To those that don't know (I didn't) this is leaderboard functionality. It shows things like characters levels, classes, deaths, max hits, tradeskills, etc etc. Really neat stuff that they track for their other games. This really needs to exist for EQ. Would be fun to see who's at the top and where you stand. Doubly so for progression servers. Just learned it exists for eq2. EQ2wire is an example of a site that consumes that api for eq2 and displays tables of what's going on.
Does it work out okay for EQ2 or are people looking that site up to decide who they are going to invite into their groups just like the WoW elitists? Genuine question.
It really does not need to exist for EQ. Maybe if they did a remastered EQ then it would be a realistic option. As it is I prefer the Dev time to focus on fixing and maintaining the game. New expansions are nice each year also.
Magelo is probably the closest thing you're going to get, but only a handful of people use it. However, it only tracks gear/character stats/achievements.
Yeah, have seen that at some point. If they exposed a small api to just allow that to be all chars that'd be a start. I think the whole thing would be awesome for TLPs because you could push it as far as you want and it would save that TLPs history even when they drop some new TLP and end the one you're on. Kind of a posterity thing for TLPs. Would be a nice addition, especially if you're someone like me that tends to get lured in to them fairly commonly. Would be nice to at least push for something that is etched in time and not just wiped away with the next server merge..
Yeah, have seen that at some point. If they exposed a small api to just allow that to be all chars that'd be a start. I think the whole thing would be awesome for TLPs because you could push it as far as you want and it would save that TLPs history even when they drop some new TLP and end the one you're on. Kind of a posterity thing for TLPs. Would be a nice addition, especially if you're someone like me that tends to get lured in to them fairly commonly. Would be nice to at least push for something that is etched in time and not just wiped away with the next server merge..
I think they actually had that in EQ1 for the first original progression-server(Combine?) where you could see how far each guild was in progression, it was integrated with eqplayers back then iirc. No need for third-party leaderboards/magelo. I thought it was neat.
For grouping it doesn't really matter in EQ2 right now, the game is almost entirely dead outside of logging in to raid and even when its not dead, heroics tend to be nerfed so much its tank and spank 2-3 months after expansion launches. But for guild recruitment and raid progression its almost impossible to run a guild or organize anything without the EQ2 API. EQ2 has so many adornments (runes), gear requirements, attunement requirements (some times), achievement tracking such as flags, flawless kills and shorthanded, 370 AA points (you cant just learn all AA's) and 8 tiers of each ability where you are required at least "expert" quality to do heroic and most guilds requires Grandmaster quality for raids, the 6th best tier, that without the API that needs to be spent correctly running a guild would be full time job. I would have quit EQ2 years ago if it wasn't for Feldon and his eq2u site.
Kinda. Its just a lot easier to manage in EQ2 because with some simple xml you can have a spreadsheet of everyone in your guild and quickly see what players need instead of manually doing it all. Litteraly takes one update of census (the eq2 api) and you know what kind of gear, spell quality and flags your entire guild (or anyone in the game that has not disabled census for the character) has.
That would make it a lot easier. From what i've seen of eq1 live it's really the same level of complexity. Would probably help.
That's E Q Baby has our own version of this that Kubat built in to our Skynet site, and it does make guild management way easier. Our Skynet site tracks all progression relevant to our current expansion, the only big difference being that it relies on the members updating all of their progression (which they are typically very good at keeping their char updated) through discord bot commands instead of an automated census API. We use an automated split/raid group builder that posts the splits/groups in to discord at the beginning of each night, so Kubat had to end up building a system like this for it to split properly which also doubled as a way to easily track progression. Obviously progression/gear/weapons/aa etc is not as complex in these expansions, but it is still insanely useful already as it tracks every single thing relevant to our expansion, and will become even more useful in later expansions. It auto splits up warriors based on gear/aa, splits up dps based on parses, bane weapons etc so that every split is about as equal in gear and raid dps as you can get it. Splits up Arx keys and coth bots for raids those are relevant in. Even splits up DKP so that one raid doesn't end up with all the whales while another raid has a bunch of broke people. Can see who has flags/keys and who doesn't with a click of a button or discord command. I remember the absolute biggest time saver being the early weeks of classic when not everyone was fully sky keyed. It would auto split up all the people who were keyed/not keyed based on the number of available keys per island so that we were able to maximize the keying progression for all members, instead of having to take forever to manually do it.
Nice! Be sure to take snapshots of the data. Maybe even create a timeline of each person's progression over time. Let me float a new idea.. Heirlooms or maybe just (at a minimum) even titles for progression servers. Based on what you achieved in the previous server. This would be a very nice addition for those of us that seem to be in the TLP server grind and might actually finally cause the starting from scratch again mode to start making sense. Where you carry over something from one to the next. I dunno, maybe like prizes or something that you achieve on a TLP that you can take with you to the next one, maybe something like adding /claim items to your list when you achieve certain things in a prog server. Nothing game breaking but useful and fun things. This may be a bit edge but maybe make all first spawns of every boss (or maybe even every type of mob) drop something unique that becomes a claim. Didn't get Djarn's "stave of enlightenment" on this server, try again on the next. There are so many fun things that could be done with this kind of historical functionality and it would finally create some purpose for the TLP grind besides krono farming.
Even just adding a more detailed record in game that you could echo out in say mode to confirm things like total deaths, max hits, zones visited, having traded or not traded with another person, etc,etc would allow for better custom "builds" that I've seen people start doing like hardcore mode and ironman modes.
It existed before. It was called EQ Players and it was problematic from the start and removed after a short period of time.
I think the issue is that EQ1 character data is still largely a blob. Even if its been moved from the old flat files to a database, the bulk of your characters information is one huge blob of data. Its just not easily looked up en masse. They built the EQ2 back-end better and you can run those types of queries without much/any impact on the servers. If I remember right, even EQPlayers wasn't reading it directly, but rather would be "updated" so it wasn't quite live data. It was better then nothing for sure, but I wouldn't hold my breath for anything like the EQ2 system unless they overhaul the backend totally. (which, they should!)
They had this. It was called EQPlayers. Nobody used it or cared about it. It became so disused, practically no-one noticed when the Commodore 64 running it was unplugged.
These are different times. I would use it and I know others that would use it. Of course it would need to keep some good info and stats to be useful. Also sounds like the old iteration had issues.
