The Lore Train at GamerEscape

I'd feel super bad if I made a new thread every time there was one of these, so I'm going to make a collective one. If you only casually pop into the Lore forum, are afraid you missed something, or just want to bask in Ferne's reflected glory through the eyes of a purple-haired lalafell, feel free to check into and/or subscribe to this thread for the cumulative dev. updates.

2013-03-15 | Naming, Clans And Bears!
2013-04-05 | Horned Children And Lost Cities
2013-05-?? | Coming soon!

I don't post all that much, but I've been following the Lore section since Ferne and everyone okay'd it, and mr. moose, sir, i can't even put in words how awesome your work on the lore and stuff is. my mind has been blown several times already from your story summaries/speculation and stuff from context I'd never even picked up on no matter how hard i tried to focus in on stuff/how many times i watched the cutscenes. (probably the biggest example of which being the ascilia/minfilia and khrimm/hermit thing.)

but anyways thank you so much for your hard work on both the forums and the Lore Train! I always enjoy reading it and I look forward to the stuff you post because it's usually either a) really informational/cool or b) stupidly funny. like, i thought i was good with the lore but i know diddly squat compared to you and the lore-forum regulars (hiir/catapult/etc.)...

so like i think you're my lore-hero or something. thanks for being cool and keep on keeping on, mr. moose. :D

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Originally Posted by Fleurette

Lots of things that make me equally prideful and blushy

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To be honest, I'm just as thankful as you, really. Without the community we've been developing, I'd just be a feral lalafell rambling alone into his mead about vast time-paradox conspiracies. But the mind-blowing has just begun! It's... well, I mean, it'll be kind of a slow-motion headasplode due to all the time-consuming aspects, but we'll get there; mind all over the place.

Thank you very much for the kind words. /deep bow

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

To be honest, I'm just as thankful as you, really. Without the community we've been developing, I'd just be a feral lalafell rambling alone into his mead about vast time-paradox conspiracies. But the mind-blowing has just begun! It's... well, I mean, it'll be kind of a slow-motion headasplode due to all the time-consuming aspects, but we'll get there; mind all over the place.

Thank you very much for the kind words. /deep bow

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Mr. Moose, is there anywhere else you've been putting this stuff? Maybe if you could make a thread specifically for linking your major posts. I haven't had the chance to read a lot of your stuff, and the forums are inherently too disorganized for me to sift through.

And as I keep requesting, please try and get some of this on the wikis. I think you'd have an easier time piecing everything together that way.

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Originally Posted by Yrusama

Mr. Moose, is there anywhere else you've been putting this stuff?

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I've been keeping my records, but a lot of it isn't ready for reading YET for many reasons, including a lack of information about specifics, the fact that many lines of text have been changed (some multiple times), slight changes in canon, and important connections/explanations that are still under NDA.

In a rare combination, I'd like to try to speak a little as Anonymoose (opinionated, sarcastic, player) and a little as Anwyll (objective, professional wiki-team member).

Why it's not in the wiki yet is a complicated (but easy to understand) issue that I'm sure Gahoo, for one, will appreciate my laying out the novel for.

The Philosophy
Individual records and database websites are quick and easy(ish), but are at the mercy of their stewards and often only temporarily useful; wikis are forever, their mistakes are easily fixed, and the status quo is fluid; but building them properly takes a great deal of time. For perspective, FFXI came out in 2001 and XIclopedia wasn't the go-to until years later, after the databases and hybrids were left by their stewards. Today, the team that built XIclopedia abandoned it for something, simply put, more and they built GamerEscape. XIclopedia's reputation is still such that some people still think it's the "official wiki" ... over GE. (Irony.)

The Issue
Wiki's are two-faced. One face is seen by the average user - they click the "[Edit]" tab and there's a row of places to put information in simple terms. "Price = 100", "Genus = Spriggan", etc. The other face is seen only by the below-zero percent of users who know how to build the constructs that make editing the wiki as easy as clicking [Edit] and writing the word "spriggan" and suddenly there's an image of a spriggan and that mob appears on the list of spriggans, and the things they drop are added to a list of area resources and so on and so on.

Final Fantasy XIV has changed its core foundation so drastically and so often that the few of us capable of managing the back-end are so frequently immersed in the the infrastructure that we don't add the minute facts very timely. Usually, we would rely on casual editors for that, but XIV's base has been both small and fractured. This fracturing, on top of the game's inactivity, have taken a toll not only on our editing economy, but our fiscal as well.

Right now we are in the process of building back-end mechanics for the everything that will be changing in ARR as well as "archiving" the pages relating to 1.X that are lost to the aether. Moreover, I, personally, am spending most of my time building the foundation of Loremonger, which I hope will be a resource in the future for properly adding information that can't simply be transferred in from the shorter-lifespan databases as well as citing that information on regular pages.

It's all a matter of building community. The troubles XIV has gone through have made me (and this is subjective, so take it as you will and try not to turn this into a resource debate) feel like GE has the most FF-focused and future-sustainable site and staff, so even though it'll take some time to get going properly, especially with the limited base, that's where I'll be. There are alternatives, but often they end up trying to cater to many games and end up being the Jack-of-All-Trades and Master-of-None.

IN THE MEANTIME, FEEL FREE TO ASK OR REQUEST ANYTHING
If you want a specific topic's page built up ahead of time, let me know and I'll put it in the top tiers of my To-Do list. If there's an in-game concept you're curious about, feel free to just ask in a thread here as we saw with Nym, and feel free to chat with me in this thread or even in GE's forums.

As long as FFXIV is around, Anonymoose will be around.
I'm sure Anwyll will be around long after.

I like GE, it's a nice community, unlike the beta forums. I look forward to your efforts in resolving the main stories of what was frankly a broken game.

Not sure if this is the right place but i am adding in the Dragoon questline dialogue to the wiki. i don't know how to use the code as of yet so i'm just throwing it into the discussion page for you Moose =) along with source links. It's an interesting read if any of you are interested in reliving it seems to me to be all about the contrast between justice and revenge. The just heart of the dragon within and the vengeful one of Nidhogg.

The first 2 quests are already written up as gamescript but i'm working on filling the rest of the questline with the gamescript in the discussion page.

http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Dragoon

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

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Yes, wiki editing is very tedious. This is why I keep asking for help from the XIV community as a whole, at least with overview material on the FF franchise wiki. A lot of what's there feels like it at least needs updating or correcting, and I don't exactly have time to edit ALL of it (obligatory research included). A lot of the Seventh Umbral Era info needs to be changed to past-tense, for example, like I did with much of the Dalamud page (we're pretty sure Dalamud itself is no longer an issue, right? :p).

I'd just like it if we had more XIV 1.0 players in that community for a while, at least to get that 1.0 information squared away. I'm sure everyone will mostly us GamerEscape for all their adventuring needs, but the FF wiki does an excellent job tying each game to the rest of the franchise.

Edit: Since I'm a little curious, but I don't have a way to dig into the 1.0 text, do you happen to know which of the kids in the Carpenter class quests was a ghost? That stuck out in my mind as one of the more shocking twists, and I wished I could do those again to see if it was foreshadowed properly.

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Originally Posted by Yrusama

Edit: Since I'm a little curious, but I don't have a way to dig into the 1.0 text, do you happen to know which of the kids in the Carpenter class quests was a ghost? That stuck out in my mind as one of the more shocking twists, and I wished I could do those again to see if it was foreshadowed properly.

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There was no ghost. The elezen supervisor was in need of medication to respond to a certain... condition.

Thanks, Alaltus! Once the info is in a wiki, it can be cleaned up anytime (even years later, if that's what it takes for someone to take interest). The most important thing is just to get it in there and preserve it. Every 1.X transcript we can find lowers the amount of time I'll have to spend on the loremonger. Finding the identities of those instanced NPCs in particular is a pain.

Basic editing guide is here. After that, it's really just frankinsteining and reverse engineering until you know what you're doing, and from there it's all just automatic ... and the occasional hour-long hunt for "that damn close paren."