WoW Armory improved with powerful tools
Demonstrative of their commitment to seeing Arenas succeed, the World of Warcraft Armory has been updated with new tools that allow players to scan Match Histories, Opponent Histories, and more surprisingly, Match Reports. Blizzard has apparently been tracking a lot of data under the hood for some time, as all the matches of Season 5 are available for viewing.
The new tools are incredibly powerful, interesting, and intuitive, allowing players to look through a teams performance over the course of a season. The Match History tool represents matches in a graph form, which players can toggle to show selected periods of time. It shows which opponents a team faced, how much ratings were gained or lost, the average ratings change during the selected period, and even when and what time the matches were played. There's just so much data available, players can conceivably spend lots of time just studying team histories.
Opponent History is an easy to read rundown of all teams a team has played, displaying how many times both teams have met, including their win-loss records against each other. The listing also shows a team's winning percentage against a particular opponent, as well as the net gains in ratings. Match Reports are a snapshot of a specific match, revealing data such as what Arena map the match occurred in, the date and time, and how long the game lasted. Even data such as Killing Blows, damage done and taken, and healing done and taken are all in there.
It's an incredibly robust set of tools that Arena enthusiasts are sure to take advantage of and enjoy looking through. Even without actually seeing entire matches played, there's enough data to allow players to visualize them and even analyze a team. Are some comps really weaker against others? Do some comps perform better in one map and not another? As more and more data comes in and more and more analytical minds peruse them, the coming weeks and months should reveal a lot about Arena play.
