like "rotating badges" where the top three contributors at any given time get the badges, and could lose them if someone else overtakes them. Would make it more competitive I think.

@momuuu wouldn't be out of the question to even automate populating unit stats etc by straight reading game files. I'd trust that much more than the existing wiki.
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Re: An AoE3 wiki?

Post by Knyron »

I don't know, IMO as a new player a wiki's fine when you want to quickly check unit stats, techs and all that data about the game. For MUs, strats, points of view, discussions... a forum is way better.

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