Project Realm History - PvE and Arena progress, statistics and more
First of all, the links posted in this thread are secure. To check you have only to take a look at our original thread which is linked by Vaneras in the following sticky in the Raids & Dungeons section of the EU forums ( WoW-Europe.com Forums -> Informative & useful Raid & Dungeon threads under Ressources ). We'd also like to apologize for making a post which most might consider borderline to spam, it is not our intention, merely drawing your attention to a site which grew organically and served quite a few World of Warcraft communities for the past year.
Why do we post this on the Elitis Jerk boards. We've now reached a point where RH contains pretty much all the features a realm community needs in our opinion, so we wish to get pertinent feedback; EJ was always the place for it. Moreover, EJ is the most relevant World of Warcraft community and RealmHistory is a site depending on it. Just like EJ we began RH for internal use on the realm of Frostwhisper (EU) and only later on the thought of expanding came to mind due to positive feedback. Also, it is important to emphasize that we do not think much of ourselves; what we created is simply an easy to use database, and while the PvP side relies on information taken from the Armory, PvE wise we simply offer some tools to the community; the way the community uses it makes it a success or a failure.
What we do. We're basically offering you a platform to organize and administer the important informations in regards to your realm. You can update onto it informations concerning the guilds on your realm, the PvE progress status, rarecrafts lists, screenshots and you can use our news section to organize happenings or keep track of important events.
Moreover, the informations you submit are compiled and provide the base of world based statistics which we offer in our Guild Ranking and Realm Ranking sections, rankings which are not systems based on inconsistent armory information but on solid facts with the sole aim of offering you a constant overview of what's happening across the realms when in need of making a clear opinion before transfers - the single flaw: you have to keep us up to date with the PvE progress of your guild.
How we work. What we desire is to make the platform available to each realm and the realm community to take care of its own business from then on. To that end, we recruit teams of 1 to 3 people after which we've made sure they have a sound reputation among the players on that specific realm and let them update the notes submitted by the rest. They are also responsible for keeping the Realm News section up to date to a certain level. To apply check this section: Forum - World of Warcraft Realm History. At the moment, we host 50 of such realms in EU and 10 in US. The rest are administered by the realmhistory team solely on the sporadic information we receive from random notes left by players and are thus incomplete to a certain extent.
Wowwiki's realm pages tend to cover much of this same information in varying levels of detail. A standardized "one-stop" source of all that information would be nice, though. Another nice tool for players considering server transfers and the like.
Why is your homepage the Frostwhisper page? It took me ages just to find your damn frontpage and it still said EU-Frostwhisper-PVP.
On the left side there's a link with the following text: "Home - Select Realm".
I believe it defaults to that, unless you've visited and selected a realm before.
I'll have to agree with Vykromond, the navigation on the site is a bit confusing when you first get there. Took me a solid 2-3 minutes to figure out how to get to other realms, such basic features should be easier to find. Very out of date and incomplete information regarding pve progress on the realms I took a look at, but the server admins or lack there of is to blame for that I suppose.
I maintained The Underbog on this site for a long time, but eventually found that most people looking for this type of information turn to their individual realm forums.
With the advent of WoWJutsu, it would also appear that PvE progression tracking is slowly moving towards a more automated approach - I keep the stickied thread on our realm forums up to date, but WoWJutsu (barring the obvious errors) is fairly accurate.
I maintained The Underbog on this site for a long time, but eventually found that most people looking for this type of information turn to their individual realm forums.
For what it's worth, the idiocy on my realm forum puts even the Blizzard general forums to shame. There's not much useful information there.
For what it's worth, the idiocy on my realm forum puts even the Blizzard general forums to shame. There's not much useful information there.
When I say 'realm forum', I generally refer only to religiously maintained stickies for progression/crafting/guild information; I rarely venture any further down the page. The only things worth reading are the newly-popularized 'duel for deletion' threads.
Hello, I wasn't exactly sure where to post this, and seeing that this is about 'realm history' I would just like to ask: What is Mal'Ganis like for Horde? I am about to reroll there, I have been playing a Night Elf Druid on Archimonde, and recently switched it to Shu'Halo to be with some friends from real life. Well, it turns out they stopped playing WoW shortly after I switched there. I thought about Mal'Ganis because I wanted to play Horde, and it is pretty Horde heavy with some of the best US guilds Horde side on it.
I plan on playing a Druid, and pvping just enough to get me Season 1 and 2 gear with the vindicators stuff, though I know too well that Mal'Ganis Horde rock. I have played against pre-mades in BGs when I was on Archimonde.
What is the level 70 instance scene like? A lot of players doing non-heroics/heroics/kara ? I know that EJ is ranked 10 in the US according to Wowjutsu, and has 3 Horde guilds that have downed Illidan, and another about to. How is World pvp? I know the Stormstrike group is pretty good. Is there a lot of high level gankers on alliance?
Any information you can give me, or advice to where this should of gone. Please tell me. (Thank you in advance)
Any information you can give me, or advice to where this should of gone. Please tell me. (Thank you in advance)
You could've found this all out on the realm forums. We have nightly login queues now. Please don't transfer here, as there is already a few more guilds planning on transferring.
"Keep your goddamned Horde character far, far away from Mal'ganis and our 3-hour PVP queues."
Did I do that right?
Sounds like Sargeras prior to the opening of Detheroc, only better.
On-topic, why doesn't RH use a model like Bosskillers, where the administrators (I mean the 'true' administrators, not the individual realm administrators) approve user-submitted kills? That would seem to require substantially less work on any given end-user's part.
"Keep your goddamned Horde character far, far away from Mal'ganis and our 3-hour PVP queues."
Did I do that right?
Why do you 3 hour queues? Only the Horde side? I get instant queues on Archimonde (Same battle group), But I am Alliance there. Thank you for the [non]Help.
Or, perhaps even better, why don't they work with WoWJutsu to get a daily dump of progression from them? There's no real need to reinvent the wheel, and whatever Jutsu's flaws it's worlds away better than something that requires self-reporting.
Or, perhaps even better, why don't they work with WoWJutsu to get a daily dump of progression from them? There's no real need to reinvent the wheel, and whatever Jutsu's flaws it's worlds away better than something that requires self-reporting.
WoWJutsu has also been pretty good about administrating errors - usually, when I report errors or omissions on our realm, they're fixed within ~48-72 hours. There's a ton of outstanding ones atm, but I don't know if they just don't have time to fix them, or if there's something else afoot.
I thank you kindly for the feedback given. To reply to some of the statements.
Vykromond & Liths: To get it out of the way quickly, you probably reached the site by clicking one of the links we gave towards Frostwhisper to exemplify different features. The system is currently coded to send you directly to the last visited realm when you type Select Realm - World of Warcraft Realm History in your browser.
On the other hand, you are right about the navigation between realms being a tad sloppy. I just added a quick fix to the matter: the Realm History logo is now also a hyperlink which sends you to the front page. On the top right corner I added a navigation tool which lets you jump much easier from a realm to another also.
Zifna & Vectivus: Before we talk about WoWJutsu's accuracy I will speak about its usefulness.
WoWJutsu tells you that guild X is ranked 8230; no proof and no further details. That is all. Average Visit Length: 24 seconds.
Realm History is built with a lot potential. We provide guild information, recruitment status, progress, rare crafts, arena data and so on and so forth. Average Visit Length: 3 minutes and 36 seconds.
All that is needed is for 1 player from the realm (meaning 1 person from a few thousands) to spend 5 minutes (in total) a day updating things and 1 person from each guild (that means 1 person from 40-60) to spend 5 minutes a week updating his guild's progress and recruitment status. It takes 30 seconds to submit a few progress dates, and even less for the admin to update them. A good and active admin allows for a much faster pace for updates than any automatic system. On most of the realms which are administered the progress is added with the evening's kills around midnight. I think it is worth the trade off, don't you think?
Lets leave Frostwhisper aside since it is the realm I administer currently, and lets take a look at a guild's page on Stormrage. I would think it would be useful for any guild. It is its history, since its inception ( Elitism Guild - EU Stormrage Normal - World of Warcraft Realm History )
Now onto accuracy. What WoWjutsu did is a good system, but in our opinion not appropriate for collecting guild progress information. We know, we practically have the same system in regards to our Arena sections, we have our own crawlers scouring the Armory and updating every 24 hours the changes in ratings and feeding all our Arena related statistics. But to apply that to guild progress? It is not viable. Yes it has a nice vibe to it, but you know from the beggining the system is flawed, that it will fail periodically and you cannot build it to guarantee relevance. At the moment the first 4-5 guilds on each realm are still positioned correctly, due to few disbands in general. But what comes afterwards is pretty much a mess, despite of their teams commendable efforts to implement safeguards. I shall speak only about my own guild on Frostwhisper EU, Total Annihilation. We are marked as having cleared the tier 4 instances and progressing somewhere in Tempest Keep. Yet, Total Annihilation is a PvP guild and has not raided anything in its whole existence; we do not get realm transfers, we do not have a big in-take of new recruits. The Armory provides what is needed to take what we extracted, Arena related information, but guild progress information will never be correct. And in time these small cracks will get larger; the world ranking looks fine on WoWjutsu because it is made of the first 2-3 guilds on each realm and those are still correctly placed, but time will pass and things will get blurry in my opinion.
Another idea which we care about is archiving; all those tough guilds which wrote the "realm's history" will disappear from WoWjutsu when they disband - and the realm's progress will be pretty much erased when the new expansion comes, if it will remain accurate that long. On realm history we keep all that; ephemeral projects do get deleted but the important guilds are kept and people can watch development over time; for me it was quite nice to flag a few of our old pre Burning Crusade guilds active again in the past few months, and I received feedback that it mattered for their old core to pick up from where they left, and for the rest of the realm to have the means to find that.
On-topic, why doesn't RH use a model like Bosskillers, where the administrators (I mean the 'true' administrators, not the individual realm administrators) approve user-submitted kills? That would seem to require substantially less work on any given end-user's part.
We are actually examining this. It would not be difficult for us to assure a 12 hour update for all the progress that is reported - even if we would cover actively all the US and EU realm together - with a small team. It is a matter of "policy" or the site's philosophy so to speak. The way we thought up the RH idea is more from the ground up: we would have these template which serves as a portal for each realm; the community becomes involved and takes over, all is done in time, the realm news section is used to report happenings and events and so on and so forth. The realm community just uses our facilities and has autonomy, that was our idea; we would simply use the data gathered and put together a world wide database with statistical features. We thought people would like that, and it would please them to be involved. Unfortunately, for that to happen you need proactive administrator who themselves involve the community as I did on Frostwhisper and overall create a positive buzz. It happened on other realms too actually, but mainly on RP realms, where the community is different. So we are now in a dilemma on whether we should stick to our plan or just do it ourselves - the problem would be that realm news and in general what we hoped to develop in terms of realm community will be gone without people from those realms administering.
I fail to see a reason to use this site instead of wowwiki for user-reported data, other than various cross-server rankings (which wowjutsu does beautifully.)
WoWJutsu tells you that guild X is ranked 8230; no proof and no further details. That is all. Average Visit Length: 24 seconds.
Err... you mouse-over the raid icons and see what bosses they've killed. Click the link and you can see the actual items worn by whom on what date. There's more "proof" there since it's mined from the Armory, and with actual players/items/dates it has a lot of detail. Average Visit Length: 5 minutes, information gleaned: everything I went there to find. Realm History? My Visit Length: 5 minutes, information gleaned: I finally figured out how to view progression on my realm (hint: the link looks like an ad, right under an actual ad, and not in the menu bar.)
Realm History is built with a lot potential. We provide guild information, recruitment status, progress, rare crafts, arena data and so on and so forth.
Guild info/recruitment status/rare crafts are easily done on wowwiki. I don't know if other realms utilize it, but on Skywall we've mostly forgone the realm forum in favor of wowwiki.
IMO, I'd focus on one specific area first (such as arena team history maybe?) and build from there. Right now there are good alternatives fully populated with data, so there's no real reason for people to switch.
Guild info/recruitment status/rare crafts are easily done on wowwiki. I don't know if other realms utilize it, but on Skywall we've mostly forgone the realm forum in favor of wowwiki.
They don't. You can probably count on your fingers the realms that keeps such information on wowwiki. However I agree with you that it is a very powerful tool and I want to congratulate your realm for making such a thing.
Summary:
- wowwiki: requires plenty of time involved but it offers full freedom on building what you want for your realm.
- Realm History: requires little time involved but bounds you to the existing features.
- wowjutsu: requires little time involved (reporting bugs & asking for guild update) but offers just more or less accurate guild ranking.
Kadaan we're just trying to present our site here, it's up to the people to use it or not. Some will, some won't. As for your realm I see no real reason why you would want to switch to Realm History except maybe for having a more organized PvE progress, rare crafts and realm news. But as I said, Skywall is a rare case.
Originally Posted by Kadaan
Err... you mouse-over the raid icons and see what bosses they've killed. Click the link and you can see the actual items worn by whom on what date. There's more "proof" there since it's mined from the Armory, and with actual players/items/dates it has a lot of detail. Average Visit Length: 5 minutes, information gleaned: everything I went there to find. Realm History? My Visit Length: 5 minutes, information gleaned: I finally figured out how to view progression on my realm (hint: the link looks like an ad, right under an actual ad, and not in the menu bar.)
Chilaun only tried to state 2 real and easily backed-up facts about wowjutsu, user's average time on site and it's flaws. Theres no need to extend this discussion further in this thread; wowjutsu has it's own thread and you can just read the last pages if you want to find out more about the site's flaws.
About that accuracy issue.. All attempts to maintain some sort of "world ranking" table is doomed to fail miserably beyond perhaps the first 100. Sites like Realm History will only ever be listing the groups who want to spam online resources with their "progress", whereas I find (at least for ER, but I'd be surprised if it was only our realm) that the large majority of raid groups actually don't list themselves anywhere at all. Automated sites like WoWJutsu has the advantage of getting unbiased raw data, but unfortunately that lack of bias is totally lost when raw data is turned into some sort of guild ranking list. I could write about the flaws of WoWJutsu at length, but to avoid a wall of text, I can offer my own guild as a tiny example. WoWJutsu is trying (very hard) to fit us into being a Karazhan guild which means I'm being totally ignored, one of our T5/T6 geared people is only listed for a single Kara item, etc etc :P All pretence at accuracy and unbiased automated methods went out the door when WoWJutsu started trying to turn the individual data into a guild.
In short, I'm sure online "bragging sites" fill a function for those who like that sort of thing, but it is rubbish to claim they are "accurate".
About that accuracy issue.. All attempts to maintain some sort of "world ranking" table is doomed to fail miserably beyond perhaps the first 100. Sites like Realm History will only ever be listing the groups who want to spam online resources with their "progress", whereas I find (at least for ER, but I'd be surprised if it was only our realm) that the large majority of raid groups actually don't list themselves anywhere at all. Automated sites like WoWJutsu has the advantage of getting unbiased raw data, but unfortunately that lack of bias is totally lost when raw data is turned into some sort of guild ranking list. I could write about the flaws of WoWJutsu at length, but to avoid a wall of text, I can offer my own guild as a tiny example. WoWJutsu is trying (very hard) to fit us into being a Karazhan guild which means I'm being totally ignored, one of our T5/T6 geared people is only listed for a single Kara item, etc etc :P All pretence at accuracy and unbiased automated methods went out the door when WoWJutsu started trying to turn the individual data into a guild.
In short, I'm sure online "bragging sites" fill a function for those who like that sort of thing, but it is rubbish to claim they are "accurate".
The only organization that could ever hope to offer anything resembling 'accuracy' would be Blizzard themselves, having their servers capture timestamps on kills and incorporating that into the Armory. I'm sure it would be a hugely popular feature, but I doubt they're concerned with it.
Every other site will fall into one of two categories - self-reporting (which will miss a substantial majority of the population) and automated (which, given existing limitations, will not provide the necessary data to accurately reflect what is being self-reported, let alone what isn't).
I've tried to use it but I still see a few issues, mostly that I can't find how to "rectify" data - for example if we are credited with a kill we don't have, I do not see how I can change this. All in all it could be a good idea to "verify" some users who could then take care at least of their own guild's information (be it progression, crafts...) but not necesarily of the whole realm.
Zifna & Vectivus: Before we talk about WoWJutsu's accuracy I will speak about its usefulness.
WoWJutsu tells you that guild X is ranked 8230; no proof and no further details. That is all. Average Visit Length: 24 seconds.
Realm History is built with a lot potential. We provide guild information, recruitment status, progress, rare crafts, arena data and so on and so forth. Average Visit Length: 3 minutes and 36 seconds.
All that is needed is for 1 player from the realm (meaning 1 person from a few thousands) to spend 5 minutes (in total) a day updating things and 1 person from each guild (that means 1 person from 40-60) to spend 5 minutes a week updating his guild's progress and recruitment status. It takes 30 seconds to submit a few progress dates, and even less for the admin to update them. A good and active admin allows for a much faster pace for updates than any automatic system. On most of the realms which are administered the progress is added with the evening's kills around midnight. I think it is worth the trade off, don't you think?
Lets leave Frostwhisper aside since it is the realm I administer currently, and lets take a look at a guild's page on Stormrage. I would think it would be useful for any guild. It is its history, since its inception ( Elitism Guild - EU Stormrage Normal - World of Warcraft Realm History )
That thread, diligently and regularly updated by a single player based on data reported to that player by other members of the community, lists 11 Alliance guilds and 16 Horde guilds. Jutsu's ranking lists 53 Alliance guilds and 64 Horde guilds. Now, even if you figure that as many as half of Jutsu's guilds are false reports (and I can tell you from my own knowledge of my server that that's not true), you're still looking at the User-Reported data missing 1/2 to 2/3 of all kills. While your realm, Frostwhisper, is somewhat more complete you still have only 36 guilds out of 86 reported by Jutsu listed. You run into the same problem you accuse Jutsu of--you're probably pretty accurate on the high end, but when you get down to the smaller/less prominent guilds, you're inaccurate/incomplete to the point of uselessness. You can't dodge that.
Now, that being said, there is some added value to your approach. I simply feel that you need to take further steps if you want to make that added value a compelling factor in terms of PvE progression.
11/19/07, 9:09 AM
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