Template talk:Gloves

So what about the Umbra Gear? Putting them in the front doesn't seem right, since they're actually useful late-game items. The prices that were on this site line up with the ones that were on other sites I've been using as a reference. Either those prices are programmed into the game's code, just they're blocked so they can't actually be seen normally, and some people have found them by hacking, or someone just made those prices up and other people copied them. I'm more inclined to believe the former, and it results in a better order, so I'm still sorting them according to those prices for now, but if anyone can verify that, it would help. If those prices really don't have any basis in the game... I'm not sure what would be the best way to proceed from there. But we don't need to know that just yet. --TheOthin 15:14, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

Well, if the prices were just made up, we could put the Umbra Gear items at the end of the list (since they're acquired near the end of the game), similar to how the Shaman's Rod is put at the beginning of the Staff/Ankh template (and is acquired early in the game). If the prices are coded and just not visible (which I find unlikely but reasonable), then I'm fine with using them for sorting the gear on the templates. However, I don't think the prices should be included in the articles as any more than a bit of trivia. After all, it would be rather misleading to say an item can't be bought or sold, then turn around and immediately list its buy/sell prices. And yes, I realize that none of this is relevant until we find out one way or another, but I wanted to get my opinion out on the table while the subject is fresh ^_^; The World's Hungriest Paperweight 16:13, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

Well, it's good to have a plan laid out now for what to do when we find out. I certainly agree with permanently removing the prices from the info boxes, then adding them back only under trivia if it turns out that the prices really are programmed in. Listing them at the end could work, but I'm not convinced that would be an accurate depiction of their effectiveness, either; it would entail movements like putting the Umbra Cloak ahead of the Mythril Clothes and the Triton's Ward. And since we generally use price as an estimate of overall effectiveness, that doesn't seem ideal. Certainly better than putting them at the beginning of arbitrarily putting them somewhere in the middle, though. Perhaps we could go with the order in which the game sorts the items? Seems pretty close to price most of the time, although it gets weird with split groups like hats... I'll look into what sort of results we'd get from doing that to see whether or not it might be viable. --TheOthin 16:31, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

One can see the prices for all items in the game by using the Action Replay code that makes all items in the game available for purchase at any shop, and prices are listed. Therefore, I can verify that Umbra Knuckles' buy value is 11000, Umbra Cloak's buy value is 13000, Slap Glove's buy value is 0, Umbra Gauntlet's buy value is 8800, Umbra Cowl's buy value is 5500, and Umbra Goggles' buy value is 3300. (As trivia, this was why I originally wrote about items having "buy values" and "sell values" instead of "can be bought for" and "can be sold for", because of how there are items that have those values programmed in even if you can't buy or sell them.)

When all of the hundreds of gear and items in DD are displayed and purchasable in a shop by the Action Replay code, they are perfectly ordered, meaning that the game does in fact have its own hidden official ordering for all gear and equipment in the game. I took the time to carefully look through the weapon and armor pages of Golden Sun Realm and compared them to how the game internally arranges the gear, and I have verified that, aside from there being some duplicates of starter items like Eoleo's War Mace here and there in the game coding, Golden Sun Realm's pages mimic the official ordering exactly, and can therefore be trusted to have all the correct buy values as well. The only difference is that GSR, for some reason, separates the crowns from the hats, when in the game's internal list the ordering for later hats and crowns are "Prophet's Hat" "Lucky Cap" "Jeweled Crown" "Umbra Cowl" "Thunder Crown" "Alastor's Hood". So, you can simply refer to how GSR orders weapons and armor to get the answers on how the wiki should order its gear in its Dark Dawn templates. Erik the Appreciator 17:23, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

Looks like you were several steps ahead of both of us. I had just been about to ask if you had that sort of information, having manually gotten the game to order the clothing and noticing that the order mimicked that of GSR and your original DD template perfectly. So the question now arises: Do we use the game's order, or the prices? Whatever we use, it should be something consistent between all versions of the templates. The first two games seem to have a built-in order as well, and it can presumably be seen either manually or with an AR. So should we switch to that order for all templates, including the ones for the previous games? It does seem like there might be merit in switching, if we're ready to go for it and find out the order of the items in the previous games as well. --TheOthin 17:48, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

But, um, the GBA sections are arranged strictly on price because the way the internal data orders the items in those game, while having items of the same type grouped together, have no real order at all, especially for the TLA items. It seems that for GS1 items, non-artifacts are always before artifacts, and the non-artifacts seem to be in right order, but even so, the artifacts are programmed any which way, and the same holds true for the TLA artifacts in their own sections. You can see how they are ordered in the codes list. So... interestingly enough, the developers seem to have taken the steps to make the internal data for the item collections appropriately ordered in Dark Dawn even though they didn't do that in the GBA games, and even though people generally wouldn't see the official ordering without hacking - actually, the relevance of the gear being better-ordered like that is that it makes artifact menus more readable for players who have sold lots of the game's artifacts to the shops. When one does that in TLA, you see how the items are haphazardly ordered in its Artifact shops due to that game's official internal ordering.

I would therefore vote for using the prices for all GBA sections in each template, and the game's order for all Dark Dawn sections in each template. Erik the Appreciator 18:03, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

Well, that quite soundly takes out the idea of using the game's order for the first two games. But I also feel that using one order for one part of a template and another order for another part of that same template will only cause confusion. It certainly confused me; my first thought when seeing the DD Clothing template was that prices had been adjusted so that Mythril Clothes were now more expensive than a Triton's Ward. For this reason, while the game's order for DD may be a slightly better order when taken alone, in combination with the price order needed for the other games, I feel that it would be better to use the consistency of sticking with the price order for all equipment templates, or at least all equipment templates with equipment from all three games.

I'm also not entirely certain of how applicable the game's order actually is. In both shops and in characters' inventories, staffs and ankhs seem to be completely separated, despite what your order indicates, and the same goes for fists and claws. So my orders for those equipment types looked much more like those on GSR, which doesn't seem ideal for this site. I'm not sure how you got the game to arrange them in the way you had them on those templates, but it seems that most of the time the game doesn't even follow that order entirely. --TheOthin 18:30, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

...Oh yeah, the game's official ordering does separate staffs and ankhs like that and claws and fists like that, just like GSR lists. That would be a problem since we had decided that those are to be considered as combined lists, and being combined would necessitate they be ordered by price.

Now, when I added Dark Dawn sections to all these item templates in December - a month after the game was released - I don't think I was even going by any order at all - internal or pricewise. Maybe I was actually relying on others to do the ordering for me. This thing about the action replay internal lists matching what GSR lists is something I'm only discovering today... So don't attach any value to how the DD item sections in these templates were ordered months back.

So then, I'll probably just say I'm switching my vote to have everything done strictly by price. Erik the Appreciator 19:14, 16 May 2011 (CDT)

That explains it, then.

Since most of the DD templates are based on price now anyway, I'll leave them all as is for the next couple of days, then change the rest to be based on price if no one's objected in the meantime. --TheOthin 05:17, 17 May 2011 (CDT)

Well, you won't hear any objections from me. I don't know if price-based organization is the most effective, but consistency is important and it certainly makes for a nice fallback when we don't know what else to do ;) The World's Hungriest Paperweight 10:43, 17 May 2011 (CDT)