character-profiles
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3D Armory offers a round of new improvements
We linked to 3D Armory a little while ago, and as Eliah says, it does what it says it'll do: provides a picture of your character as they are in the Armory in 3D. The site's founder recently emailed us about a few improvements, and as you can see over there, there's lots of new additions. All the different regions are now reachable, and while there was an issue with special characters in the realm name, it's been fixed, so you can get any character that's online into the 3D viewer. They've added character customization, so you can make sure that the model in the picture matches your model in game. Screenshots can now be taken, and even uploaded to Facebook through their Facebook app.And there are some inter-character features as well: you can now comment on character profiles, which might be a good or a bad thing -- you could mark a good player or maybe label a ninja (though we're not sure what kind of moderation there is for that. And finally they've created something called the PuGchecker, which lets you quickly and easily enter character names and see what raid achievements those characters have earned (so if someone says they've been to OS before, you can make sure it's true). And they've even got an ingame macro you can use to run the script from directly in the game.The rate of development over there is pretty impressive, and the site has definitely grown into much more than just your average Armory substitute. At some point you wonder just how many of the features are necessary (if you ever want to see your character in 3D, you can pretty much just log into the game), but they're definitely getting creative.
The Daily Grind: Online character profiles?
Web-accessible online profiles for characters in MMOs have been around for a while. The first ones I remember were profiles available for EverQuest players. In the years that have passed, they've slowly popped up everywhere. Now you can generally find something about people's characters on the game's site, on commercial guild and player database sites, or even privately hosted guild sites. Some are very simple, offering a quick overview of gear and talents. Others are far more detailed, like the World of Warcraft armory, or the almost social-networking build of Lord of the Rings Online's player pages. With all that said - some people love them, and some people absolutely hate them. The reasons vary from player to player. On the negative side, some feel that others shouldn't be able to look at their gear if they're into PvP, or don't want others knowing how much money they have. As for positives, some like to be able to compare gear with others they know to see if they can find ways to improve their own, others think that listing your regular play-times so other folks looking for friends to adventure with can find you is a great idea. This morning we wanted to ask what you thought about online character profiles? Do you love them or hate them? What are some of the best - and worst - features you've seen on different MMO character profile sites? Anything you'd add to your favorite if you could?
Is the Armory site an invasion of privacy?
While I think it's a cool feature, some players are up in arms over Blizzard's newly-implemented Armory character profiling service. The complaint? That players don't want cross-faction players knowing what gear and specs they have and thus gaining a potential advantage in PvP. Now, it's my opinion that this doesn't matter quite as much as some of the threads about it suggest, for several reasons: There's not much reason to expect you'll be singled out amongst the many players within a single realm or battlegroup. And even if you are, what is the probability of a player having all of your information on hand when they encounter you in PvP, and being able to make use of it? (It's not as though they'll have time to look it up whenever they see you.) The exception to this would be very high-ranking players whom people may make specific study of. Knowing your precise talent build only says so much about how you play -- a shadow priest can still heal and a holy priest can still surprise you with a mind blast. And in PvP situations it's assumed that you'll have one of a few variations on an optimal PvP build for your class, already suggesting your strengths, weaknesses, and abilities to your opponents. By someone familiar with gear options, gear can be guessed at with simply a glance. Especially considering that most players are aspiring to the same high-end gear and are all somewhere along the same path to achieving it. However, despite the fact that I don't really think it's worth arguing about, those arguing against the Armory aren't asking for anything unreasonable: they just want a way to opt out of the system. And since the feature is currently in beta, perhaps there's still time to see such a change implemented.
The Warcraft Armory
What's the Armory, you wonder? Well, it's a new part of the official Blizzard site (currently in beta testing) that offers access to character profiles (for characters above level 10), guild profiles, arena team profiles, and arena ladders via the web. The nice thing about Blizzard doing this is that it's all integrated -- no extra software to install, no profiles to keep up to date -- Blizzard already has all of the information and has just given us a new way to access it. The only problem: the Armory website doesn't seem to be online right now. No doubt the cause of millions of players simultaneously trying to hit the site and see how it works.Update: European players have their own version of the Armory, and it seems to actually function right now.[Thanks, greatslack]
