Tracking Arena matches with Gnomewarrior
Gnomewarrior, a site devoted to tracking Arena matches, has a growing database of over 23,000 Arena matches contributed by over 400 players. It's a pretty small player sampling right now, but the match data that the site shows are pretty interesting. Even with a small overview, visitors can check out specific Arena teams (that have contributed their data) and details on their matches such as match duration, their Team Rating, the maps they fought on, and the all-important team compositions. Mousing over a class icon will show that player's spec, which is extremely useful.
Arena enthusiasts looking to contribute should download ArenaHistorian from WoW Interface and upload their data on Gnomewarrior. The mod itself tracks pretty much everything in an Arena match such as the "exact race, gender, talents, healing and damage done for both the enemy arena team and yours, along with which map it was in, how long it took and if you won or lost." It's a lot of data, and as with all databases, the more data you've got, the better. Gnomewarrior collects all that data and makes it extremely searchable, allowing visitors to search for how teams or even how certain class / specs performed.
Perhaps we'll see tools that will parse the data, like finding out the average time for matches depending on the brackets and maps (glossing over the lists, for example, it looks like most matches last from 3-6 minutes). It's also interesting to see how certain -- sometimes oddball -- comps do against others. As it is now, it's interesting enough to browse through and visualize the tons of matches they display. With a big enough sampling, I'm looking forward to Gnomewarrior working alongside other sites like Realm History's Arena Statistics in becoming a valuable resource for analyzing Arena play.
