Changes for 5.4
Goals
Continue with the best census tracking in the most efficient manor possible.
The ideal census covers every realm at least once an hour. More frequent census runs is nice in that it provides overlap but the website isn't set up to display data at any higher frequency.
Issues and conflicts
Nothing lasts forever yet the financial stock market demand that fact must be wrong.
As has been reported and as we have seen with our Census tracking, WoW activity has retracted back from the peak (of a reported 12 million)
At this time there are more realms (virtual server images) then are currently needed to support the current continuing WoW player base.
Assumptions: The game developers wanting to improve player experience (and thereby retain and maybe grow the player base) wants to consolidate the realms.
The legal and financial leadership at Blizzard said something like this "Hell no.. no way will you admit to needing fewer realms (aka servers)"
The compromise..
CONvince the players they have a solution called "
Virtual realms".. The same old realms only better in that they can interact with other realms as if they were one...
but they aren't (we aren't decreasing the realms, see the names are still there!)
CensusPlus the addon vs. www.warcraftrealm.com the website
In any battle between the needs of the addon vs. the needs of the website.. the website wins every time. (pretty much the case)
If we were only interested in current data then Metalbeast could slice and dice the site making it much easier to maintain... and making the addon easier to modify.
But one of the advantages of WarcraftRealms.com is that we do keep track of history in the game, in fact we keep track of information about characters that we don't tell any one about..
We don't want to know this info.. but it is there, we just ignore it.
(note this information is only available to the database if there are enough frequent uploads to provide the data... no need to worry we aren't from the Government)
Problems and opportunities of Patch 5.4
When doing a census run in 5.4 we will not only get our login realm but all of the other realms associated within the "
Virtual Realm".
Either we continue doing our login realm and treat all other data as lucky capture foreign realms,
or we find a way to determine what realms are in the associated "Virtual Realm" then break out the data into each of the associated realms,
in effect we would be doing multiple realms in a single run.
The latter approach is better but requires either fore knowledge of the "Virtual Realm membership" or determining the membership during the census run and reporting/saving the data for the user.
If Blizzard publishes the "Virtual Realm membership table" then I can just point that info to the user and leave it up to them to not do unnecessary census runs.
If Blizzard doesn't make this info available until the player base (and fan sites) figure out the relationships, then I need to display the Realm membership at the end of the census run.
This becomes unreasonable if the membership numbers go too high. (Wall of Text data... something like this message)
A possible solution is to create and save a table in the addon with the following info:
Virtual realm pseudo ID, associated member realm, time of last census completion
There would be an entry for each associated member realm, Virtual realm and last census time would be the same for all members.
I can then help prevent too rapid duplication of effort for the user, by checking the current time of the next census run start against the last time completed and the delay timer as set with /census timer xx,
if an attempt is made on a realm that was already recently completed, the run would be stopped and a note provided that census data was already current.
The other major change in the addon is that I would need to create a temporary table to store data as the census run was processing,
and then at the end of the run move the table into the normal saved data area and build multiple TimesPlus entries for that one run.
Better idea
modify the program flow to build multiple TimesPlus entries on the fly as data is collected... currently that part of the data is built at the end.. the time between seeing your census character census and the final display of totals for the run.
This is a major design change and will slow down the apparent speed of the addon, but in the end we gain speed since instead of only one realm done we will have x number of realms done.
Sure the run will be longer but we save lots of wasted time logging in and out of realms.
Of course since we haven't any real data on how Blizzard will implement 5.4 for real.. all of this is just stuff I need to be prepared for .. hoping that they don't go off on a completely different tangent when they go live. The last major change was stressful enough as it was.
This is command center for SI:7!
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