WTB Realm metadata as a lua library

oscarucb · Post by **oscarucb** » Thu Jan 23, 2014 4:59 pm

Hi- I'm a very active Wow addon developer, and am interested in finding a way to make some realm list metadata available to addon authors via a lua data library in-game. Specifically, one of my addons needs a way to query configuration information about existing realms, data which is not available via the Blizzard API (Blizzard provides no way to query anything about realms other than the current realm).

The immediate need is to query which realms are "connected" as virtual realms, but I can imagine other situations where it would it be useful for addons to query the language, timezone or pvp status of other realms (especially for realms of characters you are grouped with). The actual population counts are probably less useful to addons, and could be omitted to save some memory, maintenance headache and alleviate concerns over proprietary information.

I realize warcraftrealms does not currently track realm connections (or does it?), but all the other realm metadata is already present and the realm connection infotmation could be added to the database manually as they occur relatively infrequently. I'll probably end up writing this library myself, but was wondering if the warcraftrealms devs are interested in being associated with this project (eg. providing regular data export drops, or otherwise helping with database maintenance).

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Thu Jan 23, 2014 9:25 pm

We don't track realm connections.. as you said Blizzard is realm centric with their APIs.
I get my info about current and upcoming realm connections from the official Blizzard blog.
These are also echoed in the General forums both US and EU look for blue posts from Nethaera (US) and Takralus (EU)

oscarucb · Post by **oscarucb** » Thu Jan 23, 2014 10:01 pm

bringoutyourdead wrote:We don't track realm connections.. as you said Blizzard is realm centric with their APIs.
I get my info about current and upcoming realm connections from the official Blizzard blog.

Right - although connections can also be inferred after-the-fact from guild rosters, trade chat senders and Auction house sellers.

So would there be interest in helping to build such a library? At minimum it would be helpful to pull realm metadata from your site, and the data export link on the main page appears to be broken atm. Is there another way I can get the metadata in a parseable format?