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Equipment Indices Feedback Thread

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3/10/2023 1:49:38   
  Ward_Point
Armchair Archivist


 The AQ Encyclopedia has been our repository of all things AQ. In the early years of the game, there was no lack of volunteers that helped out in creating entries for the Encyclopedia. Generating entries has never been glamorous work, and there were simply too many steps to take to generate entries quickly. This was compounded by a Forum index that was simply a list that could not keep up with the way the game has evolved over the years. The Sages of Lore Group gave us some much needed assistance up till 2020, and due to a lack of time on everyone's part, we've been looking to InfoSubs again for information about equipment.

Player expectations and strategy have evolved. Status effects are everywhere. Whether they are simple Stat Drives, Skills, SPells, DoTs... A multitude of Status effects have come into existence and have formed a core part of strategy in AQ. Some form of search function was necessary to be able to filter out gear instead of simply relying on a 'List of Best Items'. Generic, but not one that allowed a Player to customize a strategy to their fancy.

It took some time to plan, and it's taken me over a year to get this far, but my Indexing Adventure is almost complete. If all goes well, Accessories should be done within the next 3 months.

The following is a list of Indices constructed in Google Sheets.
Generally, all the Indices start cataloging gear from ~2017 onward. Most gear released before 2017 is generally outdated, although there are obvious exceptions.

I greatly appreciate the feedback & assistance that the Tavern has given me. Some recent feedback has shown, however, that players do not necessarily have the knowledge to easily navigate these spreadsheets to look for equipment.
It's practically a necessity for anyone who is looking to use these Indices to have some knowledge about Excel and how to Sort & Filter by certain keywords. Do look into the 2nd Tab on every sheet, where there all abbreviations used are explained.

Please do give your feedback about these Indices. I may not be able to implement everything suggested, but this was always a project for the community, and a set of Indices that doesn't serve the community helps no one.

Weapons Index
Armours Index
Pets Index
Guests Index
Spells Index
Shields Index
Miscellaneous / Accessories Index



< Message edited by Ward_Point -- 3/10/2023 1:53:15 >
AQ  Post #: 1
3/29/2023 2:56:33   
PD
Member
 

 Since nobody has said anything here I'll say some stuff (but it was probably discussed on Discord but I'm not privy to that):

1. These indices will suffer the same fate as all of the other resources. Without some way to officially manage as a group resource, the indices and whatever other resources that exist will rely on that persons' availability for these to be great. It's possible that someone could always restart these whenever a maintainer goes inactive to start up these and get them up to date, but a vetted system of access control should be thought of.

2. This is probably outside of the scope of the indicies, but I suspect a lot of people would like some kind of wrapper over these incidies whenever they feel like doing a non-specific search. For example, "Get me all the 100-proc fire weapons that inflict a bleed" or "Find me either energy or light shields that have elemental compression". These kinds of query cannot be easily performed, but again this is probably outside the scope of this project but it's something that came to mind immediately as something that may have a lot of utility for people. Especially if they're trying to tailor a build around a theme.

3. I wonder if there's way to make the tags and amendments better. As I noted above, trying to search for effects can be kind of difficult especially when the tags are made on remarks. Citing as "Multiple Status" hinders the ability to index whatever is out there.

I have a few ideas about how to tackle some of these things though I'm still light on implementation details. Nonetheless as a consulting resource these are actually quite solid for what we need them to be - a basic resource to consult for. The above concerns are much more emblematic of wider pipeline issues I've stressed. The team is small and there seems to be a lack of tools that they can make to auto-document these (which is actually just the ideal solution). In an ideal world this kind of stuff is just auto-gen'd as a high-level summary of whatever the code is doing and any amendment is noted as a commit diff. But that's really asking too much of AQ to do at this point.

Other thought: The information ecosystem is really fragmented at this point. There's the Forum Pedia for everything before 2018, the player-maintained AQ Wikia, various spreadsheets that exist out there (such as Nivp/Jeanne sheets) and various Youtube and Reddit guides and now these exist. And don't even get me started on how fragmented the storyline/lore resources are. The great thing about the Pedia (and the forums in general) before 2017 was that it was more or less the resource. As emblematic of the situation after 2018 with far less resources for everything, there really needs to be consolidation of information. Maybe if someone would like to pony up money or if the AQ team could allocate a tiny budget maybe we could finally head towards a solution where we can have no just some resources, but making THE resource for all game information.


If the AQ team ever reads this, in the ever expanding bubble of things that could be worked on, developing these kinds of tools would definitely be something that is worth its weight in gold in terms of value gained. I suspect a lot of time is actually spent on chasing down these details. But perhaps developing tools that can just straight up analyze the code and make an auto-summary would save a lot of time. It might not even be possible, but it's probably some avenue worth exploring. Or maybe it's already been talked about and it's been deemed infeasible. Stray tangents...

Tangent 2: I've been talking a lot about pipeline/process issues over the last year. But I'm wondering about if it's time to create a formalized discussion around this issue. As I've said before, the root of everything that is more or less deficient right now is the lack of manpower to do anything that is important. This isn't the forum for it but it's worth thinking about because even though this isn't entirely game related, this is necessitated by that issue. Without staff to go out of their way to provide information, this resource lives and dies on that to happen.

< Message edited by PD -- 3/29/2023 3:06:26 >
Post #: 2
3/29/2023 21:51:33   
  Ward_Point
Armchair Archivist


 1) Please. By all means. Apply for access. HELP ME.

2) Have you tried Filtering the data? For 100% Proc Ranged Fire Weapons that burn, for example.
Data > Filter Views > Create New Temporary Filter View
Small little icons will be created beside each category.
a) Under Attack Type:
b) Clear All to clear all existing selections
c) Search for 'Ranged', then select all options for Ranged
d) Under Element, again, clear all and search for Fire, this will also allow you to select any dual-element weapons
e) Under 100% Poc, filter for 'YES', following Steps B & C
f) Under Remarks, filter for BURN as the above.

You'll only have two options currently, Fireheart Warbow & El Muchacho.

The same concept applies to Shields, or anyone looking for a compression Shield. All you need to do is to Filter the 'Primary' element, then select any of the other filter options that appear in the Resist column Eg: Earth/Energy, Energy/Ice, Energy/Water.

Google Sheets was chosen due to the filtering capability. As long as you set up filters properly, you can easily find whatever you're looking for.

3) Please do give me your suggestions. Sheets is versatile. It's the data entry that kills me.
Standardizations is also an issue. For Shields, for example, should the 'Main' Status be CNTR, or should it be the status it actually inflicts on Block? In the absence of opinions, I've set their 'Main' Status to be CNTR.
On the bright side, as long as the Status appears in the 'Remarks' Column, a simple Filter/search will bring it up.

4) Most players wouldn't use gear released before 2017. I've also been adding any gear that was recommended by the Equipment Guide on the wiki. If I'm missing something potentially useful, of course, DM me to have it added into the Indices.

This year is... quite a year, especially where Virtual Intelligence (Hello Mass Effect references) development is concerned [ChatGPT isn't a true AI, if it was we're doomed (See the Matrix, Terminator... any number of science fiction stories)] Google making the VI software open-source practically allows anyone to train a VI to do very manual, data entry tasks, hopefully >.> give it a couple of years and we could probably train a VI to extract infosubs for me >.>
AQ  Post #: 3
3/30/2023 4:48:24   
PD
Member
 

 Thanks for responding to my concerns. And it's good to know about the data views, I'll definitely be using those more going forward.

As for my other comments: my time is limited right now (but I'll definitely take a bigger crack at this later once that bandwidth is available, I promise!!!). Though I've been looking and thinking about this problem here and there. Can't really discuss any solution in public regarding the data entry but I'll definitely DM you some more specific ideas I've been thinking about.



And now for a tangent: One immediate impact that can be done (outside the scope of these indices) I feel in the meantime that the staff can positively contribute to is that information subs should probably be written in a far more standardized way for their descriptions. Sure there's a formatted table that shows basic metadata, but the real issue is that the effect data is often written in prose, making it hard to automate. I imagine that AQ actually has its own tagging system behind the hood when things are inflicted so we'd like to harness that. IE, when a certain frame occurs, it sends a message/tag to the game engine to inflict a status on the enemy. Ideally when an info sub is made, it gets described like this (or something to the effect of this):

Frame 1:
  • Hit(Element, Power, Type)
  • Burn(Element, PowLvL, turns, hitRequired=True)

    Frame 20:
  • Hit(Element, Power, Type)
  • Blind(PowLvL, turns)

    Frame 40:
  • [Hit(Element, Power, Type)]

    This is the most ideal way to make an info-sub in my opinion. In a sense, I almost wish AQ could have info subs like how DF does its pedia entries. Like this for example. No commentary. Just raw stats and metadata.

    An example of a very prose-y info sub is something like this. Lots of words, but very little in the way of numbers. A lot of info subs are dedicated to rationale-explaining (ie, why items get to have certain power levels or why they don't), but I suspect a lot of people actually don't care about "rationale", and if they did, they'd perform the calculations themselves and then see whether the design makes sense and then raise an issue on specifics.



    But an additional commentary: Overall I still think this is a good resources. Just that in the short point that it's still got maintainability issues as well as issues around contributing to the fragmentation of the information ecosystem. Nothing I can really fault with this project itself, but this is still symptomatic of other issues that exist (mainly pipeline-process)

    < Message edited by PD -- 3/31/2023 17:28:09 >
    • Post #: 4
    3/31/2023 6:13:51   
    JasCK
    Member
     

    		 Big respect bud, it is lovely to see Spells with Hit Counts, everything is gd to me only one thing that I believe is also worth to mention in the sheet, is the hit count of built in armour skill, especially something like the Ice Necro cav, T-Rex etc.
    Post #: 5
    3/31/2023 19:07:53   
    Sapphire
    Member

    		@WARD, I do wonder if it would be a useful column to indicate if the armor has a built-in skill, if it's a toggle type, weapon-based skill, spell-based skill, a spell, a mix, all of the above, etc?

    This *might* be relevant considering, while I have no idea if staff is even considering changing it, based on some discussions in the stat revamp thread, that I just wonder how many of those near 400 armors contain a weapon-based skill? This feature could be used to provide staff a list if they did ever decide to go in one by one and manually alter weapon-based skills to help push mage builds into their own lane. And it could also help FO players simply find a list of armors with weapons-based skills, etc.
    Post #: 6
    3/31/2023 21:30:39   
    Korriban Gaming
    Member

    		Second the hit count idea, given how important hit counts are in today's meta, alot of info subs miss out that information so would be nice to see it included
    AQ DF AQW  Post #: 7
    4/1/2023 7:04:31   
      Ward_Point
    Armchair Archivist


    		 @SapphireCatalyst: In the armour spreadsheet, we do differentiate things by SPells vs Skills. (Thank Jeanne for this). I don't feel that Toggles deserve their own category. Bloodzerkers basically have a 2-Hit Skill.

    Some old stuff are oddties. White Knight, Moglord Tortress, Horo-Show and Talodosian are the culprits. They have Weapon based SPells with EleComp to Damage. Besides these, the existing rules work.

    I will have to look into setting up some type of 'Bracket standard' where skills are concerned, similar to Excel maybe like for Blazing Bloodzerker: Skill (Fire, 2), or for Ice Necro Calvary: SPell (Ice, 6). EleLocks should draw from the Armour's base hit count and aply Elecomp to damage, so that one is straightforward.

    and now that I think about it, I probably mislabelled quite a few SPells as Skills in the Weapon spreadsheet... Urgh...
    AQ  Post #: 8
    4/4/2023 4:31:48   
    .*. .*. .*.
    Pfft hahaha!


    		 @Ward_Point

    I just wanted to thank you for this! Back in the days I used to love helping out with the Encyclopedia and we were so many players actively striving to keep it nice and organised.
    We were, or at least I was also poking the staff on IRC to get info regarding certain items, loads of good memories coming back to me.
    It is a shame that the Encyclopedia is outdated but totally understandable due to lack of players contributing to it and not enough staff resources to manage it.

    Anyhow, these spreadsheets have inspired me too create new characters with very specific builds, so once again thank you. :)

    I like the idea of adding the hit count to these spreadsheets, but it will be quite difficult/time consuming to get a hold of this data, due to not always being included in the info sub entries.
    This would surely have to be a joint task for players to help out with the hit count to be added to the spreadsheets if Ward_Point would decide to include a column for hit counts.
    Post #: 9
    5/19/2023 8:28:46   
    blex12345
    Member
     

    		 This is very good and useful @Ward_Point. Could we please have this in the AQ Encyclopedia section?
    Post #: 10
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