In Game Armory Mod
 

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 :D

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.