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Wowhead, What happened!
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Post by
carrus
Are there any updates or timelines as to when certain functions may be available? Anything information would be helpful.
Profiler not working or working sporadically
Panderia quest items not showing in item searches
Wowhead Client issues
Incorrect Panderia tooltips
For me, the Profiler and Item Search functionality are my main tools. Just looking for a glimmer of hope.
Thanks!
Post by
Ashelia
It seems like you went down feedback and took a list of what people have reported which is always good to take with a grain of salt :) The client always has issues, they are usually user specific at this point (i.e. someone's OS isn't playing nice). Our tooltips are right, we actually just spent a couple days figuring out a formula for dynamic trinkets which is something new and complex Blizzard added in MoP.
But the profiler is not being updated to be MoP compliant at this point and it is bottom on our priority list. I'm sorry to have to be the one to say that to you, though I have posted it in other threads. It sucks, but it was getting less than .1% of our traffic pre-expansion, and simply isn't a priority.
The quest items are on our list to see why they don't show associated to a quest, however, they do appear in search results:
http://www.wowhead.com/items=4?filter=qu=2;ty=2;minle=390
For example. :)
Post by
tailcat
But the profiler is not being updated to be MoP compliant at this point and it is bottom on our priority list. I'm sorry to have to be the one to say that to you, though I have posted it in other threads. It sucks, but it was getting less than .1% of our traffic pre-expansion, and simply isn't a priority.
Thats because most everyone had cataclysm done quests and stuff a long time ago, traffic post last expansion would have been a better determining factor.(##RESPBREAK##)12##DELIM##Sas148##DELIM##
Post by
Ashelia
But the profiler is not being updated to be MoP compliant at this point and it is bottom on our priority list. I'm sorry to have to be the one to say that to you, though I have posted it in other threads. It sucks, but it was getting less than .1% of our traffic pre-expansion, and simply isn't a priority.
Thats because most everyone had cataclysm done quests and stuff a long time ago, traffic post last expansion would have been a better determining factor.
Traffic at the beginning of Cataclysm was horrible for it too. It has consistently gotten less than .1% of our traffic since inception, it was never a popular feature and it simply doesn't have things many people use. The group who uses it are very devout and we understand that which makes it a hard choice to choose to not work on it--but when ~2k people use it a week and something like 2 million visit our site a day, it's harder to justify the developer time to update it over the database. :(
Post by
595528
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
lney308
Ashelia:
I appreciate your honesty though I am sad to learn that you guys are no longer interested in keeping the complete site up to date and working. I have been trying to decide if I want to continue to support this site with my dollars (I get fewer $ each month and must make some hard decisions). Since the profiler (keeping track of my gear, completion on mounts, quests, achievements, etc.) is the reason I became a paying member, I guess my decision has been made for me. I just renewed a few days ago, but won't renew again. I will keep checking back to see if anything changes (like Tuviah's suggestion above) and of course will use the site if I get lost in-world, but that alone is not worth my dollars - too many other sites offer the same.
I guess being a member of the .1% has its drawbacks. :(
~H
Post by
tailcat
I agree with lney308 the only reason I have paid any money for wowhead is the profiler.
Post by
394655
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
cyclonus98
Also like lney308, the profiler was the reason I continued to use this site. It was also the reason I became a premium member. Just because you are not getting 2 mil hits to the profiler does not make it a valid reason to push it to the bottom of the pile. It's been at the bottom of the pile for quite some time. I see no reason to accept this type of laziness, its bad enough i get it from blizzard! "
The group who uses it are very devout and we understand that which makes it a hard choice to choose to not work on it
" It Shames me to even read something like this.
Post by
Sas148
You have to understand from a business perspective. It sucks that it comes down to resources and money but that's how a business works... if only a few people, even passionate people, are using something that would take a great deal of time to fix or update then it's just not practical for a company to invest money into it.
Unfortunately, the programmers are not volunteers here and therefore ZAM (Wowhead) has to allocate it's resources (money) as practically as it can.
Post by
tripsied
I've been around WoW since TBC and have been using wow head ever since. Just today, I had an in-game issue and a GM directed me to the profiler. In all the time I've been playing, I never realized it was there. Never had a reason to check the tools sections.
It might actually make sense to advertise the profiler's presence and its capabilities, especially if Blizzard GM's are advising using it.
If the profiler were actually something being actively worked on, I would pay for it. Especially since it's something I really happen to need at the moment to resolve the in-game issue.
Post by
lney308
You have to understand from a business perspective. It sucks that it comes down to resources and money but that's how a business works... if only a few people, even passionate people, are using something that would take a great deal of time to fix or update then it's just not practical for a company to invest money into it.
Unfortunately, the programmers are not volunteers here and therefore ZAM (Wowhead) has to allocate it's resources (money) as practically as it can.
As I am sure Zam will understand that I see no reason to continue paying for something that is no longer usable.
You see, I voluntarily paid, or if you rather, gave them money, because I was passionate about the profiler. And, since it is no longer practical for them to update it, it is no longer practical for me to continue to give them money.
Post by
jamesjiao
I think a useful metric here would be, does the amount of traffic, however minuscule it has been, come from mostly paying users or is the paying/nonpaying ratio not much different compared to the rest of the site traffic? Is it worth it to lose these paying users over programming priority?
Post by
Cordana
I too keep trying to visit my character's profile page having it return blank. So naturally I visit the forums to see what the deal is. Come to find the developers are abandoning this feature.
So here's my two cents on this who situation:
If it's not a priority and you don't plan on fixing what's broken, please remove it and figure out a way to effectively communicate to your userbase that it has been removed (maybe diverting any questions to a thread on the forums).
"ZAM (Wowhead) has to allocate it's resources (money) as practically as it can"... so I echo James' reply before mine.
So if the profiles have "consistently gotten less than .1% of our traffic since inception", I'm really curious to how bad the traffic is on the guides... or better yet, the forums. When those features break are you gonna let them just not work as well?
No offense, but how this situation is being handled is pretty poor, you know, from a "business perspective"
Being a professional web developer myself, my suggestion would be to retool the whole feature and simplify it. It doesn't have to be complicated. The feature was developed prior to the current Blizzard website which now incorporates much of what is in the profile system. Yes, the wowhead version is more robust (the 3D models are awesome, but not necessary... the only place you'll find 3D toons from Blizz is their armory phone app), but it doesn't really need to be. Figure out a way to have the feature
compliment
and work with the Blizzard site as opposed to replicating it... then tout it as a "new feature". Done right, you've taken an old feature, made it new and you're creating MORE traffic for something that requires less maintenance. Blizzard has done this countless times and we just saw Microsoft do this with the crap known as Windows 8 (Microsoft just did a VERY bad job executing it).
Guys, I've loved wowhead from the beginning. From the day it was a baby competitor to thottbot there was always something new and exciting that was brand new and on the horizon to help satisfy my out-of-game knowledge while I wasn't in the game. Now it just seems to be a glorified database that generates traffic from being hotlinked within the Blizzard website and a
wow.com
Joystiq wow news competitor. Is wowhead just one of Zam's ill-forgotten toys thrown in the corner ? Don't figure out a way to make me come here, figure out a way for me to want to be here. Everyone wants the hot chick... be the hot chick. :)
I still love wowhead. But if you guys plan on continuing to be the cutting edge of the Warcraft community (what made wowhead popular to begin with was the developer's effectively listening and delivering to the community, I highly suggest cutting the crap (ie - enough of the excuses -- profiles, guides not getting their forum, frequently slow site load times... we won't mention the comment fiasco -- and yes, all excuses after excuses), fix the stuff that's broken and pay more attention to the community that's supported and built you instead of alienating them. Stop worrying about the money. Wowhead wasn't made popular by money (it certainly wasn't the name lol)... it was made popular by being a solid, quality product. Do what you do best the money will come. Even if you guys said the code was crap and to please be patient while you recoded everything from scratch (do it in ColdFusion and I could help, although a site like this would probably be better geared toward .NET or Java... most certainly not PHP), using the old and new in tandem, I think you'd be surprised at how much support you'd get (that's what Blizz did with Cata). And if the money's not there, or if your heart's just not in it anymore (ie - you're just in it for the money), then maybe it's time to let someone else give it a go. No one's gonna think less of ya.
Sorry for the wall of text. We love you wowhead.... where are you?
Post by
skevans
I'd just like to add my voice to the number of users that would like to see the profiler relaunched in an effective way.
I wonder how many users of wowhead have no idea what the profiler is or how to use it? I for one have never seen an article focussing on it.
For those of us that use (well we used too) the profiler it can be a fantastic addition to gameplay. Could I also add that the reason I installed the Client in the first place was to ensure that the profiler was as accurate as possible, now I don't see any need for it.
Please reconsider wowhead.
Post by
wrlwnd
Thanks Koper for adding your input as a former dev here. I, like many, learned to use the profiler for many things,and will miss it if it goes away.
I understand that with as large as Wowhead has become, looking at the big business picture, fixing a VERY small portion for a large investment of resources is not wise.
To enlarge the business picture, I offer from my perspective the following:
If you had a business that averaged 100,000 purchases per year and of those 100 were made on some of the items carried. Once those items were sold you figure that they comprised 5% of your cost of goods sold. With that idea would it make sense to restock them? In my opinion, no. If the percentage of the cost of goods sold increased from there the answer get more adamant.
I see the page hits here as the purchases and the development cost as the cost of goods sold equivalents.
Post by
138532
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
595528
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Ashelia
We're currently trying to evaluate what we feel is actually useful and viable from the profiler to salvage, but the project is not going to exist as it currently exists for much longer.
The problem with the profiler is it's not easy to use and it was always a colossal mistake. Since its inception, it was low traffic and very hard to use effectively. Unfortunately it's not a low traffic thing that's easily fixed, either; if it breaks, it can take 1-2 months of dev time to fix back up. If a forum breaks or a guide breaks (all of which get much more traffic than the profiler), it will take usually under a day to identify and resolve the issue. This means the profiler is our lowest traffic item on the site and is also the highest developer time sink on the site, something which mixes extremely badly for Wowhead.
Features that I think the profiler has that are good are its quest tracking and item tracking. :) However, nearly everything else about it has been made redundant by the Armory or was hard to use in the first place. So like I said, we're trying to evaluate what we would like to reuse and implement again separately, but the profiler in its current form has not been functional since release and isn't worth the time repairing. It's putting a bandaid on a cut that needs surgery, basically, to fix it at this point.
It's disheartening to have a few passionate people who love the profiler try to draw conclusions that the profiler's failure means other things about Wowhead. It doesn't, it just means the profiler is a problem we've been having to deal with for years. Since I've worked here, people have been talking about retiring it. So now we're thinking about how to move forward on retiring it, but keeping many of its tools available to the public--just in a better form :)
Post by
Krume
The profiler for me was the only thing that put wowhead above the rest.
Like many other people it was something I did not know existed and stumbled upon it by accident.
The greatest thing about the profiler was it allowed you to see what stats and figures you could achieve by gearing, geming, specing and enchanting a certain way. Right now I really want to see if a haste/mastery Paladin tank would be a viable solution.
If you are not going to develop this further, please release the code on something like
GitHub
so that we may continue the project.
As for traffic, I myself would look up hundreds of items for the few times I would use the profiler however I valued the profiler far more then the database of information that is available on wowhead as this info is also available on numerous other websites.
I have not seen anyone do a profiler as successfully as yours, chardev.org came close but their stats never matched the in-game numbers.
I have used the profiler for years which allowed me to fine tune my characters in unique viable ways.
Also highly confused by what you mean when you say it is hard to use?
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