Flux

World of Warcraft along with almost every MMO has numerous items, quests, NPCs, and creatures. However, there are times when hunting around hours looking for them when you don’t know where they are, is zero fun.

To help out many sites list these as well as every bit of loot in the game. Often with some excellent additional features like wishlists, filtered searching, 3d models, and character profiles. The most popular one currently ranks 284th. This is not just among game sites, it’s among all websites.

There are two behemoths for World of Warcraft databases. The more popular Wowhead and the upstart WOWDB. Both sites have great though similar features.

Wowhead is owned by the same company that owns thottbot and allakhazam. They are independent but there is controversy about their new owner’s ties to gold farming. Wowdb is a recent site that just came out of beta, it’s owned by Curse which is popular for finding mods. There are many other database sites including the official WoW Armory. There are even sites like warcrafter that use the official database to enhance it’s features.

Making your own database is difficult to do yourself. It could be that Blizzard doesn’t want full listings easily available or isn’t yet willing to support it. Database sites have gone to some extraordinary lengths to build their own databases. Back in the day, people submitted what they found to a website and after verification it was added for others to see. Eventually World of Warcraft had features which let people like Thott (of thottbot) devise a way to do this automatically. They created software that would literally watch while you played the game for items, NPCs, or quests a player came across and upload it to the database. The current database sites used a method like this and possibly a crawl of the official armory.

That still hasn’t stopped some players from building their own database of items, either for a item comparison, various specialized programs, or just their own personal spreadsheet calculator. Allakhazam, the only site to do so, offers a full list of item names and IDs which is often used by these projects.

If you haven’t used an WoW database before, give one a try. Or take a look at the competition. You may find some new features you didn’t realize you needed all along.

Tags: tip
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.