Someone posted to a guildspecific newsgroup a request for more descriptive
helpfile for a certain skill. Blasterr replied that he deliberately made it
vague.
I have several problems with vague helpfiles:
1) Most people don't bother spending time (much/little/whatever) trying to
figure out how some specific reagent/percentage/rep affects the outcome.
Whether that is bad or good, is subjective. My personal view is that if a
player is able to train a skill to high level, whoever trained him must've
given enough information on how it works, thus it'd be bad.
2) Whoever takes the time to scientifically research how it works, will either
share the info (thus negating the fun-of-finding-out) or keep it to himself
(thus having fairly earned advantage).
3) It's impossible to know what difference having eg. attack at 50 vs. 150
has. The only feasible suggestion to any passive skill is having it as high as
possible, but whether the difference between a skill at 90 and 100 is 10% or
100%, nobody can know.
4) If a skill which helpfile says 'find out for yourself' bugs, how can one
know. If the skill is in a formula which is long outdated (eg. having a skill
affect the outcome that no longer exist etc.) how can anyone know that? The
answer to this question is not to ask a wizard - the number one 'answer' is
'are you sure? how do you know?'. The answer is not to write a bug report -
the most likely result is the report left open, or closed without any
response.
5) Lore is ok in helpfiles, but hiding information inside the lore is like
writing a wordlimited essay to school. You essentially have what you want to
say in a single sentence, but need to write 250lines of bullshit around it to
please the teacher. For those who don't really want the bullshit, a single
line detailing what the skill does and how it affects something would be
comparable to lottery win.
6) I sure hope there's something more spectacular to learn and whatever rather
than what a skill you've always had at 100% does.
7) The purpose of a helpfile is to provide help. Most of the new skills raise
more questions than they answer. Most of the old helpfiles are very generic.
Take 'cast' skills for example, the helpfiles state that casting is very
inefficient without them. Help spellcasting used to have the success-formula
(now gone, propably because it's more fun for players to try and calculate it
themselves, even with the unknown factor 'luck' affecting) where anyone could
see how the skill affected the outcome. Besides that, the helpfile offers 0
information on what it actually does, inefficient can be interpreted in so
many ways. Someone even told me that having cast skill above some % drops
spcost of spells, woah!
I had constructive criticism in mind when I wrote this, if you dismiss it as
whine I say fuck you and your overly negative viewpoint.

I find it rather lame too, that the best information about the skill can be
found out by grepping the skill out of 'show skills all' list where the info
is put in briefly.