There are many stat trackers out there: Overbuff, Oversumo, etc. But most of them resort to having to scrape their data off of https://playoverwatch.com to get their information. Why won’t Blizzard release an API to properly request game data? I know they don’t want to give an unfair advantage to the players, but is it really unfair to have a more detailed website to look at change over time?
As a developer and Overwatch enthusiast, I have wanted to make a stat tracker for a while, but other than scraping off the website, there seems to be no good way. WoW has an API so why couldn’t Overwatch?
If they did, what we would be looking for is an API that allowed us to fetch all the stats we see in our career profile in a JSON or some other format.
5 Likes
I wanted to make something like that for my own portfolio but never really looked too deeply into it. ![:frowning:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
2 Likes
Unfortunately Oversumo is shutting down May 1.
Blizzard probably won’t add one. There aren’t enough people who develop these apps and regular will just assume blizzard isn’t allowing more to be created. Blizzard doesn’t ever do anything based off of what we want. Programmers always get screwed.
I’m sorry, but what’s an API?
Application Programming Interface. Basically a set of tools or resources that allow an outside application to pull data from an operating system, application or other services.
To simply put, an API would allow sites like Overbuff to pull data directly from the Blizzard servers in order to generate their data rather than using a script that basically ‘manually’ searches for each player through the playoverwatch search function and pull data that way.
2 Likes
Alright then. Thanks a lot, Krow! 
1 Like