I remember way back in the day when I first started playing in Dec 2010 (Alien Oasis was level cap), I had no idea what I was doing during AO3: Victory Lap! I would sometimes get fortunate and get good team members, but a lot of times my teammates would be as clueless as I was (i.e. Why did Gurgox kill us all again???). All I wanted good drops for good money, so I decided to write down on Microsoft Notepad some tricks and details and what factors made certain runs much much faster than others. This Notepad file grew pretty big, and I thought other people might find it useful, especially when they are as clueless as I was when I first started. This is when I decided to create my first guide for the STS community. Then I realized my archer sucked, and I couldn't find any recent guides on archer builds. I went back to my Notepad and tried to figure out what worked best for me and for my team members. This notepad grew to be quite a large document as well, so that's when I created my Archer guide.
To be honest, guide-making shouldn't be a race or a popularity contest or something you want people to applaud and say "marvelous guide!" Guides should be made primarily to disseminate information that is essentially novel and useful to the public. I emphasize novel specifically because new information is always better than known information. Or, a guide can be created to categorize known information into a much easier to read/understand format. And a great guide will ALWAYS take forever and a half to create. I know Yanis has spent the same countless hours I have, sometimes 20-30+ hours on one thread/guide just to perfect it. It's somewhat of an OCD problem that we both have.
This should not deter anyone from creating any documentation, whether it be a guide, a list of items, or simple pointers on the STS forums. But before you decide you want to create one, ask yourself - is this brand new information that can really help people, or is it something that seems to be common sense? Will this information help answer a lot of questions that the general public may have?
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