Civilian

Please use this thread to submit any feedback, issues, suggestions, bitches etc. about Loot. 

Loot can be found here. 

Amazing.  Great work guys.

I found that the links for Kalecgos and Twins loot does not seem to be working.

Moller:

Amazing.  Great work guys.

I found that the links for Kalecgos and Twins loot does not seem to be working.

This is fixed. We have to do some special mapping for these guys since the actual name of the mob that has the loot is different than the name we're used to seeing.

 Awesome job!

For some bugs, I found some ZA boss loots to be considered as "trash loot" (like that Shimmer-pelt Vest).

Is there much that can be done in so far as improving load times? 

Excellent, sexy, easy to use.

I thought Gurruk had someone on the side these past few weeks, but this explains his distraction.

Argrax:

Is there much that can be done in so far as improving load times? 

It was rather fast, but when we added all the old legacy items last night we're finding that we're requesting more data than we really want to load at once.

We're working on paginating the data and to break down the 'all loot from zone' to not be in the navigation header (but a separate list item so you still have the option).

So yeah, the load time will improve for sure.

Thanks for the feedback so far!

Argrax:

Is there much that can be done in so far as improving load times? 

Well I just made a slight modification to backend piece and it should return much faster.  Please let me know if you can tell the difference. I went from 15seconds to return all black temple loot to 5 secs.

Performance is paramount to what we are trying to do so it should only get better from here on out. 

Nice job, guys. It's really well done.

For the curious, what's this implemented in?

I thought I'd make a post and breakdown some items that i'm looking for feedback from specifically, a to-do feature list that i have planned, as well as start a 'wishlist' of cool features that others would like to see.  I’m not a visual designer in the least, so most of the feedback I’m looking for is color and layout related. Any other user experience feedback is welcome for sure.  If you find a bug, please post the issue and the browser type and version you are seeing it in.

 Specific Feedback issues:

• Instead of the current ‘Bosses’ and ‘Raids’ navigation, would you rather see a navigation breakdown like:
• Zone
• Sunwell Plateau
• Bosses
• Raids
• Black Temple
• Bosse
• Raids

• How are the colors in the nav? For ‘Raids’ and ‘Bosses’, I used an arbitrary color. Any suggestions on making these more discernable?

• How are the colors and styles in the loot table itself? Any suggestions on how to improve it?

To-Do:

• Create a sub-header for raids for each month, to organize the list of dates better.
  

• Create a custom search ‘filter’ that will allow the user to pick what attributes of the loot they would like to see a breakdown from (ie, all loot from male troll mages or all loot for rogues from sunwell in between 5/20/08 and 6/05/08).

• Paginate the data to 20 or so items per request, sorting by date by default.

Wishlist:

• Ability to pick up to 4 players and see a side-by-side comparison of loot/raid info
• Show number of days since the item was looted (Neckface)

Known Issues:

• Clicking an item link in Internet Explorer brings you to the wowhead page for that item. The desired behavior is to show a loot table with all of the drops of that particular item (works in firefox).

Cyrran:

Nice job, guys. It's really well done.

For the curious, what's this implemented in?

Front-end is javascript using jquery (and a few other libraries) against a Windows Communication Foundation webservice configured to be RESTful and returning jsonp. 

I'm using LINQ to XML on the backend and my query tuning experience is limited but getting better. 

The front end is done mainly in javascript, utilizing the jQuery library and a few of its plugins. The data is retrieved via a webservice that returns JSON.

The back end is ASP .NET, but Gurruk has more knowledge on what we use specifically since he's been doing all of the backend stuff :).

We're collecting the data from the game using the ACE addon called Headcount, which has the feature to export all the raid info in XML in an EQDKP format (which we convert to fit our needs).

 edit: meh, i'm slow

Zafo:

Instead of the current ‘Bosses’ and ‘Raids’ navigation, would you rather see a navigation breakdown like:

• Zone
• Sunwell Plateau
• Bosses
• Raids
• Black Temple
• Bosse
• Raids

This is a classic issue with presenting data with multiple data dimensions.  It seems to me we have the following dimensions:

Location (tier/instance/boss)
Player (guild/class/individual)
Time (date/raid)
Gear (type/slot)

Any one of those dimensions, at any level of granularity, can be a place to either slice or sort the data.

It's not an easy problem to solve, but one step in the right direction might be to use another physical dimension on the screen and present results in a grid rather than just a column, so now we've got both an x-axis and a y-axis.  We'd need to figure out a presentation format that uses less space per item to make it fit in a grid, though.  For example just use the inventory slot icon, rather than the whole name of the item, and let people mouse over both for item details and for additional information that was not implicit in the layout.  For example, if we're looking at Class by Boss (within Black Temple) you would mouse over the icon and get both the expanded item information as well as player name and date received.  If you zoomed out to look at Class by All Bosses, the mouse over would also add the instance.  Conversely, if you did Class by Instance, the mouse over would include the boss name.

Yes, I realize this is way more complicated than we need, but I think this is a really interesting area of study, and I bet Zafo would have fun figuring out solutions to some of this.  It's exactly the kind of thing I used to love doing.  (Now I just love talking about it....) 

Ok so performance is even better now.   For the coders in the audience this is a funny story.

There's a method call on a collection that counts the number of items in the collection.  I was using this method call in the middle of the a loop and the value is invariant (meaning it doesn't change).  Any optimizing compiler will remove this call from the loop so that it is only executed once.  Well since I'm deploying debug code atm the compiler doesn't remove loop invariants. Bottom line is I went from 179352 accesses to the objects in the collection to 846.  Made a slight difference in performance.

We should even see better performance when I'm ready to deploy non-debug versions of the services. 

Thanks Neck, and although I can't quite visualize the scenario you described I think  I might be able to solve that level of granularity you're looking for.

If you were presented with a navigation item (let's call it Custom) that included a bunch of dropdown boxes that enabled you to select however many specific attributes on loot you chose, would that solve your issue?

For example, a layout might look like the following:

Playername: any
Class: Shaman    
Zone: any   
Date from: 05/22/08   
Date to: Most Recent   
Raid: any 
Boss: any   
Race: Orc  
<Apply Filter Button>

This would give you a list of all the Orc Shamans that got loot from 5/22/08 to the present. 

The idea of the left nav is to give user's a general way to search for loot, in a simple and intutive way.  Adding in the Custom filter might help alliviate the need for more specific permutation navigations (i hope).