File talk:MW-npc-Meder Nulen.jpg

About the Deletion Proposal

I'm not really contesting the deletion, but hasn't policy been to provide a picture per single NPC? In other words, no group pictures where this is not required? Group pictures don't really work well in Morrowind as the NPCs do not interact. --Timenn < talk > 06:48, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

There's no "official" policy on these matters, but for minor characters like these that all live together in fairly close quarters, I've just found it's more efficient to use group pictures. Yes, I had to pose them in the CS rather than taking a picture from the game, but it's not immediately obvious that I did that, and I think the group shot is good enough for its purposes. I would say that for a group shot to be used, all members of the group must be located near eachother in the same cell, be related in some manner (i.e. all in the same faction), and none of them should be particularly noteworthy on their own. (Although if they're in REALLY cramped quarters, say, an Ashlander yurt, you might still group them together regardless of how noteworthy they are.) Also, I'd say 3 is probably the limit. More than 3 in a shot and it gets confusing saying who's who. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:32, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

I'd say that if someone would like to temporarily post an image combining all NPCs in an area, we might as well use it until a better image is provided. But I don't see why long term we should continue to use the combined image if an individual image is available. It seems like an individual image is always preferable to a staged group image. --Nephele^Talk 10:37, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

I agree. Certainly on Oblivion we replaced group images with individual pictures (there used to be one of Farwil Indarys and Bremman Senyan together for instance) rather than going in the opposite direction. For Morrowind I've made liberal use of the disable console code to allow shots of individual NPCs even where they are tightly grouped. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 10:45, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

Indeed. Noticing the amount of NPC images added lately, I don't think it is necessary to have such placeholder images. Furthermore, using a NeedsImage tag instead will make the NPC be noticed in the Pages Needing Images Category. --Timenn < talk > 11:07, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

The difference is that morrowind has MANY more NPCs than Oblivion, and in particular, there are many more NPCs who are really minor and barely worth talking to. Meder Nulen and his two associates are among these. Yes, they're merchants, but they have little in the way of noteworthy items for sale, are not related to any quests, have no unique dialogue, belong to a faction you can never join and which hates you, so you'll get bad prices from them, and they live in a location where there's pretty much no need to ever visit. They only barely make the cut for "Relevant" by being merchants. Seems somewhat wasteful to give individual pictures to these fairly inconsequential and essentially useless NPCs. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:15, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

Because of the number of NPCs in Morrowind, we've already split them into relevant and non-relevant categories. I don't think we should then try to further subdivide the NPCs into relevant and maybe-relevant-but-not-really categories. If the current system has identified these NPCs as relevant, then either we should treat them as relevant NPCs or we should change the categorization system. Furthermore, if the two editors who have contributed the vast majority of our screenshots say that they're in favour of individual screenshots for all relevant NPCs, then I would take that to mean that they're willing to do the extra work necessary to collect those screenshots, even in cases of maybe-relevant-but-not-really NPCs. And anticipating one final possible concern: yes, images are taking up 2.2 GB of disk space on the server right now. But we have 156 GB of available disk space, so even at a liberal rate of adding screenshots and maps, we have more than a few years before we need to worry about running out of disk space. Not that I think we should start allowing anything and everything to be uploaded to the site; nevertheless, disk space does not need to be the primary factor in making decisions about what images are appropriate. So all in all I'm still coming out favour of individual screenshots for each relevant NPC. --Nephele^Talk 23:40, 13 March 2008 (EDT)