Talk:Traps

Archives: Archive 1, Archive 2

High resolution images

When, or if, we're permitted to upload files, it'd be good to have each image properly prepared. For the sake of formality, we should save base images with the Tacky Glue Trap, weapon images with the Wooden Base, and all images without baited cheese. Keeping them as original PNG files would be nice, too. Here's a checklist; links are ones I've already saved. Revengeance 20:19, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Bases

• Wooden Base
• Wooden Base with Target
• Stone Base
• Polar Base
• Dehydration Base
• Explosive Base
• Birthday Cake Base

Weapons

• Tacky Glue Trap
• High Tension Spring
• 500 Pound Spiked Crusher
• Mouse Mary O'Nette
• Mouse Trebuchet
• Mouse Rocketine
• Ambrosial Portal
• Sinister Portal
• Swiss Army Mouse Trap
• Snow Barrage
• Bottomless Grave
• Obelisk of Slumber
• Obelisk of Incineration
• Zugzwang's Last Move
• NVMRC Forcefield Trap
• Mouse DeathBot
• DeathBot (Chrome Edition)
• Ambush
• Digby DrillBot
• Arcane Capturing Rod Of Never Yielding Mystery
• HitGrab Horsey
• PartyBot

Freshness Chart

Please feel free to edit the code below directly if it can be further improved.
Quick list of freshness span tags below:

• <span style="display:none;">-5</span>Ultimately Stale
• <span style="display:none;">-6</span>Insanely Stale
• <span style="display:none;">-7</span>Extremely Stale
• <span style="display:none;">-8</span>Very Stale
• <span style="display:none;">-9</span>Stale
• <span style="display:none;">0</span>No Effect
• <span style="display:none;">1</span>Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">2</span>Very Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">3</span>Extremely Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">4</span>Insanely Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">5</span>Ultimately Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">6</span>Über Fresh

Staleness levels are ranked with most stale as -1, since wiki reads the '-' as just another character rather than minus. Current starting value of -5 is to allow for future addition if any more staleness levels are added in-game.
-- Grexx 18:10, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Just an additional note, if you're sorting just numbers, a '-' sign should sort properly. As the numbers for the freshness chart is mixed with text, it is read as text, thus necessitating the reversal of negative numbering. -- Grexx 16:51, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorting negative number in string is ambiguous. Please check here. Pus 04:11, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

I went ahead and changed it so that this page matches the values found in the individual weapon and base pages. Ultimately Stale to Über Fresh is -5 to 6. Then take that number, multiply by 3, and add 48. I think this was done to handle weapon/base combinations that exceed Über Fresh, but can be applied here as well. Probably more complicated than it needs to be, but it is consistent and deals with the minus sign issue. In short,

• <span style="display:none;">33</span>Ultimately Stale
• <span style="display:none;">36</span>Insanely Stale
• <span style="display:none;">39</span>Extremely Stale
• <span style="display:none;">42</span>Very Stale
• <span style="display:none;">45</span>Stale
• <span style="display:none;">48</span>No Effect
• <span style="display:none;">51</span>Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">54</span>Very Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">57</span>Extremely Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">60</span>Insanely Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">63</span>Ultimately Fresh
• <span style="display:none;">66</span>Über Fresh

--Hyperchao 22:22, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

That's a reasonable solution, although possibly a bit hard to follow for non Mathematically inclined editors, but as long as this section is here, it should be fine. How hard can copy and paste be ;) -- Grexx 15:59, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Trap Attributes

The information here is lifted almost directly from the in-game text. However I've noticed that it has been slightly touched up over time. In this case some of the changes are quite important, namely:

• a change from "accuracy bonus to attraction bonus" under Attraction Bonus
• changing "positive" cheese effect to "fresh" cheese effect
• the addition of "very" effective to Shadow description

These are changes which the developers have missed out or did not make clear enough. Normally we would revert all changes back to the in-game description, but seeing that it is a section talking about a very important aspect of MH game play, I think it should be left as is, since the changes serve to clarify the terms.

I also plan to compile a list of incorrect game descriptions that the developers can refer to easily. -- Grexx 15:14, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Trap Ranking

Regarding the short 1 or 2 liners at the introduction of a number of trap/base pages ranking the various trap attributes, I think it is wholly unnecessary since the Trap page contains the full list for comparison, and the individual base and weapon pages also contain further information for those interested in the full picture. The ranking by itself serves no purpose due to the adjustments based on different combinations, and add work in maintaining accuracy each time a new base/weapon is introduced, so I'll be putting it up as a task in MHWiki:Articles needing attention. -- Grexx 07:46, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I'd be willing to take on the cleaning up of the bases' pages, as I saw is still needed on MHWiki:Articles needing attention. But before claiming the task and adding edits, I have a question about what we would like to see on those pages. I wholeheartedly agree that the "this is better than that, but not as lucky as that other one that you can't even buy anymore" descriptions need to go. But should any characterization of a base's properties be given? For example, the Aqua. It has relatively high luck (8) and power (230) for a non-LE trap, but no other advantages. It's currently described as not being very versatile. Would we want something like "The Aqua Base, available at … , is a relatively strong and lucky base, but its lack of attraction or power bonuses limits its versatility"? Or just stick with the purchase, history, trivia, etc info and stay out of assessing the base altogether? --GoBecky 01:08, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I think that's a good description to have that you wrote. -- camomiletea 02:13, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

One thing that I have been debating about (with myself, pooflinger, and others) is whether the MHWiki is purely out here for informational purposes, or for guidance purposes. That is, whether we should include subjective content like trap/base/stratagem analysis or just keep it like the wiki is right now, just chock-full of information and information only. If we include "characterizations" as GoBecky put it, then I fear that we will intrude into the job that MH guides are supposed to be doing (eg. Sean's awesome guide). If GoBecky should include subjectivities, then I don't see why we should not include it in other parts of the wiki (which would incorporate major rewrites of most of the wiki). Admittedly, we already have a sort of "mini-guide" on our Location Quick Reference page but I think that is as far as we should go. In summary, I would like to say that we should make up our mind on whether we should include subjective information, which would require major major rewriting, or keep it out entirely. -- Victor.Song^talk 02:28, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

When you put it this way, well, I would rather keep the subjectivity out of the Wiki. To me actually, the current writeup seems less subjective than the proposed one, because the items compared are identified, rather than just saying "relatively lucky" (relative to what?). I think it's a pretty objective statement to say that "Aqua base has a higher luck factor than any other base except the limited edition Candy Cane (with which it's tied) or Magma". You can objectively compare the luck and say that this is true -- no subjective judgement involved. The problem is that sometime we are going to get another base and it might make this statement no longer true.

It's hard to come up with a good comparison-based description for the bases, since you can pretty much use them interchangeably. For weapons you can compare the related traps; traps that can be used in a particular area (e.g. Zugzwang's Last Move can be compared with Venus Mouse Trap and Mutated Venus Mouse Trap); traps that are the natural upgrades from other traps (e.g. Ancient Spear Gun can be compared with Net Cannon and Harpoon Gun), etc. But for bases there is no "natural" roughly equivalent bases to compare to.

Is the comparison between the bases necessary? -- camomiletea 02:55, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Ummm...are we fighting for the same side here? I am perfectly OK about quantitative statements like "The Aqua Base along with the Candy Cane Base has the second highest luck of all the bases, after the Magma Base" but what I worry about are qualitative statements like "The aqua base should be used in the Lagoon region because of its high luck and relatively low cost" because trap preference is highly customizable and there are tons of popular hunting strategies in which a single wiki page cannot cover. The quantitative statement, however, can be used and applied to fit a hunter's hunting strategy needs without bias.

For example, if a hunter wants the highest luck setup available, then they can just sort traps by luck on the Traps page without having to be hindered by opinions. -- Victor.Song^talk 05:19, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I think we lost Grexx' initial thought a little bit... I believe he meant to remove the ranking altogether. Don't know about the comparison part though since in my opinion it helps the players to see the trap components in a wider concept. So leaving the ranking out but trying to fit the respective base into the whole picture could sound like this:

The Aqua Base is a non Limited Edition Base that comes with the same high Luck as the Candy Cane Base though it is not quite as powerfull and fresh as the latter. However, this base's complete lack of power and attraction bonuses make it less versatile than other bases.

Please feel free to make adjustments and/or suggestions for other/better ways. ____m. 10:52, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I think it is important to call out what attribute - power, luck, attraction, or cheese effect is important for this base. For limited edition bases - I think it is good to compare them to standard bases - but I would not compare standard bases to limited edition bases. I also don't like the language of "non Limited Edition" - too close to a double negative.

The Aqua Base has the highest Luck of standard bases. This base is commonly paired with high luck weapons when the hunter needs a lucky setup.

Typically one of the attributes for a trap is more important - so calling that out would be useful in my opinion -- Ralphminer 12:20, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

M. is correct in identifying the original intent of my post, is to remove all mention of any form of rankings altogether from the main writeup for both Bases and Weapons. The reason is as stated earlier, that a comparison has always been readily available in both the Traps article as separate components, and also in the individual weapon or base articles. This will avoid redundant remarks about certain aspects of a trap component(ie Luck, Power etc), as well as reduce chances of inaccuracy as more components are introduced in-game. However, a subjective comparison of component attributes compared with sister components, such as Sinister/Ambrosial, Trebuchet/Rocketine etc in the "Related Weapons" subsection would be good as it gives players some background info on the respective trap without clicking on the link. -- Grexx 16:05, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Availability

I'm planning on doing away with all bloat from the small notes beside many of the weapons and bases such as ^{1 2 3}. The information is always easily available a click away in the respective item page. The only thing that will be retained will be a note stating if an item is always available or is time limited. Will probably be naming it 'Limited' or something similar. So it'll be a simple superscript # or *, followed by a single line at the bottom stating that the item is limited edition or limited to certain events in the past. If there's any issues with the change, now is a good time to voice it out. If not I will be implementing it in due time. The change is meant to reduce the clutter on the article and bring it back to the original purpose, a table informing players of the traps available (or not), and the prices (and possible variations). -- Grexx 12:50, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Finally got to it. Let me know if there's any further possible improvements that can be made. -- Grexx 16:12, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Limited Edition vs. Event

I just noticed that the Nannybot had the "E" (event) notation, but it does carry a Limited Edition badge, so I changed it to "LE".

That leaves only two components listed as "E." I suspect that they should also be "LE" but I don't have them so can't personally check. So would someone mind loading up the Gingerbread House Surprise weapon and Gingerbread Base — separately, of course, and each with a non-LE other component — to see if the Limited Edition badge is there? Is so, we can get rid of the "E' designation altogether. --GoBecky 03:15, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

No, neither of these has a shield per User:Pakaran. And verified personally! -- camomiletea 18:00, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

How to Sort Tables

We need a little "how-to" section on sorting by multiple criteria... If people want to compare weapons of a certain power type, they need to first sort by the criterion they are interested in, then by power type. For example to get the table sorted by luck within power types, first sort by luck, then by power type. We get suggestions to split the table every now and then. -- camomiletea 03:25, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Date Added Column

Passing along a suggestion that I received in my mailbox:

I am trying to figure out where to post or who to go to about an idea I have for a page. I'm new to wikis and I wasn't planning to actually make the change myself, but instead just bring it up for those who are more experienced to pursue. But I have been unable to figure out what to do. I was under the impression I could just write something on the discussion page for the specific article but it seems to be restricted for me. So, I'm emailing you as a last resort, lol.

My idea is for the trap and base tables on Traps page to include a "date added" column so that users can sort the table to see the newest traps and bases. I have found it a little time consuming and annoying to have to scan the whole table to figure out the new items in the chart.

Just a suggestion, but I feel it would add more utility to the charts. The main reason I personally use the charts on that page is to find the newest traps and compare them to my current traps of each power type, so finding the newest traps easily would be very useful to me.

Thank you for reading. Have a great day. :)

silvercannon87

-- camomiletea 04:56, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like a nice idea! :)) ____m. 08:18, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Rather than a full date-added column, which won't make any sense to new players, some form of highlighting of new released items with a *NEW* tag etc would be more useful. It will bring into attention new additions while not cluttering the table. This can also be implemented into other tables with new stuff. This can stay for 1 month or any other reasonable period of time. -- Grexx 12:06, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Price/Costs

While editing quite some of the costs of the individual Weapons pages and coming back to the main table to do some touch up I realised that there is an inconsistency problem regarding the Crafted Weapons: Mostly their respective price is tagged with a + to show that there's more needed than just the Gold. An exception were the Ice Maiden and the Heat Bath for whatever reason and I went the same way with Zugzwang's First Move only to see it would be needed for various other weapons as well (Ancient Box Trap, Ancient Spear Gun, Arcane Capturing Rod Of Never Yielding Mystery only to name the first 3) since there is also no Loot involved that can be purchase anywhere. The issue is complicated/obstructed by the Ambush and the Obelisk of Incineration since the Splintered Wood is an ingredient that can be purchased. The same goes for the Harpoon Gun- and Net Cannon-Reconstruction with/without Rope and also Digby DrillBot and RhinoBot since the Parts can be Loot.

My question now is:
Shall we remove all the + and ≥ here in this table and on the respective Weapon pages when (and only when) there is no "purchasable loot" involved since the actual minimum used amount of gold should be listed?

If the answer is "No":
We would need to (re-)implement it into the 2 above mentioned Weapons.

If the answer is "Yes" (and as a general inquiry):
Is it necessary/important to easily recognise Crafted Weapons? … and since I believe it is: How can we do this in the future?

Any opinions and/or suggestions?

____m. 10:48, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I would prefer not to use + and ≥ if there are no ingredients that are available as both loot and a purchase. Also I noticed that Chrome NannyBot is showing the maximum price rather than the minimum here. I think that needs to be corrected.

Crafted items including crafted weapons should be listed in Crafting. Is that enough? -- camomiletea 16:59, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I see several pieces of useful information. Minimum price (assumes all components are loot, and that SB-derived components are free), whether crafting is required, maximum fixed price (price of purchasing everything, except that price of SB-derived components is excluded), and whether any variable-cost components are included. The only time that minimum and maximum-fixed price differ is when some components can be obtained as loot, and the only time that variable-price components are relevant is when a trap is crafted.

The question is which pieces of information should be listed where. And whatever we decide, we ought to have a key on Traps to make it obvious.

I think that the Traps page should only list minimum prices - it's not worth trying to list price ranges. But where we know of a price range, it makes sense to visually mark things so that it is obvious from a glance that not all hunters can get the trap for that low of a price. So I'm fine with consistently using '≥' on the Traps table as a prefix for all traps where there are loot and/or variable-cost components involved.

But for individual traps, I think the infobox should list the full range of prices (that is, I think Rhinobot's infobox looks better as 940,000 – 1,344,340 than it does as ≥940,000, since it gives me an idea of whether it is worth my time and the cost of Limelight necessary to wait for a Nugget to drop me some DDB parts).

Meanwhile, you are proposing using '+' as a suffix that implies that a trap was crafted so that looking at Traps is sufficient to distinguish between all traps at a glance, since Crafting doesn't list all traps, and since per-trap pages don't show a trap in comparison to all other traps. But that takes us back to the question of what '+' should mean. Should it mean simply crafted (in which case, Pumpkin Pummeler would be listed as '168,000+', or should it mean crafted with variable-cost components (PP is just '168,000' since blueprints are fixed price and Evil Pumpkin Seed is only loot), and should '+' be used on just Traps, just per-trap listings, or both? On the other hand, listing '≥940,000+' for Rhinobot (prefix implies minimum price, and suffix implies crafted) looks awkward.

I also wonder what should be considered as variable cost. For example, the Evil Pumpkin Seed is only available as loot, which implies that you probably spent gold on the cheese used as your bait to get through the haunted terrortories. So one could argue that _any_ trap crafted with a loot-based component is variable cost, after all.

One other idea - maybe the thing to do is use color-coding instead of a suffix? I don't know - at this point, it's almost worth coding up any proposal for consistency and seeing how it looks rather than speculating about all the options. -- ericb ^talk_contr 17:51, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I also like having both the minimum and the maximum price in the individual articles (while keeping the minimum price in the tables here).

Using only the color-coding to indicate certain information (without any other indicators) is generally a bad idea: it disadvantages the blind (they'd be completely missing out on that information, whereas any other indicators may be read using their screen-reader programs); may cause issues with the color-blind, and such. Using both color and something else is fine, but not just color exclusively. -- camomiletea 00:14, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Keeping things simple, it would be useful to identify crafted & vendor weapons/bases since crafting brings to mind a series of steps needed to acquire a particular trap part, so agree with M. on this.

How to identify it is important, since it has to be easy to understand and unambiguous. We could use something like the current 'LE' and 'E' superscripts, and identify crafted parts with a 'C'.

For the Traps article, a simple '≥' should be enough. I don't really like listing a range since it looks somewhat out of place compared with the other rows. Consistency would also help here, since with the '≥' sign, players will know that it could cost them more and refer to the weapon/base article accordingly, so agree with ericb on this.

For individual trap articles, the infobox doesn't hold a price range well since it wasn't designed for that. The Purchasing Info section in each article already fully elaborates on all details. I prefer that the infobox matches what is listed on the Traps article for consistency.

Further, cost calculations only include fixed vendor costs and their associated ranges. Everything else is assigned a value of 0. There actually shouldn't be any '+' or '≥' to keep things simple. Details/explanation should already be in the Purchasing Info section. -- Grexx 12:41, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Watching this space, reading your answers, valuing your opinions, pondering about it and re-reading it makes me believe that Grexx' simple solution is the way to go. And ericb is right of course in that we need to see in order to be able to decide. So if I got it all right our table could look something like this:

Weapon	Power	Power Type	Power Bonus	Attraction Bonus	Luck	Cheese Effect	Points Needed	Price
Ambush	3,000	Tactical	5%	0%	12	51Fresh	950,000	62,660 ≥ 62,660 C
Ancient Box Trap	4,300	Forgotten	10%	0%	4	48No Effect	17,000,000	158,175 C
Ancient Spear Gun	3,600	Hydro	5%	10%	12	51Fresh	12,000,000	824,000 C
Arcane Capturing Rod Of Never Yielding Mystery	3,800	Arcane	12%	0%	18	36Insanely Stale	3,393,600	949,050 C
Blackstone Pass Trap	3,000	Tactical	15%	0%	12	54Very Fresh	58,000,000	1,100,000 C
Cackle Lantern Trap LE	2,200	Shadow	5%	10%	12	39Extremely Stale	29,000,000	2,224,000 C
Chrome Nannybot LE	1,200	Shadow	5%	5%	6	51Fresh	280,000Master+	508,000 ≤ 508,000 C
Digby DrillBot	3,200	Physical	18%	0%	5	48No Effect	409,500	0 ≥ 0
Gingerbread House Surprise E	2,200	Tactical	10%	10%	8	66Über Fresh	280,000Master+	94,500 ≤ 94,500 C
Harpoon Gun	3,000	Hydro	7%	0%	0	45Stale	3,384,000	664,000 ≥ 664,000
Heat Bath	4,000	Hydro	5%	0%	14	45Stale	24,800,000	1,328,000 C
Nannybot LE	525	Parental	5%	0%	5	48No Effect	0	0 C
Net Cannon	3,000	Hydro	0%	3%	5	45Stale	3,384,000	664,000 ≥ 664,000
NVMRC Forcefield Trap	2,350	Physical	12%	10%	12	48No Effect	91,000	243,580 ≥ 243,580
RhinoBot	4,950	Physical	0%	0%	8	42Very Stale	16,000,000	940,000 ≥ 940,000 C
Swiss Army Mouse Trap	1,200	Physical	2%	2%	10	48No Effect	45,500	62,660 ≥ 68,895
Thorned Venus Mouse Trap	3,400	Tactical	5%	2%	14	54Very Fresh	8,000,000	849,650 ≥ 849,650 C
Zugzwang's First Move	3,660	Tactical	15%	0%	17	51Very Fresh	38,000,000<br\>Lord/Lady+	1,030,000 C
Zugzwang's Last Move	2,200	Tactical	15%	0%	7	51Fresh	705,000	415,000

^LE  Weapon has the Limited Edition shield, and the weapon or its components are available only during specific events.

^E    Weapon or its components are available only during specific events.

^C    Weapon can only be obtained through crafting.

…and I'm actually quite happy with the legibility – the only problem is:
Somewhere in between the sorting of the price column got broken. :s
Maybe it's too late or I'm simply too blind to see the flaw in the code but if one of you knows the fix, please show me!

As always opinions and suggestions are very welcome! ____m. 00:53, 4 November 2010 (UTC)