Shattered Kingdoms

Dulrik (and maybe Alshain?),

I am working under the assumption that anything you say in the SK Forums regarding game mechanics is meant to be public knowledge (e.g., when we're told in a code update that MR no longer blocks earthquake). Given that is the case, ultimately you'd want to make sure that every statement made officially by you and (possibly) the staff were incorporated somehow into the help files so that the information would be universally available to newbies and veterans.

But this doesn't happen, probably mostly because of the labor involved in that translation from the forums to the MUD. As a work-around, I wonder if there is a way for you to use tags in the forums when you post such that if we search by a command that has a help file in the mud (e.g., I search for earthquake), it shows every official post resulting in a mechanics change about that topic. I don't know anything about programming so have no idea how hard this would be.

The current search mechanism allows for something sort of like that but it's not clean and it's not comprehensive for a number of reasons.

Thanks,
Pudgy

It's not the coding that would make it difficult, it's the amount of grunt work to follow up that would make this difficult. I'd highly advocate the use of a wiki (either in-house or with a third-party site like wikia) to compile this information, which would put the onus back on the general public.

Or someone could just make a topic in Gameplay called "Help file differences," and then keep track of what needs to be changed in the helpfiles until they're implemented in-game.

Making a topic puts the workload back on a single person. Using a wiki makes it open for contribution, which makes it a much better tool for this purpose, albeit probably never sanctioned by staff.

Help files are sync'd between game and website. Best to keep those updated.

I like the idea of a thread, so we can keep an eye on / or even subscribe to / a single discussion that will keep these important resources accurate.

I'm also in the very early stages of improving the idea / typo / bug systems for more automated assignment and workflow processing (although to be honest, it's been in the early stage for quite a while )

I wonder if robbin knows that the SEO algorithm has changed and doesn't count links in random threads as much any more.