Talk:World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Talk archive before ~ 16 October 2006

Cockatrice

Does anyone have any more information about why the name was changed? Such as the nature of the complaint, maybe. As it is it seems like this might just be a rumour. --Emit 15:00, 4 December 2006 (EST)

Rating system and item changes

I have made a section about the new rating system and the item changes in TBC in the item values page (Formulas:Item Values#The Burning Crusade), would a link to there on this page be relevant? Or should there even be a new section on the new systems here? Or a new page? Anyone wants to comment on that?

--Kanath 10:56, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

There should be a short explanation of it on here, and a link to the article from that. -- Kirkburn (talk) 12:50, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

I made a copy of the blue post explaining the new rating system at Formulas:Combat_Ratings_System. Note that the ratings-to-percent values described are only valid for level 60; at higher levels it will take more rating to get the same percentage chance. --Karrion 22:36, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

Levelling to 70

Noobishned, can you provide a reference for your assertion that people that do not purchase the expansion will be able to level past 60? The blue post link you removed directly contradicts it... --Karrion 22:38, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

Blue post on this question.

Size of outland

I've done some initial estimates on size. No data mining here, just measuring distance using timing on my epic mount. From the dark portal to the far west tip of zangarmarsh: 7 minutes Using "epic mount minutes" (cf light years) as a unit of distance, I think outland is approximately 50 square epic mount minutes in size. (imagine a square of 7 epic mount minutes by 7 epic mount minutes using the map of outland. Sure there's a couple things that go outside that square, but I think the extra spaces (like between hellfire penninsula and netherstorm) more than make up this distance. (7 minutes is generous) Using the same system (also in the beta for consistency), I traveled from Steemwheedle port to the western edge of sillithus in 9 1/4 minutes. I only counted time spent going east west, all north south time was removed (9 minutes is therefore a minimum, remember I didn't use any of the oceans, or the space between the NW corner of sillithus, and the coast (prolly about 15 epic seconds?)) A square of that is 81 square epic minutes. and comparing that distance on the map with the north south distance is about 3 times the distance, giving us approximately 200-240 square epic minutes. If anyone has any questions about this, please leave me a message at my wp talk page..

No, here is the appropriate place to talk about it. 1/5th just makes no sense - that would make outland the size of about 3 azerothian zones, which is impossible! This also ignores the very different shapes of outland and EK/Kalimdor... -- Kirkburn (talk) 11:01, 1 November 2006 (EST)

So, what's your complaint about my research, you dispute the 9 1/4 minutes / 7 minutes sizes of the zones? Or, given that that information is correct, you dispute how I'm estimating the size of the whole continents? Also, saying that it's about the same size as three azerothean zones feels about right to me. Note that the 7 minutes for outland covered just hellfire penninsula and zangarmarsh. Dividing that in half is 3 1/2 minutes. the 9 minutes is traveling through 3 zones (and doesn't include the water...), so each zone is about 3 minutes. so the outland zones are a little wider than the kalimdor zones. But note that both zangarmarsh and hellfire penninsula are a lot smaller North South. Tanaris is huge, probably a fair portion larger than any of the outland zones, Zangarmarsh is probably smaller than Swamp of Sorrows, hellfire, probably a little larger than SoS. Remember that SoS is a small zone, so maybe a little larger than 1/5, but I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit smaller than 1/3, probably closer to 1/4. Mckaysalisbury 15:07, 3 November 2006 (EST)

(Oh, and I meant for just a ping on wikipedia. I don't really watch papges on wowwiki. This is the correct place for the discussion.) Mckaysalisbury 15:07, 3 November 2006 (EST)

In the faqs about flying mounts being allowed in Azeroth the figure 4 times gets mentioned as the ratio of Azeroth size to Outland size. --Dga 16:18, 3 November 2006 (EST)

Hrm. Well if we look at Image:Composite Map of Outland.jpg and Image:Official map of outland.jpg, and assume that Hellfire Peninsula is larger than EPl, surely this must show that it's at least more than 1/5. I reverted 1/5 because of the absurdity of the possibility, rather than a get at your methodology. :) Comparing it to an Eastern Kingdoms map [http://www.wow-europe.com/shared/wow-com/images/basics/flight/en/index.htm, it looks more comparable to the size of Lordaeron, so about 1/3-1/4, rather than a fifth. -- Kirkburn (talk) 16:34, 3 November 2006 (EST)

Arena Rating System

This is in case someone out there hates me for removing the sentence, "A person might be calculated to win at 60% but when they actually pwn the other team their chance of winning changes to 100% or a 1." This statement is false.

The probability that we assign to a "chance of winning" does not reflect our ignorance of some deterministic process, but instead expresses the partitioning of an infinity of possible event paths by their outcomes. The universe is by its nature chaotic and this quality is expressed at all levels. Ask your local weatherman. --Bendykst

Article organization

I just scrolled through this a couple times, and it's almost impossible to figure out what's going on here at first glance. I can see the obvious separation of confirmed and debunked rumors, but the article lacks visual direction, and the 3% margin indentation is getting out of hand.

I would like to reorganize the sections so that there are more ==second level== headings to give some clearer delineation of topics, reduce the sheer number of sections to increase readability and reduce the margin problem, and just make the damn thing look sharper. The "debunked" section would stay at the end as a second level heading.

As long as this is a supported change, I'll get to it.

Edit: I've also been getting some errors from MediaWiki about the article being too large (33 KB) for some browsers to edit. As such, I'd also like to summarize sections and then link to a main article for the details. User:Montag/sig 18:17, 15 November 2006 (EST)

IMHO the page should only be about factual information. Rumors/Debunked should be in talk page or some other article. --Gryphon 18:31, 15 November 2006 (EST)

I'll second that. Anything to remove content from this page. I can certainly move that section to its own article, if it's even needed, since most of what we know about BC is complete and those rumors will continue to pop up with each expansion until they're realized. User:Montag/sig 18:32, 15 November 2006 (EST)

MediaWiki is being a bit paranoid; most modern browsers support signficantly larger text fields without any sort of difficulty, so the size of the article shouldn't be a factor in revising it. The key issue here is how the content is presented, not how much there is of it. Starlightblunder 12:10, 3 December 2006 (EST)

New article editions for peer review

I have written two proposals for new editions for this article. The current article looks and feels very incoherent. Many sections are in the wrong place, repeat information, and have information tacked on in very unorganized ways.

My versions have a bit more coherence. They are too many edits to describe completely. However, my primary goals were to increase readability and make the organization more intuitive. I removed the Debunked section, made all sections under the Confirmed Information their own headings, integrated sections into areas that were more appropriate for the subject, improved the wording of all sections, removed unnecessary lists, and removed unnecessary self-promotion and speculation. I also removed detailed information and, if a main article didn't exist, created one and added that information to the main article, then linked the article in the appropriate section.

I have two editions:

• User:Montag/World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade -- Re-organized. Mostly a cut and paste job from the original with the above improvements. All information in the original included in this edition.
• User:Montag/World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (shorter) -- Removed all but the most important information. Cuts the first edition down by about 20-25%.

I'd like to hear your reactions to these articles, either here or on the talk page of the article itself. I'd prefer you confine your reactions here to keep the discussion coherent.

I highly recommend we adopt one of these editions or some new edition for this article to improve its quality since it is one of the most high traffic articles on the site.

I prefer the shorter edition. It captures the essential, leaving it up to the reader which piece of information they wish to explore in more detail. Great work Montag! --Dracomage 15:59, 30 November 2006 (EST)

One article that is linked but doesn't exist is Burning Crusade spells. After BC goes live, we'll be getting rid of the BC tags, but for historical reasons I'd love if we had a page or a category for spells first included in BC. At some point I may get around to writing this, too, but if someone else feels the urge, go for it. User:Montag/sig 17:11, 30 November 2006 (EST)

I'd like some more comments on this before replacing the article. I don't want to replace one of the higher traffic articles on the site without more people in favor of it. User:Montag/sig 23:32, 2 December 2006 (EST)

Since nobody seems to be adamently opposed, I will replace the current article with the shorter version I've worked on. If you think it's too early or too controversial, please revert and we'll continue discussion. User:Montag/sig 15:29, 3 December 2006 (EST)

Racial Changes

I've seen a few articles that mention that Racial abilities are going to get reworked for the BC. Does anyone have a run down of this? --BestBrian

Logo and margins

I put the logo back in because I thought it is, after all, the BC logo, and it's certainly the first thing people will recognize about the expansion (when this article is old news). I did, however, keep the NDA out. ~

I also added the margins back in since the old article had it and this also seems to be becoming standard for more well-traveled articles. At some point in the future, we'll finally get the CSS altered and we'll be able to take it out. User:Montag/sig 01:13, 5 December 2006 (EST)

The logo is of dubious value, and package shots definitely do not belong at the top of the page. Think about it - virtually nobody is looking at Burning Crusade to see the new artwork - it's the content they're after, and the header is eating 350 pixels worth of vertical space. If you really want a logo on here, move it to the right, it's secondary to the content you're presenting.

It's curious to note that Wikipedia's article on TBC is currently better than ours - it both contains more information, and presents it better. Note the absense of irrelevant visuals - logo is not obstructing content (aligned to the right), packaging shots are under release information (where they should be), the login screen doesn't appear under "New high-level dungeons" (of all things, why this?), and the whole thing looks much less of a linkfarm. In short, the wikipedia article illustrates a better direction to go in - rather than truncating everything to a few sentences to work with peculiar presentation methods, the article should give a good idea of the content introduced and updated by the expansion.

As for the divs, well, that's just digging a grave for yourself. It's doesn't do much for legibility, and the formatting pseudostandard is a pain - using margin-left: 3% in global css severely limits the amount of subheader levels you can use. Part of the reason for your revision was that those 3% stacked indefinitely, and you've removed some headers to compensate. However, even in this revision, the Table of Contents appears disconnected because 2-9 are actually subpoints of a missing New Features header - a header that wouldn't be a problem if not for the artificially introduced formatting issues. Starlightblunder 11:33, 5 December 2006 (EST)