CoH CCG

[Blondeshell]

I'm considering making an attempt to assemble a full set of the CoH CCG cards, just for the information not for actually playing.  There are a few stub articles up for heroes and sidekicks, but no images, and certainly not all of them that are part of that game.

Can anyone imagine why there would be a problem with expanding the content on the CCG to the wiki and adding images of the cards to the articles?  I know that the publisher is still in business, but the game itself has been discontinued for several years and the official Web site is pretty much dormant.

[eabrace]

As an example, I went looking to see if wikis for other CCGs have card images.  Much as it pains me to link to anything in that domain, there's one here with lots of card images.  I did not, however, see any wikis dedicated to any games created by Alderac Entertainment, so I can't say for certain whether there's any precedent for their games.

My gut tells me that you'd be OK to upload the images, but just to make sure, we might want to make the uploaded image sizes something smaller than printable sizes or something.  That way no one can claim we're putting the images up for the purposes of printing our own cards or anything.

[TonyV]

I'm considering making an attempt to assemble a full set of the CoH CCG cards, just for the information not for actually playing.

Do you actually have the cards?  I bought a crapton of them on the cheap a while back just for the purpose of seeing what they looked like.  If you have them, which ones are you missing?  Maybe we could coordinate to get a full set to image.  Even if they make us pull articles down or whatnot, I'd like to have the images stored somewhere for posterity, since they're out of print and will likely be permanently lost without some kind of community effort.

[TonyV]

Here's my inventory.

[Blondeshell]

I just got my first two boxes of booster packs yesterday, one of each series, but I hadn't opened them yet. Yeah, I'd be willing to coordinate with you to make a composite complete set.  I'll try to take some good pictures of stuff, too, so we'll have records of the different packages that were available at retail.

[Blondeshell]

Found some neat info here, including a picture gallery.  Not all cards, but there lots of the packages.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/19766/city-of-heroes-ccg

[TonyV]

Nifty.  If you're game, I'd still like to get a consolidated set together, or as close as possible, with images that we take so that we don't have to ask for permission or anything to post them.  

If you see any cards that I have a bunch of but that you're lacking, or vice versa, maybe we could trade permanently so that we each are closer to having the whole collection.  Even if we each end up with unique copies of some cards, if you have a good scanner, maybe I could ship you those to scan and you send them back or something.

[TonyV]

P.S.  Want to know what's funny?  In looking for more information, I just Googled coh ccg, and this very thread--created less than eight hours ago--is the fifth result in the search list.

Wow.

[Blondeshell]

Heh, it's probably the most anyone's talked about it in over three years.

[Sleepykitty]

o.o bit curious about this little project myself, keep meaning to buy a couple boxes (have an unopened one somewhere..) but never got around to it..

<.< so.. when uploading the cards.. are you going to make them a sub of the coh ccg page? or something like "Positron (CCG)"?



o.o oh! not sure I got all the various boxes and packaging variants when I added them to the merchandise section, so if you see something missing...

[SaintNicster]

When I get home, I can check what cards I got with the CoV collector's edition

[Zombie Man]

This discussion is all pretty prescient since I'm in the Going Rogue Closed Beta and the Big Thing is that all battles in Praetoria will be turn-based *and* Card-Based!!








Why are you all looking at me that way?

[Sleepykitty]

o.o no reason *continues to hand out pillow to ppl around Zombie_Man*

[Blondeshell]

<.< so.. when uploading the cards.. are you going to make them a sub of the coh ccg page? or something like "Positron (CCG)"?

I'm not sure about that.  There will potentially be separate articles for over 500 cards, so I'm open to suggestions about the best way to structure them.   Ideally there would be a separate page for the set card lists to help as an index of sorts.  In the meantime, I'll see about rounding up at least one of each type of distribution box and see where my cards end up.

[Sleepykitty]

thinking about it.. if the card images aren't just going to be stuck in a gallery, but actually have an individual page for each card...


^^;; well, you'll probably have to do the "Sleepy Kitty (CCG)" sorta tag set up, if for no reason other than we'd have a heck of a time with disambiguation pages.

[Sekoia]

Actually, why not make the image itself the article? Each card only has information on one side it looks like. I can't imagine there's that much that would actually need to go into the card's article since the card would speak for itself. So maybe just upload each card as "File:CCG Ghost Widow.png" or something. Then if you do have extra information (like what box it comes from or something?), you can put it on the image's page.

[Fleeting Whisper]

That makes sense to me. And if you put them all in their own category, you don't need to make a gallery page for them, either.

[eabrace]

The only added benefit I could see for a gallery page would be that you can sort a gallery page any way you want to.  It's not quite so easy to organize an image category page.  The Badge icons category immediately comes to mind as an example of a group of images that isn't necessarily well-organized when sorted (semi-)alphabetically.

[Blondeshell]

Is there a current gallery page set up so I can see what the difference is?  (I'm familiar with the badge category -- *shudder*)

[eabrace]

Although it has since been replaced, I had a gallery set up on the Costume Colors article to display the color samples.  You can still see the gallery version by checking the revision history.  Compare that gallery to the Costume Color Sample Images category.

[Blondeshell]

Yes! A gallery would be much more preferable for a browsable list of card images than a straight category listing.  I'd still like to use a standard sortable wikitable with links to the image files, but both pages would be useful, I think.

[Cannonfodder]

Thank you for putting up the CCG stuff!  I'm enjoying reading the cards and seeing the images.

If I were interested in buying some complete boxes or packs of cards, where would be the best place to go?

[TonyV]

I think they've been out of print for a while. You could try your local comic book store(s), but your surest bet is probably eBay.

[Blondeshell]

The cards I've put up so far are just from the downloadable demo deck .PDFs -- the real cards are yet to come.  I found some good prices at a couple sites where you can buy full boxes of the boosters and battle packs for both series: www.potomacdist.com and www.universalcards.net.  Potomac Distribution even has a coupon for a free Arena Booster Box on their Facebook page that's good through next week.

[Blondeshell]

Pretty soon, I'm going to start uploading scans of the cards I've accumulated so far.  Before I do that, I'd like to get feedback on an appropriate image size, balancing readability and odds that we'll be asked to pull them down for being too good.

I've uploaded three test images for comparison:

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/File:Health-223.jpg @ 223 px, which is the same width as most of the cards on the site linked at the beginning of this thread.

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/File:Health-300.jpg @ 300 px width

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/File:Health-400.jpg @ 400 px width

I've been saving everything so far at 400 px so I can adjust that down based on what we agree to use.

[eabrace]

I don't have any trouble reading the cards at 223 px (monitor resolution of 1920x1200 on my laptop), so that should be sufficient.  300 and 400 do look much prettier, but I think 300 approaches too good and 400 is pretty much over that line.

[Sekoia]

What's the small print at the very bottom of the card? I can't really read it well at any resolution. If it's important, it should probably be noted in the description eventually since it's not legible.

Is the goal here to archive these cards for posterity's sake, since they are out of print and likely to become scarcer and scarcer? Or is the goal merely to just document them for the reference? If we're looking to archive, then I'd say go with 400 pixels. If we're looking to document, then I'd lean towards 300 pixels but 223 could also work.

If we get asked to pull them down for being too good, we can probably just negotiate a downsampled size at that time instead. If they notice the 400 pixel images and complain, then at that point we can use a script to downsample them all to 300 or 233. It should be fairly straightforward to automate that, if the need arises.

Is it possible to scan them in as PNG instead of JPG? Given the type of images these are, they will probably store well as PNGs, and PNG is lossless which means they'll rescale without gaining artifacts. If we're just documenting, then it's not really a big deal; but if we're archiving, then having them in a lossless format is preferable.

[SaintNicster]

What's the small print at the very bottom of the card? I can't really read it well at any resolution. If it's important, it should probably be noted in the description eventually since it's not legible.

Is the goal here to archive these cards for posterity's sake, since they are out of print and likely to become scarcer and scarcer? Or is the goal merely to just document them for the reference? If we're looking to archive, then I'd say go with 400 pixels. If we're looking to document, then I'd lean towards 300 pixels but 223 could also work.

If we get asked to pull them down for being too good, we can probably just negotiate a downsampled size at that time instead. If they notice the 400 pixel images and complain, then at that point we can use a script to downsample them all to 300 or 233. It should be fairly straightforward to automate that, if the need arises.

Is it possible to scan them in as PNG instead of JPG? Given the type of images these are, they will probably store well as PNGs, and PNG is lossless which means they'll rescale without gaining artifacts. If we're just documenting, then it's not really a big deal; but if we're archiving, then having them in a lossless format is preferable.

Mostly copyright information.  I think there is also a card identifier number on the last line.

[GuyPerfect]

I've been saving everything so far at 400 px so I can adjust that down based on what we agree to use.

In cases like this, I always upload the hi-res version for those who care to view the image in more detail, but scale down in the article according to the size I want it to be presented with.

I recommend uploading your 400px versions and putting them into the aricles with |223px]] at the end.

[Blondeshell]

[eabrace]

I think if you're feeling up to tackling all of that, it's a great idea.

To make an easy-to-navigate category listing, I think I'd only put the redirect pages in categories and not the actual card pages.  That way they can be sorted alphabetically rather than lumping everything under "C."

There's a trick you can use with Category tags to sort articles by something other than the name of the article.  If you use the format [[Category:<Category>|<Sort Text>]], the article will be added to the <Category> Category and be sorted within the category listing by <Sort Text> instead of the name of the Article.

Here's an example.  Note that when you look at the list of subcategories on that page, they're sorted by the username instead of all being stuffed under the letter 'U'.

[Blondeshell]

There's a trick you can use with Category tags to sort articles by something other than the name of the article.  If you use the format [[Category:<Category>|<Sort Text>]], the article will be added to the <Category> Category and be sorted within the category listing by <Sort Text> instead of the name of the Article.

Ah, so that's the same way that the mission templates are sorted.  That would keep things a bit more traditional rather than assigning categories to the redirects.

[Blondeshell]

Okay, I've got a few sample card pages uploaded to my user space, and you can find them at http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Category:COHCCG_Images.  I've intentionally mis-coded some information in order to test the different options of the template (which I'm very proud of, BTW  ), including automatically assigning the cards' categories.  Please take a look at them and let me know if you have any feedback on the layout and formatting.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to add all of the actual card entries to the COHCCG namespace, even though it's a redirect.  This is because, although the cards will be sorted using the category trick mentioned above, they'd all still have "City of Heroes Collectible Card Game/Arena Cards/" in front of - every - single - entry - on the list.  Putting the cards under the redirect will shorten that to just "COHCCG/<card name>", which is MUCH easier to process visually.

[Cannonfodder]

I liked the sample articles you put up.  Works for me.  Card image on the right perhaps?