Template talk:Infobox item

Item types should be linked to item's category page.

Aren't "Estimated Craft & Research Time" useless?

Suggested improvements
I think this template could use some improvements: first, the "estimated craft time" is basically useless, since it varies so much depending on the skill of your workers, and can be calculated from them anyway. The "estimated research time" is also similarly useless. It would be nice to have something like "estimated number of research points", which would I think be more useful information, but this would require a pretty large research effort. Maybe it could be added and then if people actually have a chance to do some research they can put it in.

I think the red starred items (for instance, those explaining the auto-calculation of purchase price) are distracting and can be removed. Instead, I think most of the items (e.g. "market value") should be wikilinks to pages which can explain the concept in more detail.

Anyway, if no one objects, I'll implement these in the near future. FourteenDays 23:40, October 14, 2011 (UTC)


 * Send the word out about this subject, people will respond earlier if they get notified of such things (might even make a template for notifying on userpages ;) )


 * Comments from me on this subject:


 * - Craft and research times are not useless. They give an indication and thereby a bit of a clue on what to expect. People aren't dumb who read the wiki, they know it is not a one size fits all kind of approach.


 * - Would love to see the research time and craft time changed to 'research units' and 'craft units' but i am afraid getting that info together is a true pain to go through. I have not yet a clue on how to calculate the units anyway plus what it means for you. Would be nice to make a template where you could insert your own stats and the exact time rolls out ;)


 * - Red colored text is yust a reminder. I don't even see them when looking at pages, let alone make me distracted. I think they are good to have there as new readers might find them usefull.




 * Well, I've gone ahead and implemented most of the changes I suggested above (although I've left craft/research time alone for now). I've also created Recipe where we can talk about issues with recipe purchase price in more detail, which I think is a better solution.


 * The problem with craft time and research time is that there's so much variance -- there are items I craft in 2 hours now which took me 10 hours when I could first craft them. And without knowing whether the person who added the information was a low-level or high-level player themselves, it's hard to translate that information.


 * I agree that it would be very nice to have a template which can automatically calculate craft time. I was even wondering if it would be possible to have the infobox automatically calculate the crafting time given "average" crafters, but even that looks like it might be a little too complicated for Wiki templates to handle.




 * I think we should nuke the research/craft time. They are simply too variable to be remotely useful beyond "short/medium/long." And when I go on my research binges and respec all of my points into Innovator, I cut research times from >200 hours to <20 hours on very high-end recipes. I just see no upside to having this information in the template.

Page Design
I really hate the look of item pages. All of the useful information is in this big vertical box on the right of the page.

I think we should look into finishing the work at Template:Infobox item horiz and make that the default.

I would also suggest getting rid of the "General Buyers" section, which is redundant with the Customers box at the bottom of the infobox. While we're at it, I still think we should get rid of research & craft time, as we've discussed.

I'm still trying to figure out how to edit page design. Where is the stylesheet for the wiki? The table in this template is being forced to the right by a CSS style, but I have no idea where the stylesheet is...