Armory Amor

Blizzard have announced a service for WoW called The Armory. It tracks character, guild and arena information for the game, and seems to update each night (although this may have slipped to weekly with the site's elevation to official beta status). Of most interest is the character information, which is laid out like the character profile in the game. Every active character in the game, on every realm, is listed there for all to see. For example, you might want to check out my Orcish Hunter Varshak that I transferred over from the Frostmane realm in time for the expansion, or Raemus the Undead Mage that I played with the guys on Wednesday nights a few months back. You might even want to check out the mighty Dudefella, the character of Gabe from Penny Arcade, or Rafe's hellaciously nasty Undead Warlock Kettle. Hell, you can look up anyone's character if you just have their name and realm.

Having character details online isn't an earth-shattering change to the game, as you can view these already if you and your target's characters are of the same faction and standing next to each other in the game world. The Armory allows viewing of character details from opposing factions, which wasn't possibly before, but it's unlikely this data will ever be used strategically. Its appeal is almost totally entertainment-based, although I suppose it's mildly useful to see which items and talent builds various badasses are using. It's not like one can simply go shopping for such items, anyway.

While it might be concluded that the site adds yet another doodad to keep WoW players paying their monthly stipend, I think it also removes a greater, more compelling one. If I want to check what level George's Druid Revlis is up to, or if I want to check which trinkets I'm using, I don't have to log in anymore, and this severely reduces the chance I'll accidentally get involved in a random Ramparts run and look up six hours later, wondering where my evening went. This has got to be good news.

The one downside of the site (apart from it being a colossal time sink and being totally useless to non-players) is the design. The layout is fairly pretty, with all manner of arty edgework, heroic figures and parchment backgrounds from one side of the page to the other. The implementation of it though... sheesh. There's six hundred and fifty tonnes of Ajax here, and pretty much all of it is completely unnecessary as far as I can see. I can only surmise that the enormous amounts of character data being hurled around the net is significantly reduced by doing it in Ajax, because the site doesn't seem to do anything interesting. If there were Ajax lasers, Ajax massage chairs and animated Ajax breasts on the page I wouldn't care so much that the URL bar, back button and Open In New Window functions had been broken. Anyway, it's likely that only web developers like myself care about such things, so I'll wrap this gripe session up for now.

Update: There seem to be an awful lot of Character Data Awaiting Refresh errors coming up, which is a bit silly. You'd think they'd just show older data until the new data is ready, wouldn't you?