While going through a redesign of my homepage, I went through the process of trying to figure out what I'd like to include in the "Gaming" section of the site. Given that my game of choice right now is World of Warcraft and my gaming platform of choice is Steam, I figured adding feeds for both would be easy, especially considering that I already have a World of Warcraft API of my own.

Well, maybe not.

For the front page of my site, I'd like to include the three latest activities in WoW. You can see a list of such activities exists on WoW's community site. You would think that something like this would be easily reproducible, either via an RSS feed or using an API. Indeed, if you search for this page on Google, it will count the number of items for you, indicating that it must be a feed of some kind. But try plugging that URL into an RSS reader and you get the official World of Warcraft blog.

Worse, the Blizzard Community API offers no such method to obtain such information. In order to get the information, you'd have to scrape it from the screen, which is a violation of Blizzard's API policy. Even worse, this data used to be available from the old WoW Armory, something I had in LibWowArmory while it was still in beta.

How am I supposed to present this data on my website if Blizzard doesn't allow me to get it from the one and only source that exists?

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of awesome things that you can do with the current community API that you couldn't do before, including obtaining statistics about auctions, get information about character and guild achievements, and much, much more. I do some of this already with Cheevos FTW!.

But a character feed should be mind-numbingly simple. And by that, I mean it should take a skilled developer at most a day's worth of work to get this programmed, tested, and deployed, especially within a system as well-developed as the API currently is. What is so wrong with the development process for the Blizzard API that this doesn't exist yet?

Character feeds aren't the only thing Blizzard hasn't reproduced that can no longer be accessed. Calendars for players and guilds and guild bank logs used to be obtainable using authentication on the Armory, even if you had an authenticator. I had it working 100% in LibWowAPI and was ready to do some amazing things with that data for my guild. Now I can't, and that's truly a shame.

Steam is another platform I'd love to be able to use to show off my gaming adventures. Steam, too, has an API that you can use to obtain information from them. So, let's get a list of my most recent achievements across all of my games.

Turns out I can't. The only place a player's achievements are listed is through links on their games list. Sure, you can add an ?xml=1 to the URL to get some XML data from each page, but there's the kicker... "each page". There is no single location that Steam lists all of a single player's achievements across all games, thus forcing me to go game by game to get the XML I need to generate my list. I have 29 games on Steam. This means I have to send 29 HTTP requests just to get my latest Steam achievements. That is ridiculous, and would slow down my web site considerably to try and load this on demand.

Being a programmer by trade, I know that what I want is possible to do. If I were creating a game, I know this would be a key feature that I'd make sure was just as polished as the product itself. It baffles me that two of the largest gaming companies in the world are missing this. We're in a day and age on the Internet where gaming data that allows players to make awesome community content should be expected, and not just a bonus perk of playing the game. While I think that both Valve and Blizzard recognize this and are taking steps in the right direction to create such APIs, they both have a long way to go to make a complete API that is simple to use and contains features that developers actually will want to have.

Comments

Unknown
Posted
I agree. I've been wanting to build a checklist app for LOTRO for a while, using a feed like what is available on my.lotro.com, but there is nothing available. Anything entered into the my app would have to be entered manually, which throws the ease of use for my app in the trash.

If it's available on the game's site, make it available via API or RSS.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

I'm fact that's what Lingo needs: a "phone" block. The clue is an incorrect autocorrected form of the answer. ๐Ÿ™ƒ

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

It's like my phone knows I've been playing Lingo. I typed in "exited" and my phone was all:

โฌœ๏ธ EXCITED ------
โ–ช๏ธ
โ–ช๏ธ

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

@arborelia Bag-les.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

A comparison of the classic Tetris and Descent communities. Not a post I write lightly, either.

roncli.com/blogger/37031578090

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martin
@luftlesen @mstdn.jp

Aptiz played #Pentis again. In the beginning you can see roncli asking in the chat for the right version. About an hour later, he broke the #PentisRankings record with 60K ! Congratulations roncli ๐Ÿ† ๐ŸŽ‰
twitch.tv/videos/2052528360?sr

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Yeah, it's season 11. But the OTL Season 6 highlight reel is up, this time Fireball has taken the reins! Check out this video jam packed full of kills, deaths, silliness, and Sirius puns. youtube.com/watch?v=SXstLVjnaG

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Over on , someone retweeted sympathy for the people being laid off today...

...and then said that Amazon Games was hiring. You know, the one that just had layoffs in NOVEMBER.

Honestly? Tech sucks right now.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Seriously. Why is it called Sagittarius, A Star? Clearly, it's Sagittarius, A Black Hole. Silly astronomers.

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Cultural Historian: Dr. RGST
@DrRGST @mastodon.social
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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

This eslint/stylistic breakup is going to give me a headache. Don't developers have something better to do than give other developers busywork?

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Bing is so bad. otl.gg is being blocked in their search results, and Bing webmaster tools are absolutely useless, not telling me why it's being blocked.

Does anyone know of some way to get a human to look at this and see what's wrong with it?

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Olivia W'
@WLivi @retro.pizza

it's not actually common for real hackers to use two keyboards at once; that's just a stereo type.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

I got my wish. ๐Ÿค’

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Me and my wife, despite buying a house of nice size, always seem to get in each other's way, be it in the kitchen, on the stairs, it doesn't matter. She's all up in my two square feet.

I often joke that all I want for Christmas is my two square feet.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Update 2: The record that beat Blue Scuti stood for one day. Blue Scuti got it back.

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๐ŸŒช MikeMathia.com ๐Ÿ“ก
@mikemathia @ioc.exchange

#C++

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Update: This record stood for 1 day.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

I got the honor and privilege of calling the NES Tetris NTSC world record today while running Classic Tetris Wars on my Twitch channel for the very first time. It was thrilling. Congratulations to Blue Scuti for his 6,609,220 level 153 performance. clips.twitch.tv/DiligentDeadGo

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Yogthos
@yogthos @mas.to
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TwistBit
@TwistBit @musicians.today

like, you used to use a phone line to access the internet

now the internet is accessible on your phone

nothing has changed actually

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Six Degrees of Sunday returns Sunday, January 7th, at twitch.tv/roncli. Cya there!

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Are you ready to get Six'd Off?

Six Degrees of Sunday, my 6DoF long play Twitch series, is getting revived for 2024. Plus, I will be producing Six'd Off, a companion YouTube series showcasing each game.

Check out the announcement for the game list and more! youtube.com/watch?v=yeRbjjpQVZ

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

So I started a fresh YouTube channel some time ago, and yesterday I released the first real video to it.

Check out highlights from Argus Industrial Moons' run to the OTL Season 10 Best of the Rest title! youtube.com/watch?v=Z2x-GGW9FY

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

I guess that qualifies as a "log"...

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

People at work are calling Kubernetes K8, and I hate it. It's not "Kubernete"!

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Want a preview of what CTWC will be like next weekend from a gameplay perspective? CTL Season 22 finals starting now.

twitch.tv/classictetrisleague

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

No airport hell this morning, but you know that lady that talks about security at literally every airport? I just realized, she sounds old AF.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

If this security line posted signs "5 minutes from this point", "10 minutes...", etc., They'd have to post them every foot.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

I'm sorry, what?

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Robin Ward
@eviltrout @carpdiem.online
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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Did I miss Elon making another purchase? twitter.com/unity/status/17016

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Konstantinos Dimopoulos
@konstantinosd @mastodon.gamedev.place

That's a lovely free bundle of books for people interested in getting into games programming: fanatical.com/en/bundle/intern

#gamedev #book #free #programming

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

Use TypeScript they said. It'll be better they said.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

If you know, you know.

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

@shanselman Speaking of Overload, here's something you may be interested in... recently, some community members released "Overload First Strike", a single player Overload campaign that is a complete remake of the original Descent First Strike campaign.

overloadmaps.com/overload-firs

It can work with just the original game, but it works best with "olmod" as it takes advantage of some of the features it provides: olmod.overloadmaps.com

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Scott Hanselman ๐Ÿ‘ธ๐Ÿฝ๐Ÿ๐ŸŒฎ
@shanselman @hachyderm.io

@PossiblyMax @deepthaw ya and there are new remakes of Descent like Overload that are enhanced and thereโ€™s even hardware that Vic Putz made to make the Space Orb look like a controller with NO drivers. Works on all operating systems hanselman.com/blog/bringing-th

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

I don't know who wrote this, but MORE PATCH NOTES LIKE THIS PLEASE. ๐Ÿคฃ

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

First OTL flag capture in 7 seasons, and it was a game winner. clips.twitch.tv/PeppyFitOrange

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Ronald M. Clifford
@roncli @mastodon.social

I could buy a nice amount of coffee with this!

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