Now im hearing from members how cool this Armory is! Maybe it's just cuz it's monday and im in a cruddy mood already but I just looked a coworker's pc and they were looking at this new armory page on Blizz's website. He's saying how cool it is that he can check all his stats and what he's wearing anytime he wants. He use to be in our guild but no longer is btw. So I tell him yea well you could of done that on our website for the last year! He then proceeds to tell me that yea but he doson't have to keep a profile upto date or anything like that nor dose he need to belong to our guild. Uhhg. it's just frustrating when people act like uploading and updating there profiles is such a big chore!

Anyway sorry to bring my frustrations here but was wondering how other people that have used and loved what WoWroster has brought us for so long now feel about this new armory page that Blizz is doing?

Thanks for taking the time to listen to my rant.

In a way, the armory page is competition. In another, it can be turned to our advantage.

WoWRoster is superior to Armory in the aspect of data displayed, flexibility (addons), and friendlyness for exotic browsers. A downside to roster is that it's more work updating it, but datafarming from Armory will be supported in R2, allowing automatic updating of that part of the Roster data (but not of the data Roster offers, but armory doesn't).

Im sorry Pleeg, Im not sure I understand the last part of your response? So your saying in R2 that updating will no longer be required? Or just some of the data will be automatic.

I'm very excited to see the new R2 version!

I think in re reading I understand. Your saying that some of the info that the armory dosn't show like bags and bank will still be needed as an upload in roster. Am I correct in saying that?

Roster provides data that Armory currently doesn't have.

R2 will be able to use Armory to populate some of its data.

In principle, a 3rd party here could parse Armory's data and synthesize CharacterProfiler data to upload to the current Roster.

Honestly unless they decide to start displaying what recipes people can make on the armory I'll still be using roster.

In principle, a 3rd party here could parse Armory's data and synthesize CharacterProfiler data to upload to the current Roster.

That is an interesting idea and it would at least fill in the blanks on guild roster pages. Allow people who want to to still upload their information but have it data mine the rest from the armory site, if possible.

EDIT: Damnit...I need to update my picture on the sig. I'm really hating all this regearing into mismatched stuff.

ScratchMonkey wrote:In principle, a 3rd party here could parse Armory's data and synthesize CharacterProfiler data to upload to the current Roster.

The idea has been raised in the dev channel. It's currently not a priority for us, but we've done the tests and we know it's possible.
Synthesizing a CP.lua wouldn't be the route I'd choose by the way. A roster addon can also pull armory data and insert it directly into the DB. Such a process could then even be scheduled to occur automatically on older profiles, if your webserver supports that.

Ah, yes, that's a better implementation. No need to worry about overwriting legitimate CP data if it's done from the server.

You could also run it as a separate input page, so that the scheduled scrape-and-update could be initiated from one's home machine (where potential hosting restrictions on cron jobs don't apply).

Elethil wrote:
Anyway sorry to bring my frustrations here but was wondering how other people that have used and loved what WoWroster has brought us for so long now feel about this new armory page that Blizz is doing?

Thanks for taking the time to listen to my rant.

Well, the primary reason for our guild to start work on a roster is to have a way that people can look up the recipes the people in guild have and check what mats are needed. A second reason is to be able to check who has the same quest as you. As far as I noticed Blizz' page doesn't offer any of the two tasks. So for me it is absolutely no alternative to the roster (about the roster I'd just whish that all addons would be multilanguage+multiguild, though... that's on the other hand my criticism on the roster...)

Melliandra

Have any of you seen this? :

http://jebus.geek.nz/WoW/armory/

Generates sigs based on Armory data, so it looks like you can pull from the Armory pretty easily. I'm really looking forward to getting Roster able to do that, yes indeed.

Excellent!

So R2 will scrape Data from the Armory, Yay!

I was thinking that scraping the armory for data could be triggered by updating the Guild. Perhaps making the Guild update happen before the character update so that possibly older Armory data won't overwrite what is being uploaded, or having some type of check to determine what data is newer.

I definetely don't see Armory replacing Roster, but if the Armory can be abused by Roster, that would be great.

We have both on are site at the mo but roster is great and give's loads more info than Armory rock on roster