official World of Warcraft

[SMELTN]

So got the patch downloading this morning before I left for work, but no official word on the wow site or even mmo-champion yet if 4.1 is live...

[Rigby]

I just read they are opening Old Ironforge in 4.1 and ZF (one of my favorite instances) is now a level 85 heroic. I haven't played for six months but now I have the urge to start again.

[SMELTN]

not Old Ironforge, but opening back up ZF and ZG as heroics with 353 gear. Same bosses same setups etc. So its going to be fun again.

Still not getting an answer anywhere on if patch is Live today or not

[Rigby]

not Old Ironforge, but opening back up ZF and ZG as heroics with 353 gear. Same bosses same setups etc. So its going to be fun again.

Still not getting an answer anywhere on if patch is Live today or not

It was on the PTR unless they changed their minds:

Old Ironforge Open to Public

[the evn show]

Also, it's ZA and ZG. ZF is still not in the game.

• ZF was the 5-man dungeon in Tanaris where the quest to summon one of the bosses required you to slog through an elite area in the Hinterlands and kill mobs 5 levels higher than the boss you were trying to summon, typically 7 or 8 levels higher than you were.
  
• ZG was the 20-man troll raid in Stranglethorn Vale that you had to farm even when you were wearing Tier 3 so you could get best-in-slot healm/leg enchants and world buffs for Loatheb, 4 horsemen, etc.
  
• ZA was the 10-man troll raid in the blood elf starter zone that poorly progressed players complained was too difficult and overly progressed players farmed for months on end to sell mounts to poorly progressed players for large sums of gold.
  

[Shaun N.]

• ZF was the 5-man dungeon in Tanaris
  

ZF was a 20 man raid

[CoLdFuSi0n]

ZF was a 20 man raid

LMAO ZF was a 5 man 40+ lvl dungeon ZG was a 20 man raid

[Rigby]

ZF was a 20 man raid

No he's right, ZF is a 5 man instance in Tanaris. It's the one with the epic stairway fight.

ZG was the raid. There are so many "Zul" instances in the game it's easy to get them confused. :)

[Shaun N.]

No he's right, ZF is a 5 man instance in Tanaris. It's the one with the epic stairway fight.

ZG was the raid. There are so many "Zul" instances in the game it's easy to get them confused. :)

Haha, oh yea. DOH!

[Asiri]

I just wanted to make a quick post to see if I could get a bit of feedback about a relatively-new site that I've been working on during my time at and after University - I apologise now if it's not allowed in this section.

Anyways, the site started off as my dissertation project and it was focused on how evolving web technologies could be used to enhance raid logging sites which (in my opinion) we're very static, a bit difficult to use and hid a lot of things away from the average user. I took a little break to work on other projects in the past few months and that's the main reason why I'm asking for a bit of feedback since I'm back to working on it, and I know things have changed in the game; also a lot of the current users aren't very vocal on the forums and they don't post much info about how things are/what they'd like to see changed etc.

Now the site is still in alpha (almost into beta) and there are a lot of future plans to enhance it and add to it, but right now I'm back to focusing on the core of the project before expanding the functionality; although there are a lot of new ideas in there already.

The site is linked in my signature and any feedback would be great, you can post it either here, our forums or via the contact form on the site.

Thanks.

[the evn show]

Anyways, the site started off as my dissertation project and it was focused on how evolving web technologies could be used to enhance raid logging sites which (in my opinion) we're very static, a bit difficult to use and hid a lot of things away from the average user.

For what it's worth, I actually poked around on this a couple of months ago but ended up just going back to world of logs It's not that your site wasn't good it's just that worldo f logs isn't terrible and the "live parsing" is a killer feature IMO.I suspect the majority of people posting logs are using it to measure e-peen ("Oh look I ranked 48th on heroic al'akir. I'm awesome!) and the remainder are using it as a better front end to the combat log. Why the hell is the recruit shaman dead - time to hit world of logs.

What I want is a tool that's more familar with the content and I really think in order to make one valuable to end-game raid guilds you have to be a member of one. When somebody dies on maloriak there are a handful of conditions that probably caused that: I want to see them highlighted.

I have a pretty good idea of what I want in a logging site but when I finally sat down to program one (I was writting mine as an objective c application) it just got so out of hand that I was basically rebuilding the wow combat engine from scratch. It seems to me like most of the startup logging sites are made by casual raiders, or people with interests in programming but not really the high end of warcraft raiding.

Assuming the servers aren't worthless tonight I'll upload a log from our heroic BWD run and use it to analyze our performance. I'll take notes about what I'm looking for, what was easy to find and what was missing. I know I'll be demanding so be prepared for a lot of "Why can't I see <X> easily?"

[Asiri]

What I want is a tool that's more familar with the content and I really think in order to make one valuable to end-game raid guilds you have to be a member of one. When somebody dies on maloriak there are a handful of conditions that probably caused that: I want to see them highlighted.

The ironic thing is when I started working on this I was a member of a pretty high-end guild, the only problem with a dissertation in your final year in uni is that it really doesn't work well with a full raiding schedule and I had to give it up. It's been a fair few months now and I would agree 100% that I'm a bit out of touch with the sites' audience, hence asking for some feedback/advice on where to take it. I think with previous experience of almost all aspects of the game with more recent feedback from current players then I don't see why a site can't be kept upto date and relevant.

I have a pretty good idea of what I want in a logging site but when I finally sat down to program one (I was writting mine as an objective c application) it just got so out of hand that I was basically rebuilding the wow combat engine from scratch. It seems to me like most of the startup logging sites are made by casual raiders, or people with interests in programming but not really the high end of warcraft raiding.

I can fully understand that, I think in the end I came up with a pretty good solution on how to handle the events. The whole back-end is made in PHP meaning the parsing is all done online instantly without requiring you to download and use a client. There are however provisions in place to enable live logging and a huge range of other features but at the end of the day I'm one person and adding every feature from the get-go is impossible. I'd love help but I don't really know any proper developers that are available to help continue the site with me.

Assuming the servers aren't worthless tonight I'll upload a log from our heroic BWD run and use it to analyze our performance. I'll take notes about what I'm looking for, what was easy to find and what was missing. I know I'll be demanding so be prepared for a lot of "Why can't I see <X> easily?"

That's not a problem at all and any feedback would be fantastic, I'd take 1000 demanding people who know what/how they want things over a bunch more that don't...I can't work without people telling me what should be changed and proper input and I welcome all constructive criticism.

[the evn show]

Raiding was a bust yesterday, but I did play around with things a little bit and on first pass here are the general things I wish I had:

• Start and end time for fights don't tell me a whole lot except that it took 15 minutes to clear trash or 5 minutes to recover from a wipe. I'd rather see the length of the attempt, it makes it much easier to find "good attempts" on wipe night.
  
• A way to plot consumables would be nice. If someone dies to say searing cinders (heroic nef) I'd like to see when they used a health stone/health potion. They way world of logs plots deaths with red vertical lines might be a good model to use. Something I can toggle on and off per player.
  
• Similar to the above, plotting personal cooldowns like shield wall, divine shield, or dispersion would be nice (something like the way world of logs plots bloodlust uptime with a blue background).
  
• Bonus points - displaying trinkets and procs like the above. While this does have some value in figuring out what went wrong (ie, did you use mirror of broken images while hanging out in al'akir's lightning?) I think it'd be more useful for analyzing personal performance. Does your new arcane mage stack trinkets/pots/cooldowns for a burn phase or do they blow them randomly?
  
• the breakdown of tank/dps healers seems a bit buggy. You notice blood DKs getting listed as DPS and frost DKs listed as tanks.
  
• Plotting "important" parts of the boss encounter on the graph. For example, It would be nice to see "head phase" and "worm phase" marked for magmaw his heroic-mode "burn phase" that kicks in at 20%. For gay dragons it'd be nice to mark the swap between them so you could see which was on ground and which was up in the air. "Oh look blood lust 5:30 into the fight" isn't as useful as "bloodlust 10 seconds before the 25% burn phase? Oh we needed that extra DPS to clean up adds going into the end, that makes sense"
  

Things I liked:

• I like the estimated health for the death info display. I wish I could see incoming/outgoing healing too.
  
• The way you can toggle on/off specific mobs details is first-rate. "Who's killing bloods on Cho'gall? Nice work firemage/dk/warlock, wait, what is the hunter doing...?" A way to see both the boss and lesser-mob timelines at the same time would be amazing. "Oh, that friggin' hunter was tunneling the boss again, that's why we wiped".
  
• I'm not sure how I'm supposed to use this page. What I'd like to see is something like:

  
  total
  

  • vampiric touch: 40%, 150 ticks, 80 crits, total: 230. average tick: 6000, average crit: 12000, average damage: 9000. misses: 2, uptime: 92%
    
  • shadow word pain: (details like above)
    
  • devouring plague: (like above)
    
  • Mind blast: hits 30, crits: 10, misses:0, total: 40. average hit: 30k, average crit: 105k
    
  • other spells...
    

  chogall

  • Spell break down like above but only for cho'gall.
    

  Adherent

  • spell breakdown like for total, but specific to this mob type. Ideally specific to the mob. IE: chog'all will spawn somewhere between 2 and 5 adherents during the encounter, being able to see who a player handled each one would be best.
    

  blood of the old god

  • Breakdown like above, but note: This is one of those "trash mobs" that you aoe down. I don't care about any individual mob, but I do care about the "wave" of mobs as a group. I'd like to see how all the mobs in the first wave are dealt with, then the second, then the third, etc. Treating each collection of 5-25 mobs as a single entity would be ideal, then I would see 2-4 entries for this with breakdowns like the above
    

I know the issues above are non-trivial, especially when you factor in variations in strategy that make guessing how to treat mobs a difficult task.

[Asiri]

Firstly let me say thanks for the feedback, it gives me something to work on and improve which is always nice.

Start and end time for fights don't tell me a whole lot except that it took 15 minutes to clear trash or 5 minutes to recover from a wipe. I'd rather see the length of the attempt, it makes it much easier to find "good attempts" on wipe night.

I've just changed the way raids are displayed, as can be seen here - if you hover over the duration you'll still get the start/end times since I rate them as being useful. Over time the duration will be changed to feature more prominently on the encounter pages etc.

A way to plot consumables would be nice. If someone dies to say searing cinders (heroic nef) I'd like to see when they used a health stone/health potion. They way world of logs plots deaths with red vertical lines might be a good model to use. Something I can toggle on and off per player.

I agree, and that's the reason this page exists (warning: extreme lag), so I could test what I could pull easily from the logs and we now store all buff information - it just hasn't been put to good use yet.

Similar to the above, plotting personal cooldowns like shield wall, divine shield, or dispersion would be nice (something like the way world of logs plots bloodlust uptime with a blue background).

We plot bloodlust/heroism on the graph with the same blue background, and used to put a red version on the player page after a death but it was removed. However I do like the idea of adding the personal cooldowns, and since we do already have the data stored it should be doable and will be something that I add soon.

Bonus points - displaying trinkets and procs like the above. While this does have some value in figuring out what went wrong (ie, did you use mirror of broken images while hanging out in al'akir's lightning?) I think it'd be more useful for analyzing personal performance. Does your new arcane mage stack trinkets/pots/cooldowns for a burn phase or do they blow them randomly?

I agree and like above it will just be a case of figuring out a white list for every class/spec combination as to what we show etc. I know that many items use the same naming convention but trinkets are quite unique in that regard.

the breakdown of tank/dps healers seems a bit buggy. You notice blood DKs getting listed as DPS and frost DKs listed as tanks.

It's quite true and I did ask for some help on that issue, I've played my share of classes in raids but I haven't done everything and I asked for a bit of help here, if you had any more input that would be great.

Plotting "important" parts of the boss encounter on the graph. For example, It would be nice to see "head phase" and "worm phase" marked for magmaw his heroic-mode "burn phase" that kicks in at 20%. For gay dragons it'd be nice to mark the swap between them so you could see which was on ground and which was up in the air. "Oh look blood lust 5:30 into the fight" isn't as useful as "bloodlust 10 seconds before the 25% burn phase? Oh we needed that extra DPS to clean up adds going into the end, that makes sense"

This is also something I've thought of doing, and while it wouldn't be that hard it once again came down to a question of time limitations of what I can do personally. It will be added in the near future though and I'll see how fast I can bump it up the list.

I like the estimated health for the death info display. I wish I could see incoming/outgoing healing too.

That SHOULD be visible too, last time I used the site it was so I'll be figuring out how/when that bugged out and get it fixed asap.

The way you can toggle on/off specific mobs details is first-rate. "Who's killing bloods on Cho'gall? Nice work firemage/dk/warlock, wait, what is the hunter doing...?" A way to see both the boss and lesser-mob timelines at the same time would be amazing. "Oh, that friggin' hunter was tunneling the boss again, that's why we wiped".

If you had more details about how you'd like the different timelines displayed together I'd be happy to hear it, it sounds like a quite interesting feature and I'm honestly just not quite sure how it'd play out in the current scheme of things.

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to use this page.

The player page has been left out in the cold so to speak with a lot of the recent updates but like many other items on the site since we're in alpha it has been a case of "just what can we get from the log" and there just hasn't been the time to properly display/manipulate the data into a fully usable format quite yet. I will take your layout ideas for the page and see what can be done with them but the more I look at the site the more I am tempted to rip apart the front end and recode most of it since the layouts have been stuffed full of information as we've gotten it rather than designed around what we can display, but it was to be expected.

[the evn show]

Appreciate a chance to talk with someone who's worked on this problem before. My parser was more of a "world of fails" where I tried to work out who was screwing up specific mechanics because that's the feature that I needed most. I abandoned it for pretty much the same reason you haven't done it: it's a lot of work for one guy and I'm in University again so I can't really spend every weekend hour banging away on code (plus I've got a 9 hour a week raid schedule to keep up with).

The servers were crap last night so I didn't get a chance to raid which means no logs. We did tear through the new heroics: they're pretty awesome.

EDIT: I like the "count" of cooldowns used. It's a bit of a shame this stuff isnt' shown in context but it's awesome that the info is available.

The one weird thing I've noticed is potion counts on every log site are messed up. For example the mage is shown with 4 volcanic potions in an encounter, realistically you'd expect 2 (one before the fight, one during the encounter). For keeping tabs on that on world of logs I used a query that looked for "volcanic power" fading rather than being applied: that seemed to be a much more reliable way to track pot use.

Also, I like that you've got an JSON API. I might poke around with it this summer - maybe I can bang up some of the pages I'd like to see.

[Asiri]

I can fully understand the apprehension of attempting it, I honestly think I would of stuck with my original dissertation plan (exploring the 3D techniques involved in recreating the elements as realistically as possible) if I'd known just how much was going to be involved in the process. Overall I'm quite glad I stuck with it, certainly past the dissertation stages since back then it looked NOTHING like it does now (at some point I'll post the original concept site on our forums) and as few people use it as they do it's nice that they get something out of it. If you ever do decide to go back to trying to code a parser I'd be happy to work with you on it and show you how I put together mine.

That's not a problem, but if/when you do next raid if you still feel like uploading something and giving a bit more feedback that would be fantastic. I also just got done fixing the health issue not showing healths/consumables, which you can see here; However I'm just presuming that the health stone/potions have been fixed I can't find anyone that used any, which is a sad view on the people that use my site...or the code is wrong - which I think I'd prefer for some reason!

[the evn show]

That's not a problem, but if/when you do next raid if you still feel like uploading something and giving a bit more feedback that would be fantastic.

This week might be a write off for mains, but we will probably still do our alt run (which can clear normal mode in a night provided we aren't too drunk to play by the time we get to nef/chogall). Raiding on a patch night is a lost cause, and many of my guild-mates are grad/med/law students so we're all slogging through final exams. Tack on a couple of people taking vacation and I don't think it's worth the effort to throw ourselves at heroic chogall.

Either way, I'll fraps the raid and post it on youtube or osmething along with dumping logs on your site and WOL.

[SMELTN]

Hey Asiri, what is the best method of getting logs recorded to use with your site?

[Asiri]

Hey Asiri, what is the best method of getting logs recorded to use with your site?

The usual /combatlog method works fine, you can also zip the generated .txt file to make uploading easier. There are plans like I've said already to introduce live logging and I've managed to dig out the old c# application that I was working on a few months ago for it.

[the evn show]

Doubt we're going to raid tonight. Halfus and Omnotron are both bugged on heroic mode (robots don't activate: the first one comes up, goes to sleep, and then you never get another one, halfus drakes don't debuff him).

I'm not sure if they work on normal, but we'd rather not raid if we can't do heroic.

[Elliott]

Doubt we're going to raid tonight. Halfus and Omnotron are both bugged on heroic mode (robots don't activate: the first one comes up, goes to sleep, and then you never get another one, halfus drakes don't debuff him).

I'm not sure if they work on normal, but we'd rather not raid if we can't do heroic.

Haven't seen mention of the Halfus bug. Is it only on 10m? Seemed fine on Heroic 25.

[Asiri]

Since I managed to rescue the work I did on the recount.me live client I've spent a few hours updating, cleaning and making it all work with the new site features so it's capable of uploading on the fly again. At the same time I've been putting together a few plans and concept scripts to do some pretty cool stuff I think, which you can read more on here. Your feedback as always is very welcome.

[SMELTN]

Since I managed to rescue the work I did on the recount.me live client I've spent a few hours updating, cleaning and making it all work with the new site features so it's capable of uploading on the fly again. At the same time I've been putting together a few plans and concept scripts to do some pretty cool stuff I think, which you can read more on here. Your feedback as always is very welcome.

Sent you a PM

[the evn show]

Haven't seen mention of the Halfus bug. Is it only on 10m? Seemed fine on Heroic 25.

Seemed random, we had he despawn a couple of times and then it worked. 10-man.

We killed a couple of bosses and then just gave up in BWD - dealing with bugged encounters isn't worth the hassle.

Alt run tomorrow, I'll post that.

e'll be introducing a pop-out raid frame that will let you keep track of the raids health, deaths, buffs etc. - akin to a web-based version of grid that you can watch from the outside. As you can now, you'll be able to scrub back and forth through the raid as it happens as well as having the fights split off for more detailed analysis later.

If that works, and it's sufficiently fast - I'll will advertise you like no tomorrow. It's pretty much exactly what any raid guild with someone 'on the bench' wants. A way for people to feel connected to the action even though they're not there. It's a killer feature IMO.

edit: Has anybody managed to get a bear out of the ZA timed run? We beat the it but didn't get anything from the 'jars' except for gold.

[Asiri]

If that works, and it's sufficiently fast - I'll will advertise you like no tomorrow. It's pretty much exactly what any raid guild with someone 'on the bench' wants. A way for people to feel connected to the action even though they're not there. It's a killer feature IMO.

I've already got a semi-working version on my localhost, right now it's just a raid frame with the players health bars going up/down but I want you to be able to drag out a few players and watch a more full health bar (hp will have to be guessed but it's doable given that we can see their buffs etc) and from there a lot more will be added. The delay will be around 30 seconds, given that there is no "legal" method of getting to the combat data until the cache is dumped it's out of my hands that far, but as soon as it's out it'll be on the site within 5-10 seconds of that and as a viewer you shouldn't notice any lag or interruption while the new data is added to the end of your current segment.