Comments on: Here’s Your Chance, Fellas

By: Fiordhraoi

Fiordhraoi — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:52:00 +0000

I’ve got to back up Jayrox here. As a networking guy, believe me, I have a solid concept of the sheer mass of information that has to be moved in order to keep things like gankbang & wowjutsu working. It’s a huge undertaking that I wouldn’t want to do myself. Props to those that do it.

Hopefully Blizz will be able to slim down the data they provide a bit, and get their database responding quicker.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:36:00 +0000

@dave

You are completely and totally wrong. Try reading a FAQ sometime. WowJutsu only counts the gear the first time it is found on a character. If they subsequently change guilds, it only counts towards their original guild.

By: jayrox

jayrox — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:10:00 +0000

Hey guys,
I understand your frustration with getting fast and constant updates. As a creator, operator and stat junky I want to see stats updated as fast as possible also. I run gankbang.com and one of the major problem my site and the many like it have to face is The Armory itself. The past couple weeks have been insane for updates. Everything from changes to the xml that were easy to fix to 30 second download times or complete timeouts all together. Sadly, these are things we cannot control. Ive gone about making another queue for gankbang to try and keep everyone updated when The Armory is slow or unresponsive. Its a tough business to be in. We try very hard to make everything as fast as we can. Ive personally talked to the guys at wowjutsu a couple times trying to figure out whats causing the delays and how to prevent them. One of my biggest problems is the fact that people constantly submit guilds to gankbang and many of them dont have a single level 70 on the roster. This causes problems also. Before I can update people I have to check to see if a guild is valid. Making sure it exists, making sure there is at least 1 level 70 on it. Of a list of about 160k guilds, well over 1.3 million arena teams and nearly 2.9 million characters compounded by 0.3 - 45 second downloads for each xml file can make for a very long updating process. Add in talent xml files, and items and you can easily make that a lot longer. For a ‘complete’ gankbang.com update I have to query The Armory at least 7,292,000 times, and try to keep blizzard from banning my crawler for a DDoS attack and my host from banning me for using too much processing and bandwidth.

As you can see, the process isnt as simple as many people think. I hope you guys understand and see we really are trying to keep everyone updated. It is just a slow and very very very long process.

By: dave

dave — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:05:00 +0000

Eh, that site should just die.

The main problem is in the very premise that it is built upon. [b]Guild progression cannot be determined through guild member’s gear[/b]. It’s wildly inaccurate. People change guilds, plain and simple. All it takes is for one person from a more advanced guild to move to a less advanced guild. That’s it. One small change and it’s hosed.

Wowjitsu is for epeen maintenance, and that’s it.

By: Valyre

Valyre — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:11:00 +0000

I also am on the sympathy bandwaggon. Progression bosses have been dropping gear that no one wants. Ironic? Yes.

One druid in our guild is a WoWJustu fanatic, so he’s been begging people to take the items and log out with them on. We’ve been doing our best, but it’s hard to remember.

It’s been weeks, and still nothing.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:46:00 +0000

I feel your pain with the lack of updates BRK. My guild is at about the same level of progression as AC (Kara, pfft. Gruul, farmed. ZA & Lurker Below in the works). WowJutsu only has us downing 1 boss in ZA, and 1 piece of loot from ZA. We have two groups that have downed bear, and we have downed bear and eagle multiple times.

I do think we all need to be patient with WowJutso. So far, they have the most elegant solution to guild progress. All the other methods for tracking guild progress have involved manual updating. Wowjutso is a great idea. Scan the armory for the gear people are wearing, and update a guild status based on that. I think the problem is two fold here, and only one of them can be fixed by WowJutso.

Problem One: focus on top guilds. Pardon my french, but screw them. There are a lot more of us who aren't in top 1000 guilds, or whatever they are. The problem with focusing on those top guilds is, my guild doesn't get updated. So I go to the page to manually queue my guild and put them in. There are what, 8-10,000 guilds out there. How many of them are manually entering themselves in the queue?

Problem two: Armory is slow. I mean molasses in January slow. Nothing WowJutso can do about that.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:34:00 +0000

Is is just me, or are all of the World of Warcraft websites insanely slow. The main site, the armory, the forums, all of it. Just plain old slow.

By: Tirth

Tirth — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:39:00 +0000

LoL

D….I am with ya man….They need to stop slack’n….and trying to pin the problem on something else instead of just fix’n it….

By: tinwhisker

tinwhisker — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:43:00 +0000

Yes, the armory is constantly down and sites that scan it only exacerbate the problem.

My own guild shows updates as recently as a week ago but does not show any credit for downing bosses in Z’A or SSC that I know people are wearing.

By: Someone

Someone — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:45:00 +0000

The main problem, which some people tend to forget, is how insanely slow and constantly off-line the Armory is. Stuff like WoWJutsu only make it worst with their constant scanning…