I keep getting strange behavior from the armory during the development and testing of my code. Sometimes I can make hundreads if not thousands of requests and sometimes I can make only a few hundred before the armory site starts returning HTTP 503 error codes at me. Which tells me that they are bandwidth throttling requests that come in.

Needless to say this weeks crawl over the armory may come latter then I wanted it to be. I have some ideas on how I can get around this but, ugh more work arounds. :(

I also found out that there are pre cataclysm events starting as far back as patch 3.2.2! Every once in a blue moon if you are in dalaran or elsewhere you will see the world shake briefly. I was wonding what that was all about and you know too ! Deathwing is awaking !

I've finished crawling the list of character names for SoE and like last weeks 2% drop in character population, this week the character population has dropped another 30% or so.

Rough population data for last 3 weeks

1. March 23, 2010 = 8,727 -31.82%
2. March 17, 2010 = 12,800 -2.73%
3. March 8, 2010 = 13,160

Keep in mind that I am currently only crawling characters that are in a guild so there are probably many other characters that are being missed by my scans. After I begin to ramp up character tracking more and more of those unknown characters will get added into the known characters list.

Crawling character and statistics data for 8k+ toons can take upwards of 20Hrs which is part of why I am only scanning the SoE realm at this time. :)

There has been a bit of back tracking going on with the code I wrote and I am having to modify it somewhat now that I have a good idea of how much storage and data is being downloaded week to week. Once I finish making the code changes I will start crawling this weeks character data from the armory.

I have started downloading fresh statistics data to the database. Some finding thus far

• Seems like SoE server population has dropped by roughly 2000 toons so about a 5% change in population from last week

I have almost completed grabbing just over 13k in character data from the armory and there statistics. First order of business is to restrict all stats and character data to just the Sisters of Elune server, then build and test the statistic querying code on that data set before expanding out to the other realms.

Based on the number of realms there are and the amount of time it takes to acquire data for over 13k characters I am thinking the best way is to update the statistics and character data once a week. But exactly how I'm going to do that is tricky and I have a few ways of going about it but each one has it's advantages and pitfalls.

Welcome to the WOWTracks website. Wowtracks.com is intended to become a World of Warcraft character and statistics tracking website. The site is still being actively worked on so check back often for updates!