Template talk:Chart league difficulty

5

15

25

35

45

55

65

75

85

95

I like it. --Alfwyn 19:53, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Ditto! Can't wait to see how the first ocean, Ice, looks once it is complete. -- Cedarwings ^(talk) 20:21, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Here are the problems with it right now.

1. The thirty, forty, fifty range looks too close, color-wise.
2. I don't know how these look to the colorblind.
3. Putting numbers on the map is kind of ugly but I'm not sure what other way we could show the gradations within each group of ten.

I'm considering making the ring into a whole dot so that the color is a little more easily read.--Fiddler 20:49, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

How about this colour set?

☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻

I did it by writing out the whole list of colours separated by 33, and picking out what seemed to me to be the most dissimilar ones. The full spectrum is below. =)

☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻ ☻

Mind you, it'd be good if we could avoid being too garish... and some of my colour choices are a shade on the bright side. It's one reason I always used gold and firebrick rather than yellow and red when doing league colours in the Olden Days. --Belthazar451 00:06, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Current colors

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Proposed colors

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

I think 0 is now too close to 10 and might be easily confused. I do like the proposed color for the 90s (and let's continue to have 100 follow suit, there's no way to get any higher than that anyways.) I'm also thinking the number should remain visible. It certainly help see the trending any particular route undergoes. --Fiddler 22:30, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Leading zero

What does {{#expr:10*{{#expr:floor({{{3}}}/10)}} + {{#expr:{{{3}}} mod 10}} }} achieve above a simple {{{3}}}, except removing leading zeroes ? --Alfwyn 21:32, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Nothing. Removing the leading zero is exactly why I did it. --Fiddler 21:42, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Re-scaling

Due to the unexpectedly low numbers found throughout the Midnight chart it's been suggested that we change the cutoffs for the different colors. I'd like to see how the rest of the oceans turn out before we pursue this, but I'm thinking breaking the difficulties into groups of six, with value over 42 into groups of 12, could work well. It'd only require an additional two colors and would provide better granularity at the low end of the scale.

• 1-6
• 7-12
• 13-18
• 19-24
• 25-30
• 31-36
• 37-42
• 43-54
• 55-66
• 67-78
• 79-90
• 91-100

--Fiddler 05:19, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Can we somehow just set it up to have a smoothly varying scale? It doesn't particularly matter too much if nearby colours are similar, just that distant colours are drastically different. --Belthazar451 05:29, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Not with the way it's currently set up but there might be some nifty operation you can do to make that happen. Right now the template looks at the tens value of the difficulty, finds the appropriate sub-template, and uses the hex value it finds there to color the dot. This system is very easy to subdivide by any whole number, at the expense of increasing the number of templates. --Fiddler 05:52, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

[NB: I'm using a Mac, which has a different coloring profile than other OSes, it seems, and I'm chiming in quite late to the overall discussion] I'll be working on the other oceans in the next couple of days, but a quick visual scan reveals nothing appears to be nearly as dark as upper Ruby. On Malachite, the max saturation value I found was 40 (along most every interarch), and I don't cursorily spot anything that appears higher on Cobalt (or Viridian, presumably Crimson as well), Sage (presumably also Jade), or Hunter (presumably also Opal). I've found values of 40 on Cobalt (between Hadrian-Jubilee), Sage (between Mirage-Deadlight), and Hunter (Hubble's Eye-Ix Chel). Furthermore, the average difficulty on Midnight proved to be about 23, and on Malachite presumably slightly less (I don't have an easy way to get that value yet, but there are fewer high-end LPs), and the difficulty of all extinct/CI/Atlantis points so far examined has been 24. On Midnight, every value from 5 to 40 is seen at least once. Therefore, it seems reasonably that we gradate most carefully in the 1-40 range; I feel even subtle color changes (even at the expense of more templates) are most useful there. I think 40 should be a reddish orange (perhaps around ☻ suggested above), and that we should aim for an average green at 25. I'll be surprised if there's any reason to distinguish anything above 40 outside of Ruby. --Yaten ^talk 06:40, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I think we should try to keep it to under ten colors for our main area of concern (on a PC I believe I saw a 46 between Dragon's Nest and Tigerleaf, so 1-50 may be more appropriateJust double-checked, it's 40.) because one of the main concerns with the chart change from last spring was that even though the game now displays the absolute difficulty of a league it was far too hard to tell two league apart. And yeah, the numbers are a bit jarring but without them we fail the red-green colorblindness test. --Fiddler 07:13, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

1-6:☻ 7-12:☻ 13-18:☻ 19-24:☻ 25-30:☻ 31-36:☻ 37-42:☻ 43-54:☻ 55-66:☻ 67-78:☻ 79-90:☻ 91-100:☻

1-5:☻ 6-10:☻ 11-15:☻ 16-20:☻ 21-25:☻ 26-30:☻ 31-35:☻ 36-40:☻ 41-45:☻ 46-50:☻ 51-100:☻

Looking at it more I like the lower variant. It puts green over the average 24 value and it sets 40 at orange. which makes sense since I've always heard from Viridian navigators that our interarches really aren't red at all. I'd still like to see some greater gradation from 51-100. --Fiddler 14:53, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I've just finished Cobalt/Viridian/Crimson and published the spreadsheet here. Looking at this we see even less variety; no points above 40 or below 5 anywhere and none above 30 except along interarch routes; there are 30 distinct gradations including all of the integers from 5 to 30. I like Fiddler's lower variant as well, and his point about the red-green colorblindness test is well-taken. How can we adapt the current parser functions to determine a range? --Yaten ^talk 19:37, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

The floor function can be divided by whole number. For instance,

{{#expr:floor(1/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(3/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(5/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(6/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(7/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(9/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(10/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(11/5)}}, {{#expr:floor(15/5)}} gives us: 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3. So our actual ranges would be 0-5, 6-10, and so on. For the larger groups over 50 we simply set up redirects from one template to the other.--Fiddler 19:51, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Should the 16-20 splotch be aqua? Otherwise, I'm still not a great big fan of black. Maybe it's just me, but it looks out of place. (As does the violet on the other end, but I don't think I'm ever going to manage to convince you of that.) I'm sure it'd be simple to insert a new colour in the middle - the jump from lime to yellow in particular is a big difference in the HTML code. To me, a colour like AAFF00 looks distinct enough from both of them. Like I've said before, though, I don't think it matters too much if adjacent colours are similar - the important thing is that far-distant colours are different, and that the series makes a logical spectrum from the blue end to the red. The point is to give an idea of the rough strength level at a glance, not the specific level - otherwise the Ringers would be using numbers rather than a hue on the map. If people have to be checking the key just to find out where in the scale a colour comes, then it's not working. --Belthazar451 21:08, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

If people have to be checking the key just to find out where in the scale a colour comes, then it's not working.

Right, which is why I think colors need to be distinct even from their neighbors. And I don't think the blue to red scale can be divided into ten segments, let alone a dozen, with clearly distinct colors. Not only do we have to keep in mind red-green colorblindness, but we also have to deal with differences between monitors, eyesight, etc...

16-20:☻21-25:☻xx-xx:☻26-30:☻31-35:☻

I think the color debate can rage for months. Do we think that the 0-49 in groups of five division is a good way to go? We can find further solutions for 50-100 separately from debating the color scale. --Fiddler 21:34, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

PC v. Mac v. Linux, desktop v. laptop

We've conjectured a bit on why Donsmythe and Yaten got different values for Ruby than I did, but Yaten and I got values that agree for Ice. I just checked here on my desktop and the values I got for Midnight agree with what Donsmythe found so I think the difference is in my laptop. This means we should disregard the values I found for Ruby and use Donsmythe's completed map for now.--Fiddler 14:53, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Numerical annotations

I think we need to lose the numbers from the rendering. The exact values are not very important when actually engaging in piracy, and they make the map far too cluttered. Do people agree ?

- Aristarchus (Midnight) 23.3.10

I disagree. Part of the reasoning for the numbers is to help out those that have trouble with colours. -- Cedarwings ^(talk) 16:26, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree that league labels make the map extremely cluttered. I think a mouseover with the difficulty rating would be a fair tradeoff for the colorblind, leaving the map easily legible with or without colors. Adjusting the hue of the current colors might help them be more differentiable as well. --— Callistan ^{(talk/contrib)} 22:26, 25 October 2010 (UTC)