WarcraftRealms.com

What exactly is character XP when it comes to WoWCensus?

When I look up guild populations, it sorts it by "guild xp" or something like that.

Does this mean that it isn't listing the guilds by population?

Don't know if I'm correct, but I have always imagined, it's something like all XP/levels from toons in a guild, combined..

FuxieDK wrote:Don't know if I'm correct, but I have always imagined, it's something like all XP/levels from toons in a guild, combined..

I can't imagine how Census+ would get xp information from just doing a /who

Certainly it can get levels as we see that in the chart.

If XP is related to levels, then it can certainly muddle the results when looking at the guild report. The top guild can have fewer people in it but be the top because it has more "xp"?

You need a fixed amount of XP per level, so that would be pretty easy..

FuxieDK wrote:You need a fixed amount of XP per level, so that would be pretty easy..

Yeah, that certainly would.

Defeats the purpose of the census though.

If you're looking for a populated guild, a guild of 1 level 110 would show up before a guild of 5 level 20s.

XP might be useful in this way if you're looking for a guild with high level toons.

But since the Census doesn't actually say what XP is used for and how it is compiled, how would you even know that is how guild listings are being sorted.

I think we need an official explanation of what XP is. Then we can decide if it is a good thing or not.

Thought experiment:

You are interested in joining one of two guilds.

The first guild has 500 members
The second guild has only 50 members..
which guild would you probably want to join?

adding more background information:
The first guild is "Bankers and Traders" and all 500 members are level 1
The second guild is "We love to raid" and 25 members are top level, of the remainder more then 13 are within 80% of top level and the rest are scattered among the levels.

Now which guild would you probably want to join?

The expectation was that you would be more interested in a guild that has shown activity by leveling the guild members.

And the math is not linear, the experience factor change from level x to x+1 increases the higher the levels... for example the factoring between level 20 and 21 is much larger then between level 10 and 11.

bringoutyourdead wrote:Thought experiment:

You are interested in joining one of two guilds.

The first guild has 500 members
The second guild has only 50 members..
which guild would you probably want to join?

Depends on what the guild is about.

The expectation was that you would be more interested in a guild that has shown activity by leveling the guild members.

And the math is not linear, the experience factor change from level x to x+1 increases the higher the levels... for example the factoring between level 20 and 21 is much larger then between level 10 and 11.

But the census presumes that the user wants that particular information. Perhaps someone wants a large chatty guild vs a small, high level guild.

Would it be better if there was a toggle? Sort guilds by population/sort guilds by xp

That would add more programming work
creating the toggling function
adding the option to the options page
etc.

If you want to try a listing that doesn't use XP
then you can modify your copy of censusPlus.lua.

Use an editor that can show you line numbers.. I would recommend Notepad++

open your addons/censusplus/censusplus.lua file
go to lines 3419 and 3421 (below the comment -- Sort by total XP first )

replace m_TotalCharacterXP with m_Count
in all four locations.

This will sort your guilds by population.

But I'm a bit confused when I start to filter the data. The order seems random then and not sorted by total xp. For example I'm leading a undead guild on our server and I want to know which other guilds are big undead guilds. Atleast I thought I can filter then by undead and just get the guilds ordered by the combined xp of the undead characters in the guilds. Is it bugged or do I anything wrong?

Sorry I do not think that has ever been a feature in CensusPlus.

It would been an interesting expansion for the next CensusPlus programmer to undertake.

I am on my notebook computer using battery power so I can't test by running WoW.. power requirements for the graphics system visible drains the battery .

Looking at the code it seems that the character names displayed list does follow your single race selection, but the guild sort appears to always be based upon total guild members seen.

I take back some of that I said...
the sub-selectors like race do impact the sort and the display of characters in guild.
But.. yes there does seem to be something odd going on at the sub-selector level.

What I was seeing is that the sort of guilds would change... but not as I expected.

Oh well, again that will be a expansion/fix for the next programmer.
Care to try your hand at WoW addon coding?

Where do you start learning it?

Btw, any fast way to establish the http://www.warcraftrealms.com/connectedrealmstatus.php ?

I'm playing on a realm with six connected servers. Would be nice to see the data here like in the addon.

grab some simple addons and explore their code.
www.wowinterface.com has good resources.
www.wowprogramming.com a very good source for all the game specific functions created by Blizzard Entertainment. I was able to find his massive book at the local library and had it on almost continuous check out for 6 months (it is a bit outdated but works well with the errata and addendum on the website.)
www.lua.org is the home site for this scripting language.. but be aware the version implemented in World of Warcraft is not the current version as shown on the programming site.

CensusPlus is old code.. and was started in the days were the only way to modify the game display was to use separate .xml formatted files.
Blizzard changed their coding standards and integrated the visual elements into the base .lua coding.

Any rewrites should look toward the new coding standard instead of continuing the old. Current CensusPlus is a mixture of both coding styles.

Also CensusPlus started as and continues to be very straight line linear coding, The code base which is entirely too large at over 12k lines for all the files, can be shrunk by more then 60% by using more modern object oriented programming ( but I was under a time gun and couldn't take time to use best practices. Besides the last big chunk of coding was for the options window so had no real impact on performance.)

If you don't already understand oop programming concepts it would be a real good Idea to read up on it and play around using it in the Lua coding world, either in or out of World of Warcraft.

I have done a number of addons that never went public, they were training and experimental items.

A far as the page coding on this site including the large mySQL database system that drives everything..

That would have to be taken up with Metalbeast.
While he would love to make a number of changes to the site.. the reality is that www.warcraftrealms.com is at the bottom of his priority list.

The only reason the site still exists is that he is an avid raiding guild master and saw a real need for the data and he happens to be the owner of a not insignificant Internet Services company here in the USA.

I suppose you might be able to convince him to turn over the site to you, but you probably would need to be able to prove you can handle the task.

A full take over of the site is not cheap. The costs were a major portion of the reason that Rollie decided to move control of the site to Metalbeast.
(The last spreadsheet I saw showed that this site is on servers and bandwidth that are normally charged about around $500US/month.)

Thank you for the links. I'm not sure if I have enough time for this. I really have to learn lua at first. There are programmer out there far better than me. I just wanted to help because I really like the data and the statistics this site has.

I hope we will find a way to continue and improve this project!