Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
Q. Will you produce statistics on Achievements now the Armory has made them available?
A. Not at the moment, there are plenty of other sites already working on that, e.g. WoW-Achievements.com.
Q. Why is realm (name) missing from your stats?
A. I have not included all realms yet, data collection is still in progress I hope to gather data for all realms shortly.
Q. Can you add my suggestion/idea/chart to your reports?
A. I am definately open to suggestions, please feel free to email me okoloth(at)gmail(dot)com
Q. Can you track population changes over time, for example talent balances as patches change dynamics in the game?
A. Yes, all the information collected so far is attributed to the patch that was active at the time.
Technical Questions
Q. How do you collect this data?
A. Initially I used the Armory Arena Ladder pages as a starting point, from there I could fetch the top 500 Arena teams for each Battlegroup. I retrieved the character sheets of the team members and if they were guilded I went on to pull all their fellow guild members. This approach wasn't perfect, but it helped build a huge dataset for a start. Nowadays I am collating data from various other fan sites were the mention of a guild-name and realm is enough to lead me to 100+ previously undiscovered characters. I have also revisited all the guilds and characters I have previously recorded.
Q. Are you planning on open-sourcing the 'spider' software?
A. Not at the moment - it is very much entwined in to the Linux/Unix environment I am running it from and is no where near robust enough to run from the average Windows PC. If you are interested in retrieving information from the Armory I highly recommend phpArmory from Marenkay.com.
Q. Do you use the 'last modified' or 'last logged in' parameters to determine if the character is still used?
A. Yes, all the character information is attributed to the patch that was active at the time.
Q. What hardware do you run this on?
A. Several different servers ranging from Intel(Dual/Quad-core) Xeon, PowerPC and SPARC machines - all running on Linux or Solaris. The 'spider' software isn't particularly intensive most of the time they are sleeping so not to overload the Armory.
Q. Do your computations take forever?
A. They used to, now I use the idle time between requests to pre-process all the character sheets. I run more than 200 XPath queries on the XML to extract the information I am interested in to a 'summary' table in the database. The XML character sheets are then compressed and archived. Reports are generated (rather quickly) with SQL Views on this table.
Q. Have Blizzard contacted you about the load / bandwidth you are generating?
A. No, Blizzard have not contacted me about the load my spider generates. I invested more time in the 'collector' aspect of the spider than any other part; there is a lot of timing / delays / caching which prevent it from producing a crippling load on Armory servers. The spider supports a huge range of HTTP/1.1 features including things like If-Modified-Since and Accept-Encoding compression if the Armory servers choose to honor them, its User-Agent string clearly identifies this project and a link to this blog. Interestingly, over at The Build Mine Kuroshiro spotted a notice on the Armory updates page saying "... third-party sites that mine Armory data may need to make adjustments to account for the new file configurations ..." which implies they are aware of mining projects but for the moment haven't explicitly banned them.
