UDWiki:Open Discussion/New Dangermap

The purpose of this page is gauge some opinions on what changes should be made to the Dangermap (currently located on Suburb and accessible from the sidebar of this wiki) to make it more relevant for current users of the wiki and the game. I'm hoping, for the purposes of this discussion, that we can all agree that something should be changed in the current system, be it large or small.

The reason for this is because, going by the statistics of the game, there are 66 people per suburb on average, and taking into account player density across Malton, most suburbs under the current system should be Ghost Towns. And that doesn't count the statuses which are grossly out of date and don't have an "unknown" status that exists for them.

We have a couple of options. We could change the numbers for each Danger status so the numbers scale closer to the numbers we have now, or rewrite the meanings altogether. This previous open discussion has some interesting ideas for rewriting the entire system, and my favourite solution, which I think would also be the easiest, would be replacing the Dangermap with the Danger Center, which I find much more helpful and accurate on the general wellbeing of a suburb.

What do you all think? Should we be fixing this up in a large or small way? I personally find it a great time to do something exciting and overhaul the entire system, or if you don't think we should change anything at all, please pipe up. A ZOMBIE ANT 08:07, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

When I saw the title of this page on RC, I thought you were referring to a proposal on the works from last year, but I was wondering when someone would raise this. I don't edit the Dangermap itself due to this -- majority of the city's suburbs are classified as "safe", following the historical (and current) definitions, even if break-ins happen at a daily basis/even with a very active zed horde.

This discrepancy/dissonance is also why I call buildings that have less than 10 survivors across the 'burb, while not having any zeds and/or ruined buildings as "reverse ghost towns" (since the "ghost town" tends to refer to something so broken by zeds that neither zeds nor survivors inhabit the place.) I also considered changing the numbers stipulated in the DangerReport Building Status indicators to reflect the current number of characters, especially since more people seem to edit those than the suburb danger statuses. -- ^{(stalk · KT · FoD · UT)} 13:50, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

That's an interesting page indeed, but for now I want to focus on the suburb danger levels. Like you said, I think the numbers are all wrong, though I think doing statuses (either for suburbs, or individual buildings) based on numbers is wrong- seeing as as long as the game's player count will change, the numbers will always end up being redundant eventually. That's where I personally think the building statuses generally have the right idea, they are based on the threat of the building to survivors, just not based on an arbitrary number of survivors vs zombies. For this reason I think UDWiki:Open Discussion/DangerMap Version 4 got it right by making it a ratio. However, that discussion was made before the DangerCenter existed and I'd love for that to somehow become the standard for people in future. A ZOMBIE ANT 14:24, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Now that would have been interesting. I kind of wonder why that wasn't the standard that ended up being used for the DangerMap. Using a ratio instead of an arbitrary number is more in keeping with NPOV. It's also a more sensible approach -- like you said, I think the DangerCenter was in the right direction. I see the numerical values in the current descriptions making sense in the past, but not now. -- ^{(stalk · KT · FoD · UT)} 15:32, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

I think the honest truth is that the amount of different opinions overwhelm whoever proposed changing it and they end up abandoning the idea. People tend to think that everyone needs to be pleased before they change something, which I tend to disagree with. It's mostly why good improvements of the main page haven't been made since AHLG did it in 2009, and also why some other parts of the wiki have been so static. For example, I think a lot of people think DangerMap was a community consulted creation, but as far as I remember hearing it, Hagnat just up and "made it" one day and just plopped it on there and it became the arbitrary indicator of survivor safety in the game. Same for Main Page and Community Portal. They were very dated before AHLG just added changes. He did consult the community, but it takes someone to care enough to push it through eventually. A ZOMBIE ANT 11:42, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

My favorite iteration of the V4 discussion was EMR based danger map. It was the least subjective, most informative idea. The problem was displaying the info in a way that does not look like shit. I think there is a sandbox page in my userspace somewhere with all those icons and it looked as terrible as you might think it would. I had the idea of replacing the icons with smaller squares, but that's about when the discussion died I think. I've since accepted that the Danger Map has outlived its usefulness outside of just being a map (which is all most people probably use it for these days). Remember that suburb danger levels are user driven and will always be inacurate as long as people don't care enough to update. For that reason alone, perhaps an EMR based system would be best since one or two dedicated people could cover practically the entire city with minimal effort. ~ _{04:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)}

Technical Issues

Just to point out the obvious, unless someone has a bot available that can make the changes for us, we can't make any changes that involve changing the name/number of different statuses, unless someone plans to go through all 10,000 blocks and modify those old names to match the new ones. We can rewrite their descriptions with numbers or ratios instead, but when it comes to the templates themselves, any changes to them will need to be done by bots, and I'm not aware of any current users having any to run. That kinda puts a limitation on the scope of the changes we can talk about.

Also, before I discuss any of this further, a disclaimer: I'm biased against changing the way the infrastructure for it works, for the simple reason that I suspect I'm the one who will get stuck implementing any changes, given how the system works. —Aichon— 14:40, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out that limitation! I overlooked this because the descriptions/instructions other aspects of User:DangerReport utilize templates, but I failed to consider that any change that would require changing the names of the statuses would require a bulk edit. In that event, the old status templates would probably need to be retained for the sake of posterity/archival purpose, until updates with the newer status indicators will deprecate the older ones. (We know that isn't happening, though - I've edited some building danger statuses that have not been edited ever since the creation of their entries on the then-new, now-current User:DangerReport.)

I do have a concern about changing the entire system - I only started with 'contributing' to the wiki in 2010, by editing Danger Report statuses. It was easy for me to 'return' to the wiki after not caring about it for a long while, because the familiar syntax for updating building danger reports. Just modifying the descriptions of the currently available statuses, with no additions/deletions, seems to be the option of less hassle. -- ^{(stalk · KT · FoD · UT)} 15:32, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Sure, keeping the old names is the most sensible, rather than a complete reworking. I prefer to base the definition of the danger levels on ruin/unruined/lit, since it is practical (it can be determined "on the ground"). Although it also makes sense to consider or incorporate survivor and zombie populations. (Depends on what we want out of a suburb map that is updated to reflect an ingame reality. If we're keeping the suburb danger idea, it makes sense to include survivors/zombies since they'll affect how hard/easy it is to stay alive or not-dead.) --  AHLGTG THE END IS NIGH! 20:29, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Having the danger levels' descriptions revised (albeit probably with the same names) based on barricade levels would make my life (and those of a few others) much easier, oh GOSH YES. I'm usually bad at explaining what I suggest with words; I once wanted the danger reports to be revised to be based solely on barricade levels, but no survivor/zombie counts, but you have a good point.

Assuming a revision based on barricade levels,

Safe: VSB(0) to EHB(+~), with 0 ~ 1 zombies across the block.

Under Attack: Loosely barricaded to QSB+2, with 2 or more zombies across the block. (This criteria seems closer to "Vulnerable", but we don't have that status, so...)

Under Siege: Loosely barricaded to (EHB? idek,) with 5 or more zombies across the block.

The other building statuses seem to be fine at this point, though. -- ^{(stalk · KT · FoD · UT)} 22:00, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

It surely would suck if you had to do it all yourself, though I doubt that will happen so don't worry. However, I don't think the task will ever need to be that mammoth. Firstly, I was hoping the discussion would be focussed on Dangermap, not the building danger statuses, since I believe it's arbitrary and irrelevant numbering system is contributing to its low use. And secondly, if we were to do a rework of the danger statuses, there wouldn't be 10,000 templates to edit since there aren't 10,000 buildings in UD. Also, surely a transition could be made? You keep the old templates, make new ones, change the guide under the building danger status templates to only include the new ones and wait for the new ones to get adopted first. You'd have to give them different names, but surely that would work. A ZOMBIE ANT 01:35, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

In fact, don't template inclusions work through redirects? You could redirect 'safe' 'under siege' etc to their equivalent statuses through the transition period. Phase it out, and only do it manually when the old template inclusion rate gets low enough for a human to be bothered doing it. A ZOMBIE ANT 01:37, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't know if it'd work or not. I can't recall how inclusion limits work, so it's possible a change like that may very well push the Danger Center over the limit just by adding that extra redirect. We were having to do stuff like make templates with names just one letter long since two letters was causing things to break, so without testing, I won't know whether we can do something like that. I suspect it'll work, but I'm not certain.

Regarding the Danger Map, those were the changes I was talking about not looking forward to if I had to do them myself. The problem isn't that there are a lot of changes (just a few hundred, probably); the problem is that any changes to it will be complicated. Rooster made that system, as I recall, and though it works great, the stuff ties together in ways that aren't easy to notice until you break them. A lot of templates get used, but don't have any links going to them since the transclusions are dynamically created. That sort of stuff is difficult to sort out.

Regardless, I'd be okay with replacing the Danger Level for a suburb with the Danger Center template for that suburb in most places where the suburb's Danger Level is currently being used (e.g. on the suburb pages themselves). And I can already imagine one way to determine the overall repair/ruin status of a whole suburb in order to do something like, say, produce a box that provides a color representing the overall state of the suburb (i.e. something akin to the current suburb Danger Level), but it'd be an incredibly heavy set of templates, so I'm not sure that it's something we can actually do in practice. —Aichon— 02:13, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

That sounds awful, I hope it isn't the case. A ZOMBIE ANT 02:52, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

What would you all think of the super simple proposal of replacing the Dangermap with the DangerCenter on Suburb? A ZOMBIE ANT 11:32, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

A quick story: I thought I was okay with your proposal, since no objections came to mind, but I wanted to do a quick double-check on some stuff, so I went to the DangerCenter to look it over again. I noticed a block that had a weird color and wanted to see what was up at that block. I clicked on the block, but all I got was mouseover text with the name of the suburb. So, I clicked on City Map on the nav bar to the side, clicked on the name of the suburb in the Dangermap, and then went "oh crap, the main use I have for the dangermap has nothing to do with danger levels, and everything to do with how quickly it lets me jump to a suburb!". There may be ways to address that issue, such as layering an invisible set of divs over the DangerCenter that adds links to each suburb, but we'd have to do that on Suburb, since I doubt we could add that much code to the DangerCenter template itself. Long story short, the dangermap serves more purposes than merely displaying the danger, and we need to consider those as well, since I'd argue that they may actually be more important than the danger levels. —Aichon— 16:51, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

You're certainly right, I had thought of that tradeoff at one point and I was thinking perhaps it might be worth having both a Danger-related map on the suburb page, and also further down, one that has clickable suburbs on it (if we can't have both in one), or the other way around. Might be a bit cluttered, but it would at least serve both purposes? A ZOMBIE ANT 01:13, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I don't believe we'd be able to tansclude the Danger Center on the Suburb page because of template call limits. If memory serves, Danger Center is already at the very limits of what is allowed. Transcluding it might be too much. Also, there are server strain concerns with Danger Center. I remember after it was completed, the wiki ran very slow for a while. Assuming it could be transcluded, it might be potemtially wiki-breaking to try transcluding it on the most widely viewed page on the wiki. At the minumum, some tests should be ran before even continuing with this particular idea. ~ _{04:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)}

Really good point, I also remember when the wiki almost died as a result of the newly completed DangerCenter. Like you said, a test would be absolutely necessary. For example, perhaps putting it on the suburb page, with a notice explaining that it's a test and if any adverse experiences are felt, to note them on the talk page, etc. A ZOMBIE ANT 05:38, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I suspect they'd be pretty obvious. ;) —Aichon— 15:01, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, there are a few ways to approach the problem. I think the moral of the story is simply that I'm okay with eliminating Danger Levels, which we represent in the Danger Map, and replacing that functionality with the Danger Center instead. We'll simply need to add something that allows for easy navigation to suburbs. It just occurred to me that it might be possible to add it as a mouseover in the nav bar: mouse over some link, out pops a minimap that shows you suburb names on hover, and you can click the one you want to jump to it. Although, it'd only work if we could get everyone using an updated CSS, which was the technical hurdle we hit with the main page update. —Aichon— 15:01, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

The wiki always lags for me when I (or maybe someone else also) accesses the Danger Center. Are we sure about this? --  AHLGTG THE END IS NIGH! 21:11, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

The Danger Center also gives me massive wiki lag. User:DangerReport, not so much. I wouldn't mind using it MAYBE if it didn't make pages take 3 minutes to load. I can imagine it has a lot of templates called. -- ^{(stalk · KT · FoD · UT)} 21:57, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I wasn't aware lag occurred still from the Danger Center. If that's the case I think, sadly, it might not be worth doing. It'll always be a dream... A ZOMBIE ANT 01:00, 19 June 2014 (UTC)