You’re just saying words that you don’t understand fully. Have you done any wow addon development? Addons are very restricted to what they can and can’t do. 3rd party apps like TSM helper just read data into a flat file and then that data is read by the addon in game. All that data still comes from the WoW API. The WoW API that is hosted by Blizzard.
Again, this doesn’t really make any technical sense.
What API Server? Any communication done from addons to anything outside of the WoW API is done by writing/reading to files, you can’t establish network connections from within an addon. That’s why there are 3rd party apps that you install like TSM Helper, Warcraft Logs client, etc…
edit: just go open up any addon .lua file in notepad and take a look at the code. most have core.lua file that contains the main logic of the addon.
I’ve never seen an API that doesn’t log access. That’s why you use an unique key for accessing most APIs, so the logs can even track which user is accessing the API, what calls they are making and what time it is happening. pretty standard stuff.
If you have a list of 100 numbers but you only let me see 25 of them I can do whatever I want with those 25 numbers but at the end of the day only you have the full picture.
So you are conceding that a 3rd party has an api. Once that api is called blizzard has no idea what it does. Great.
If you choose to believe that blizzard has no use for that data that is fine. I didnt say they did either. I just said there is data they do not directly have access to related to how those addons are working. ie access logs for one.
Give me 25 numbers out of 100. I’ll give you one number as a response. You give me 25 more numbers. Out of a different, or even the same 100. Then give me the correct response. You might be able to, but I would bet money it would be much faster for me to give you the response, or at least give you the method I used in determining the response.
Not only that but there is a reason people use analytics services. Often times especially when you have all the data. It is cheaper, easier and faster to pay a service that specializes in the data you have collected.
I literally work in Data Analytics and Software Design so you can’t BS your way out of this one.
I wish you had a clue to the amount of real time analytics that goes on. Blizzard literally has a global dashboard with a realtime visual representation of every single player logged into WoW.
If you think there is any metric that isn’t already calculated and projected by Blizzard internally that they would have to outsource by all means please give one single tangible example.
They are hiring Masters and PhD level Data Scientists and Analysts but ya they probably didn’t think to get an average price of an item over time.
You work in analytics and dont understand api’s are black boxes you dont get to see inside? I too am a Sr. Engineer. Whoopty do. Prove it by accepting you are wrong. Blizzard doesnt know what goes on, on external applications. You wanted to play semantics by saying tsm helper etc are not part of how their addon functions. And acknowledge they have data blizzard does not about its useage…
And if you work analytics you know you are better at it than blizzard. So yeah they pay your or some other company to do it for them. Prob AWS.
The number of scared gold buyers in this thread, nervously laughing and desperately hoping the OP is trolling…lol
It’s a good idea, imagine the amount of gold blizzard could wipe out of the BC economy. Most of them will just buy new accounts and boosts. Ban them all imo.
It’s so funny because an API is the exact opposite of a Black Box but you keep referring to it as such.
The API is what lets a programmer interface with a “black box”. It is in the name. Application Programmer’s Interface. APIs are often heavily documented so you know exactly what you’re going to get and when. The Service they interact with is also usually documented but internally.
Dude, they are literally hiring data scientists and analysts with Master or PHD level education, why would they pay for staff to do it and then also hire it out?
Notice how it doesnt tell you how it does what it does. Just what is expected to happen…
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/using_rest
Any where in here where it tells you how google determines the results? And I don’t mean how your inputs affect the results. How does it decide foo and bar are relevant, not in concept but in fact? How about how it actually authenticates your request, not the type of auth, or the inputs but the exact actions it performs. What about what it logs? Get me…
Now if google is open source there might be a deep stretch where you can find that. But there are proprietary apis. That was just an example
I know what industry standards are, that’s how. I’ve worked across enough large software development projects through different organizations to be able to confidently state without equivocation or hesitation that they log everthing.
Why can I say this?
Because I have yet to see in 5 years as a Jr. Dev, 9 years as a Sr. systems architect and 10 years as a Sr. data analytics project coordinator an API that doesn’t log. If I found a programmer that was not logging API calls they’d be gone before the end of the day.
Big kid programmers do big kid programming. I don’t know what rinky dink html/css programmers you know but even they know enough to user verbose logging for troubleshooting.
Why don’t you?
Since you still don’t understand what an API is though I still don’t expect you to get it and instead just you’ll just double down with another incorrect statement that shows how little you know about any of this technology.