Forum:Annotating Rotational Content

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Annotating Rotational Content

We might want to think about what's the best way to annotate "rotational" content, i.e. content that rotates in and out of availability on a long-term basis. Top-of-mind I'm thinking about how Hallowmas companions are coming back, but also that Whitsun eggs will start to cycle in and out of availability. And I suppose the same could be said of Rat-Season items, although that's a little different because we can know with certainty when those items will become available again.

The current stat of things is that content which is not available right now is marked as RETIRED. Note that "right now" means "the last time this Festival was active," which is not necessarily the most useful thing to see the other eleven months of the year. The problem being that "Retired" tends to have a connotation of permanence, but it is now expected that some such "Retired" content definitely will become available in the future, but the timeframe isn't known. So the big ol' {{Retired}} banner gives a misleading impression.

Keeping in mind the goal of the Wiki is to be a reliable source of information for players, I think it's useful for planning to distinguish content which will always be available during a Festival, vs content which will never be available, vs content which will sporadically be available during some years but not others.

This could be just as simple as conjuring up another banner & font pair and updating some stuff. But there's another wrinkle, which is how Hallowmas & Whitsun let you experience some content out-of-season by paying Fate (but not all). So some Rotational content would actually want to be cross-linked with Fate-costing counter-seasonal content. I think we do some cross-linking for duplicated Waswood content, is there something useful there that we can re-use?

- PSGarak (talk) 19:44, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't be so sure that cross-linking Fate and F2P pages would fly (we can't show you this text, but we can tell you it's near-identical to this page).

For rotational seasonal content I might go with another banner, as you suggested, or an optional parameter for {{Retired}} that explains something wasn't available last year, but will likely return next year. Perhaps we could also have something for content tied to cyclical world qualities ("This is currently inaccessible until such and such rolls over at approximately this time." vs "This is accessible until this moment when this quality is expected to change."). TFF (talk) 06:41, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I guess it could be possible to semi-automate this for some content, such as Whitsun eggs, so that the banner changes based on availability? This could essentially use a wiki-based "world-quality" that gets updated manually, but for some content like Hallowmas companions that seems harder. Aximillio (talk) 20:09, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

NB: For eggs, there is {{Egg Cycle}} for now, which renders this:

Wiki note: Starting in 2021, the free eggs and the eggs available with an Amber Ha'penny change every year; eggs available without the currency may require it the next year and vice-versa. -- RagCall (talk) 07:17, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

I'd say this should be a variation of how we treat Seasonal content, which is also "retired" and brought back routinely. Saklad5 (talk) 14:48, 26 October 2022 (UTC)