WoW: Early beta for community devs

API Discussion
1

It’s not about the API itself, but I guess it’s a relevant problem year-over-year for some community devs.

Is there a special/priority way to receive a guaranteed invitation to betas/test realms for community devs?

My Story

…and why it’s important (at least for me):

As for now, I am making a discord bot, which allows users to evaluate game-items in World of Warcraft based on API data. I made it a couple of months ago, but I need to prepare all the formulas for shadowlands.

If you are interested in or might wanna take a look at https://i.imgur.com/FyMLNN3.png

The problem is, that (in this certain case) I needed to receive a full list of Shadowlands items obtained from vendors or all items that belong to the trade_class: Herbs.

You might wanna say: Wowhead it! Right? - Wrong.

This is how Wowhead returns all herb items from shadowlands.
https://shadowlands.wowhead.com/herbs?filter-any=82:166;2:9;90001:0

The problem with the vendor obtained items is much complex than that.
https://shadowlands.wowhead.com/items?filter=166:92;9:1;0:0
(even vendor-page itself doesn’t have a list of all selling items)

At least we have Marlamin’s wow.tools? But there is not an easy way to obtain vendor items.

So, the easiest way is to log in on Shadowlands beta, come to Orebos and check the vendor manually, with listing every item id one-by-one on paper.

Which I really could do, if I have access to it. But thank god, I play in some Hall of Fame TOP 100 guild, so almost every guild member has an access to it. Except me, which is such an irony.

This story has a happy end. Because I asked a friend, and as soon, as he logs on, I receive all the necessary data. But it’s only a «for now» solution.

BUT!

Conclusion

As for my point, there are two options to fix it. The first is:

  • Form a list / make an online application form for community devs, with reviewing / pre-moderating (so people won’t span with ‘GIMME BETA’ for fun) current dev’s projects, which is a bit bureaucratic.

  • Or to enable Battlenet-Namespace header/param in all endpoints, allowing to request game-data not from the past, but the future or upcoming versions of the game. Like this one: https://us.api.blizzard.com/data/wow/item/178787?namespace=static-us&Battlenet-Namespace=static-9.0.1_35598-us&locale=en_US as sometime Araspair mentioned in his message via API community discord:

Now that I’ve explained the versioning: when I say that static data has a TTL of 42 days, this is from the last publish for a server version. As in, if the server version does not change for a month, this TTL is refreshed every weekly maintenance until the server version is next bumped. When the server version is bumped, the new data will be published to a new namespace ( static-{new_version}-{region} ), and the TTL for the old static namespace will be 42 days from the last publish . static-{region} will point to the new namespace.

I understand that probably I should post it not here, but Press and Media Contacts in my region. And I know for a fact, that there are other more priority requests for the API team, which are mentioned in relative «Our vision is to help you achieve yours » thread, like bonus_list for items, API schemas and so on.

1 Like
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I’ll make sure that Wowhead’s version filter is fixed, so you can get a list of items added in Shadowlands.

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I’m not sure that there is a guaranteed way these days, sorry :frowning:

A few years ago there was a stronger effort to connect influencers and fansite owners with Blizzard, and that meant being on the invitation list for expansion Beta tests, but they also used to ask us who else we’d recommend to be added. Things have changed a lot since then, and I no longer know a practical way of letting them know about you. I hope you get in soon, anyway!

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Thank you for noticing it, Erorus.

Well, as I noticed, the problem with the Herbs filter on Wowhead in connected with the added_in_patch field, somehow, almost all herbs (expect Vigil-whatever herb) equals to added in 8.2.0-build number. Which is not true.

And as for vendor items, it will be complicated to do for now, because as I understood (with my friend), even Blizzard team doesn’t know exactly what reagents should be sold by each vendor.

I mean that vendor pool item are much bigger than it definitely should be.

So I am checking every crafting spell for now, and extrapolate my BFA experience with that, to understand what items should definitely be a vendor-obtained only.

I know that. The point is, that as for now, almost every player with 12/12M Nyalota progress has a beta invitation. (So at least I have an option to ask my friends)

I found funny, that I refuse to have such progress in the game, because I am being busy all the «game-time» with this bot, but have an active sub to receive a beta.

And as a fact this is a bit demotivates me, like «I am doing something useful for the game. Probably people will like it, and will use it in the future» But it’s like: «the world is against me, because I don’t have beta which allow me to receive a necessary data.»

5

I understand how frustrating that must be and I’m sorry :frowning:

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Well, nothing I can do about it. And at least PTR realms has new items from Shadowlands.