Epic Puck

I have talked about the application known to BrotherHood members as PRC – Puck’s Ready Check. 

It simply consumes the XML data from the WowArmory. It presents itself in an XML file as well with a bit of XSL in order to make itself slightly more pretty than XML alone

How does it work?

Every twelve hours, an automated task requests the BrotherHood guild roster from the Armory. The scheduled task then trolls the list and requests from the Armory each member’s raid achievements, their armor and their spec. BrotherHood uses EPGP for its looting system. Based on the GP formula, the Ready Check application produces a GP value for the gear of each member. A Gear Score, if you will, is produced.

I personally don’t think gear scores tell you much about a player but that is all we have before we raid or group with any player.

Also based on the GP formula, each raid zone in the game has a maximum GP value because of the ilvl of the drops from that zone.

Puck’s Ready Check then sorts the roster and the zones to show players where their possible next drop could come from based on their gear alone.

Contact me directly if you are interested in this for your guild.

I know a lot of my subscribers are not coders. Nonetheless I would like to put this bit of code out there.

The sorting problem would occur if the grid was sorted normally. That is, you set the single column you wish to sort the grid on and use the following code client side:

var r_grid=igtbl_getGridById('< %=gridName.columnName%>');
r_grid.addSortColumn("gridName_c_0_0", true);
r_grid.sort();


The problem with this call is that the Ultrawebgrid does not retain the sorting order of the column. The Ultrawebgrid control will then flip the sorting order when the above is called client side.

This code is the fix:


var r_grid=igtbl_getGridById('< %=gridName.ClientID%>');
var sortColId = r_grid.Bands[0].getColumnFromKey("columnName").Id // ID of column to sort grid by
r_grid.Bands[0].getColumnFromKey("columnName").SortIndicator = 0; // Make it think it's unsorted
r_grid.sortColumn(sortColId, false);
if (r_grid.Bands[0].getColumnFromKey("columnName").SortIndicator = 0)
{
r_grid.addSortColumn("gridName_c_0_0", true);
r_grid.sort();
}


I hope it helps you like it did me.

I have written a tiny application which consumes (politely) armory data and constructs an xml combined with xsl (thank you Kelai).

The application is called raidready.  It puts all the items that a member is wearing into a nice neat layout for me to view and likewise the other members to view.  It can be tooled for any guild.  It just so happens that at the moment the configuration is set for BrotherHood.  It requires .Net 2.0 to run properly.  Knowledge if XML/XSL is not required.  Further, I have never gotten a 503 as a result of its work.  On a day when there is an update I will get a 500 because the armory is normally taken down with the update.

If you are interested in this for your guild, email me.

I read this post on TardFactor which suggest that it might have occurred but I just don’t see it.  Currently, my raid sorting application runs without a single 503 error.  I just put in a fancy delay thread.sleep(60000);.  I guess if I was slamming the armory with several hundreds of http requests a second then I would expect to get a 503.  Blizzard probably isn’t throttling.  They are probably correctly blocking http spam requests when a threshold has been reached.

write better code, be polite to web servers and you might not get a 503.

I have been looking for a long time for a way to build a better raid.  I don’t mean simply more qualified people.  I mean a way to determine what zone would be best for a guild member when their gear is at a certain level.

After you get past the gameplay component, it is about the players gear.  If they are not exploring where that best drop is going to come from, the Guild’s Raid Leader should take on that responsibility in my opinion.

We all know that Blizzard gives us the item levels of the items we have in inventory.  Numerous Addons provide this information eg. InventoryOnPar as well as the Armory.  How can we use the existing data to do what I wanted to do?

I have created a base application which does mostly what I want to do.  The c# applcation will consume the guild’s roster.  It will iterate the roster, going through each member and producing a GP value for their gear utilizing the same calculation EP/GP uses.  GP is summed for that character and added to a resulting XML.  A base line for each level of gear and rarity is added to the XML.  The result of that is transformed into pretty html for everyone to view on a site.

I hope to make it live this weekend for the members of BrotherHood.