Talk:Drugs

Table value discrepancies

Creating a "drug effects" table (under that subheading). This allowed this page's extra-wide "addiction & tolerance" table to shift some columns to that table - win/win. However, in gathering info I found more than a couple contradictory values, and others that I don't trust 100%. Under the pre-existing table here, Go-juice has a listed duration of .7 days, but under the go-juice article it states that it lasts 1.875 days. (Am going with lesser value w/ a {check} template for now).
Then, the table @ Flake#Drug has some values that I find vary suspect - Yayo is listed +15 Movement, but on the same page it's -20! Or is the +15 an offset for the -20 Consciousness penalty to Move, and the "-20" was an observed cascade??? (that's what I'm going with - for now) Also under Yayo, both Consciousness and Manipulation are -20 - but since a -20 Consc equals a -20 to Manip, I similarly have to wonder if that's an accurate additional -20 (-40 manip?) or not (believing "not" for now, w {Check}).
Further, "Tiredness" (aka Rest Fall Rate) was confused with "Rest" in the Psychite tea intro (fixed), and I find it hard to believe that Go-juice has a fraction of the Tiredness reduction that Flake & Yayo give (80% vs. 33% Tired) AND no boost to "Rest" - but... maybe? Did Rest/Tiredness get confused (again), or one simply left out? Were those table values maybe intended as "negative" values, reducing Tired (and/or Rest!)? Who knows? NOT ME, that's the problem, and I don't know how to get in to the code to find out. Specifically:

• Duration of 1 dose of Go-juice (.7 days vs. 1.875 days?)
• Confirm both "Rest" and "Tired" factors for Flake, Go-juice, and Yayo
• Confirm "Movement" (+15 or -20?) for Yayo
• Confirm no additional -20% "Manipulation" for Yayo
• Evaluate accuracy/clarity of Flake#Drug table; evaluate deleting, or editing OR copy/pasting to related articles (I'm happy to edit once I know the correct values, whatever works)
• Only if you want, scan new effects table and pre-existing "addiction & tolerance table for for similar hiccups

Thanks for any help or thoughts. Albedo (talk) 00:13, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Alright so:

• You seem to be mixing up the withdrawal symptoms with the high effects. Yayo gives you +15% when you're high on it, but if you're addicted, but haven't taken it for a while and are undergoing withdrawal, then you get a -20% penalty.
• You're right that Yayo and Flake seem to be missing their rest offsets (i.e. the amount they instantaneously fill the Rest need bar). They are +40% and +20% respectively.
• On a related note "Improves joy 80%" is similar but that sentence very poorly explains it. It fills the need by 80%, just like the rest offsets.
• "Tiredness" seems to be rest fall factor (i.e. with a factor of 33%, you take 3x as long to get as tired). I am unsure why its called tiredness. I can't remember off the top of my head what it is referred to as in the infoboxes. It is also possible it got renamed as some point.
• Table looks good to me, so long as it doesn't grow too much more. COuld use a little formating love including links to the relevant drugs and stats. It is ultimately replacable with text if you have reason to get rid of it, but its a fairly unobtrusive way to do the comparison if you'd like to keep it.
• Unsure as to the drug duration. Looking at the .xml it looks like a single dose gives you 50% seveirty, and you lose 75% severity per day, or a duration of 16hrs which would round to 0.7 days, but all three of those numbers would need to be tested in game to confirm.

Part of the issue is that the drug pages are a mess without any decent standard and they have info scattered all around. We really need to convert them to something clearer. Go-juice is a pretty good start, but it needs to match the same general format as the other pages (e.g. Acquisition listing not just crafting but how else to acquire, analysis pulled out of mechanics, etc). I have no idea why the stats are in descriptive language and in the intro paragraph for half the drugs - its confusing as you've discovered. Harakoni (Wiki Moderator) (talk) 13:28, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

I understand high vs. withdrawal, but certainly dropped the ball on that one - I missed the "Withdrawal" sub-heading, plead tiredness. Speaking of which, yeah, "Rest" and "Tiredness" and some other values... not intuitive whether positive/negative values are good/bad, nor what the diffs are nor ~exactly~ what they do, and some would be clearer if %'s were all listed as "+.X" so it's not potentially seen as a % multiplier when it simply adds .X decimal amount. I'll put some thought into a suggestion for standard page layout, what is/not clear and/or adaptable across all subjects - as you say, each seems to be its own thing atm. Still some Q's for some of those values. Will tweak table later today, thx.Albedo (talk) 16:46, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

No worries wrt the high vs withdrawal. It happens, glad its cleared up. As for the % multipliers, we can't turn them into +decimals because they ARE multipliers. They aren't offsets, they're factors and that affects how they stack. What we can do is add something like "Applies a x33% multiplier to a pawn's rest fall rate, meaning an otherwise healthy and unaffected pawn takes 3x longer to need to sleep" or something like that so that you get the actual effect so you know how it will stack, and then how it affects a baseline pawn quantitatively so its easy to deal with.

Wrt to the page layout, I'm keen to hear your thoughts. I'm thinking something like the following

• Intro paragraph (with general, but not detailed, effects and a description)
• Acquisition (with drug synthesis speed/drug cooking speed identified)
• Summary
  • Detailed effects (ala Go-juice)
  • Side Effects
  • Overdose values (maybe? Or maybe just put them in the above two )
  • Withdrawal
• Analysis
  • Trade
  • Use
• Version history etc.

A balance of keeping the pages roughly the same format as all others (something go-juice has an issue with) but also keeping all the necesssary information there and accessible (something go-juice does fairly well). Exactly how the information is presented under those headings is a problems though.

Side note, what is with this undo? My previous edit ADDED the bit about ailments, not removed it and did so for the reasons you say (food poisoning isn't a disease). Your undo didn't actually undo anything, only adding a single character somewhere. I am very confused. What did you intend to do? Harakoni (Wiki Moderator) (talk) 00:18, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

re ...we can't turn them into +decimals because they ARE multipliers - Some certainly are, but not all of them are, that's the problem. When a drug adds "40%" to Recreation, that's a flat .40 bump, doesn't matter what you start at - BUT both that "40%" and the Go-Juice Rest Fall Rate "+40%" effects reads as "%" - no way to distinguish between the 2 effects. (Some have a "+", but that doesn't make the intended mathematical operation any clearer, additive or multiplicative.) Then of course the issue re whether "+X%" is a good thing or no...

As for page payout, if I look up a drug, as a new player I would want to see the Effects standing out and near the top - "What does this do?" - that is what a drug "is", more than anything, its in-game effects. (And, actually, the current spectrum of formats is handy here for comparison - bring up the 8 drug pages, and see what hits you on each one, what works and what doesn't.) Flake is a good example imo - it gets right to it (tho' it then wanders off on tangents). The info box on Psychite tea is handy (tho' maybe a diff format). I think the chattiness of Wake-up should be avoided, at least as an Intro - that's Summary/Analysis material. One clear problem is when an editor (understandably) discusses "pros/cons" in one sentence - those cons naturally vary, and then send the discussion off in unpredictable directions. Since most all drugs will be a "pro/con" balance, let's try to avoid that, or (better) to standardize the topic points on a page layout - detailed talk of "balance" is Analysis, not Intro.

• Intro: tight and short; basic Use recommendations + what primary in-game purpose is this drug designed for/does it serve? Go-juice is for combat & emergency production, etc.

• Possibly a line or bullet point for significant/unique warnings (1st-dose addiction %, heart attack %, Luciferium's "forever", non-produce-able, etc.)

• Summary - Get to Effects asap, immediately after the Intro (or even as a continuation of it!). This is what defines a drug in most players' minds - the [Mood + Rec + no-risk] of Psychite Tea, or the [+100% Rest + risks] of Wake-up. Go-juice's bullet points works, altho' something about a table/box sim to the one on Psychite tea is attractive, stands out. (Could fill the cells or back-ground the bullet points w/ green/yellow/red for positive/negative/ dangerous effects, to clarify that issue - plus color is good.)
• Acquisition (I know Acquisition is usually near top in other articles, but those items are usually obvious re "What do they do?" - I think that Effects info should come first, then this once someone has the info to decide if they want to acquire it.)
• Analysis - this is where one can wax chatty about pros and cons and balances and considerations; TLDR doesn't hurt at the bottom.

Whatever we end up with, we proly want to make a page layout to copy/paste for each, easily done.

Edit: And other editors are welcome to jump in on this - use one of the tables on the Article page for this Discussion and open the 8 diff Drug pages, compare/contrast for yourself.

(@ H - re "+/- Ailments" - now I have no idea. I saw it as deleted, no idea how/why. It's good as is/was, def, sorry for confustication.)Albedo (talk) 01:45, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

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Just a note on the +40% vs. x40%. I think the format on pages like Moving is the way to go here. Although one could argue that x0.4 without the unit would be better. --Ickputzdirwech (talk) 06:29, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

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I'm unclear as to what the problem is; is the issue the difference between instaneous (e.g. a one time recreation offset) and continous effects (e.g. rest fall rate multi while high), or is the issue that you don't think readers will notice the difference between a + and x? Go juice solves the first by splitting the two types of effects, though a short explanatory sentence should be added as to what the difference is. I think we can trust that they can tell the difference between a a + and a x though.

Wrt Flake, it puts everything in the intro and that has problems. First is that the effects are hidden in the paragraph. You can pick them out because they're numbers but its still not ideal. More importantly, the wiki doesn't put detail in the intro because 1) pages should be consistent - if we train readers that substantive detail isn't in the intro, it makes it confusing to find when it is; and 2) substantive detail can't be in the intro as the standard because it precludes the use of headings and more detailed pages end up with walls of text and shunting the TOC further and further down the page. Non-standard standards makes comparing multiple pages as a reader annoying too.

Acquisition is the same - every other pages type puts it first. The intro should give a rough idea of what it does, and acquisition is typically short anyway.

Meanwhile, and likely most importantly, YOU might be looking for a list of the effects, someone else might be looking for who it spawns on, and another reader might be looking for the cost analysis for selling over Yayo etc. We have a very wide range of user skills and interests - its easy to remember what flake or ambrosia do, less so other details/analyses. Thats why the intro is kept short and the headings are used, so that they can instantly see the TOC and go to the content that they want to see. That serves EVERY reader, rather than some, and makes navigating the pages consistently easier.

I like the idea of the tables for clarity and catching the eye. Good call on that. Cell fills don't always play nice with wiki color themes or with STDT templates, and can be a little garish, but a lot of the stat and capacity pages use the following templates for modifiers to indicate if they're a bonus or a malus (e.g. Moving#Base_factors.

• +10% (A postive value with an advantageous effect e.g. Moving)
• −10% (A negative value with an advantageous effect e.g. mental break threshold)
• +10% (A neutral effect, regardless of whether its a postive value or not e.g. pain[by some arguments])
• −10% (A negative value with a disadvantageous effect e.g. Moving)
• +10% (A positive value with a disadvantageous effect e.g. e.g. risk of dying )

Plus again, its the standard in other contexts and that aids understanding. Thoughts?

- Harakoni (Wiki Moderator) (talk) 23:09, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

(Starting a new indent sequence, just because 6 colons already...)

Re "...is the issue (re %'s)...?" - Unfortunately, the issue is the English language, and how % math is read, or can be read, and how it is read by most of the population - which is random. When we see "+40%", it's never clear (without specific explanation or context) if the author meant "(X + 40)%" or "net (X x 140)%". There is a standard "default" in mathematics, but only those familiar w/ formal math operations and expressions are going to know that rule - the majority read it randomly (apparently depending on the phases of the moon). It's just an awkward fact that "a 50% increase" or "50% more" sometimes means "add .50" and sometimes means "multiply by 1.50" - and that's how (non-math) people read +50%". For many, they simply fog over when they see that squiggle symbol" (%). And then there are common poor wording choices and misreadings of "clear" wordings that only make things worse. More, in-game, the stats are given as %'s but only if you mouse-hover, so we get the common reading of ".00 to 1.00" (or higher), which can be read as %'s - or not. And in game most stat mods are additive, but some few (e.g. [[Bionic_heart#Analysis}bionic heart]]) are in fact multiplicative - yay.

My Wiki rule is to try to write for a 3rd grader - we have some playing the game, we have some players who are ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray, we have non-native speakers - it's just a good rule to Keep It Simple, whenever. If possible it would be clearer if we moved all discussion of stat values from %'s to flat 3-digit values - 0.00 to 1.00 and beyond, so modifiers could clearly be either a "+.50" or a "x1.50" - done. Even if that doesn't perfectly mirror the game - it's still clear, and clearer, and it mirrors what people see when they are not specifically mouse-hovering, and it's not open to (mis)interpretation. What we want to avoid are wordings like "increased by 50%" or "a 20% penalty", etc. - and their symbol counterparts, all of which are rife in these articles, unfortunately. But in the end, whatever works, so long as it's 100% clear and not taken for granted - we have to beware the curse of knowledge, that we (you two more than I) understand the deeper machinery behind the UI, but not every player will, nor will they be as intuitive re mathemagic distinctions.

As for page layout order - yeah, true, standardization as it stands, agreed. re colors - some combos can certainly be garish and obscure the words they are highlighting - but that can be avoided, there are combos (tend to be on the softer side) that work fine. But if automatic templates/tables work better w/ colored letters rather than cells, that serves just as well.Albedo (talk) 01:57, 14 April 2022 (UTC)