Curse

truemyths · May 05, 2008, 02:03 PM // 14:03

let's see ... concise descriptions or ... more content! Gee, which one did ANerf pick? GG Anet!

Elder III · May 05, 2008, 02:09 PM // 14:09

Concise, in most situations, either confuses the reader or butchers English Grammar; often it does both. To sum it up in 4 words: I never use it.

Aera Lure · May 05, 2008, 02:15 PM // 14:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by MasterSasori

I find concise harder to follow. The English grammar DOES have some purpose.

lol. My thoughts exactly.

Nevin · May 05, 2008, 02:19 PM // 14:19

Concise attempts to thrust too many new terms for the oldies to get into like... "Interruption Effect:" It makes us stop to think of that first, breaking the thought process of the actual skill. After a while you get the hang of it yeah but in short what concise should've really been was...

Restore Condition
Traditional: Remove all conditions (Poison, Disease, Blindness, Dazed, Bleeding, Crippled, Burning, Weakness, Cracked Armor, and Deep Wound) from target other ally. For each condition removed, that ally is healed for 10...58 Health.

Restore Condition
Concise: Removes all conditions. Removal effect: heals for 10...58 for each condition removed. Cannot self-target.

Restore Condition
What Concise SHOULD'VE been: Removes all conditions from target other ally and heals for 10...58 for each condition removed.

Mr. G · May 05, 2008, 02:21 PM // 14:21

[mend condition]

all i can say is thank good for concise

Quote:

let's see ... concise descriptions or ... more content! Gee, which one did ANerf pick? GG Anet!

you realise people were actually asking for this right?

Poor anet, its always lose-lose

I find the concise useful as you'll always know if a skill does something where it'll be for example the penalty of the skill is always at the end.

Aera Lure · May 05, 2008, 02:45 PM // 14:45

Concise tends to be very clunky grammatically and therefore harder to read quickly, making it not necessarily a better option. Nevin has a good example and I agree with the way Concise should have been written in this case:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nevin

Concise attempts to thrust too many new terms for the oldies to get into like... "Interruption Effect:" It makes us stop to think of that first, breaking the thought process of the actual skill. After a while you get the hang of it yeah but in short what concise should've really been was...

Restore Condition
Traditional: Remove all conditions (Poison, Disease, Blindness, Dazed, Bleeding, Crippled, Burning, Weakness, Cracked Armor, and Deep Wound) from target other ally. For each condition removed, that ally is healed for 10...58 Health.

Restore Condition
Concise: Removes all conditions. Removal effect: heals for 10...58 for each condition removed. Cannot self-target.

Restore Condition
What Concise SHOULD'VE been: Removes all conditions from target other ally and heals for 10...58 for each condition removed.

They could have improved things to a degree with little to no work at all simply by removing "(Poison, Disease, Blindness, Dazed, Bleeding, Crippled, Burning, Weakness, Cracked Armor, and Deep Wound)" from any mention of condition as well as a few other tweaks.

I'm not sure why they didnt write Concise like the example suggested above, because in the version live in the game, the fact that you cannot self target isnt until the end of the description, which doesnt read logically very well, not to mention that there is pretty much no need for "Removal effect:".

Kale Ironfist · May 05, 2008, 02:50 PM // 14:50

Quote:

you realise people were actually asking for this right?

Poor anet, its always lose-lose

I don't think people were asking for what they implemented. What they could have done was streamline all existing skill description text to be consistent and less convoluted than they were. Instead, we got their version of 'concise', which at times weren't concise as demonstrated in the OP.

As you note, all Prophecies condition removals (including Mend Ailment) friggin list what conditions are removed. They didn't really need that, especially when there were mouse-over toolbars and now, the Isle of the Nameless.

DarkNecrid · May 05, 2008, 02:51 PM // 14:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kale Ironfist

I don't think people were asking for what they implemented. What they could have done was streamline all existing skill description text to be consistent and less convoluted than they were. Instead, we got their version of 'concise', which at times weren't concise as demonstrated in the OP.

As you note, all Prophecies condition removals (including Mend Ailment) friggin list what conditions are removed. They didn't really need that, especially when there were mouse-over toolbars and now, the Isle of the Nameless.

Yes they are concise.

Go look up Concise. It doesn't mean small.

Aera Lure · May 05, 2008, 03:07 PM // 15:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by DarkNecrid

Yes they are concise.

Go look up Concise. It doesn't mean small.

Concise: marked by brevity of expression or statement : free from all elaboration and superfluous detail.

No it doesnt mean small, but it does mean what Kate Ironfist was getting at, namely more streamlined and less convoluted, which I would argue is sort of accomplished in Anet's implementation, but not very well, because the other part that is missing in many cases is clarity. Concise without clarity is indeed sort of pointless in this context.

They would have accomplished more by getting rid of the conditions in parenthesis, making a few tweaks, not introducing "Removal effect:" etc, and making the sentence flow as in Nevin's example.

pumpkin pie · May 05, 2008, 03:44 PM // 15:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Necrotic

Well Pie...if you had spoken to the Master of Area Effects and read what he has to say....then you might know the answer to that.

And not to single you out specifically Pie, but this is a good example of the problem I find in this game so often. Players refuse to read the manual or anything else that would actually help them understand how the game works, prefering to simply make a warrior and hit things or make an elementalist and nuke them. But I digress....I personally prefere the standard description over concise...I feel that when i use the concise descriptions that I am somehow missing something...whether or not I truly am.

Edit: I had added this last part originally but the forum crashed before I finished...

no offence taken or what so ever, i am discussing something, and I do agree with you players do need to read more, if they/we do, there will not be so many players asking questions with obvious answers in the game.

the problem I have is not with reading in this case, I do admit, I don't remember exactly word by word what the master of area effect said, I did read it when the zaishen arena was introduce (long time ago, remember everyone was there doing the zaishen challenge? and before you enter you must go thru the isle of the nameless.), but hey who remembers something so long ago, what I remember is, yes yes, but you did not answer my question.

This is not problem with reading, its has to do with the estimating of the range/area that a skills can affect while one is in a battle, how wide is this area? I definitely know what touch means, you go up and touch your target. What does nearby means, if you rogorts something, how far away should the next enemy be to be affected? Sometime you think they are nearby, but then they don't get affected. What is the range of nearby? is it inside the opponent's agro circle, one cm on the map? half an inch? is it half the agro circle? and whats is the range or the rest ...

Its not that I don't read, Its what are the ranges. I've been nuking stuffs for quite sometime, and knows where to stand just right outside of the meteor, but that's after a long time of observation. Sometimes still misses and gets knocked down or get affected by [Cry of Frustration] even thou I am not even standing close to the players who was hex with it.

With so many other skills and in a battle, you definitely have to look very hard to know and get yourself familiar with all the skills on one's skill bar to know exactly what are the range of each of these skills will affect, and I am not talking about 1 profession. that is why a radar is good.

excerpt from wiki what master of area effect says
Area of Effect (AoE) skills affect a given area of the playfield, and not any one specific target; any target inside of the area will be affected by the skill. The affected area generally does not move over time, so players can move away to avoid negative effects or closer to benefit from positive effects. Area of effect skills affect all valid targets within the horizontal radius regardless of barriers or altitude.

see, what is these given area of the playfield? and what does it means the horizontal radius?

However the Master of Bow did give some good pointer which I did not know back then, Tell me about Types of Bows. Tell me about Line of Sight. Tell me about Height Advantage.

gerlin · May 05, 2008, 04:00 PM // 16:00

Concise description is for people who already know the skills and are too lazy to read the whole thing again. Or for people who have mathematical brain like me.
Concise is much more structurised then trans, though gives a less rpg feel.
What you people were expecting is like.
Barberous Slice: +25 damage, +bleeding 13s = no stance.
But this would be cooler : Barberous Slice: if(stance = true) attack(25, 0);
else attack(25, 13); (class attack has constructor with (damage, bleeding)).

Zinger314 · May 05, 2008, 04:07 PM // 16:07

Concise skill descriptions was an attempt to make it more Magic: The Gatherting-esque. However, since MtG actually uses keywords for important abilities and the people who design MtG actually get paid above minimum wage, it doesn't work well for GW.

snaek · May 05, 2008, 04:53 PM // 16:53

concise is pretty bad...
but i still use it cuz it makes me feel more 1337! ^__^;

Alleji · May 05, 2008, 05:38 PM // 17:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sab

The concise descriptions are more convoluted than concise. All they needed to do was clean up descriptions like [[RC] and [[Phoenix], instead of rewriting everything in weird sentence fragments.

That's pretty much what I wanted to say.

Standardizing skill descriptions is good... as long as they're still in English.

Killed u man · May 05, 2008, 05:47 PM // 17:47

As said before, concise is more "to-the-point". They tried to clean out the redunant statements in so many descriptions.
However, (I can't remember any of the top of my head atm tough) I've already found more than 20 skills in which the concise description still has redunant (or even ambiguous) statements...

Actually, I'm going to have fun at this very moment trying to find some examples

StormDragonZ · May 05, 2008, 06:46 PM // 18:46

Sometimes a concise description isn't needed at all.

Go look at the following:
Shield of Regeneration
Wail of Doom
Second Wind
Avatar of Melandru

Snow Bunny · May 05, 2008, 07:53 PM // 19:53

Also -

If you're new to the game that you don't know what skills do, then you'll pick traditional most likely.

If you know what the skills do, then really, the option doesn't matter. Restore Condition can say whatever it wants - I know that it heals for a certain amounts, removes all conditions, and can't self target.

Shadowspawn X · May 05, 2008, 08:24 PM // 20:24

Concise fails, a totally terrible concept. More confusing with bad grammar and stupid catch praises like substituting "end effect" instead of "when this enchantment ends". Not good.

Longasc · May 05, 2008, 08:56 PM // 20:56

Concise descriptions are a typical ANet improvement. Unfortunately this has become a trend in everything they do:

Good idea, not so good implementation.

People asked for better, less misleading and correct skill descriptions for quite some time already.

They got concise descriptions, while some of the misleading "traditional" descriptions were changed, but some not.

I just wonder why better skill descriptions, clear and to the point, without being pressed into this "concise" scheme which is not always concise or even correct as people pointed out, were not possible.

They could do better. It is not really game breaking for the skill descriptions or that much of a big deal, but it is a general trend to do things a bit sloppy that is really sad!

crazybanshee · May 05, 2008, 10:40 PM // 22:40

I never even bothered to turn on concise descriptions.. I'll take the extra .3 seconds to read the full description tyvm.