All posts by Unevent

FANDOMbot got some of the uploaded images, yeah. After that didn't take me long to undo what presumably took this particular person quite some time to put together once I got on.

Normally our vandalism is just low-level or peculiar bots that insert random links into pages, or stick things into random categories for no apparent reason. This kind of thing's not common and hey, gone within the hour's not too bad, I've seen Wikipedia vandalism persist longer. Between all our admins we seem to have most hours of the day fairly well covered. Can't ever entirely stop vandalism on a wiki while keeping it open for legitimate contributors.

If no staff are around just revert what you can, as indeed you did, and someone will be around to clear up the rest before too long. Normal users can't delete pages, but if someone makes one that's just vandalism (with or without shock images) you can just blank it as a stopgap, one of us will clean it up properly later. Don't hesitate to hit up my talk page either, increases the chance I'll see things earlier if I get a notification there.

"We truly don't know diddly-squat besides agent Caelar's reports, but we could still create the whole architecture from scratch ourselves if we cared: Just take inspiration from the other wikis!" - Haximus

I'm disinclined to do that because just copying the way other wikis do things doesn't exactly give a huge incentive for people to come here as opposed to just... staying on whichever wikis we "took inspiration" from. Which would likely just amount to basically copying anyway, given none of us have the BG3 knowledge to really interpret what we're looking at and put any kind of creative spin of our own onto it, so it'd be purely very derivative. Not something I'm keen on just from the point of view of "someone puts in a load of work elsewhere and we just lift it", but even if we set that aside I don't think it's really going to encourage many people. No, I think it better to let any contributors design architecture themselves - it'll be more intuitive to them having made it themselves, higher chance of some originality that motivates people to use this wiki over another and doesn't risk us getting a bad rep for just "plagiarising another wiki's work".

Obviously if one of us gets really into BG3 then we could start designing it ourselves, or if someone shows up who'd love to contribute but needs some help getting the architecture set up then we can assist, but trying to do it ourselves with no knowledge of the game, simply imitating other wikis elsewhere? No, not keen, I'm afraid. Can't stop anyone if they really want to do it, but not something I'll be doing myself.

@Haximus Thunderburp My desire is simply to make it plain that this is the case, partly so that nobody misunderstands any decision here as being final and binding in perpetuity should it come up in future, and partly so that if any hypothetical BG3 contributors look through this thread when they're deciding as to whether they'd like to contribute or not they know that they can chime in and their opinions on the matter won't be disregarded simply because they've not been here for years editing BG1&2 stuff. Either possibility is one I've seen happen in other online communities - usually through ignorance rather than malice - so I'd like to just make it explicit so no such misunderstandings occur here. :)

The vibe I'm getting here from the discussion thus far seems to be that people's preference is roughly: if and when BG3 content shows up - assuming anyone who wants to provide some doesn't request a separate Fandom wiki to avoid the pain of merging with this one - the immediate solution should probably be for duplicate page titles for BG3 content to have "(BG3)" as a suffix at the end. Or "(Baldur's Gate 3)" or whatever else gets settled on; probably depends on how any new contributors would want to do it. If we do start getting significant BG3 content and traffic as a result of those early pages, only then can we think about, say, making the current "Potion of Healing" into "Potion of Healing (BG1&2)" - again, suffix subject to change - to try and provide greater symmetry between articles that exist for both games. But in the short to medium term, keep all current content as-is - don't mess up existing pages for the sake of those as don't even exist yet.

Reasonable summary of how everyone's landing on this so far? I'm happy with this as a provisional solution provided everyone else is on the same page. Though to reiterate my earlier point, should we suddenly get an influx of potential contributors who favour a different answer I think they should be heard out and the policies adjusted if their preferred solution is still agreeable without too much disruption to our existing content.

My concerns are mainly making sure that what we have here on the wiki isn't overly disrupted by trying to make BG3 content appear. I don't really have much of a horse in the BG3 race, so to speak; the game doesn't immediately appeal to me from what I've seen of it and while I don't rule out playing it eventually, it's definitely not high up my list. So of any solutions proposed, my vote would be for whatever's least disruptive to our current architecture, but if people are fairly unanimous in one that's a little more disruptive then I'm not going to insist on vetoing it!

At this late stage, with BG3 having been in early access for some time, and wikis for it having sprung up elsewhere on the internet, I'm not sure as to whether we realistically can attract significant numbers of contributors simply by laying out some bare-bones architecture. This is why I say that honestly, I feel any input I have on the decision isn't super relevant, as I think we'd need opinions from someone dedicated to specifically setting up BG3 content on a Fandom wiki rather than just going to one of the others. If their preference were to just start a new one (baldursgate3.fandom.com?) because integrating into this older wiki was too much of a hassle with the likely number of duplicate page titles and whatnot then I'd happily point to it on the frontpage here and wish them luck in their endeavour; I'm not personally wedded to the notion that we have to have it here if people would rather it go on its own domain because it'd be easier for them. Whether everyone else on staff here or the Fandom higher-ups would be okay with that, though, I don't know.

But, on the other hand, were BG3 contributors to decide that they would rather have it on here then we should listen to what they have to say on the matter, whatever's provisionally decided now. To take a super trivial example; if we decide "Potion of Healing (BG3)" is the best way to do page titles for BG3 content but when contributors show up they're all making pages with the format "(BG3) Potion of Healing" then we should probably let them go with that rather than making a big song and dance over it. Right? I'm not opposed to theorycrafting how BG3 content might work here; more just saying that any decisions made here should have a slightly provisional status pending the arrival of any actual contributors.

I've been quiet on this for a while because honestly, I don't know what the solution is.

Our problem with BG3 content has historically been - and remains - a lack of contributors. Unless anyone present is willing to undertake the gargantuan task of establishing the BG3 pages, building up a base for them including potentially creating new templates and whatnot, and hoping more people rock up in order to build on that base, rather than going to the existing wikis elsewhere, I'm not really sure what our opinions are worth. If we all make a decision and agree that it sounds great, but some hypothetical future BG3 contributors think that it's terrible and it puts them off contributing here, then... well, wasn't really a great decision. I don't know if my computer even can run BG3, and I've no plans to get it, so I can't say "well, as a future contributor to BG3 content, my opinion is this:" and justify my reasons.

My natural inclination is towards something that has the lowest impact possible on our established content; whether or not we get some great BG3 contributors in future, at present the wiki is one of the best sources around for BG1&2 info, and interfering with that for the sake of hypothetical future content that may not ever materialise doesn't seem smart to me. In all honesty, were the decision mine solely, if someone else wanted to start a separate BG3 Fandom wiki then I'd entirely support that; literal decades separate the games, the developers are different and the game plays entirely differently, with different rules and turn-based combat rather than RTwP. BG1&2 are arguably more similar to Pillars of Eternity than they are to BG3. But then much the same could be said for Fallout, and they've managed to integrate all the games together into one wiki there, so... if someone does figure out how to get that working here, I'm not intrinsically opposed. But without input from someone who might actually be working on the BG3 side of things, I'm not sure what my two cents are worth, given that things which seem entirely reasonable to me might seem terrible to them.

I realise this isn't the most helpful reply, but... Can't really give much other feedback on the subject while remaining honest. I'm likely willing to defer to what other people agree on for this, but with the caveat that if we suddenly get people wanting to add BG3 content when the game releases proper and they voice disagreement with whatever was decided, their opinions should probably be given quite some weight, as without them... well, we'll just continue not having any BG3 content.

Sorcerers like your main character don't learn spells from scrolls; they learn more as they level up. They can cast any spell they know provided they have enough spellcasts available of the appropriate spell level.

Mages like Xzar learn from scrolls, so they can know more spells than sorcerers do, but they have to actually pick which ones they memorise to cast every time they rest. So sorcerers can be more flexible in combat, but mages can learn a wider variety of things to keep the two balanced.

The Sorcerer page here on the wiki lists the number of spells a sorcerer can know on each level. So for example, at level 3 your character will learn an extra level 1 spell, and at level 4 they'll learn their first level 2 spell.

Hello again! I do remember you indeed, nice to have you back for a little while. :)

Been a while since I've done the Jaheira romance, but I think he sells it in dialogue if and only if you've reached a certain point in the romance path with her. I can't remember when exactly, though.

There is a Polish and Russian version of the wiki, but I can't vouch for the completeness of either compared to the English version as neither have that many contributors as far as I know.

Longstanding bugs that I've not seen mentioned in patch notes directly, but have been complained about often enough I'd be surprised if they've not fixed them;

• The poison bug. Most associated with Flail of Ages, but also certain other weapons that had a poison/poison damage effect failed to apply any of their additional effects if the target was poison-immune.

• Larloch's Minor Drain bug, or "the one that ruined Foebane". Larloch's was just dealing 1d4 magic damage to the target but not healing the user.

Mod fixes were available for both, but I'd hope Beamdog have fixed them given they were well-known and introduced only in 2.5.

Well, what sort of thing do you feel is missing? The Wiki's constantly being worked on and improved, but if there's something in particular you feel is lacking then it'd be helpful to know where to focus our efforts.

Don't worry too much about making a mistake editing either. Edits can be easily undone if they somehow go wrong, or another more experienced editor can stop by to help correct any formatting errors or other mistakes. No-one will hold it against you if you don't get things absolutely perfect - almost all of us have made mistakes on our edits before!

Welcome! As Haximus says we seem to be pretty self-sufficient at the moment until we get some contributors in to tackle the mammoth task of BG3 content. Suspect there's some lessons to learn from the Fallout wiki on that one, given that it also tackles some radically different games that are part of the same series - BG3 looks to bear relatively little resemblance to BG/BG2, so when content for that starts getting added we'll be facing the organisational headache of how to separate articles for things like areas, classes and races in "BGClassic" versus BG3. But as of right now that's not a problem as we've not yet got anyone contributing much there - might not be until the full proper release that anyone really shows up for that, I'm guessing.

Not that I know of, unfortunately. I think it has to be done one by one.

On the Grease page, right? I think I've managed to fix it with <gallery> tags. Take a look and see if it looks right for you on your end, and thanks for the contributions!

I'll look into the app when I get a spare moment to see if everything is working fine - I use Fandom as a resource a fair amount anyway for this and other games so I'll probably make a fair bit of use of the app anyway. As for BG3... I currently have no plans to play it myself, having not gotten on with the Divinity games when I gave them a go. There's a lot of Divinity elements in BG3 which makes me suspect I wouldn't get along with that either. Might change my mind when I give the Divinity games another shot if I get along better with them next time, but for the foreseeable I can't contribute much there myself, though I'm obviously happy to assist in anything requiring staff attention if other contributors want to make content here for it, assuming that BG3 isn't considered "different enough" to merit its own wiki... but that said, the Fallout wiki manages fine with both the old isometric games and the modern "shooter RPG" style ones. I don't really have a strong stance either way; Lytora was also unsure as to how we were going to handle BG3 when we very briefly discussed it.

Speaking of Lytora though, I think they may have deleted their account; their Contributions page shows the message "This account has been disabled globally by user choice, or by FANDOM."