While going through a redesign of my homepage, I went through the process of trying to figure out what I'd like to include in the "Gaming" section of the site. Given that my game of choice right now is World of Warcraft and my gaming platform of choice is Steam, I figured adding feeds for both would be easy, especially considering that I already have a World of Warcraft API of my own.
Well, maybe not.
For the front page of my site, I'd like to include the three latest activities in WoW. You can see a list of such activities exists on WoW's community site. You would think that something like this would be easily reproducible, either via an RSS feed or using an API. Indeed, if you search for this page on Google, it will count the number of items for you, indicating that it must be a feed of some kind. But try plugging that URL into an RSS reader and you get the official World of Warcraft blog.
Worse, the Blizzard Community API offers no such method to obtain such information. In order to get the information, you'd have to scrape it from the screen, which is a violation of Blizzard's API policy. Even worse, this data used to be available from the old WoW Armory, something I had in LibWowArmory while it was still in beta.
How am I supposed to present this data on my website if Blizzard doesn't allow me to get it from the one and only source that exists?
Don't get me wrong, there are a number of awesome things that you can do with the current community API that you couldn't do before, including obtaining statistics about auctions, get information about character and guild achievements, and much, much more. I do some of this already with Cheevos FTW!.
But a character feed should be mind-numbingly simple. And by that, I mean it should take a skilled developer at most a day's worth of work to get this programmed, tested, and deployed, especially within a system as well-developed as the API currently is. What is so wrong with the development process for the Blizzard API that this doesn't exist yet?
Character feeds aren't the only thing Blizzard hasn't reproduced that can no longer be accessed. Calendars for players and guilds and guild bank logs used to be obtainable using authentication on the Armory, even if you had an authenticator. I had it working 100% in LibWowAPI and was ready to do some amazing things with that data for my guild. Now I can't, and that's truly a shame.
Steam is another platform I'd love to be able to use to show off my gaming adventures. Steam, too, has an API that you can use to obtain information from them. So, let's get a list of my most recent achievements across all of my games.
Turns out I can't. The only place a player's achievements are listed is through links on their games list. Sure, you can add an ?xml=1 to the URL to get some XML data from each page, but there's the kicker... "each page". There is no single location that Steam lists all of a single player's achievements across all games, thus forcing me to go game by game to get the XML I need to generate my list. I have 29 games on Steam. This means I have to send 29 HTTP requests just to get my latest Steam achievements. That is ridiculous, and would slow down my web site considerably to try and load this on demand.
Being a programmer by trade, I know that what I want is possible to do. If I were creating a game, I know this would be a key feature that I'd make sure was just as polished as the product itself. It baffles me that two of the largest gaming companies in the world are missing this. We're in a day and age on the Internet where gaming data that allows players to make awesome community content should be expected, and not just a bonus perk of playing the game. While I think that both Valve and Blizzard recognize this and are taking steps in the right direction to create such APIs, they both have a long way to go to make a complete API that is simple to use and contains features that developers actually will want to have.
I agree. I've been wanting to build a checklist app for LOTRO for a while, using a feed like what is available on my.lotro.com, but there is nothing available. Anything entered into the my app would have to be entered manually, which throws the ease of use for my app in the trash.
If it's available on the game's site, make it available via API or RSS.
This is my blog where I give my thoughts and opinions on various topics and share my creative endeavors with the world. I run two personal blogs, but combine them here for ease of access.
Blogger - My oldest blog using the Blogger platform contains posts full of opinions, gaming, and code.
Tumblr - Tumblr posts are all about my creative side, containing music, videos, writings, and updates on my web creations.
You can select a category below to view the latest post, or browse thorugh the posts using the navigation found at the top and bottom of each post.
This Saturday I'll be running my 7th annual 24 hour birthday stream! This year, you'll see Risk of Rain 2 Eclipse runs, Noita, Crypt of the NecroDancer deathless, and a blind run of Tunic!
This Saturday I'll be running my 7th annual 24 hour birthday stream! This year, you'll see Risk of Rain 2 Eclipse runs, Noita, Crypt of the NecroDancer deathless, and a blind run of Tunic! It all starts Sat 6/10 11 AM Pacific time. Cya there! https://t.co/j8C1xJHbgG
Just found out I broke XIVAPI.js for web users. Oops, sorry about that. Their use case was using it on the client side, mine is server side, so I didn't catch it!
I'm kind of hoping this "Retro category" kick that the classic Tetris community is on right now dies out. Half the time people don't put "Tetris" in their tags, so it makes it impossible to find these streams.
"CEO Satya Nadella cited economic conditions and an investment in artificial intelligence as he informed employees about the change."
If I had ever thought about working at Microsoft, I would no longer have those thoughts. Big tech clearly is not interested in taking care of its workers.
I am torn between "fuck off AI" and the prospect that my #spreadsheets might be so reflective of my strange thinking that I might single-handedly avert the #AIApocalypse by letting it try.
The rings seem to cap! Maybe at 7, maybe at 8, need more necroscience to find out. I realized this on Death Metal when his score wasn't increasing over 1000x the skeleton's scores with each consecutive hit, and then noticed the ramp combos were maxing out somewhere just north of 100 million.
So maybe the strat is going to go back to getting hearts up to 5 and then stacking rings up to 8?
I didn't expect to like Crypt of the NecroDancer pinball as much as I do. I got three different billion+ scores in the first 24 hours of the game's launch.
It's a very unique table, I recommend reading the table ruleset included with the table after your first playthrough.
You can also play it and all the other Pinball FX for free for 24 hours after downloading and running it for the first time.
there's a word that describes the feeling I get from assessing a problem, coming up with an algorithm, writing the code, then running it and having everything work as expected first try
I'm really interested in seeing the endgame here. This site's usefulness is being dismantled piece by piece. Can't wait to see what it is being dismantled for.
Dance your way to the top of the leaderboards on Crypt of the NecroDancer Pinball! Experience the ultimate fusion of rhythm and pinball on our new table inspired by a beautiful classic from Brace Yourself Games.
Well the second leg was 100% miserable due to a family behind me who insisted on their kid sitting on their lap, and completely not caring how often and how hard they kicked my seat. #airporthell
I got rebooked to an earlier arrival which is good, but that means three flights instead of two, the latter two being zone C, which means two miserable Southwest flights. #airporthell
I just had to log in to a remote server to fix an error, make a code change to upgrade the discord.js library on that server, reinstall npm packages, copy files into a production web site (otl.gg if you're wondering), and restart IIS. All on a mobile device in a location with terrible reception (NAS Pensacola).
Amazing what you can accomplish with technology these days.
Somehow got to Dallas on time. Now I'm on a flight that has the possibility of a dog running loose. Seriously, I've never seen a non-service pet outside a carrier on a plane before. #airporthell
i'm so sorry for being that guy but i can't overstate how reminiscent current twitter is of Portal 2 when the entire facility starts to break down because wheatley got so insecure about being called a moron he starts cobbling together abominations that don't work out of spite
Been doing Professional Game Consultation for about 2 Years now. Did a little talk about what it is and why its SOOOO important for your upcoming games #indiegames #gamedevelopment #gamedev
This is the first step in removing chronologically ordered posts... They make the algorithm the default option and in a couple of months they will say "oh no one uses chronological posts, so we're removing it".
Chris Pronger suffered commotio cordis after taking a slap shot to the chest in 1998.
Praying for a similar recovery and outlook for Damar Hamlin…Pronger was back on the ice weeks later and played 12 more seasons en route to the Hockey Hall of Fame. 🙏 https://t.co/qYfT8kv66s
Mulling permanently closing this account and never opening this site again. You all are wonderful people, but I question whether this place is worth it anymore. https://t.co/Pmzltt4fXn
Seems like it's on the Cohost/Tumblr side of the aisle in terms of post length and content. It also has optional monetization for your posts, whatever, I won't use that but I'm sure it's a nice option for some.
After a 110-5 score line, it became apparent change was needed in the OTL. Well, change is coming. This update should go live tomorrow. https://t.co/j8TwWzLogN
The value proposition for Mastodon, as a Twitter replacement, has flipped since the last time I tried it:
Mastodon: you might pick the wrong server and have to move away from it Twitter: you have definitely already picked the wrong service, and you have to move away from it
https://t.co/40yzlOfRR0 <-- I don't want to be on a platform run by an abusive leader and overworked staff. I'm so dependent on twitter for my work though, I've got an essential part of my contact network here, but every second I'm here I feel I'm betraying my morals.
Tumblr may become relevant again, but probably not for a while. There are a number of non-creative projects ahead of it that need doing, so it'll be a while before I regularly put out stuff again. That said, look for something new there in the next few days. 👀
Caveat on Tumblr: I've been there for about 9 years, back when I decided to split my blog between my creative endeavors (Tumblr) and everything else (Blogger). While I still have the account, I'm not very active on it since my creative endeavors have taken a back seat.
Being shitty to your workforce, rolling out features no one wants, not addressing PR disasters in a timely or acceptable fashion, belittling a percentage of your user base.
If it's available on the game's site, make it available via API or RSS.