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 And that doesn't count the statuses which are grossly out of date and don't have an "unknown" status that exists for them.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)

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)