Interesting uses of the WoW Armoury
A while ago Blizzard launched the World of Warcraft Armory - a site which shows detailed information about in-game characters, including their gear, guild, use of talent points, reputation with the various in game factions and a number of other things. It's basically a pretty Web frontend to part of Blizzard's huge internal game database.
What makes it interesting is that the site makes extensive use of XSLT, view the source of any of the charater pages and what you get is raw XML. This makes it very easy for crawlers to grab and parse this data, and a number of sites have sprung up that are doing this in interesting ways:
- wowrankings - this site has adds up the item values of all items each player currently has equipped to give them a total 'score'. Higher score means better gear (generally), so by searching this site you can see lists of the best equipped players on your realm, the best equipped players of your class (globally).
- wowjutsu - this site has looked at where each item a player has equipped comes from and used this to build up a list of the bosses each guild must have killed. This data has been used to produce guild rankings, which you can view either globally, by region, or by realm.
- ArmoryMusings - this guy has setup a blog purely to showcase some of the info he's got from spidering the armoury. In particular, he regularly produces graphs to highlight how the various classes fare in the different arena bands.
On the negative side, the armoury makes pretty heavy use of Ajax, much of it questionable. And rather than using one of the well known Ajax libraries to avoid the headache of browser compatibility issues, it's all ground-up JS. Consequently the site can be horrendously slow, and in busy periods your browser can just sit there hanging for several minutes whilst it tries to make sense of everything that's thrown at it.
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