It’s been a while but I have finally gotten around to adding a missing mount and companion tool to the site.

Enjoy!

It’s been a while since I posted but I’ve been so busy with work and working on the guild portal that it has just slipped to the back of the pile.

Anyway, the guild portal is nearing completion now.  I have to say I like the way it is going.

Recent additions:

• Find missing quests
• Character info
• HK statistics

The missing quests item gave me the biggest problem.  After multiple site crawling and gathering of data over a few days I managed to get it to work though.

Next up Auction House data…

After a good few hours the missing recipe option is now live!

Seems to be working correctly from my testing.

Enjoy

Features I am hoping to implement over the next few days:

• Complete list of recipes for each profession with a filter to show which ones the guild does not know presently
• Linking to AH prices for crafted items to aid with gold making
• Links to profession guide sites

Changed the right hand list to show last 5 added recipes/patterns etc.  I will most likely add a page of its own to show new recipes added in the past day (to showcase any new recipes etc guild members may have snagged!)

To further reduce calls to the Blizzard API, I will be caching more info from other sites and only call for new recipes from Blizzard.  This change is required due to hitting the limit again today.

Just finished the first draft of the site.  It could do with some pagination on the longer pages but I will get to that a little later.

For now it is time to kill some Horde!

EDIT: Yep! I couldn’t leave it alone knowing that that I needed to add pagination to the browse profession section.  It is now added!

The guild I am part of in Warcraft needed some way of tracking who can craft what.  This information is available on the armoury but not in a searchable way.  I have been wanting to get into programming something using the new Blizzard API for sometime so I volunteered.

A day or so later…

After numerous iterations and a fair bit of trial and error, I finally managed to get the code working!  Seems that there can only be around 3000 requests a day made to the API so I needed to handle the last-modified headers efficiently. So many hours, a slight late night (I can’t seem to stop once I get going) and around 300 lines of code later – success!

Now it is on to the front end and some linking trickery with Wowhead…

According to MMO-Champion Patch 4.3 will be deployed on the live realms this week.  Over the last few weeks, or possibly a month, I have not played WoW that much.  This is down to a few things but mostly down to work and a growing boredom with the current content.

The main features that am I looking forward to are:

• New armor sets (for PvP since I don’t raid anymore)
• The changes to the valor points system
• The transmogrification feature
• Void storage

The final battle against Deathwing is now available too.

I won’t go into detail as all the info you could ever need is already posted HERE.

Oh yeah almost forgot.  Since I opted for the annual pass I will be grabbing a new mount (Tyrael’s charger – see video below) when it drops too!

So although the SWTOR BETA weekend officially ends tonight I have decided to stop playing it.  That’s not to say it is bad.  No far from it.  It is a good game.  I was expecting it to be better graphically, however I have heard some elements have been intentionally lowered due to this weekends tests being purely about stress testing the servers before the launch (20th December.)  I decided to stop because I was getting hooked and knew I could not continue after midnight tonight.

This is by no means an in-depth review.  Just some thoughts.

Starting out and character creation

I rolled (some may say predictably) a Jedi Knight.  The intro movie is awesome it has to be said (click HERE for the official videos).   The character creation screen is quite good.  I have to admit I did not spend a lot of time playing with the looks of my character (ok I moved a few sliders and then hit random a few times!)  However, my wife spent ages making a character and by all accounts its pretty awesome.

Starting zone and questing

Having played (and still playing World of Warcraft) since around the launch of TBC, questing and moving around was not new to me.  In fact, in a lot of ways, it felt like playing WoW (at least mechanically) but in Space.  Don’t get me wrong this is not a bad thing.  I quite enjoyed it.  Especially the spoken quest lines.  I get the feeling that could get old one or two alts down the line though….

Combat

The combat is quite fun and the lack of auto-attack did not bother me much (since I primary play a mage in WoW.)  The rate at which you gain skills seems good too.  Although I was disappointed I couldn’t wield a Light Saber until around level 8! Still you gotta learn the ropes and understand the force and all that first young padawan… erm sorry drifted off there.

Crafting

I didn’t explore this too much but it seems pretty hands off.  Simply by opening the crew window you can send a member of your crew, which in my case was a droid, to go and work on it for you.  The crew member will then come back in a few minutes.  I can’t say I like that concept very much.

So..

To sum up, this game is a great effort at an MMO and if you love Star Wars then you will love this.  I would probably play it if I was not already playing WoW or both if I didn’t think the entirety of my free time would be gone!  The only things I hope they improve are:

• the feeling of an “empty world”.
• the NPC’s don’t seem to do much.
• the wildlife seems non-existent and there is a lack of ambient sounds which is a little weird.

I would not replace WoW with this though.