Forum:Treating the Wild Appalachia update

Forums: Index > Wiki discussion > Treating the Wild Appalachia update

Hi everyone,

As you all know a few days ago Fallout 76 patch 1.1.0.8 was released, with the inclusion of a new content pack named Wild Appalachia. Two more are to follow.

Until now it's been treated on this wiki as an add-on, with most pages having the Wild Appalachia references in the infoboxes and categories. Although several wiki pages from this new update are categorized Fallout 76. So there's still some confusion I think.

Personally, I'm unsure if we should define the Wild Appalachia as an add-on. It was released within a patch update, unlike every other add-ons in the past. Meaning everyone gets the update, and it's for free. Besides that, I have the Fo76 Editor (Fallout 76 GECK) working since yesterday, and it's not that easy to distinguish the content from the original Fallout 76 content. There's isn't a separate Wild Appalachia branch, and it doesn't have a unique DLC ID (starting 01...). All the new content is mixed the old Fallout 76 content.

So one could say it's just a part of a patch, and should be treated as such? What I'm saying is, what if we don't consider it an add-on, but just keep everything Fallout 76 related, without refering to Wild Appalachia. As an alternative we could try to distinguish the new content and only put links on the Wild Appalachia page, but that'd be it.

I can imagine there are other opinions and some or more of you do want it see it as an add-on, and keep the content separate, with Wild Appalachia refered to on pages. Point is, we should make a decision about what to do, and not use both options as I've seen done up till now.

What do you guys think? Jspoel 18:04, March 16, 2019 (UTC)

I would treat it as separate. I guess the closest match we have had from this in the past is the Courier's Stash. This one was treated as an add-on while it didn't even bring new items. And the items linked to it didn't have an ID that could be differentiated from the rest (as they were in the game from the start). I know it's not the same, but I think the same treatment is best here. - ^Greets Peace'n Hugs (talk) (blog) 19:42, March 16, 2019 (UTC)

As one of the frequent F76 editors, I personally prefer to keep them together because of the difficulty of splitting out what are new items added in the update with the non-distinctive editor IDs as well as the staggered nature of the release. Also technically everything in Survival Mode will technically be a "Wild Appalachia" update, but I presume (disclaimer: I don't actually know) will be considered as its own separate game mode within 'Fallout 76', not 'Wild Appalachia'. My concern is that there will be more and more blurred lines as we get further updates and it won't be as clear cut anymore. However, I understand that there is precedent for splitting things out and will abide with whatever the consensus is. --L84tea 22:19, March 16, 2019 (UTC)

Well, I did name it as content pack at first. I think we should have it stay as it is now; there are some things that we can't easily change, like the infobox, that incurs the content to be an add-on. Besides, Bethesda did name it so as a some sort of a special product, so it'd be a bit odd not to refer to it like that, too, despite the content being released gradually over these next weeks. ☢ Energy X ☣ 23:09, March 16, 2019 (UTC)

This is probably not the best place to raise this issue, but unfortunately I don't see anywhere more appropriate (please point me somewhere more appropriate if there is). One of my quibbles with splitting out, say, consumables into 'Fallout 76' consumables and 'Wild Appalachia' consumables is for things like the alcohols. Something like Rum (Fallout 76) has been in 76 since release but of course now there is a new aspect to it which comes with the brewing and distilling function in WA. So do we classify it as a Fallout 76 consumable or Wild Appalachia consumable? Practically we have circumvented the problem by categorising the page as both, but is it misleading to call Rum a WA consumable when it was always in-game? --L84tea 03:03, March 24, 2019 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply, I hadn't seen this discussion.
I've looked at how the wikis for games with similar update schemes work and I've found the following:

• Guild Wars 2 wiki categorises by named update. They have approximately four updates per year.
• GTA Online wiki does not categorise by update, but notes the named update on the relevant pages.
• World of Warcraft wiki (Fandom) does the same as GTA Online.
• UESP barely categorises anything—their category structure is extremely flat.
• TES wiki (Fandom) does the same as Guild Wars 2.
• Warframe wiki categorises by major version number, and it looks like there's 2 major updates per year.
• Overwatch (both Fandom and Gamepedia) do not categorise by update.

So sadly there does not seem to be a common approach to this problem.
I agree with Jspoel that it's hard to distinguish between pre-update and post-update items in the editor, though I would like to add that we can always deduce the origin from the community patch notes. Not as easy as looking at the first two characters of a base ID, but it is an option.
While it is true that content packs (or whatever we call them) are required to be able to even play the game (unlike add-ons in previous games), the big advantage of categorising by update is that users can easily find which items and quests are related to each other by browsing through the sub-category. Since the updates are somewhat coherent in their subject (e.g. one update is about breweries, another about survival mechanics, etc.) these categories become a natural sub-categorisation where flat categories would otherwise grow very large as this game continues expanding.
- FDekker ^talk 20:27, March 21, 2019 (UTC)