- An Encyclopedia for a New Generation
- Equipment Indices
- Definitions
- Filtering
- Sorting
Introduction: An Encyclopedia for a New Generation[]
It has quite literally been twenty years since I started playing AQ as a wee lil' boy back in 2003. I was asked to join the AQ Forum Team in 2010 first managing the now-dead AQ Guides before moving onto Q&A. I started helping out in Encyclopedia in 2012, as the years passed and more ArchKnights retired, I remain among the last of them, with an ever-increasing workload due to weekly releases.
Dramatics aside, the Community has needed a functioning Encyclopedia for awhile. AQ is... endearingly messy, although this has somewhat improved in recent years due to the implementation of functioning Standards within the game. In general, a Level 150 weapon will always be stronger than a Level 135 Weapon, all else being equal. Gone are the days where the Level 75 Fyre Force Ultimate with its 20% BtH was the best weapon even compared to the Level 105 Reignbringer... Forgive an old man his ramblings.
The forums aren't the best way to sort and maintain large datasets. As AdventureQuest has evolved over the years, strategy & gear has also evolved. As with most games, Players have learnt to Min-Max, not only with Character Stats, but also to Min-Max the status system. You can read about AQ's Status System here in an informative post by Ch4otic. Stacking a Status is extremely beneficial to the Player, and as Players, we need to stack as many things in our favour as we can so that the infliction chance is as high as possible. It was this that got me thinking of how to set up a database where one could easily search for Potency items that would swing the tides of battle in our favour. Till this day, a combination of the Fracture Point spear, Scarab Pet & Ninja Lawyers are my favourite combination of Bleed stacking.
There are no functions for sorting or looking for gear with specific statuses on the Forums. Each status has an individual page where any gear that inflicts that Status is put onto a list. This creates an insane amount of work for an ArchKnight or Sage. We'll have to create the entry, modify multiple Indices, and add it to the Status list. As a working adult who has a day job (Most forum staff are scouted volunteers), maintaining the Encyclopedia in this way was simply no longer feasible. Google Sheets was the most sensible piece of software to use. It's widely available on any platform, and more importantly, it's accessibility means that the community at large will be able to navigate the Indices via knowledge of Sheets (Excel) in general.
After some planning, I began the herculean task of Indexing every piece of gear in the InfoSubs that did not have an Encyclopedia Entry. This started in January 2022. It took me 15 months to Index almost everything. The Sheets do require manual entry to upkeep, but the upkeep of Sheets is much easier than a multitude of forum links.