RaidBots - Web Tools for WoW Nerds
 

RaidBots - Web Tools for WoW Nerds

Figured I would actually make an "official" EJ post to gather feedback and ideas for RaidBots as well as spread the word a little more.

Here's the rundown of the live tools:

Epeen Bot

See your own raid parses over time compared against the rest of the world. See how you measure up!

CompareBot

At its core, CompareBot can do a few things with World of Logs parses:

• Compare specific player parses against each other or summarize an entire attempt across the whole raid.
• Highlight important buffs and debuffs and call out potential mistakes.

There are a lot of ways that raid leaders and raiders use the tool every day:

• Compare yourself against the top ranking players to see what they're doing differently than you.
• Compare 2 or 3 of your raiders of the same spec to see why one might be falling behind.
• Drop in a whole raid to see who's standing in fire the most.

DPS Bot

This bot collects information from all public parses from World of Logs every night, crunches the numbers, and then presents them in pretty graph and table form for all you data nerds.

There's a lot of cool information here. Right now the main slices you can check out are the top 100 parses from the last 2 weeks or EVERY SINGLE KILL PARSE from World of Logs. You can now see a quantifiable answer to "what is the average DPS for spec X across all players?"

Player Raid Achievements

This one is for all the recruiters and guild leaders out there. Find yourself poring through achievements on the armory for applicants to your guild trying to figure out if they got kills when they said they did? This is the easiest way to quickly see if a character got a raid kill when it actually mattered.

Feedback

I'm always listening for new ideas for new tools or things to add to the current tools. Am I missing key class buffs or potential player failures in CompareBot? An achievement you want to see on the raid achievements page? Let me know - I usually respond to requests in a few days whenever I can.

For anyone paying attention, these are the same tools that lived on StratFu for the last year or so. I just finally managed to get them to their own domain and hosting.

Happy raiding!

Instead of Top DPS comparision, could you also add something like top50 or top100? That should filter out any special scoreboard only runs and give a more realistic overview about the current state of one spec.
Also, parses for Argaloth seem to be missing.

Argaloth is there, make sure you're looking at the 25 Normal or 10 Normal links on the right side.

More detailed methodology of which parses I include in each daily data point can be seen at Docs: Top DPS � Raidbots Blog - the important bits are that I cut only use parses from the 2 weeks preceding the collection date and cut off the top and bottom 5%.

Definitely an excellent tool. I noticed one glitch in the achievement report : it report accurately that i have completed BoT and BwD but when I use the dropdown button all single kills are red.

I'll take a look at that. I believe some achievements track the date that you earned the tick until you finish the achievement. Once the whole thing is done, the individual dates for each tick no longer show up in the XML. I'll see if I can figure out a simple way to just hide the sub-list if there are not dates to show.

Great tool, so far it seems like it will be very useful. I do have a request though - when doing a comparision between two or more individuals - that "Total Damage Taken" be added to the ranked cells (or at the very least in the Damage Taken tab). It would be nice to be able to see the total damage taken without having to do the math myself from the Damage Taken tab when I'm comparing tanking classes.

I've added a total row to damage, damage taken, and healing tabs. I also found out I hadn't properly been handling blocked damage and glancing damage so total values should match up to the World of Logs values now.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Edit: Also fixed the request above for the achievements list. If the main achievement is complete but the dates for the criteria achievements are empty, I just hide the extra info.

Added highlighting of "key" class abilities to individual compares as well as full raid reports. These are mostly important cooldown abilities that might help to highlight difference in playstyle or skill between players.

Full raid example: CompareBot! - RaidBots - Web Tools for WoW Nerds

Player compare example: CompareBot! - RaidBots - Web Tools for WoW Nerds

This is a very rough list of abilities that I collected from what I know of all the classes and specs. I am absolutely sure I missed important stuff so please let me know if you want to see more (or less) information in this section.

I could suggest you to add an quick information about which spec is each player in your full raid example. Maybe using the mastery icon next to the name. And then sort players within their class by spec.
It would make comparing significant class skill easier as theses are indeed class skills but are too spec skills.
This could used for consumables usage too, sorting by name or consumable doesn't help much, sorting by spec would be more useful. I'd be happy to see if someone didn't used consumables too, maybe adding a reddish color to the line of people who didn't.

At the moment I'm unable to determine spec from the World of Logs data that I scrape but it's definitely something I've been thinking about. I might end up re-implementing spec detection from the various bits of data on the character detail page or I might be able to leverage some new data that I have access to. Not quite sure yet but it is on my mind.

Thanks for the other ideas. I've been trying to figure out how to implement similar ideas. I'll likely add another tab to the full raid report that is essentially the most distilled version of the data to serve as a "raid leader's quick glance" kind of view.

The new DPS Bot is finally live! It looks pretty similar but there’s a lot of new stuff going on:

• The dataset being used is now ALL boss kill parses from World of Logs, not just the top 200 records.
• In addition to being able to see the DPS medians from the Top 100 parses, you can see the the median across EVERY. SINGLE. KILL. logged on WOL (this is the All Parses option for Samples).
• Spec Score! This is a new way of quantifying overall DPS across all fights in a tier. There’s a longer description on the DPS Bot pages at the bottom and I’ll be writing up a long post/page about the methodology of Spec Score later today.
• The tables that used to be hidden behind a link are now on the same page because I felt like it.

Why is this interesting and good?

Scraping the top 200 rankings from World of Logs had a lot of problems associated with it. The rankings are from all time so if a spec was nerfed it took quite a while for the data to show just how far the spec DPS had changed. This new data collection method should show changes much more quickly since I’m using every parse as the data set.

In addition, being able to crunch the numbers across all parses lets us finally answer questions like “what’s the actual DPS of the median player and how does that compare to the top players?” Pretty cool stuff. And I’ll be able to do even more with this data once the changes I’ve made prove themselves out and a little stability comes around.

Also, lots of little fixes and tweaks

• I finally got around to making the checkbox code on DPS Bot be pretty smart. Group checkboxes should update based on the state of the individual specs.
• Even faster. I’m now using Varnish to cache pages since they only change once a day and I’ve gone through and made a lot of little speed tweaks to how pages and assets are served. The site should be even faster than it was.
• Help tooltips! These should show up the first time you visit the updated site and then disappear unless you switch them on again. I may add more to make the various bits of the site clearer to new visitors.

Anyway, it’s been a pretty major effort to handle the huge amount of new data but I’m pretty happy with how it’s come out so far. I can do a lot more cool stuff with this so I’m pretty excited.

Added advanced controls! Change the measure of the graph or the sample period! See how many people are killing a boss week by week! Confuse yourself and others as you forget exactly which slice of data you're looking at!

Added Adjusted Spec Score, more percentile measures on overall DPS and individual fights, and hiding low sample specs by default.

New bot added to the family!

EpeenBot - RaidBots - Web Tools for WoW Nerds

Measure your own raid performance against the rest of the world (more specifically, all public logs on World of Logs).

See if you do better over time. Which percentile do you really fall into?

Please let me know what you think of the tool. I'm always open to feedback and make a lot of changes based on suggestions from good people like you.

You could add a direct tooltip for what exactly a percentile means. While it's in the FAQ, I guess that would immediatly answer the most obvious question.
Also, as an alternative graphical display, you could add a bell curve with your position in it (if that's possible with the tool you're using).


// Edit
Oh, maybe even an Epeen comparision between two players?