roncli.com blog: September 2011

While I was working on converting LibWowAPI to use the new Blizzard WoW API, I came up with an idea that, I think, is pretty good.

Cheevos FTW! is a new website that I've created that allows a World of Warcraft player to figure out what achievements to shoot for next. It works by crawling through the WoW API, reading a character's achievements, guilds, and arena teams. The achievements are stored in a database while guilds and arena teams look for more characters to crawl. Guild achievements are similarly stored. Every so often, the achievements are analyzed and sorted by how many players have accomplished the achievement.

When a player enters their realm and character name into the website, it takes the sorted achievements and removes all of the achievements the character has accomplished, and spits out the top 10 remaining achievements from the sorted list. This effectively gives a list of recommended achievements the character should go for next, based on what achievements other characters have already done. The same happens for the guild's achievements.

The site is a very simple concept, but is very data heavy. Already, before the site even has gone live, I've crawled over 70,000 players who have accomplished over 13,000,000 achievements! Within a couple days, this database will have more records than my logs site.

This was a fun, quick site to put together. I have no idea how big it will get, but it will be fun to see how it gets used by the WoW community.

Labels: Cheevos FTW!, Coding, Gaming, LibWowAPI, World of Warcraft