Morrowind talk:Armor, by Body Area

The case for a plurality of armour views

During my time playing Morrowind the site has been of great help - but the item pages always seemed to have a usability problem. It is proposed that users would usually like to find how to improve a piece of armour that they currently have, or find out how their current piece fares compared to all the other potential choices that could be used in its place. From this perspective having all the armour pieces for a specific body area in one place to allow comparison makes logical sense. The original page was not replaced since there are probably also uses for that particular layout, such as finding out what the other pieces of armour are for a piece you have currently picked up.

I would like to add that armor should include any clothing items as well, all of the additions in the expansions should be in the master list of equipment, and it should be a sortable table. I would love to be able to sort by enchantment points for each slot. I would head this project up, but I really have no idea how to wikify all of that. I don't want it to be a new page duplicating all the information on other pages, we already have that sort of system, there should be a central (definitive) article on equipment.

Would it be possible to put each items info into its own page and transclude the thousands of entries from those? I propose an organizational structure much more compartmentalized and flexible, such as WoW Armory's or Wowhead's. I wonder if it would even be possible to filter certain things out, such as expansion data (seems likely a simple task of hiding fields with the BM and TR tags). It certainly would help people looking for the locations of a certain rarely asked about item, and it could list some important information and opinions. For instance; if someone wanted to find all of the Muck Shovels in Morrowind, every location, NPC and quest related to them would be listed, and that data would be used in the notes of the item on the junk page and on the quest pages where it is required. This would consolidate data on a number of items, including such pieces as the Daedric Pauldrons, which are scattered all over. Every item would be listed in a uniform way in every place, and sorted to the users desired format. Lukish_ Tlk Cnt 13:59, 21 November 2008 (EST)

Face of god having 750 enchant points?

That simply isnt true as im wearing one right now and it only has 75. and 75 isnt enough to get any enchantment worth having, is this helm glitched? I got it where you get Elerons ward and am on the x box non goty.

All enchant values are divided by 10 when seen in-game. 750 is the value that is shown in the Construction Set, and is more relevant to the calculations for spell values and such. And yes, most of the heavy helms are not much good for enchanting. If you want a good enchanting helm, one of the light Telvanni helms work better. Cephalopod is the best. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 22:24, 19 December 2007 (EST)

Redundancy

Having now tackled most of the other redundant Morrowind items pages, this article is now one of the last remaining cases of significant redundancy (redundant with Base Armor). The options I can think of are:

• Ignore it and live with the fact that stats for every piece of base armor are listed in at least three different places (once here, once at Base Armor, and once on the relevant styles page; given that the styles page use a completely different organization than the Base Armor pages, the latter seems to me to be a case of necessary redundancy).
• Create 21 different subpages (one for each section of the page), then transclude all of those subpages onto this page and the Base Armor page.
• Reorder Base Armor to make it truly identical to Armor by Body Area, then eliminate the second copy of the page (change Armor by Body Area into a redirect or delete it)

I'm leaning towards the latter. I can see how being able to see Light Boots and Medium Boots, for example, at the same time could be useful -- let's say you want to compare the stats of the Indoril Boots you just found with the Chitin boots you are already wearing. Therefore, having the various types of boots grouped together on the page has benefits. On the other hand, I can't think of reasons why having Light Boots and Light Greaves side by side on the page would be important. There is no way you're going to be able to see all of the Light Armor items on the page at the same time, so for any type of browsing you're going to have to scroll up and down on the page; having to scroll a bit further to get past some Medium and Heavy items doesn't seem like it would be an increased inconvenience. If you want the Light armor items grouped together so that you can see what a full set of Light Armor would look like, the Base Armor page is the wrong place anyway: to see all of the stats on Chitin armor, for example, you should be using the Chitin page. The only "convenience" I can really see with the current organization of the Base Armor page is that a link such as Morrowind:Base Armor#Light Armor is possible, for example to say "this page provides a list of all base Light Armor items in the game" -- but is that really an important feature?

Any thoughts? --Nephele^Talk 13:26, 19 November 2008 (EST)

I'm not opposed. Arguably, that link in your example should point at Morrowind:Light Armor instead. Sure it's a skill page, but it does give basic stats for the items as well, and many of our other skill pages list the relevant items to the skills as well. It might even make sense to add a section to that page (and the Medium and Heavy Armor pages as well, of course) which would give the detailed stats of all Light Armor, just like what's on Base Armor, only without the pictures, maybe. You want the pictures, you go to Base Armor, which would have the "by Body Area" style organization. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 00:25, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Well, adding the detailed stats to the armor skill pages would result in the exact same redundancy problem; it would just shift the problem from one page to another (or, I suppose, three others). So error fixes such as this one, made just today, would still leave the same error, unfixed, on one of the other duplicate pages. And I'm not sure there's really enough benefit to readers gained by duplicating the data.

On another, semi-related topic... I've also realized that there is currently no consistency, between pages or even within the same page, in how the armor is ordered.

• Order used when sorting style of items. Within the cuirass sections of the page (e.g., Light Cuirass), the items are sorted by armor rating. Other sections of the page sort the items alphabetically (e.g., Light Helmet), but with exceptions to group related items (e.g., Netch, Boiled Netch, Nordic). Others seem to be mostly random (Heavy Helmet).
• Order used when sorting type of armor (body area of armor). On most of the style pages, the order is quasi-top to bottom (Helmet, Cuirass, Pauldrons, Bracers, Greaves, Boots, Shield). On this page (and Base Armor), the order is seemingly random (Cuirass, Helmet, Pauldrons, Greaves, Boots, Bracers, Shield) -- is there any possible reason for that order?

Admittedly, the sort order is a fairly minor issue. Nevertheless, if/when I proceed to automatically generate new versions of the tables directly from the CS data (which is, from my point of view, far easier than checking the existing tables to find all the little mistakes), I'm going to end up imposing a consistent sort order; I'm just not sure what that order should be.

Therefore, I'd like to propose the following standards for all armor-related pages:

• When sorting style: sort by armor rating. It means that most of the columns (exceptions: name and ID) will be sorted roughly from lowest value to highest value. It also means that related items such as Netch Leather items and Boiled Netch Leather items will automatically appear side by side. It will be more consistent from one table to the next than alphabetical order, given some occasional naming anomalies ("Left Glass Bracer" vs "Chitin Left Bracer"; "Armun-An" vs "Native Armun-An", etc.)
• When sorting type of armor: sort from top to bottom (Helmet, Cuirass, Pauldrons, Bracers, Greaves, Boots, Shield). The ordering may not be immediately obvious to readers, but I think it's at least one step less confusing than the apparently random order currently used on this page. Another option is alphabetical order (Boots, Bracers, Cuirass, Greaves, Helmets, Pauldrons, Shield), which would also work as far as I'm concerned, if other people are in favor of it. It's not my first recommendation primarily because it is not currently being used anywhere, and therefore would require a reorganization of every page (all the style pages, as well as the Base Armor and Armor, by Body Area pages).

More food for thought. --Nephele^Talk 02:59, 20 November 2008 (EST)

The explanation for the helmets is that I was making a small distinction between "standard" helms, which are fairly common, found in leveled lists, and generally fit in with full set of armor, and "special" helms, which are mostly rare (in some cases only 1 or 2 exist), and not necessarily part of a full suit. You can see this in the names of the images I used for the helms. (In the case of Heavy Helms, I evidently omitted the Imperial Templar helm, which is why it seems out of place. My bad on that one.) Admittedly, there's no easy criteria for this distinction, it just helped to divide the pictures into two sets, so that you could see them all, rather than trying to cram them all into one. I agree that the charts should be more consistant, however.

I don't see a huge problem with having content duplicated on both the Base Armor and the Skill pages - especially if you're going to generate it directly from the CS. If the info comes directly from the CS, and is not typed in by hand but generated via scripts, we know that it is correct, and it shouldn't need to be fixed in the future, so worries about having to make fixes on both pages are unfounded. The reason for having the info in 3 places is that there are 3 basic ways of sorting things: By material/style, by body area, and by weight-class. All of these sorting methods are useful in their own right, and so it's not really redundant to have them all available.

The same is not true, for example, of weapons. Weapons have 2 basic sorting styles: material/style and weapon-class. There are subclasses within weapon class (Dagger, Shortsword, Tanto, and Wakizashi are all sub-classes of Short Blade), but there is no 3rd sorting method. All weapons are equipped the same way - in your hands - you can only equip one at a time (barring bow&arrows/crossbow&bolts) and all weapons of any given sub-class are governed by the same skill. The only other possible distinction in that case is between 1-hand and 2-hand, but I don't think that we need a page for all 1-handed weapons and another for all 2-handed - that just seems like overkill. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 09:20, 20 November 2008 (EST)

I agree with Nephele - there's no point in having two copies of the data. If you're on the Medium Armor page and want information on medium armor it shouldn't be a problem to click a link. I also prefer the idea of changing Base Armor into a "by body part" order.

As for the sort order within the styles/types, I've always gone from bottom to top when I think about it - interesting we do that in different ways! - so I'd prefer a body-order sort for that.

There's one other possibility, which I wouldn't mention except that you're already talking about auto-generating the data. Store the information for each item on its redirect page inside an includeonly tag (as a table line). That way, each of the current pages could be kept (using transclusions) but there'd still be just one source for the data. I can see some advantages to this, although the thought of that many transcludes on one page is a little scary. If that's too much, then as I said, I'll vote for the one page at Base Armor in the style of this one. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 12:57, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Thanks for all the feedback. Although the concept of hundreds of transcludes for all of the data took a while to digest ;)

Fixing errors is an obvious case of problems caused by redundancy. However, even if we can guarantee that all of the information is 100% error-free, there will still be reasons why editors want to edit the page. Adding icons and adding images make up most of the page history, not error fixes. I'm thinking of turning all of the item names into links (assuming that the item redirects become links to style pages). People add notes to individual items to document quirks. Almost by definition, it's hard to anticipate what might need to be changed, but the chances are that the page will continue to be edited -- and those edits will need to be propagated to any redundant versions of the page.

The prospect of continued edits to the page also means that moving the table data to individual item pages would be problematic. Adding a typical note about an item (asterisk in the table, text below the table) would mean editing the item page -- but then would also require finding every page that displays the item because the text below the table would have to be added to those pages. Minor formatting tweaks (e.g., adding links, adding/removing commas from all numbers, italicizing the data in a column, whatever) would become nightmarish to implement.

Furthermore, it's not even necessarily true that every page displaying an item's stats would use the exact same table format. For weapons, I think the style pages need to have an additional column stating the weapon's type/governing skill -- which isn't needed on the Base Weapons page because that's how the items are sorted. Or perhaps a better example: when bows and arrows are displayed on the Base Weapons page, the empty columns are dropped from the table, but when they're shown in the same table as other weapons, those columns need to appear. Adding such complications would be difficult (not impossible), but they would probably make the transclusions so complex that the system really would crash pages such as Base Weapons. --Nephele^Talk 16:00, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Good points. I did say it was scary! In that case I'm definitely for keeping the number of pages to a minimum rather than needlessly duplicating material. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 03:54, 21 November 2008 (EST)

It seems my comment in the previous section has been discussed already. I would use a new template for items, make separate item pages (using that database dump), then transclude them all. The new tables should be the simple default kind. Taking into account the item template's colspan/rowspan/style arguments, nicely cramming the data from the items into the tables will be the tricky part. Lukish_ Tlk Cnt 14:21, 21 November 2008 (EST)

Basically, a customized database solution such as the WoW ones you pointed to above is not possible within a wiki format. A separate stand-alone program would be necessary to provide that type of functionality and ability to create custom sorts/filters/combinations dynamically based upon any set of user criteria. As far as I know, any approximation of that within the wiki would have only a fraction of the features you're looking for, it would make the pages showing the data nearly impossible to view because of the server processing times required, and it would make it nearly impossible for editors to add new information. This is a wiki, which is inseparable from both its strengths and its weaknesses: it is easy for anyone to add information, but that ease-of-use has consequences in terms of complex data-handling. Unless you know of a way to actually create such a database within a wiki (or know an example of such a database created within a wiki), in which case details on the technique would be welcome information.

Splitting the information up in the manner you're suggesting would make it far harder for readers to find information in many cases (e.g., if you want to see the stats for a full suit of Daedric Armor, it's much easier to see all of the information in a single place such as Daedric Armor than to have to pull up ten separate pages to separately find the stats for each of the ten different pieces of armor). Rpeh's suggestion, as far as I understand it, was to simply have the single line of armor statistics in a separate page; most readers would never view that page directly, but would only see it through existing pages such as Base Armor or Daedric Armor. Expanding that concept to have every piece of information related to Daedric Pauldrons on that subpage would make it impossible to meaningfully transclude that information into any summary pages.

Part of what I'm working on is to address the exact issue that you raised above, with multiple places providing information on Daedric Pauldrons. I'm trying to consolidate the information on Daedric Pauldrons onto the Morrowind:Daedric page: all of the stats are there, all of the locations are there, and all of the related items are there; explicit links to the detailed location information for Tribunal and Bloodmoon could easily be added. I then want to turn every mention of Daedric Pauldrons on the site into a link to that information on the Morrowind:Daedric page. That's basically how the wiki works best, in my experience: if the redirect for a given item takes you to the place that has the most complete information on that item. Then any search on the item name, any search through the armor categories, or any link anywhere on the site takes readers to that complete set of information. It's not a dedicated subpage on the topic, but it doesn't need to be, as long as the information is where people are looking for it. It's also part of the motivation for getting rid of redundant pages such as this one: so that readers don't feel like they need to check a half-dozen different pages that describe an item to assemble complete information on the topic.

If you want to add additional information about Muck Shovels, there's a column right there in the table where such information can be added: links to quests have been provided for other such clutter items (Bolt of Cloth, Ceramic Bowls, etc.). Given that the only reason (that I know of) to search out such mundane items is to complete a quest, information on how to find such quest-related items is provided as part of the quest instructions. If editors somehow accumulated enough (non-redundant) information about Muck Shovels to make the information not fit in the table on the Clutter, then alternatives such as a separate page dedicated to the item could be discussed. However, splitting up the tables before there's enough information to require separate pages seems like putting the cart before the horse. Again, unless there are some wiki tricks that I don't know about. --Nephele^Talk 15:08, 21 November 2008 (EST)

Most people who are looking up armor don't want only the Daedric special page to come up with that info. They want the list of alternative armors for that slot to be available in the same place to compare. If there was a transcluded list of items which all followed the certain table format for the items table, it would be a simple matter to make a table for types, for slots, etc, and it would also be easy to sort them by enchantment points or armor rating. When everything is redirected to specialized pages, it is indeed comprehensive, but it isn't nearly as flexible. I wouldn't suggest making the database interface as complex as the WoW Armory filters, but it could be as useful if we had pages for each item, people could edit items a lot easier, and have a lot more discussion, and a lot more information than the tiny notes section currently allows. Lukish_ Tlk Cnt 14:31, 22 November 2008 (EST)

Lukish, I don't think you realise what you're asking for. My idea was that each item should have a page with its stats listed, and even that was one that I recognised was probably a bad one: Nephele's extra points proved that beyond any sensible doubt. Your suggestion wouldn't need the hundreds of transclusions that scared me, but thousands. I'm not saying it's a bad idea - and neither is Nephele - but there's no way of doing it unless you know of something that neither of us have heard of. If I was writing a site specifically to present a list of items then I wouldn't do it like we've got it, but that's because I could use all the modern tricks of website development and not have to rely on wiki-scripting. However, we're on a wiki and for better or worse we have to live within its confines. Do you have specific, wiki-based suggestions? If not, I don't see how we can do what you suggest. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 17:16, 22 November 2008 (EST)

Hmm.... the problem with taking a couple hours to write a lengthy reply is that in the meantime, rpeh beat me to the punch ;) But having written it, I might as well post it in all of its redundancy.

I'm sorry, but I don't really understand what you're proposing. Either I'm missing the point completely; or else, I'm understanding the general outline of your proposal, but I cannot understand how it would really be implemented: how the pages would actually be organized, or how it would make it easier for readers to find information. To dissect the various components that you've mentioned and explore each in more detail:

• Creating separate pages for every item on the site.
  • Other wikis have taken this general approach. In particular, Obliviowiki has created different pages for many individual items (e.g., Hands of Midnight, vs UESP's listing; or for something representative of a Muck Shovel page, Pickaxe). (Apologies in advance for using multiple Oblivion examples even though this is a Morrowind discussion. It's just that I can provide more concrete Oblivion examples, both because of other wikis with Oblivion data and because I'm personally more familiar with the detailed quirks of Oblivion items). But even on Obliviowiki, they haven't gone as far as separating the individual armor items (e.g., all Daedric armor is discussed together at Daedric armor). Furthermore, I think that basic differences about how to organize information are one of fundamental differences between UESP and Obliviowiki, so I can't help but conclude that UESP's greater success is in part because UESP's organization works better, for readers and editors. Not to mention that I don't see any advantage of the Obliviowiki articles over UESP's, for example....
  • Personally, as a reader, I would rather pull up a full article on a topic than a short permastub such as Hands of Midnight. If the permastub information is all that I'm interested in, then either format is equivalent. But the chances are I'm interested in more than the minimal information. No matter what additional information I'm looking for, the chances are much better that it's provided on a full article (however it may be organized) than on a permastub.
  • If the proposal here is to create full, comprehensive articles instead of permastubs for each item, then what exactly is all of that additional information? If it's not already on the site somewhere, then why not? If it is already somewhere on the site, then the information must not be specific to that item. Therefore creating comprehensive articles means a whole new redundancy problem because the articles are padded with information that is repeated from other pages:
    • Do you repeat all of the information about how Daedric armor is made on every individual Daedric item? Do you create separate images for each individual piece of armor or repeat the image of the full suit of armor on every page? If you want the page to be truly comprehensive do you repeat general information about heavy armor, or about pauldrons, on every individual page?
    • In Oblivion, all of the information about how/where you can find any piece of daedric armor is the same. So do you repeat the entire section on Leveled List Info on every item page? Or do you provide a link, in which case most readers will have to click through multiple pages just to find what they're looking for?
    • In Morrowind, let's say you look up Ebony Pauldrons to learn where you can find them. But the chances are that you're actually interested in finding other components of a suit of Ebony Armor. So then do you have to look up each separate item, compare each of the individual location lists and work out which locations are common to all ebony armor? Wouldn't be easier to just look at a list that has already done that sorting?
  • For editors, having countless separate articles on different items and keeping them all up to date is nearly impossible, for all of the redundancy-related issues already discussed.

• Transcluding each item's information onto summary tables. Basically, I already discussed the pitfalls of this approach in my earlier approach. With what you're proposing, it seems like the problems would only be worse. Transcluding a full page of information (2-5KB of text, images, etc.) just to get one line of data means that the server needs to use up twenty (or more) times more memory, internal site bandwidth, and overall resources to generate the page. A page such as Base Armor would crash (take 15 minutes to load, or else just load a completely empty page for all readers). That's not just idle speculation: we've had to revamp dozens of pages on the site to overcome problems caused by overly large transclusions. Most relevant to this discussion is Morrowind:Artifacts (e.g., this discussion): just trying to transclude 67 individual item pages onto a single page was impossible. There are maybe 200 items currently on the Armor, by Body Area article... and you'd like to include even more items (e.g., clothing).

• Creating more tables for viewing the information. Every individual set of tables needs to be manually created: an editor needs to create the page, an editor needs to list the items that belong in that table, etc. Even if the item data is transcluded, the wiki still has to be told which pages need to transcluded.
  • The number of possible separate pages is enormous. You want to be able to filter out the expansions? That can only be done by having a separate page for each combination (a list of all pauldrons in Morrowind would be one page; a list of all pauldrons in Morrowind, Tribunal, and Bloodmoon would be another page; third and fourth pages for combinations such as MW+TR, MW+BM). Other useful filters have even more possible options, and therefore more separate pages (base pauldrons; unenchanted pauldrons; enchanted pauldrons; all pauldrons; pauldrons plus related clothing; etc). And organizing by body area is just one of many possible ways to start by splitting the data.
  • There are countless ways in which readers would like to be able to group information. If the goal of a reorganization is to provide more such groupings, where do you draw the line between which groups are "worthwhile" and which ones aren't? Or if the reorganization can realistically only accommodate one or two more possibilities, will it really significantly help readers compared to the current system? If the dream really is a system in any way comparable to those WoW databases, why put the work into a system that will only ever offer 10% of that functionality? Why not admit that the wiki can't possibly do it and instead put the effort into a non-wiki solution that really provides all of the desired capabilities?
  • It's also possible here that you're suggesting creating mega-pages that list every relevant item and then let users just sort the tables according to preferences. However, if a page with 100 items is impossible, a page with thousands of items is out of the question. Also, every sort option that you want to cover within a single page would mean a separate column in the table -- which means you're not even talking about the "simple default kind" of table. You're talking about tables that are far more complex than our current tables. If you want to be able to sort by game (MW vs TR vs BM), that's a new column. A column for the enchantment, another column for governing skill (heavy armor, light armor, medium armor), another column for details of the item type (bracer, gauntlet, shield, tower shield, left, right, etc).

I hope this doesn't come across as a dismissal of your ideas. On the contrary, if there really is a better way to organize the item data on the site, I think we need to find and implement it. Not only in order to provide our current readers with better information, but also in anticipation of TES5: I'd rather get all of the new pages that need to be created for TES5 set up correctly the first time around, instead of repeating these multiple rounds of data re-organization. However, it's not a new problem or a new discussion. How to organize items has been brought up multiple times, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about alternatives, checking out what other sites have done, and even experimenting with possibilities. Ultimately, even though I can see that our current system (even after proposed tweaks and improvements) has its drawbacks, any other system that has been brought up has far more problems. --Nephele^Talk 18:31, 22 November 2008 (EST)

Just a small comment here, but - An offline application that displays tables which can be sorted based on the parameter(s) of your choosing, now where have I seen this before? Oh yes - the Construction Set! I mean, not all data is displayed there, (it rquires a few extra steps to, for example, get a list of locations where an item can be found) but that's pretty much exactly what the CS is. No consolation for console-users, of course, but for around $10US last I looked, you can have your own PC copy of the MW GotY edition with both expansions and the CS included. So, no, I don't believe that UESP should try to duplicate the functionality of the CS. That's just ridiculous, and probably impossible to do in a wiki without some serious modifications. I earlier suggested 3 tables for armor, but I would not even consider separating or duplicating the data any further than that. That would just be a nightmare to maintain. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:26, 23 November 2008 (EST)

This has given me much food for thought, but I'm still a proponent of item entries and CS-like functionality. In response to "where do you draw the line between which groups are "worthwhile" and which ones aren't?" I'm treating the filtering as a separate problem, which will involve some javascript, not work for wiki tables. I want to expand the capabilities of these wiki tables for the benefit of users and editors alike, creating templates for items, item pages, and possibly a new table-template which can hide items or fields with the expansion tag. The pages we have now, such as the Daedric page, the clutter page, the armor page, will all have the same content, but instead of static and incomplete tables, they will have sortable transcluded item cells with the possibility to remove extraneous information.

Since each items many locations wouldn't be information needed on every page with info on them, yet would be necessary for a complete item page, it would be beneficial to have the data saved in a normally hidden cell, which could be revealed by custom template attributes, meaning that a new table template would be desirable for category pages which want to list that data. I wouldn't put the general location info (or any info for that matter) on a separate page, even if it is general info which would be repeated for nearly all of a categories items, since the whole point of this method is to centralize information into pages based on items. If the locations for ebony armor can be fleshed out on the ebony page, then by all means, duplicate the info that is already in the listings up in the description.

My initial question was whether it would be technically feasible, and it appears that there is a limit for wiki transclusions. As I understood it, transclusions only change pages when they are updated, but since the pages are always generated dynamically, then there would be no way for the servers to handle the load. However; if we get a caching server and have somewhat stable item pages, there should be a way to get around this limitation, but I'm no expert at wiki-software. Lukish_ Tlk Cnt 16:00, 23 November 2008 (EST)

Savior Pauldrons?

I just got done doing a slaughterfest in Tel Fyr (already beat the plot :D), and the large cabinet on the right corridor when facing Divath Fyr's office contained two Pauldrons, the "Savior Left and Right Pauldrons." They were light armor, 900 health, 9.0 weight, and 266 armor rating (when my Light Armor was at 100). Don't see ANYTHING about these in the wiki at all. Any ideas?

Question answered on Tel Fyr. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 22:54, 19 December 2008 (EST)

Armour doesn't work

Just started playing Morrowind (GOTY), every piece of armour I equip not only doesn't increase my armour rating but I go up in unarmed skill while wearing it. What's going on? — Unsigned comment by 88.109.185.200 (talk) on 20 November 2009

You gain armor skill by getting hit. Each hit counts towards a specific equipment slot, and the class of armor in each slot decides which skill to increase. In the case where the slot has clothing or no armor, unarmored skill is increased. You must be fully armored in order to stop using unarmored; the equipment slots can be seen here.

With a good unarmored skill, unequipping armor which you are unskilled in will likely help the overall armor rating of the character. I recommend finding one of the trainers for the armor class which you wish to equip. Lukish_ Tlk Cnt 11:07, 14 December 2009 (UTC)