Talk:Foraging compendium

A Few Issues

I would feel more comfortable marking this as an essay than as gospel game data. As everyone knows, and as mentioned in the article itself, the rank ranges are quite imprecise, in some cases wildly so, and therefore I believe they are misleading. Additionally, what is meant by "ranks"? Foraging alone, or Foraging plus Perception? That needs to be made more clear. And although mention is made both here and on the project page about contributing to the compendium, no information or links are available in the article to enable a contributer to do so. The compendium is useful, don't get me wrong, but if it's just going to be mirroring a database that is maintained and published on another site, that should be made more clear. --Farman 18:07, 8 April 2007 (CDT)

As the original author, I can tell you that I moved it here so that it could be maintained by myself and others much more easily. Olwydd asked me if he could host it (it was a forum project before that) and I agreed. It's likely that he'll be mirroring the database we have here rather than us copying what he has, especially since little to no work has been done on it since he first picked it up. Perception seems to affect foraging on a sliding scale, so it's assumed that the listing of "Ranks" is a ballpark number that reflects a character who has close to equal foraging and perception. For a contributor to help, all they would have to do would be to simply edit the article, unless you can think of a better way for people to post their numbers and allow more dedicated users to keep the chart updated from that data? As for marking it as an essay, as long as it's here and anyone can work on it, I'm happy. --Kadru 9 April 2007

Sounds good, Kadru. I'm still not clear however what 'ranks' refers to precisely--is it foraging plus perception, or a ballpark figure for each skill? In other words, does the number shown reflect what the average of those skills should be, or the total? I think that should be made explicit in the article.

I guess I'm also confused about how the data have been determined. Is the compendium just a collection of individual data points or have multiple results been tabulated for each item? I think that's a critical point since the ranger bonus and other buffs have to be accounted for in order for this chart to be accurate. --Farman 02:22, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

For most of the items, these numbers come from multiple results for the same item. Some are estimations based off of one or two results. The chart assumes that foraging and perception are closer to each other, but I am having trouble finding a way to definitively prove how much perception affects it. These numbers assume no ranger bonus.

Herb Links

I've corrected a few small typos, and changed the links to the herbs to conform with the individual herb article naming format used in the Alchemy article. Each herb article is titled by its primary name only, eg Jadice instead of Jadice Flower since jadice powder, pulp, and tincture all fall under that category. --Farman 18:10, 8 April 2007 (CDT)