• Maligne

Excuse my ignorance with mods and the armory, but I had an idea. What if you had a mod that would take the names from from Arena Master (or similar mod) and display infomation from the armory in a frame. This is already done manually by some with two computers, etc, but this would automate it and make it easier.

Things I'm not sure about:

- Can mods have outside access to the internet (I doubt this one)?
- I know certain aspects of the Armory can be datamined, but is it possible to take a "snapshot" of the whole thing? Or even just a certain battlegroup. Then you could have local copy that the mod could access on the fly.

What better cc is there for a druid than polymorph?

 

◊ Malan

WoW operates in a sandbox, so it only has access to data that it reads at the time you load it up. You'd have to use an external program to snapshot the armory and then have the in-game mod read the snapshot. The hassle of course would be keeping it updated.

 

• Maligne

Yeah, depending on how long it took I could see doing an update before each night of Arenas and having it be quite helpful.

What better cc is there for a druid than polymorph?

 

Cel

I can't imagine being able to use the armory, even if cached, quickly enough during an Arena match would be possible, unless you're a stealthy.... once they fix the combat log bug where people "Gain Arena Preparation" next patch, I mean... currently you have time to alt tab, type in the name, read up on their spec and gear... in short: mad hax. :X

Edit: Then again, a mod that flashed: MAGE || ARCANE/FROST || 950 +damage || 20% Crit or some such would be effective, now that I think of it... Caching the ENTIRE armory would be one sizeable file on your pc, however, even with filters and such.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

• Deris

Well you could just filter for your BG and your "bracket" - I'd imagine at most it would only be a couple hundred at most teams?

 

Cel

Well considering my 2v2 team was 300th @ ~1800ish rating, and it's triangle like, in that there are more lower ranking teams than high... Imagine 3-4 on a team, you're looking at thousands and thousands of records (by somewhat blind estimation) for 2v2 alone.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

Suesse

The armory says my 2v2 team is 5300th. Our record was 7 wins 3 losses last week, so I think it's safe to say there are teams below us even though we're in the 1400-1500 rating range.

The point being, there are more than a couple hundred teams in the battlegroup.

 

dodga

I remember an addon that did something like

- If it has information about a player: display it
- Otherwise "mark" that player
- The included binary would then read the SavedVariables file to download all data of marked players from the armory
- Repeat until your memory woes

That's just about as much as you can do, because WoW cannot access anything outside its scope (e.g. websites, binaries or files).
Also, do you trust random binaries that come with your addons? I sure as hell won't run those.
But then again the source was available IIRC and I use WoWAceUpdater...

EDIT: The addon I meant is called Arena Enemy Talents.

remember my name - you'll scream it later

 

Belenos

Cladhaire released a mod called LightHeaded that has all of wowhead's quest comments in it, so when you click on a quest you can see everyone's comments on it with loc's etc. The data file is a few megs but supposedly it works fine.

My point is that if you wanted to write this mod, having a small relevant set of data on every arena player in your battlegroup would not be infeasable. A few megs of data is not too much if you are running with a good amount of RAM.

 

• Blup

I've actually been thinking about making an addon like this. I was thinking of polling the arena once a week to update.

But then you get the following problem: what if someone:
-Respecs in between
-Gets some new gear

So you get a nice popup saying so and so is a fire mage while he actually just respecced to frost yesterday. I'm not sure how useful this sort of addon would be though if you can't even trust what it tells you.

Other than this though, I don't see any problem creating such an addon, you'd just have to refresh the data regularly. Not sure if Blizzard has any monitoring going on about used bandwith from a single source, since getting every arena player from a single battleground weekly would generate a lot of bandwith if lots of people start using it.

 

Mencius

Like someone said earlier, you'd basically have to cache the Armory every day - at the very least - and some times many times per day if you wanted seriously up to date info.

Seems do-able though.

 

• Deris

You will never fight a team with a rating a whole lot different than yours - you get into a "bracket" basically from what I understand where your pool of teams is maybe 50 +/- rating points of your current rating. For example last night I pvp'd for about an hour? (12 games?) and while it isn't the largest sample size, I only saw 3 teams for all 12 games.

 

• Greybone

An easier solution that would be somewhat easy to code, I'd imagine, is to just gather some talent/playstyle info from the matches as you play them. Say you see a mage use dragons breath, and the next time you play him, you could display 'Fire Mage' when you selected him for example.

It's limited what you could record like that, but team composition, general spec choices and roles(does priest X cast mostly healing or damage spells for example) would be fairly easy.

Still a bit cheesy, I guess.

ps. Your picture makes me wanna throwup and laugh at the same time.

 

• Blup

That would work of course but it would require some "ugly" coding. Having the check combat log entries for specific spells to get class/spec info makes for some hard to maintain code.

Hybrid specs might be a bit of an issue though. I'll see if I have some free time tonight to check out how doable this is. It might be ugly but it could be of some help. Although the times that I ran into the same player/team it's usually been just a few matches apart so I still remember their spec.

 

• alcaras

I think the problem is by the time you tag the player and retrieve their info, you'll already know (and remember).

E.g. I assume all mages are Frost, unless I see they're Fire -- and since there are fewer Fire mages than Frost, I remember the Fire mages.

Sometimes when the other team gets us into playing prolonged pillar peekabo I'll open up armory on my other monitor and look up any players whose talents I'm not familiar with.

 

Cel

Mmm... I might have to use this catch phrase.

In addition I have to admit that I've given into the temptation of using the current ability of seeing people show up on spell alert "X Gained Arena Preparation" to get an Armory listing during the 2mins before the match. It's terribly useful, albeit cheesy.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

alienangel

I'd think you'd achieve a large part of the utility just adding a "notes" feature to Arena Master - after a match you get to jot down some notes about enemy players/teams. Little handscribbled things like "Has Water Elemental!" or "spams sheep well" or "always grouped with a rogue" would be a lot more useful than getting armour summaries that tell you their rogue has 223 resilience and off-hands malchazeen instead of gladiator's skiv, or that their mage was farming herbs last night when you did your DB refresh.

 

Papajan

The only concern I'd have for such a mod developer is that their mod may be circumvented (and I would expect it to be) for the higher ranked teams. In other words, if such a mod became publicly available, I'd expect highly rated teams to put on poor gear just before they log out so that you're fooled if you look them up on the Armory or use the mod. I can't see people respeccing before every logout at the high ratings though, so grabbing that from the Armory might be doable.

Something that might be more practical would be to log every damaging ability you see from arena opponents and have database info to tooltips like "Median Frostbolt hits for 1500, max Frostbolt crit for 4000, Max damage done to one target in 3s: 6000" or some simple statistics like that. Since you know how often they're using each damaging ability, you'd know their spec for the most part without having a mod explicitly try to figure it out.

The same style of reasoning would be neat to apply to teams, such as "If I can see X and Y, usually the last person is Z", which would just be like a memory aid rather than trying to log every team roster from the Armory (team rosters seem buggy on there anyway).

 

cladhaire

This isn't much different from storing and displaying quest comments like I do in LightHeaded, with the exception of the log off naked, etc. In order for it to truly work, on first mouseover, you'd get notification of what spec the player is, since that can't be hidden right now, along with what class makeup they have on their team so you know what stealthers might be around, etc. I suspect this would be useful for some people who aren't in the cutting edge of their bracket.

The issue is how to distribute the mod. I suspect one addon stub per battlegroup would be sufficient, and then once the proof of concept is done, you can store more information (Such as equipment). Interesting idea.

 

Cel

A not so difficult way to figure spec with the above combat log parsing:

Program the mod to react to certain abilities, for instance:

Say I'm Mutilate spec: Ferrit's Mutilate hits you for 2100 would trigger the mod to fill in 41... so now the mod would display 41/?/?. Now you have most of the information you might need facing me... who really needs to know where the other 20 pts go?

More examples:

Mage1 gains Arcane Power would fill in 31pts in the far left for that person's entry... Mage1 gains Iceblock would fill in 21 points in the far right.... so if someone used both they'd display 31/?/21 and you can take a guess that they are 40/0/21 or 31/0/30, but either way you now know that this mage (at least for the near future) is arcane/frost, and you will have this on hand for every future match.

A new entry would always overwrite an old entry, ie: if the above mage uses Dragon's Breath in the next match, he must have respec'd between matches, his entry would be cleared and a ?/41/? would be the new entry until more info is found.

Realms would have to be included in the entry to avoid stacking 2 different people's stats... but it totally seems doable and more of a record keeping mod rather than a preemptive mod... meaning it gathers information you should already know about the people and keeps track of it, so this is a bit less shady than searching the armory for someone. :P

Pillar Peekaboo though... they're bringing it on themselves to be armoried... consider it just repercussions for having them stare at you from a distance for too long. XD

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

Chup

So... I had thought about the in game armory mod as well, and while it would be awesome I think it'd be impossible with the amount of data you'd need to get unless someone can access it from a mod thats already running, but I doubt it can be worked out.

So I was thinking, the two most important things you would want would be their spec and their total HP, since that reflects the type of gear they have. Also in order to know who would be easiest to burst down.

While it cant be pulled from the armory, I already have mods that give me the % of health someone has left. Would it be too terribly difficult for a mod to read the % of health, see how much goes away when I deal a specific amount of damage, and from there easily calculate the person's max hp and store it for future reference, or until needed later.

Then during, as was said "pillar peekaboo", someone could take pot shots at the other team egging them to come out, and also getting all of their max HP stats.

Feasible?

 

dodga

You are describing MobHealth actually

remember my name - you'll scream it later

 

Chup

Will it work on enemy arena teams? I thought it only worked on mobs...

 

Thelyna

It works on anything with HP.

 

◊ Shadowed

Didn't notice this topic until today, but i'm the author of Arena Enemy Talents.

The reason I didn't add health info is mainly because I would have to parse buffs and remove them from the total health value, and people tend to change gear rather often if they're a raider so it's far easier to use something like MobInfo/MobHealth. Really as long as you use some sort of inspect mod that shows the players model you can work out a rough HP/Resilience value.

Originally I was thinking of trying to do combat log scanning and checking abilities but I don't really like having to maintain a database of spells associated to different talents which requires localization and extra work of guessing "If we have X talent stored, but they have Y they must have respecced".

Trying to guess on who you're playing based on who you've could be done, mainly I didn't want to add this to prevent confusion of people trying to target somebody just to realize that it was a guess and they're in combat so it couldn't be updated with the real entry. We have different tricks however we can use, one being the focus bug where they pop up randomly and another being whispering people from the same faction/different server (which i'm implementing once WoW 2.1 comes out).

Just make the user build a database themself, it's not very hard after a week or playing you should have a decent list built or you can tell it to request the talents of a specific page on a bracket. There is a mod that uses an aggressive method of scanning and has the information for the top 300 teams of every US/EU battlegroup...but considering how the data is gotten i'm not really thrilled people are doing that.