WarcraftRealms.com

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

Ody — Tue Nov 30, 2010 4:23 pm

Author: Ody

Posted: Tue Nov 30, 2010 4:23 pm

Did Blizz disable these search parameters? For me they don't work anymore

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

Rollie — Wed Nov 24, 2010 11:07 am

Author: Rollie

Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2010 11:07 am

I think this definitely offers some ability to help add some additional data. The biggest problem is to provide the kind of data we look for here, would require crawling the armory at rates that Blizzard would probably not like, just as ER mentions.

At any rate, Kenny, thank you for posting this up and I will investigate how I might be able to incorporate these into our offerings.

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

Balgair — Tue Nov 16, 2010 2:45 am

Author: Balgair

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 2:45 am

It is entirely possible that there's just been less people playing in the past couple of weeks than there were a month ago - populations tend to drop in the run-up to an expansion, people take breaks etc, so there could well just be less active people than before. If it goes up again in a few days (with the final stage of the elemental invasion happening, that may get some interest), then it's probably just natural population changing - it will definitely go up in December when Cataclysm comes out, anyway!

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

Vaks — Tue Nov 16, 2010 2:35 am

Author: Vaks

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 2:35 am

Ody wrote:

Strange that last week when i checked my realm eu-blackmoore only level 80 chars,
it was H:14311 / A:14827 . And today it's H:6309 / A:6019

Any ideas why the numbers differ so much?

I also see "strange" numbers...

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/search?q=factionId:0+realm:aszune tells me Alliance on my server has 13,280 characters total, while the censusing of my server shows total alliance 16,783 the last 30 days...

I find it hard to believe more than 3500 characters has migrated from the server or been deleted in the last 30 days... I've not even been censusing this server for a full month as I just transferred to it myself...http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?serverid=324

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

Ody — Mon Nov 15, 2010 3:49 pm

Author: Ody

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 3:49 pm

nice catch HeroakaKenny

Strange that last week when i checked my realm eu-blackmoore only level 80 chars,
it was H:14311 / A:14827 . And today it's H:6309 / A:6019

Any ideas why the numbers differ so much?

http://eu.battle.net/wow/de/search?q=factionId:1+realm:Blackmoore+level:80

http://eu.battle.net/wow/de/search?q=factionId:0+realm:Blackmoore+level:80

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

1974ER — Tue Nov 09, 2010 3:44 pm

Author: 1974ER

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 3:44 pm

In a way, yes, you are wrong... because the censusing and archieving creates data that can't be crawled from the armories, as it wasn't and isn't available.

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

HeroakaKenny — Tue Nov 09, 2010 3:12 pm

Author: HeroakaKenny

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 3:12 pm

I thought census was a necessity because of the fact that this crawling possibillity wasn't there before. Am I wrong ?

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

1974ER — Tue Nov 09, 2010 2:46 pm

Author: 1974ER

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 2:46 pm

Kenny...

You are getting two things confused with eachother. Armories (and we are talking about only two, as WCR only collects data on US and EU servers) remember every single character in existance, whether active or not. The values we store here, based on our censuses, represent the amount of characters we have seen ACTIVE (in the past 30 days). And the history archives contain data... that Blizzard doesn't have. I can't armory check a character that no longer exists or that has had it's name changed... but I can try to find it on WCR.

For the max level characters... as we discussed earlier... On heavily censused realms most 80s get seen regularly. And even on those that see less censuses... if someone gets seen, it's more likely to be an 80, not one of the smaller characters.

And we are not going to scan the frequently updating characters just once. What we were discussing was the amount of armory crawling we could theoretically do without crashing the site or Blizzard's armory servers to supplement our efforts. Did you think we are going to quit and let a crawler replace our efforts???

EDIT: A couple of minor typos.

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

HeroakaKenny — Tue Nov 09, 2010 12:27 pm

Author: HeroakaKenny

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 12:27 pm

Lets be honest.
Using the armory is over all a better way to get the stats and I'm not talking about the character history or activity or anything else like that.
What i mean are the clean stats. xx% horde characters existing on realm xx for example. No filter at all.
For that a armory Analysis can't be tricked out and it's the best way over all.
The coolest thing would be if the armory itself would have alle the information warcaftrealms is given. Not that i want to underrate your hard work you did the last years. But if a side would have to make millions of request to analyse all 4 (or was it 3 or what ^^?) armorys its kinda ineffective.

Thats what i wanted to say first.

Balgair wrote:

Problem with that logic is there's more characters at 80 than at 10-79 right now

To get to the quote above..
What also was mentioned here in the thread is that max level chars are very static. So scanning one time per month for them to update all characters that census could not catch up is a good way to get the right stats.
But you can't scan characters from 10 to 79/84 who are frequently updating only one time per month...

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

Balgair — Tue Nov 09, 2010 7:50 am

Author: Balgair

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 7:50 am

Problem with that logic is there's more characters at 80 than at 10-79 right now Earlier in an expansion, yes, that'd work, but certainly not at present - http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php indicates 2,737,992 lvl 80s in the records and 2,195,752 10-79 characters Yes, once you go down to lvl 1 there's more again, but I doubt Rollie would do that; there's far too many unused lvl 1 alts around for it to be practical regarding database space (the site used to go down that far but hasn't for a long time due to space issues)

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

HeroakaKenny — Tue Nov 09, 2010 7:33 am

Author: HeroakaKenny

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 7:33 am

1974ER wrote:

Interesting idea, Azgaurd... though, given your assumption and the current state of population on almost all servers... For WCR purposes it might actually be better to query levels 10-79 (after Cataclysm 10-84) and leave the top level to manual scans.

But as some posts before said..
Using the armory is difficult in some ways. It costs ton of traffic and
may not be accepted from Blizzard.
If we just catch up the max level it might not be so much traffic that blizzard will ban the website.
So scanning one time per month only the max level chars would be effective for them and lower the amount of traffic.

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

Balgair — Tue Nov 09, 2010 6:51 am

Author: Balgair

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 6:51 am

Yeah agreed there! Level 80 (soon 85) tends to stay very static (aside from obviously new level 80s, so would still need done occasionally) but the lower levels change much faster All the more so in a month, when there'll be goblins, worgen, troll druids, blood elf warriors, dwarf shamans, etc etc all appearing for the first time!

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

1974ER — Tue Nov 09, 2010 3:42 am

Author: 1974ER

Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2010 3:42 am

Interesting idea, Azgaurd... though, given your assumption and the current state of population on almost all servers... For WCR purposes it might actually be better to query levels 10-79 (after Cataclysm 10-84) and leave the top level to manual scans.

Why am I suggesting such an action, you might ask? Well, on most realms, about 50% of characters that get seen are at level 80. And level 80s generally tend to settle in a guild and stay there. Therefore, they actually mostly just get seen, they rarely produce new data, as they no longer level up and guild changes are less frequent than among the lower levels.

Querying the part that actually gets seen the least, would improve the data the most.

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

azgaurd — Mon Nov 08, 2010 8:19 pm

Author: azgaurd

Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2010 8:19 pm

I would not expect armory crawl to replace but improve due to the number of queries i would say just limit the Query to the top 5 levels (80-85) those are the biggest and most important level in my opinion, there is no need to be scanning my level 36 hunter i hop on and get a level every month or so... just use armory to get the Level capped characters or the top 5 levels those also by proxy should be the most active

Re: Getting exact realms stats and all Infos through the armory.

1974ER — Mon Nov 08, 2010 11:24 am

Author: 1974ER

Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2010 11:24 am

There is indeed lots of room for improvement... but direct armory crawling isn't a viable overall solution.

There are interesting possibilities in it, though... Maybe one day we'll have a gender for all active characters... and through that... the answers to questions such as: Is the female dwarf rogue the rarest gender race class combination... or is it the female troll warrior? Or something else? Are there any level 80 (85) female goblins / worgen on my realm yet?

EDIT: I just did some recalculating... One option, which MIGHT be feasible would be to aim checking one server per hour for level 10+ characters. 25 days equals 600 hours. US and EU currently total slightly under 600 servers. So if the site and armory can handle that, we could get about 1,??? checks per server per month.

I know it isn't much, but it would ensure that almost no realm would ever zero out. Maintenance breaks or armory crashes would still cause problems, though.