Data Loss

The machine that I had most of my work on has failed and I don't know if I have a good backup now. I'm trying to find what I can but most of the links off this blog probably won't work anymore. The work that Okoloth is doing is much more advanced than I've done so I highly suggest you check his site out for the state of the art on armory mining.

More on Armory Data Standardization: Data modelling a character

I'm continuing to work on this. One of the big challenges is doing this in the face of the impending release of WotLK, level 80 and revamping of talent trees. Ideally, not only do I need to model a character in space (all of a character's elements) but I need to model it in time as well. All the analysis I did last year will be useless because talent trees will be different. Because of this requirement, it's a lot harder than "just grab the XML and shove it in a database".

I gotta think about this some more, but I want to be able to track characters in time, kind of like the Internet Wayback Machine.

Armory to Data Miners - It's ok!

I finally got around to looking at the recent batch of armory updates, and noticed this little gem:

XML file size reduction: The XML files used by the Armory have been optimized for speed, partly by streamlining the amount of code in the files. As a result, third-party sites that mine Armory data may need to make adjustments to account for the new file configurations.

There you go, implicit permission from Blizzard to suck down data.