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Much Needed Update!
7/18/2008 10:56 AM - Ulsoga
First off, many apologies for not having written an update in a while. We've been busily working on the site everyday though! Most of you
probably noticed some recent changes even though they weren't detailed here in a news post. For instance a number of our integrity checks are
more strict at this point. This has corrected a lot of issues in the system, but has generally caused more discrepancies with guilds involved
in raiding alliances. The good news about this is that we've started readying the system for guild alliance support and have a very solid idea
of how we will make it work. I don't currently have an ETA on when it will be finished, but we're working on it!
Another recent change was the addition of the tier pages to guild info. While on a guild's WowJutsu page you can see how far along people are on getting their tier sets. There are a number of filters to let you break down the information into manageable chunks, and you can then link to those filtered pages directly. For instance say you're wanting to know how many people in your guild are one item short of their T6 4-piece bonus; click on the tier 6 page and apply two filters - one to set players with > 2 set items and one to set players with < 4 set items. Example: The Anarchs on Gorefiend. We plan on adding a couple more filters to this page, but feel it currently serves as a pretty good raiding tool for guilds that are wanting to maximize the way they distributing gear. Right now our server is experiencing heavy load and is almost consistently running at its limit. We've been doing a lot of work on the backend to try and help with these issues, but it's possible we'll need to purchase another server in order to fully address the problem. Users may be noticing that batches are completing slower than usual though. Hopefully we'll be able to dig deeper into finding the cause of the slowness some time this evening. We've got a few major changes under way that I'm really quite excited to talk about, but without an estimated completion time I think I'm going to have to remain tight-lipped! I'll be trying to update here soon with more info though! Cheers. :)
Integrity Check Fixes
6/05/2008 10:01 AM - Ulsoga
The integrity checks have all been repaired (and a couple of new ones have been added). Updating the scores for all the guilds in our system
is expected to take around 14 hours. To ensure that the process goes quickly the rank regeneration is temporarily disabled until the score
calculations are complete. Users will still be able to queue their characters without any problem, it's just that their guild's rank won't
actually update on the site until later this evening.
US/Oceanic Armory Undecided
6/05/2008 5:15 PM - Ulsoga
It's offline, it's online. It's offline, it's online. Player queues are currently getting a little backed up because of the US Armory downtime.
Expect delays until the Armory stabilizes.
US/Oceanic Armory Online
6/05/2008 1:20 PM - Ulsoga
It's back online and queueing is enabled again! :)
US/Oceanic Armory Offline
6/05/2008 6:37 AM - Ulsoga
It seems as though the official World of Warcraft site (Armory included) is down. The duration of this downtime is unknown but hopefully it won't
be more than a few hours. While the Armory is unavailable users will be unable to queue guilds from the US/Oceanic realms.
More Fixes, Kil'Jaeden Loot Problem
6/03/2008 9:45 AM - Ulsoga
It turns out there was a second bug causing Horde guilds to be displayed as Alliance. We've retroactively corrected about 3,000
guilds that were experiencing this problem. If this is still happening to you and you've already tried manually updating,
send us an email and let us know so we can look into it.
The Armory seems to be having an issue with updating players with the new Kil'Jaeden loot. In a few cases items are appearing, but overall there are lots of blanks where the items should be. This is causing some problems with our system automatically detecting the kills so we've manually forced updates in these cases. We're still working on some of the integrity check problems that have occured since we put the new queueing system online. This should be fixed this weekend along with a few other bugs we've found. :)
6 New Insignias, ZA Chests, EU Armory Returns
5/27/2008 3:45 AM - Ulsoga
The European Armory is back online and players are now able to manually scan guild mates
again. Currently the batch queue is a little backlogged so processing is happening slower than usual. This should clear up pretty soon and
the system will start to zip through all the batches awaiting completion.
We've now added the Zul'Aman timed event loot tables to the database. Along with this we've put six new insignias up for guilds to try and earn. Check out the insignia overview page here! A bug has been fixed that was causing previously disbanded guilds to be reenabled when scanned with the new system. It has been corrected so it will not happen again, however the change was not retroactive and we still need to go back and remove the problem guilds that got by before the fix was in place. Finally, congratulations to SK Gaming for the world first Kil'Jaeden kill!
EU Armory Currently Offline
5/23/2008 3:51 PM - Ulsoga
The European Armory is temporarily down for maintenence. No EU guilds/players will be able to be updated until it is back online.
" The EU Armory has been taken offline temporarily to address a stability issue. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this issue."
Integrity Checks Issues
5/21/2008 9:04 PM - Ulsoga
Quite a few inaccurate kills are sneaking past our integrity checks since the new character scanning system went online. We're aware of the problem
are going to be finding a fix for it soon. If you're one of the guilds that's getting falsely promoted in the ranks... don't get too attached. ;)
"Hybrids" Bug
5/20/2008 7:32 AM - Ulsoga
In some circumstances a guild's overview page is showing a number of "hybrid" characters in the guild class statistics chart. These players seem
to be there as a result of failed scans, which can be caused by a handful of things on either our end or the Armory's end. While we're working on
a fix for the issue, you can temporarily correct the problem yourself by manually scanning
the problem players in your guild. To find out who they are simply click the "Roster" link on your guild's WowJutsu page and look for the
characters with no scan dates and a hybrid icon next to their name.
/ 
Ouch.
5/19/2008 10:32 AM - Ulsoga
Ok so the server is getting completely hammered right now with all the update requests. People have literally queued thousands of players at once
and the poor server machine trying to cope with the load. It's going very slow, but it's going... Expect the queues to take several hours with the
current high demand for player updates!
For the Hor - err... Alliance?
5/19/2008 9:32 AM - Ulsoga
A bunch of you wrote in (thanks!) alerting us to a problem with guilds displaying their factions incorrectly after being scanned with the new system.
We've pinpointed the bug, fixed it, and are now re-parsing approxomiately 2,000 guilds to correct the issue.
Character Queue, Take Two
5/19/2008 3:07 AM - Ulsoga
The Character Update page has returned after having received some debugging love. This is
still in the testing phases however! We're not yet sure how the server is going to handle the updates on a large scale so we will be monitoring
it closely. Even though your guild rank won't be displayed right away (we plan on making this dynamic very soon), you will see the results of the
player scans on your guild page as soon as they're complete. Your guild's rank changes will be visible after the next rank update (these occur every 6 hours).
We've also added in a special function with the queue that will automatically scan an entire guild if it hasn't been updated in a month or more. We did this so that the people that have had problems adding their guilds to the site can easily do so by entering the name of one player and having the system auto-detect their guild and update it. This also applies to adding new guilds into the system - simply enter in one player from the guild and WowJutsu will detect it and queue it for a scan. So hop over to the Character Update page and check it out. If you have any bug reports or suggestions send us an email at feedback@wowjutsu.com with "Character Queue Report" in the subject line.
Character Queue Temporarily Removed
5/14/2008 5:20 AM - Ulsoga
Ok, so after just a short period of time with the new queue system being public we were able to locate a lot more bugs that need fixing. We're taking
it offline to address some of the problems and it will be back later!
Individual Character Queues, Database Fixes, and Rank Changes
5/14/2008 3:41 AM - Ulsoga
We have quite a nice update happening this week! It's not a visible change, but we've done more work speeding things up on the backend which in
turn makes putting new features on the site easier. Doing the work caused us to have a bit of downtime, but we think it was worth it because it will
prevent such long lengths of downtime in the future.
You've probably also noticed that the icons on the ranking pages are a little different now. Much like the starred Illidan kills, we now have different
"locks" for the bosses in Sunwell. This new method of scoring will only affect guilds which have reached the various lock points in Sunwell, and will
correct some of the problems with guilds incorrectly passing other guilds in rank.
Last and most certainly not least is that we've finally got the beta version of the Character Update
page online. We've not yet been able to test this new feature on a large scale and we anticipate quite a few bugs with it right off the bat. For this
reason we're going to keep the old Add Guild page online and also keep the old crawlers running alongside
the new crawlers. Just as a heads up, we plan on eventually removing the ability to add an entire guild to the queue. While we originally planned on
keeping it in place, we realized that by limiting the updates to individual players we will vastly reduce the stress on crawlers and therefore the
manual updates will be able to happen much more quickly. Our system will still continue to do its weekly scans of full guilds though. One thing to keep
in mind while trying out our new queueing system is that the queue times might be abnormally high at first. This is due to two things: First being
that a lot of people are probably going to try to update a lot of characters right off the bat. Second is that while we're testing we don't have as
many crawlers running on the new system. Once the kinks are worked out and we've completely dropped the old system we will be adding a lot more
crawlers.
That's it for now!
Individual Character Updates Slightly Delayed
4/29/2008 12:29 PM - Ulsoga
It's taking a little longer than anticipated to get everything set up for the individual character scans. This is in part due to the fact that
we're also changing the "Add Guild" and "Update Progress" pages. With the new changes it will be easier for the community to monitor the process of
on going scans. We are hoping now to have the new goods online this weekend.
Email Issues
4/21/2008 1:12 AM - Ulsoga
Hey all! I felt like it was necessary to make a news post regarding emails. First off let me just say that we get a LOT of email. If emails were beers then the
WowJutsu inbox would be every frat party in the past 12 years - combined. We read through the majority of the emails we get but we're not able to respond to everyone.
However, most of you tend to write in about similar issues which alerts us to the biggest bugs on the site. A number of you are experiencing problems
adding your guild to the system. This is being worked on and will be fixed within the next week. A lot of the other common problems that people are having are
being addressed as well, and will also be fixed soon. So if you mailed in I'm sorry I couldn't get back to you, but you definitely aren't ignored. We're working
on it!
One big feature that will be coming up within the next week will be "instant" updates. Basically we're going to allow people to queue individual characters within a guild,
as well as the guild as a whole. While you'll still have the option of queueing an entire guild, character updates will be much quicker for accurate boss kill times.
This will allow us to put more focus on time as a variable in determining score, whereas before this wasn't really possible since it could take over a week for the update
to take place. When queueing characters you will be able to see your position in queue at that exact moment, and know roughly how long it will be before your turn is
up. While not truly "instant", it is obviously much faster to scan the 2-3 people that got drops than to scan 40-50 people just to get to those 2-3.
Cheers. :)
First Sunwell Gate Opens
4/9/2008 1:59 AM - Ulsoga
Coinciding with the first gate of Sunwell Plateau opening, we have made a few adjustments to the scoring system. In brief, the bonus points earned by loot from instances below a guild's current progression will no longer affect a guild's score. Only items from the instances that a guild is "actively raiding" will count. Specifically, we have grouped all the instances into three tiers, and when a guild is found to be active within a tier (requires a certain number of boss kills) then the bonus points from items in all lower tiers will no longer count towards the guild's score.
The tiers are defined as:
Sunwell is Here!
3/25/2008 1:12 PM - Ulsoga
The much anticipated Sunwell is finally here and we've added the new bosses into the system. You'll also notice that all the guilds have become "unlocked", as
the race to complete the new content has started again. It will be interesting to see if the current top guilds stay on top or whether someone new will take over
the #1 position. :) As more information about each boss is released we will be updating our loot tables and working towards making a Sunwell section
on The Vault. We'll also be adding insignias for the new content fairly soon.
Enjoy 2.4!
Clever News Title
3/10/2008 4:30 AM - Ulsoga
It's been a little while since I last made a news update, but that just means I have a lot more to talk about this time around!
We've made quite a few fixes over the past several weeks. A number of issues regarding database optimization were resolved, so the server is able to process the crawler packets more efficiently. A bug that was causing certain guilds to be queued multiple times (thus adding to the queue times) was also fixed. We added in loot integrity checks for Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, so we'll be able to automatically detect and fix errors within these instances. Another adjustment that many of you will be happy to hear about is one with the Add Guild page. A number of you were having problems adding your guilds into the queue. We have pinpointed and fixed the bug that was causing that issue. Just to clarify though, it's certainly possible that you could queue your guild and it still return the message stating that your guild is already in queue. This time it will really mean it though. ;) Some of you have probably already noticed that the tool tips on the insignias have been updated. We went ahead and added in a small blurb of text that better explains how each one is acquired, since there seemed to be some confusion there. There is also a new page that lists out all the possible insignias with details on each one such as what percentage of guilds have obtained them. You can check out that page here. We've been preparing for the much anticipated 2.4 release. We're getting things ready on the back end for the new Sunwell instance. Soon the chains are going to come off and all the starred guilds will be unlocked. The fight to the finish will start again! Along with other 2.4 changes we'll be officially removing Doom Lord Kazzak and Doomwalker from the loot list, since there will be no way to determine whether or not a guild has actually killed these bosses after the patch. It's something we've mentioned doing for quite a long time anyway though. In addition, our crawlers are now gathering a lot more data than before, and we have some cool things in store! Finally I just wanted to note that we're aware of some of the issues with the Armory at the moment. Quite a few characters have been showing up "red" in their guild rosters. This is a combination of both the Armory reporting an error and our crawler not dealing with this error effectively. We will be making the fix to the crawler soon, so that when the error is given our crawler knows to rescan the character again. In most cases a second scan seems to correct the problem. That's it for now!
Insignias
2/01/2008 4:30 AM - Ulsoga
We wrapped up a new mini-feature on the site this evening. On each guild page will be a collection of insignias representing various achievements. They'll be popping up
gradually rather than all at once - it will probably take around 8 hours for all the guilds to be updated. Here is an example of a guild page that has already been
updated: Ludicrous Speed : US Bloodscalp.
Currently there are 12 insignias that can be unlocked, and there are several more in the works. We aren't sharing specific details about how you can earn each one, because we think that part of the fun is trying to figure them out. For the time being most of them will become visible on a guild's page while progressing normally, however we will be adding slightly less obvious themes fairly soon. The insignias don't do anything to boost your score, they're purely a fun way to display your guild's accomplishments on the site. :) I was asking if there was anything else that needed to be mentioned in this update, and I was told that I should mention a walrus. Here's a walrus:
And The Winner Is....
1/28/2008 1:25 AM - Ulsoga
Sorry it took us a little while to get around to posting the winner, but it actually took us a while to decide. We received a ton of really fun entries and
after boiling it down to the final 10 we found that we liked each one for different reasons (which only made the choice harder). Of course in the end only
one remained standing, and that would be the screenshot submitted by Brechnar of The Unspoken on US-Shadow Council. I would say the thing that really stuck with us about this particular entry was
that it involved organization and effort from both factions to get it just right. So congratulations to Shadow Council! Welcome to the daily update queue, there are
leftovers in the fridge.
 We hadn't originally planned on doing this, but one screenshot in particular had us both laughing. We liked it so much that we decided to give them an Honorable Mention. The shot was sent in by Chiara of Milkless on EU-Mannoroth. I don't think the timing of the shot combined with the facial expression could have been any more perfect. As a reward, we decided to add Chiara's guild Milkless to our daily update queue as well! The leftovers are still in the fridge if Shadow Council didn't get to them already.
 There are a couple of small updates to mention as well. One being that we got our first set of crawlers on a European-based server running. The crawlers scan both US and EU realms, but they're able to hit the EU Armory more quickly than some of our US-based crawlers. We also added a new background image (with two color options) to our Seal Builder this evening. Go to your guild page and click on the golden shield to create your own seals and check it out. Some time this week we hope to be making another update with a fun change or two.
Seeing Red
1/17/2008 2:25 AM - Ulsoga
Just a small update to fill people in on a small change we made to the guild pages. We have made it so that characters who
had errors returned from the armory during a scan show up in red on the roster page. Recently the armory has been a little iffy and some
pages don't display right away. After a few attempts the page will often come back up though, so we make sure to scan a player several
times after an initial fail. If the character continues to fail our crawler will flag them and move on. They will be retried again on the
next guild scan.
Some of you probably noticed that we had some downtime yesterday, we needed to do a little work on the backend of things. It's possible that on Saturday we're going to have a few hours of downtime as well. Don't forget to get your last minute entries in for our screenshot contest! We've received a lot of entries but there is still plenty of room for more!
Happy New Year! The Vault's Updated!
1/2/2008 2:57 AM - Ulsoga
I haven't written a news update since just before the holidays, and now that the dust has settled I've got all kinds
of things to bring everyone up to speed on :)
First off we've decided to extend the deadline of the screenshot contest another two weeks.
While we've received quite a few submissions already, we realize that a lot of you may have been busy over the holidays and were unable to get
your entries submitted. The new deadline is 11:59PM (GMT) January 20th, 2008.
We've also made a small change to the guild pages that gives a better indication of their current progress. The instance icons now show
details on which bosses have been cleared and at a glance you can see how many instances they've cleared vs. how many are still in progress.
There are a few more adjustments like this we'll be making to the guild pages soon, in order to make them easier to browse and more
interesting to poke through.
Over the holiday we also fixed the issues with both the Seal Builder and the ability to
add new guilds into the database. Both are now working as intended. Also, if you noticed that your guild has recently vanished from the
ranks (combination of issues with the armory and a bug in our system) you can go to our Add
Guild page to requeue your guild and they will be put back in the ranks during the next update.
Another important issue to bring up is the fact that the Blizzard Armory is currently experiencing problems with scanning characters
on various realms. This of course causes some problems with scanning guilds properly, since the characters within these guilds
are returning errors. We imagine that Blizzard is working on fixing the problem though, so it should be back to normal soon.
Finally, one of the things I'm most excited to report... The Vault has been updated! Holy blackened
basilisk, Batman - it's true! We've now got it set up so that all of the data will refresh once a week. Zul'aman statistics and information
have been added to The Vault as well.
Speaking of ZA, we've dramatically scaled down the values of the bosses within this instance. All of the scores in our system have already
been adjusted to reflect the change.
I think that's about it for now!
Contested Territory
12/16/2007 3:22 AM - Ulsoga
Now that the crawlers are running (and quite fast so long as the armory is responding) we've decided to hold a contest!
 Your entire realm can have a shot at being added to our daily update queue. For more information, check out the contest details page. We're eager to see what the different realms can come up with for our screenshot challenge and we're sure at least a few of you would be eager to get daily WowJutsu scans. So put your heads together and send us something awesome! :D On another topic entirely, I wanted to mention the cluster of Illidan kills that took place during our recent downtime. Most of you probably know that your score becomes locked after you've cleared the BC content, so having such a delay between scans meant that quite a few guilds were locked at the wrong rank. We'd like to correct this problem and we're asking that people write in to us with the correct dates for these Illidan kills. Just drop us an email and be sure to include Illidan somewhere in the subject line. Don't forget to mention the region (US or EU), realm name, guild name, and the date of your original kill. I also want to take a moment to thank all of the awesome people that are running crawlers for us. WowJutsu isn't a company or organization, it's just a community project pulled together by a couple of people that love to play WoW. If it wasn't for the handful of friends and family members running these crawlers, we definitely wouldn't be able to keep up with all of this data. So thanks you guys! :D All Data Moved!
12/10/2007 6:02 AM PM - Ulsoga
It took longer than expected to transfer the site over to the new server, which really shouldn't have been
too surprising considering how much information our site logs. All of the data is now moved over to the
new server and the final tweakings are taking place before it's active. It's very close!
Transition In Progress
12/07/2007 4:13 PM - Ulsoga
The new server is purchased and everything is being set up to transfer the site's data over. You've probably
noticed that the crawlers are not running at this time. They will need to be down until we have everything
moved over, which will likely be some time tonight or tomorrow. Egbert thanks you for waiting! Well,
actually Egbert used to thank people for making Paypal donations back when the donate button was available.
Since we took the button down poor Egbert has been sitting alone in an image folder waiting for more people to
thank. Now he'll thank people for being patient!
 Changing Hosting Services
12/06/2007 5:20 PM - Ulsoga
Our current hosting service is not able to handle the high amount of pressure created by WowJutsu. You've
probably noticed that the site has gone down a few times and that we've had a handful of database errors
pop up. We've decided that it's time to upgrade and move to a more reliable service with a dedicated server.
We're really excited because this change should make a number of things with the site run more smoothly. The
transition will be taking place soon (within the next few days) so there will be some downtime. Have no fear
though - when WowJutsu returns it will be healthier and happier (and have had all of its vaccinations). :)
Bizarre Resurrection
12/04/2007 9:49 AM - Ulsoga
You may have noticed that some old/disbanded guilds have begun to show up in the ranks again. This is the
result of a new "check" that we're testing. The check will allow the system to more intelligently disband
inactive guilds. We will be removing the problem guilds from the ranks this evening, but in the meantime
they may still continue to pop up here and there.
Blizzard Armory Down
12/04/2007 3:48 AM - Ulsoga
It appears that the Blizzard armory is down for maintenance. With the armory not working properly, the
US/Oceanic guilds cannot be updated. I suspect, however, that Blizzard will have this issue resolved
shortly. EU realms appear to be scanning normally at this time.
Update on the Updates: Part 2
12/04/2007 1:14 AM - Ulsoga
Our changes have held strong overnight and the crawlers are currently plowing through the old data. We brought
up a few new crawlers to try and get through the backlogged guilds in better time. The number of updates happening
per hour/day at the moment is looking really good so far. You can view the update page for yourself here:
Armory Crawler Progress.
With the bug fixes, we've also altered the order in which guilds are scanned. While we always have the system scan
the oldest guilds in the system first, we're also now grouping guild updates by realm. This means all of the scans
on a realm should be happening much closer together.
Many of you are wondering when we will bring the manual update page back up for use. There isn't really a specific
time that I can provide, but I can say that it will be made available again once the backlogged data is... well..
not backlogged. This could be as long as one week or as little as two days. At any rate it shouldn't be too far off,
but in the meantime we need to make sure everything is in order before allowing people to put any more pressure
on queue times.
On the subject of emails - quite a few of you have emailed in (some more than once) asking about the slow
updates, and as much as I would love to respond to everyone I just won't be able to. Please continue to submit any
bug reports that you come across as well as suggestions for the site. However if you're ever wondering what's going
on with the crawler, this notes page is probably your best place to check. We try to keep everyone updated when we've
noticed a problem. :)
I also want to mention that we will be adjusting the point values for the bosses in Zul'Aman. We currently
believe that the kills for this instance are valued too high, so we will be lowering the figures to make it more
balanced.
Update on the Updates
12/03/2007 1:10 AM - Ulsoga
Ok, it took a few days but we've finally pinpointed the bug that was causing the guild updates to get so backed up.
We've made some fixes, optimized a couple of things here and there, and the scans seem to be running normally
at this point. Since the crawlers got backed up, it will be several days before everything "catches up".
It is also worth noting that there are currently issues with accessing the European armory, so the EU scans are
running slower than usual. This is not something we can do anything about but I imagine the issue will subside
shortly.
In addition to crawler status updates, I wanted to mention that we're going to be updating
The Vault soon. We recognize that it's been a while since the data was
refreshed, but we need to make a few changes to the system before we can get that going. Soon though!
Thanks again for everyone being so patient. :)
Holy Slow Updates, Batman!
11/29/2007 2:42 AM - Ulsoga
Just a quick news post to let everyone know that we're aware of the sluggish update speeds
right now. We're working hard to correct the problem and hope to have things functioning
normally very soon. Thanks for your patience!
Update 11/29/2007 4:35 AM -Ulsoga: We have temporarily disabled the ability to manually add guilds to the queue
until we've managed to trim down some of these delays. You can still add new guilds to the
database with this feature. In the mean time please sit tight while we continue to resolve
the issue!
Guild Update Times
11/15/2007 1:45 PM - Ulsoga
This is just a reminder to everyone that each guild updates about once every 7
days. The exceptions to the rule are the top 500 US guilds, the top 500 EU guilds, and
all guilds on Bloodscalp (US) which
get updated daily. Any of the "starred" guilds that have completed BC content
are excluded from the daily update list so that more relevant guilds can have
the advantage of quick scans.
If your guild hasn't been updated in 4 or more days, you have the option of manually
adding your guild to the crawler queue here: Update Your Guild
Shaman T6 Loot Error
11/15/2007 3:37 AM - Ulsoga
By now most people are aware of the in-game bug involving tier 6 resto shaman gear.
Naturally this caused some discrepancies in our system, so we had to make adjustments
to correct it. All T6 resto shaman gear received over the past 48 hours is being deleted
from our system. This change is affecting 161 players across 117 guilds, for a total
of 588 items. Any of the legitimately acquired loot will show up in the new scans and
the ranks will be restored. Until we're certain that Blizzard has fixed the problem, it's
possible that we'll need to do this process again.
It's also worth noting that the European Armory is currently experiencing some problems,
therefore our system is unable to scan EU guilds. We're hoping that Blizzard gets it
running smoothly again soon, but in the meantime we'll only be able to update the
US/Oceanic realms.
Zul'Aman is here!
11/13/2007 5:46 AM - Ulsoga
With the release of the new instance Zul'Aman, we have updated the site to include
the new loot tables. Guilds that have "completed" BC content will not be unlocked for
this instance, so nobody will be losing their place at the top. With so little information
currently available on ZA, you may see some errors while more loot information becomes
available to us.
Coinciding with this release we have also revamped all of the
WowJutsu guild pages. Some of the new features on these pages include:
Recent EU Guilds Vanishing Act
10/27/2007 5:45 AM - Ulsoga
Recently a number of guilds from the EU realms went missing from the ranks. This was
due to to the fact that the European armory was temporarily unavailable for a few days,
causing an error when the guilds were scanned.
We've re-queued all the guilds that were affected during those days, so each one should
be visible on the site now. We're working towards a fix that will prevent this problem
from happening in the future.
Fixing some progression problems
10/1/2007 2:21 AM - Ulsoga
We ran some filters across all the guilds in the system tonight to hopefully address a lot
of the current progression problems and help lessen the impact of people PUGing raids. A
total of 3,266 guilds were affected by this process. These filters will also automatically
be run as guilds are updated through the day.
Unfortunately, due to the changes some guilds that are members of raiding alliances
will very likely take a large hit to their score, as from the filters perspective each
guild in the alliance usually has impossible progression. On the bright side though, we
do plan to add true support for simple raiding alliances though, and hope
to have something available in the coming weeks. But for now we needed to fix a lot of
the mess in order to have a clean slate as we move forward.
If your guild is not part of a raiding alliance and you think that legitimate loot has
been inappropriately disabled from your guild then please contact us.
For the curious, these are our current filters (processed per-guild):
We wanted to keep the list small for now, and centered on progression points that are essentially impossible to go around, and also ones where it's very unlikely that players would disenchant all of the loot. Introducing The Vault!
9/17/2007 12:09 PM - Ulsoga
After a lot of time and effort, we're eager to release our newest feature addition to WowJutsu - The Vault.
In a few words, The Vault is simply a compilation of unique statistics mined from the site's database. It provides you with information about how
loot is distributed amongst specific classes, allowing you to drill down even further to find out which items are desirable amongst a specific class spec.
Keep checking back as we'll be tacking on even more interesting information as time goes by. As always we appreciate any and all feedback; if you've got
something to say drop us a line at feedback@wowjutsu.com.
Also many thanks to some of the people that helped organize all of this data, including Sleepingspud and Ghond of Ludicrous Speed, Felstriker of Promethean, and
my mom (human spell checker!) from... well, her house. Other great folks (Aladocious, Aurasuavis, Madula, Mojombo, Oxley, and Tanindreal) from Ludicrous Speed were kind enough to pose for screenshots used in some of The Vault headers. ;)
Enjoy!
Some more server problems
9/13/2007 10:09 AM
The site was down for quite a while yesterday / this morning due to a botched server upgrade. It seems to be
running okay for the most part now, but we may have intermittent Internal Server Errors as things are adjusted
to the new server.
So due to these problems the daily updates are happening later than normal today.
Server problems / disbanded guilds
9/6/2007 3:43 AM
Yesterday we ran into some server problems during the day that you may have encountered
while trying to add a guild or use the seal builder. These should hopefully be addressed now.
Disbanded guilds: We just ran our first pass of automatic disbanded / inactive guild
detection and flagged roughly 2000 guilds this way. If you notice that your guild
is suddenly not showing up in the listings then please send us a mail at feedback@wowjutsu.com
since it may be that your guild was incorrectly flagged.
Manual guild updates
8/31/2007 9:40 AM -Aspir
I've added the ability to update an already existing guild to the Add Guild page.
For now we only allow updates on guilds that haven't been updated in at least 4 days (as indicated by the "Date Indexed"
field on the guild's page). Click here to add or update your guild now.
Also: The various CAPTCHA issues people were having on that page should be resolved now.
On another note, we've been getting a lot more e-mails recently and are reaching the point
where we won't be able to respond to all of them. We do read them all though, and will respond
to as many as we can.
Crawler update: Just to note that with the recent crawler changes speed is improving, but the
problems are certainly not all solved yet. There are still guilds who haven't been updated in
some time, and the overall speed needs to improve a little more before it can keep up with
the load. Things are, however, much better than they were over the past couple of weeks.
Quick update
8/30/2007 2:28 AM -Aspir
Just a quick update:
The new crawlers are shaping up nicely now, and after resolving various performance
issues, they are steadily working down the list of old guilds. I'm continuing to
monitor their performance and adjust their parameters with the aim to balance their
update speed such that the site can keep its data current while playing nicely
with the Blizzard armory servers.
Once I have all this crawler stuff fully stabalized I'll get to work on some of the
pending features on my plate. One of the first on this list is to add a way for
people to manually request guild updates. Another popular one has been to add PVP/PVE
indicators to realms, along with ranking filters for them.
New crawler running
8/24/2007 1:34 AM -Aspir
I've got two instances of the new crawler running and things seem to be going
smoothly, however it appears that as of this evening both the US and EU armories
are having problems, so I've had to basically stop indexing completely due to
this. Hopefully it clears up by the morning.
I'll probably want to continue monitoring the crawlers for another day before
bringing up another one.
New crawler status update
8/21/2007 9:48 AM -Aspir
I apologize for the recent slow armory updates. I know there's a lot of guilds
who haven't been updated in over a week (7000 of them!), but things look on course
to have the update issues resolved this week:
Last night I finished most of the work on the new crawler, and my initial tests
showed a very nice speed increase. I expect to bring one of the new crawlers live
later tonight. I'll probably only run one of them for a day so I can monitor its
behavior, then once that checks out I'll start bringing up additional crawlers
to deal with the load.
Note: Along with the normal daily updates, today I forced an update on any guilds
within the top 10 ranks on their realm that hadn't been updated in over 7 days.
This update will probably still be running for several more hours, but will
guarantee that each realm is at least getting some updates.
Slow armory crawling
8/16/2007 8:36 AM -Aspir
We're aware of the continuing problem with guild updates running slowly (some guilds
lagging behind by as much as 10 days) and have been working diligently to improve the
situation. We hope to be running some preliminary tests of the new crawler this weekend,
and then push it into production sometime next week.
Please bear with us.
Now Entering: European Rankings
8/8/2007 4:30 AM -Aspir
Good news! Initial EU realms are now integrated into the site. Near the top of most pages you should
now see links to swap between US and EU modes.
There's still a number of error guilds that we are working through (guild/server transfers that
happened before we started scanning), but I think the data set is a little cleaner than the US
data was on release. If you don't see your guild in the list, remember you can add it by going to the Add Guild page.
Now for the bad news... With twice as many guilds to update we can't keep up with reindexing the top
1000 guilds of each region every night. So for now this will be reduced to the top 500 from each
region - our apologies to those who were striving for the daily updates.
We have some changes in
the works that will drastically improve the time it takes to index all guilds, and
hopefully we can start getting this going in the coming weeks. Once the iteration time is back to
a decent rate we'll increase the number of daily updated guilds again.
Please feel free to send any comments, bug reports, or questions here: feedback@wowjutsu.com.
Big score changes incoming...
8/4/2007 9:01 PM -Aspir
I've just finished making some changes to the scoring system. The point values for each
boss are now based on statistical information from the site, with a couple of small
adjustments (such as making final bosses of an instance worth slightly more than the
other bosses in the instance).
It'll be several hours before everything is updated. Also note that to go along with these changes I've reduced the minimum score needed to be ranked down to 10.
Here are the specifics for those who are curious:
"Add Your Guild" and a couple small updates
7/31/2007 2:50 AM -Aspir
We've finally gotten to adding a page where people can manually add their guild
to the database. The number of e-mails we were getting was getting to be pretty
unwieldy, taking up more time every night just to go through and get all the
guilds added. Check it out here.
This change should reduce the number of e-mails we need to go through
significantly. On that note, I apologize if you have sent in an e-mail that hasn't
been responded to yet. We do try to respond to each one, but sometimes things get
lost in the mix.
Faction filters: You'll notice on most ranking pages you now have options to filter the list so you
can choose whether to see all the guilds, Horde only, or Alliance only.
EU update: European support is coming along well, and I should be ready to release it next week.
Seal Builder & Other Things
7/24/2007 3:30 PM -Aspir
We've just recently wrapped up work on the WowJutsu Seal Builder:
Boast your guild's achievements by embellishing your website or forum with a custom WowJutsu seal! The image of
your choice will be automatically update as your rank changes, so there is no need to recreate the seal.
Click here to read more about the Seal Builder. On other news, you'll notice that there is now a Battlegroups link across the top navbar. This provides an overview of progression across each US battlegroup. We have horde/alliance filtering in place as well, but we'll need a little more time before it's hooked up to the site properly. Update on EU status The EU crawl is nearing completion (75% done). We had some slowdowns last week where we couldn't crawl the EU armory at all for several days, but it's up and kicking again and we're making our way through the remaining guilds. I'm hopeful to have the remaining data collected by the end of the week, but we'll have a little work to do before it's ready to be presented on the site... so I can't give a specific date. US rankings now linked from realm pages
7/18/2007 3:27 AM -Aspir
Just as the title suggests, I've now made it so a guild's US rank is displayed on the realm's index page,
and clicking on it takes you to the appropriate page of the US rankings. This will hopefully make it a
lot easier to locate your guild. The color coding of the links is just meant to give a quick glimpse of
where the guild stands overall, and the breakdown is:
1,000,000 Page Views!
7/16/2007 3:51 PM -Ulsoga
We'd like to thank all of the people that are continually supporting the site. Right now we're at 100,000 unique visitors and the site has only been up for 2 weeks. To give you an idea
of just how people that is I made this graphical representation out of 100,000 dots:
Well, I guess it doesn't look to impressive because I stacked all the dots on top of eachother to save space - but if you could look at it from the side it would be really tall! So again, thank you to all of the visitors that continue to check back and provide us with invaluable feedback. On the subject of feedback, we encourage everyone to report errors that they notice in the database. We're going through and manually adjusting any discrepancies that we find. E-mails can be sent to feedback@wowjutsu.com. Armory crawl
7/10/2007 6:05 PM -Aspir
The US armory has started to act up recently from what I'm assuming are patch-day related issues, so I'll just be crawling the EU armory for the rest of the day. Hopefully I can continue with the US crawl tomorrow.
Update 7/11/2007 2:32 AM -Aspir: The Armory is responsive so I've got the US crawler running once again. Today's updates will be lagging behind slightly due to the outage.
Armory crawler progress and recent changes
7/10/2007 7:46 AM -Aspir
I put together a page recently that some of you may be interested in: Armory Crawler Progress. The page refreshes every minute to show the latest 50 guilds that the WowJutsu crawler has indexed.
Here's a brief rundown of the fields you'll see on the page:
Note that a guild's status won't be reflected in the overall / realm indexes until those pages are refreshed, which is usually once every few hours. In addition, I have begun my initial crawl of the European armory. These results won't show up in the above page, but they are happening. The first crawl always takes the longest, and the EU armory seems slower than the US one (perhaps just latency), so I probably won't be finished with it for another week or two. In the meantime I have plenty of stuff in store, and should be releasing some more goodies later this week! As always, feel free to direct any feedback, questions, or suggestions to feedback@wowjutsu.com. Some recent updates
7/6/2007 10:51 AM -Aspir
To everyone who has written me their thanks in regard to the site: Thanks right back to ya! I'm glad and surprised so many people are enjoying the site this much!
Quick update on recent changes:
WowJutsu launch and first bug fix
7/4/2007 4:21 AM -Aspir
Yesterday was the official launch day of Wowjutsu and I must say I'm really taken back with how well it was received! I hope to continue to shape the site into something that people will find useful. Thanks!
On another note, I fixed the problem that people had noticed where guilds / players with extended characters in their names weren't being indexed. I'm regenerating the affected parties now.
Introducting WowJutsu (Beta)
7/2/2007 1:12 AM -Aspir
I've been working on this site in my off time for probably going on 2 months now. It started one evening after my guild, Ludicrous Speed from Bloodscalp, downed Gruul for the first time and the other officers and I began to wonder, "Where does this put us in guild rankings on our server?". At the time the PVE progression thread on the Bloodscalp forums wasn't being actively updated. Anyways, I got the idea to use the World of Warcraft Armory to help create a site that could rank guilds without them needing to manually submit their progression status.
That was the start of it, and here now after many late evenings after work and weekends, I finally have it at the point where I'm happy to have the general public take a look.
I also wanted to send out a special thanks to Katherine Dinger (Ulsoga) for all the artwork (everything non-blizzard is her stuff), and to the rest of the Ludicrous Speed leadership for their feedback as I was developing this (Notably: Edghar, Fammy, and Ghond) -- Thanks guys!!
The site is still under development, but hopefully some will find it useful as is.
Feel free to direct any feedback, questions, or suggestions to feedback@wowjutsu.com.
The Burning Crusade and World of Warcraft are registered
trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Certain graphics are owned by Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Item links provided by Wowhead. © 2007 WowJutsu |
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