WoW: Armory

You an MMO head? A Blizzard follower? Do you play WoW? Then you have to see this... Blizzard Announces the World of Warcraft: Armory. What is it?

"The Armory is a vast searchable database of information for World of Warcraft - taken straight from the real servers, updated in real time, and presented in a user-friendly interface. Since the Armory pulls its data from the actual game servers, it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date database on the characters, arena teams, and guilds of World of Warcraft in existence."

Also, please note the "beta" sticker on their website for the WoW: Armory. Testing it this morning, we checked for "MoreCowBell" in their guild search to see if it could find one of the 2old2play WoW guilds. Check out the results here.

Sure as heck, it found two guilds. One in horde and one in alliance (2old2play). Interesting little tidbit of information. Clicking on the results for our guild, we get a list of all members with all the information about those characters.

Clicking on the characters resulted in an error earlier today, but as the update below states, much of those bugs are ironed out already. Of course it's only beta, but the idea is solid, even if they stole it from about a half dozen fan sites and add-ons. The real jem is their use of AJAX and slick interface design. The defiantly put a lot of work into the experience.

Here is our site admin's little toon.

Slick interface and graphics aside, a lot of the PvP people in the Warcraft forums are not to happy about this. Why? Well, now the privacy of your countless hours of talent tree tweaking and gear configuration are lost. Anyone with a pair of quick fingers and a web browser can find out exactly how you are speck'd in a matter of seconds. Imagine going into WoW's arena stealthed as a rouge or druid class just to find out the players names before the fight begins.

In our opinion, this should only effect the more well known PvP players. The top teams will undoubtedly use this information to find (pardon the pun) holes in the competitions armor. Kind of like stealing the other teams playbook for a football game. Is it fair? Apparently Blizzard thinks so.

Update: It looks like they fixed a lot of the player issues and you can now view everything from talent trees to gear.