wow-armory
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WoW Armory for the iPhone released
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Blizzard_releases_WoW_Armory_for_the_iPhone'; Blizzard has just released an official WoW Armory client for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The App features the ability for users to see a number of important things on their iPhone that they normally would be able to get in-game or through use of the official armory site. Some of the major features include: Character information, including gear, achievements, and specs PvP leader boards Talent calculators Official Blizzard news An integrated item browser In-game calendars You can download the app right now from the WoW Armory page and the App Store. The app is free. This is the second mobile application Blizzard has developed, the first being a mobile authenticator app.Some first impressions of the app after the break!%Gallery-68031%
wowTwitter is a Twitter just for your characters
I'm not sure how well this will scale, but it's an interesting idea: while it's certainly possible to just create a Twitter account for your World of Warcraft characters (so anyone interested can always see what you're up to), the folks behind a new site called wowTwitter have gone a step further, and recreated Twitter's functionality specifically for Azeroth's virtual denizens. It's very barebones right now, but basically, after you register, you can punch in any of your characters, "verify" them by changing something about them in the Armory (like unequipping the piece of gear on your wrist), and then you can send and receive messages on that character, with special channels created for the guild, your realm, and so on. I thought it used Twitter somehow, but it seems completely separate: they're running their own database and servers, so while the two work the same way (there are "@" replies and hashtags), they don't interact at all.Which means they'll also have all of the problems that Twitter has had -- when only a few people are using your database, it runs fine, but if it starts to scale up at all, then you run into lots of "Fail Whale" downtime. And I'm not sure we need a whole other system just for WoW characters (though this one does have the nice bonus of "claiming" your character so it can't get impersonated). At any rate, they're in beta right now, and actually hosting a cash money prize contest for the most characters verified and tweets posted, so a link from us will probably show them how ready their system is. If it's your thing, go forth and wowTweet!
Armory temporarily disabled to cut server load
Today being BlizzCon ticket sales day, Blizzard is anxious to keep everything running as smoothly as possible. In an attempt to lessen load on their web servers, they've temporarily disabled the Armory. In fact, this has been the case since last night, when I went to check out our main tank's armory after the raid (he had just gotten Shieldwall of the Breaker and I wanted to see what he was upgrading from). This is going to be inconvenient for those of you attempting to form PuGs, especially PuG raids. Hopefully BlizzCon tickets will sell out relatively quickly, and this madness will be over, and our beloved gear-checking, snobbery-enabling service returned to us. How will you be vetting players in the mean time?
The rise and fall of class popularity
While writing the most recent Shifting Perspectives column and browsing old records on Druid population statistics, I started to wonder about the various factors that play a role in how popular a class becomes. While Blizzard and Blizzard alone has the exact numbers on who's playing what, various fan sites have honed data collection strategies over the years and amassed a pretty impressive pile of numbers. This only got easier when the Armory launched in spring 2007, and by now I'd be surprised if players weren't at least broadly accurate about overall trends. If we can trust what we see, how we do best explain fluctuations in class popularity? Has Arena success (or the lack thereof) been as influential as we think? Is class population an accurate, albeit crude, guide to the overall "quality" of a class at any given moment -- or just a guide to the perceived "quality?" I'd be interested to hear what people think.Having played a Druid since the beginning of Burning Crusade and observed it going from the second least-played class at 60 to the third or fourth most-played class at 80, I have my own theories about what's influenced Druid population numbers particularly, but I need to do a little more digging before I can be sure. However, I don't know whether any of it really applies to other classes, and the meteoric rise of the Death Knight is a thought-provoking (and somewhat troubling) trend.
The Queue: Druids are cats, too
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.Dear Alex,Thanks for making nearly all the comments and questions in yesterday's Queue about cats and dogs.Yours,Adam.Geekycole asked..."Do you guys have any news on a fresh realm opening up?"
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.
WoW Code: Better than a pocket protector
If you've ever woken up in the morning and said to yourself, "Gee, I'd like to appear nerdier today," then do we have the story for you! Scare your real life friends and confuse even the staunchest gaming nerd. Use "WoW Code" in your forum signature!N: Sephare, M:Pa73, Mb: 3/56/5, Mr: Hu, S: Ravenholt-US-RPPvP, G: Twilight Empire, Pvp–, Pve+, Y2005.5, DC, Ori-MC/B, TBC-Kara, WLK-Nexus/B, L++, C-Wl/DK, R-Ud, RP++. :), V0.3What you see above you, besides a whole pile of utter confusion, is actually a World of Warcraft character broken down into very basic terms using the WoW Code method. Everything from name, to talent build, date joined, and player preferences are included!We'd take the time to break it down, but TyphoonAndrew at The Eye of the Storm blog has already done that in an easy to read format. Now if you could excuse us, we're going to go break out our Tandys and play some extreme World of Warcraft: The Molten Core on our Atari 2600s..
Armory going down for Wrath updates
Crygil posted early this morning that the Armory will be going down at 6 a.m. PST / 9 a.m. EST to prepare it for Wrath of the Lich King. The Armory will be down for approximately eight hours.He doesn't go into specifics about what will be updated, but we have some good guesses at what we could see included: Achievement listings Wrath of the Lich King items New reputations Faster character data updates Crygil also mentions that all the character data will be reset. This means that you have to log into your character to repopulate the Armory information on it. This is important if you have seldom played alts yet still refer to the armory data, or if you are currently applying to a guild that requires armory information.We'll have more concrete information on what this update brings after it's complete, sometime around 2 p.m. PST.
Windows Mobile users get in on the mobile Armory fun
Hey Windows Mobile folks? Feeling a little left out of the mobile Armory app game? We've got just the thing for you: the WoW Player for Windows Mobile will pull up all the character information you want on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC device.Unfortunately, unlike the iPhone app we posted, we haven't actually tried this one, and there's a few comments up about it not finding characters correctly (it looks like it requires PocketPC 5-6.1 and .NET Compact Framework 3.5, whatever that all is). But on the other hand, it's a free download, so if you're stuck with a Windows Mobile device and really want to see your characters on a mobile screen, it's worth a try.Doesn't look as good as the iPhone app (whoops, sorry that's our Mac snobbery showing through), but there's definitely a nice installed base of Windows Mobile users out there, and they could use a little WoW love, too.
LFG Armory uses Armory to match up characters and guilds
LFG Armory is a new site that's aiming to beat the official Armory at its own game. Blizzard's site, as complete as it is, is still occasionally buggy and slow, and LFG Armory is looking to give players an alternative. And it works fairly well -- while the FAQ claims that data may be a little behind (due to caching of Blizzard's information), both the guild and player profile pages look pretty good and load quickly (and if the site can stay up after we link to them here, that'll be a real sign that it's a stable server).But the real feature that makes LFG Armory something more than Blizzard's official site is that it has a guild and arena team matching system built in. Once you register your name and your characters, you can do a search for guilds and arena teams and try to find one that matches what you want -- percentage of level 70s, class makeup, and number of members. On the guild side, you can set your guild as looking, and then when you hit a match, LFG will match you up.It's an interesting system, but like all social networks, it all depends on participation -- when I looked for a guild for my Hunter on Cenarius (who could use a guild, by the way), nothing came up, because likely no one on the server was looking (for a Hunter at least). But as an alternative to the Armory, LFG is looking pretty good. If they can get people to the site and stay up, they might give Blizzard's official site a run for its money.[Via World of Raids]
Tracking the Tournament Realm rankings from the armory
If you're interested in keeping track of the 3v3 Arena Tournament, You can look at Vhiari's breakdowns, sure, and good ones they are. But there's also another resource that should come in handy: The official ladder listings right on the official Armory. By choosing the Coliseum 1 battlegroup, you can see the rankings for the Tournament Realms. The current top 3v3 team, Outrageously Better Pros, Is a Priest/Rogue/Druid team, although the Druid has no games played. Maybe they used to be Priest Mage Rogue, which is a pretty strong combo these days. It should be fun to watch these rankings as the tournament progresses, both to see what class and spec makeups stay near the top, and to see what outrageous and silly names people can come up with for their teams -- without breaking the naming policy, that is. What's interesting to me is that despite the fact that the Tournament itself is 3v3 only, the 2v2 and 5v5 brackets are still in full swing, with quite a few teams. I suppose this is a sign that people really do like the idea of a good solid PvP only realm to duke it out with high powered characters to prove their worth. I have to wonder if Blizzard is watching those brackets as closely as they're watching the 3v3 bracket, or if this is a sign that they may make these arena practice realms more permanent in the future. Either way, all this activity should be fun to watch. Keep your browser pointed to WoW Inside for all the latest Tournament Realm news, including the escapades of our own WoW Insider Arena Team. Here's some arena page trivia too, while we're on the subject: Mike pointed out to me that the blade that Draenei chick on the arena ladder page is holding is known as The Hungering Cold. Its model was used for the Infamous "Sword of 1,000 Truths" in the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft." It currently drops in Naxxramas, so chances are we'll see it again come Wrath of the Lich King.
Brutal ratings requirement for Brutal Gladiator items?
MMO-Champion was able to take a sneak peek at some items released on the official WoW Armory and discovered some truly brutal news: if the items go live as they appeared on the armory, the new personal rating requirement to wear Season 4 shoulder pieces will now be 2200. This is a steep ratings increase from Season 3, where shoulder pieces required a personal rating of 2000. As of this writing, the two items that MMO-Champion was able to scope out cannot be searched for on the official WoW Armory -- either hidden from searches or removed from the database entirely. The Brutal Gladiator's Mooncloth Mantle and Brutal Gladiator's Ornamented Spaulders no longer appear in the item database although MMO-Champion was quick to take screenshots. [EDIT: Apparently, the items are viewable in the EU Armory, you can view the Mooncloth shoulders and healing plate shoulders. - Thanks, BaboonNL!]There is no guarantee that these item changes will make it live or if the weapon requirements -- currently 1850 for Season 3 -- have also been raised. Although Tharfor has gone on record to state that it's likely that Season 3 items' ratings requirements will be lowered in Season 4, Blizzard didn't mention raising the rating requirements for Brutal Gladiator pieces. According to Realm History, this means that roughly 12% of players rated 2000 and above in 5v5 teams will qualify for the shoulder pieces; 11% of the 3v3 bracket; and about 9% of the 2v2 bracket. That means an even smaller percentage of the general population. As much as Patch 2.4 catered to casual content, if these details make it live, it seems as though Arena play has become even more hardcore than ever.
Yarrr! There be treasure hidden in them thar data servers!
Have a need to embed Pirates of the Burning Sea information in your website, blog, or toolbar? Then you'll want to read Flying Lab's PotBS developer Brendan Weitzman's latest developer journal. There he talks about the special Crawler server. You can't play on this server -- Crawler's job is to go through all the data on the live servers, figure out what has changed, and copy the changes to itself so that the developers -- and the wider world -- can use this information. What sorts of information Crawler can give you, how much of it you can use and how often -- all these are answered within.Will this info change your life? Well, probably not. But isn't it a nice feeling to know if you did need this information, it would be there for you? See if your server is up without logging in -- or set up email alerts when your port gets thrown into contention. You can make those sorts of apps with this data. And maybe in the future, as they prepare ever more of their data for players to use, you could build something like WoW's Armory. We're just beginning to realize how games will be played in the future. They will be everywhere -- in your browser, on your cell phone, on your iPod.... This is how it starts, with a developer explaining how players can get at their data when they are not in the game.
Inspecting across factions, let's all hold hands now
One of the little things that snuck by in the 2.4 patch notes is the ability to inspect players across factions. Horde can look at Alliance folk's gear, and Alliance can look at Horde people's gear. They can only do this when no one is flagged for PvP, however. This is a really neat feature. My friends and I often times play "guess the gear" on the Horde toons we pass during our PvE adventures. We solve our arguments by looking them up in the armory, but now we'll just be able to right click on the Horde character's portrait and choose "Inspect." Pretty nifty.Now... the real question becomes, where could this lead? For a long time players have been wondering if one day we'll be able to group across factions. Blizzard has obviously been leaning towards cross faction interaction and friendly support for a while now. We had the AQ gates opening, the recent goings on in the Isle of Quel'Danas, and lots of quests where you have to help out a member of the opposing faction.
Dear Blizzard: Am I your police officer?
Dear Blizzard, First of all, I really do have to thank you for changing the name of that guy called Longjohnson. Yeah, He sent us this pretty long rant about how it was unfair his name was changed, but honestly, it was a pretty clear violation of the naming policy against inappropriate references to bodily parts or functions (Sorry Jason, I'm only siding with you to a point here. Your character's name needed to be changed). That said, I'll give him this: It is pretty annoying that he was able to then proceed to the Armory and find 19 characters named Longjohnson and 60 characters named Bigjohnson. If a name is impermissible because of being profane or inappropriate on one server, it should count on them all, right? Every server has the same set of naming rules, except for RP servers, which have the extra "appropriate for an RP server" qualifier, so this shouldn't be a problem. Mike has actually observed that enforcement tends to be a bit lax in the past regarding both the naming policy and RP server policy, but I figured it was worth bringing up again.
GoDaddy invades WoW Armory
In one of the most bizarre things I've seen happen to the World of Warcraft in my three years playing, the WoW Armory site today is pointing to a generic GoDaddy.com domain parking page. The screenshot above was taken at 1:08 p.m. CST on March 2nd, 2008. WoW Insider has received numerous reports of this. It seems to be a DNS related issue. The domain name wowarmory.com expires today, and it appears as if a registrant has grabbed the wowarmory.com domain name as soon as it expired.DNS entries for blizzard.com and worldofwarcraft.com point to cerf.net, while the DNS servers for wowarmory.com are currently pointing to domaincontrol.com. While some of you might be seeing wowarmory.com work correctly, others are not. The ISPs of people who are seeing it work have not had their DNS records updated yet, however within the next 48 hours they will see wowarmoy.com go down as well; unless Blizzard fixes this before then (I am sure they are already aware, or becoming aware of it).Stay tuned to WoW Insider for the latest on this story.Thanks to Matthew Rossi and his wife for contributing to the technical sleuthing in this post.Updated 2:34 p.m. EST: You can access the armory using a sub-domain of worldofwarcraft.com by going to http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/Updated 3:03 p.m. EST: http://www.wowarmory.com/ is now working again. It looks like Blizzard really jumped on the issue and fixed it.
Guild Launch signatures are back
One of the more popular dynamically generated signatures out there are provided by guild forum hosting site Guild Launch. For those that don't know about it, they provide nifty signatures to go on the bottom of your guild forum posts, and look just like the one pictured in this post. The signature updates based on the WoW Armory data provided by Blizzard. Pretty handy for showing off your stats. After all, who doesn't want to show off that their warrior has just over 16k HP unbuffed?About two months ago the signatures stopped updating entirely. The major problem was that the Armory, which we are always reminded is still in beta, was experiencing some problems. Last week the Guild Launch signatures stared updating again (thanks to the Armory working again), but with a twist. They now will update automatically every 6 days instead of every day. However, you can still manually recreate the signatures once every 24 hours if you just have to get your stats updated. (Although with that said, I have rarely seen the Armory update right after you equip new gear and log out... still in beta. Yup.)Your old signatures will still work indefinitely, but they won't be updated anymore. To take advantage of the new updated signatures, head over to the announcement page and follow the instructions. Basically all you have to do is change one word in the html line for your signature; find the word "sig.php" and change it to "wsig.php". Poof! You're done. What site do you use to make your graphical signature?
Your WoWJutsu rank
The folks at WoWJutsu provide a great little competitive tool that ranks guilds according to the PvE raid content they've completed. The site is pretty popular, and a lot of guilds use it in their advertising over at the Guild Recruitment Forums. My guild has been known to pay pretty close attention to the number. I have to admit that about once a week I find myself checking our ranking against those of other guilds my friends are in. This got me thinking... what good does basing your progress against other guilds do? Sure, there are the ultra competitive guilds like Death and Taxes and Nihilum. However they approach the game in a way that leads them to needing to care about how close the guild behind them is doing. For most of us, competing against other guilds is only going to lead to unforeseen frustrations. Most guilds have a boss or two that they get hung up on. Back in the days when BWL was hard, my guild spent a long time defeating Razorgore, and after he was gone the rest of the instance fell within a month. This kind of common hurdle in WoW is not reflected in WoWJutsu; all you get to know is that a guild is stuck on a boss, not that they're going to have amazing progress after it.
