armory
Latest
Show your characters on Facebook
A friend who recently invited me to social networking site Facebook showed me the WoW Armory application (you have to have a Facebook account to use that link) the other day. It's a little dohicky (technical term) that will automatically show WoW characters on your Facebook profile. Unfortunately, it's as no frills as they come right now-- basically you can see the character's name, class, level, server, and a basic outline of what they're wearing. No pics at all. But if you want to automatically share your characters on your profile via Armory info, there you go.I was going to suggest the Signature Generator we posted a while back if you wanted to post a much more detailed look at your characters on Facebook or anywhere else, but apparently it's MIA. The site doesn't load at all. The Google cache shows that maybe the site's creator burnt a bridge he wasn't supposed to, and unfortunately while there are a few other sig generators around, none of them look as good (or work as well-- I couldn't get my character to come up on the other one) as that one did.So if anyone knows of a good working sig generator, feel free to throw it in the comments below, and we can all show off our characters in our various webspaces. Oh, and though WoW Insider hasn't made our way to Facebook just yet, we are alive and well on Myspace, so come befriend us there if you like.Update: Reader Nick G sends along his own, self-made Facebook app, which he says is created by a WoW fan, not "a company trying to create a social network website and drive traffic to it via a Facebook App." Which is cool, but unfortunately, when I tried to create my character with his, all I got was an error message. So if his works, you might like it more.
Armory data: Popular and unpopular specs
Finally, someone has done something worthwhile with the Armory other than make fun of people's gear and complain about invasions of privacy. Zyph of Maelstrom wrote a program that pulled random names of level 70 characters off of Allakhazam and inputted them into the Armory, and then compared their specs. He ended up with the spec information of over six thousand players. Zyph wanted to find out three things from his study. First off, he wanted to know what percentage of a class was specialized (31 points or more) in one tree. Then he wanted to see how many people who were specialized in a tree skipped the 31- and 41-point talents of that tree, and how many took them. The results of his survey can be found beyond the cut.
Forum post of the day: The "no one else has my name" club
Oh, but the fun there is to be had with the armory. And if you're bored of using the armory for laughs (trying to find the game's worst players, perhaps?), here's a new use to keep you occupied -- at least for a little while. This thread is a tribute to the game's players who, as proven by the armory tool, have completely unique names. Of course there are some problems with this, as pointed out early in the thread: either they're the only ones with their names because they're lame names to begin with or their formerly unique-and-cool names are about to be copied by every last person reading the thread. So why not go on and take a look? I'm sure you're unique, just like everybody else.
Guildwatch: Splitsville, population us
It seems we're right in the middle of Burning Crusade raiding drama-- guilds who had a solid raiding group before the expansion are seeing all kinds of trouble as they reset themselves for new instances and new group limits and requirements. Lots of guilds are splitting under the pressure.Not that it wasn't expected. But there sure is a lot of drama going around. This week's Guildwatch, your weekly look at happenings around the guild scene, starts right after you click the link below. And don't forget: your tips power this place-- if you've got news of drama, downing, or recruiting, let us know at wowguildwatch@gmail.com.
Breakfast topic: What have you learned from the Armory?
We've got some great tools for guilds. We've got generated signatures, lots of Legolasses (and Legolads), some liars revealed, and even the worst players (that last one is from an official Mike Schramm Troll Post (TM)(C)).So in the two weeks since it was introduced, what have you learned from the Armory? Have you figured out something new by checking out someone else's spec, or learned something about your guild from theirs? Have you gotten a good tip on an item you can't live without, or found one that you later asked a guildie about? Have you checked out a "famous" WoW player, or checked how many players have the same name that you do?Blizzard has put one of the most comprehensive tools online for any MMORPG. It's only been around for a few weeks, and it's only in Beta, so we're apt to see more functionality arise for it yet. But here in the beginning, just what are you using it for?
Armory tools for guilds
I knew the Armory was a good thing. The actual Armory site is already useful enough, letting me check out party members' specs so I don't have to ask "are you imp sap," etc. But being as how this is the era of web tools, it's only natural that such a huge data source has given rise to a few tools for rearranging that data. We've already seen the awesome signature generator, but I think this is even better.A player going by Antiarc has written a few tools that pull data from the Armory on every character in your guild, and then give you some great tables you can sort in various ways. For instance, I can look at the character stats page and gloat over the fact that I'm the highest Spirit and +healing Priest in my guild, and then look over in the spec column and realize that's because all the other Priests are Shadow (besides one level 64). Or if I'm looking to get something crafted, I could call up the profession comparison page, and see who's put in the effort to get a Jewelcrafter up there. Finally, if I'm looking to see who can join me in some thrilling Heroics, or just who's got way too much time on their hands, I can check their standing with the various factions.Due to the fact that these scripts do pull down and process quite a bit of data, they take a while to run; but the results pages are static, so once you've generated your results you can share the link around and it'll load quickly. If you just want to see what the pages look like, please do use the preview pages to avoid undue server stress.By the way, if Antiarc's site goes down or just to spread the load around, there's a mirror here. Now go forth and compare![thanks, jbob, for sending this one in!]
Fun with the Armory
Now that the Armory is finally up and working (it was crushed by requests when it was first posted), I've had a chance to look at it, and I have to say, I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen on an MMO's website ever. The Camelot Herald was cool (for those of you who know about that), but, privacy issues aside, the Armory is going to become a terrific tool for players, guilds, Alliance and Horde all over the world.Already, it's showing us things about the game that we'd never known otherwise. There are apparently 22 pages of Legolas toons, although Leroyjenkins doesn't have the showing I'd have thought (50 entries, none of which are above 60 as of this writing). Maybe he wipes too much. While there are tons and tons of "alliance" guilds, there's only a few for "horde." Death and Taxes either has 20 chapters, or 19 wannabes-- Nihilum doesn't have any. And while arena teams are fairly new, lots of people didn't get too creative with them-- there's 165 teams with "arena" in the name. I tried to see if our friend Juffowup, the naked troll hunter, was still naked, but he hasn't been on a while. Antitweak, the naked druid, is only 20, but she is-- yup, still naked.And there's lots of cool personal stuff in here, too. My shaman, Shamanic, shares a name with lots of people, but from what I can see, he's number one (the one from Thunderhorn) on the list-- confirming what I already knew, ahem. And I think it's particularly cool that on every character screen, they even show, in the right corner, the buffs you have on the character at the time. Now that's real-time! Unfortunately, they also show your professions, so everyone in the world can see that I've been slacking off. But overall, I love the Armory. You guys seen anything funny or cool in there yet?
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]
