Thread: Why aren't the new quests in the lorebook?

See title.

Originally Posted by Anetheroc

See title.

Short answer, they weren't flagged appropriately when the Mirkwood data export was performed. It is an on-going question/issue; we're working on various solutions to avoid this and hope to have them out Sapience Soon.

Long answer might come some day in a blog post. For now, all I can say is *sigh*...

Hmm one other thing about quests in lorebook, unlike wow and eq1 and most other top games, there seems to be almost no entries there or on fansites that have enough people explaining things.

i have yet to be unsure about something, enter a search in the in-game lorebook and get an answer....just a rewritten quest or if an item, just the tooltip info and almost no guides or raid info.


Any ideas on encouraging our more knowledgable players to post more input in there?

Originally Posted by Duwis

Short answer, they weren't flagged appropriately when the Mirkwood data export was performed. It is an on-going question/issue; we're working on various solutions to avoid this and hope to have them out Sapience Soon.

Long answer might come some day in a blog post. For now, all I can say is *sigh*...

Understood. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Is this the same reason why we're not seeing components such as Skirmish Marks and such in the lorebook as well?

Originally Posted by Merric

Is this the same reason why we're not seeing components such as Skirmish Marks and such in the lorebook as well?

Nose... you have hit it right on.

Thanks Duwis! Much appreciated.

Originally Posted by anwar

Hmm one other thing about quests in lorebook, unlike wow and eq1 and most other top games, there seems to be almost no entries there or on fansites that have enough people explaining things.

Oh, there's a lot of information on fansites, but the problem is that Turbine first strangled the Lorebook in its inception then hasn't really allowed it to grow. To be fair, a large part of the strangle/not allowing it to grow was my fault.

See, when the game started, Turbine was pretty adamant that there would never be an official wiki. They made that quite clear, repeatedly, that they had no interest in doing such a thing. Of course, being an incredible way to share information an unofficial wiki soon sprang up, lotro-wiki.com The game launched and if memory serves me right, it was like two weeks after launch that Turbine said that they would now have an official lorebook.

Which was great, but a freaking metric ton of quests had already been typed in on lotro-wiki.com. And because lotro-wiki.com was a "free" site, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 and since the Lorebook was owned by Turbine, the Lorebook is a commercial site, so that precluded any batch quest data transfers, people would have had to go through by hand and copy/paste each and every quest and all the templates and everything that makes a wiki look good would have had to be redeveloped from scratch.

So there we were, with a whole huge amount of work that went in, then Turbine wanted us to walk away from it and start from scratch. So a number of us, myself included told Turbine, "No, not just no, not a chance." We said that Turbine already had all the quest data in its computers, the devs had already typed it up, they should seed the Lorebook with an amount commensurate with what we'd already done (virtually every quest had been typed in) and then we'd jump on it and the Lorebook would take off.

Turbine refused. And so the Lorebook languished, by and large untouched. A good portion of the people that really cared about a LotRO wiki were pretty turned off by that. Most of the people that created Lorebook articles created fluff articles, about their own characters, or their kinships, or something else like that (to be fair, I created articles for my characters as well) and not much of real substance was being put in.

So then finally Turbine decided to seed the Lorebook. But they decided to sew it all up in such a manner that nobody else could do anything with it. with Official pages that nobody else could edit. And in another decision made at the same time, that was in large part pushed by me, they decided to base pages off the Category pages. Instead of making the Category pages a backside navigation tool for the rest of the Wiki, like the Wikipedia, I thought it would be a lot easier to just use the Category pages. But this made it really unintuitive to find pages and then Turbine took off from there, putting items in Item space, putting armour in Armour space, etc. Virtually nothing is in what's known as mainspace. And there it's sat ever since, Turbine doesn't want to create offical templates or official transclusions.

The problem with official locked quest writups is that it looks pretty but it's not wikified. Nothing links to anything else and because of the different namespaces linking is a pain in the butt.

When Chief Grimbriar casually mentions Saeradan, there's no link to Saeradan's page. Unless you go search for Saeradan, there's no way to find out who this guy is, where he is or anything else about him. For instance, here's some quest text from before Bree-land was revamped and quests were changed.

I want you to bring this medallion over to a man named Saeradan. He has a cabin in the woods. It's a ways out of Bree to the north and a little to the east.

Now, here's what you'd have to do to link Saeradan and Bree in that quote:

I want you to bring this medallion over to a man named [[NPC:Saeradan|Saeradan]]. He has a cabin in the woods. It's a ways out of [[Lore:Bree|Bree]] to the north and a little to the east.

Notice how I basically had to type the name twice? Also, there is no Bree page. There's a Bree Area page and a Bree Lore page and a Bree... well, a lot of them, but no overall Bree page that gives a good overview of Bree and what's there and what can be found.

Now, if I tried to make a Bree page and transclude information from all those other pages, I'd end up with duplicate headers all over the place because I can't put in or tags in those other pages. It would look like a real mess.

So I don't bother and I'm not about to try to spend the hours and hours trying to duplicate something that's already there if Turbine would just unlock it or create some way for players to really be able to edit the Lorebook.

Now, I'm working on a Barad Guldur overview that I hope others will jump in on and I think I'll go make a Bree page just to see how messy it gets, but the Lorebook was stunted at birth and never really allowed to grow since.