by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Most dedicated raiders in World of Warcraft have dabbled or consistently work with combat logs either for personal or raid betterment. But combat logs, sometimes thousands of lines of data, are almost impossible to to decipher and extract the information that you need on your own. This niche has been filled by only a handful of sites like WoWMeterOnline and World of Logs. But recently a new player has joined the ranks of combat log deciphering, Warcraft Logs (WL). WL has only been on the scene for six months but have already made leaps and bounds in the logging community. Their easy to use platform, more detailed reports, and their newest feature Combat replay have given them the edge to beat out the competition. We had a chance to interview the creater of Warcraft Logs to get a better insight on who and why the project was started and what they have planned for the future.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience in World of Warcraft?

I am Kihra, and I currently play a feral druid in Temerity on the Windrunner server. I have been playing the game since Vanilla, and at one time or another have played all the roles in the game. I was a ranged DPS back in vanilla, a healer and melee DPS in TBC, and then tanked for a long time on my prot paladin (T8-T15) before finally switching back to melee DPS for T16.

When did you first start Warcraft logs and why?

I started it about six months ago. I mainly just had an interest in the problem space, and so set out to explore what I could do. Once the site got going, I started thinking about what features World of Logs was missing that people had really been wanting for a long time. One specific example was the Dark Animus fight, where you really wanted to be able to see specific Anima Golems, so I made sure that the ability to get to specific mob or pet instances was a core feature.

How much time do you spend working on WL?

About 3-4 hours a day right now, usually at night.

We didn’t see a staff page are you coding, designing, and manage WL on your own?

At the moment yes. It’s just me. 🙂

Have you taken donations to keep the project going or is everything out of your pocket?

I have not yet opened up donations, but that will be coming fairly soon. I wanted to make sure I had a solid foundation in place to build on before asking for donations.

Do you have plans to have premium features like World of Logs?

Yes. Anything that involves permanent storage will be a premium feature (so for example storing reports with no rankings in them for more than 4 weeks will be a premium feature). It is likely that Combat Replay will end up being a premium feature as well. I’m still debating what exactly should be premium and what should be free.

What challenges have you ran into while designing and coding WL?

Probably the biggest challenge is scalability. The site has to be able to handle a bunch of guilds all logging at once. One big difference between my design and other log sites is that reports are stored in segments, with a segment typically corresponding to a single boss fight. This allows me to load only the fights that the user looks at without having to load the entire report. When you’re looking at a single fight, Warcraft Logs is very fast. If you try to load a bunch of fights, though, that can be a bit slower. I do have some ideas for how to make that faster though.

What feature are you most proud of?

Combat Replay is probably the feature I am most proud of. This feature allows players to watch the combat unfold in real time and see where they were on a 2D map view. It’s just getting started, but people are already pretty excited about it.

Can you describe the main differences between World of Logs and Warcraft Logs?

Some of the key advantages Warcraft Logs has:

1. You can belong to multiple guilds
2. You get your own personal logs page, so you don’t have to make fake guilds on your realm just for personal logs.
3. You can see specific mob instances, so you can tell who was hitting Anima Golem #5, or analyze damage on specific belt targets on Siegecrafter Blackfuse.
4. Pets and players are combined, so for example a hunter looking at how much damage they did will see their pet damage along with their player damage. Players of pet classes find this much more intuitive than WoL’s individual pages for pets and players.
5. WL separates pet damage and absorb damage/heals with color shading on the bars so it is easier to see your real damage taken as a tank for example.
6. WL has a number of views that WoL does not, namely Summons, Dispels, Casts and Interrupts graphs and tables.
7. WL’s Pins feature is like a more advanced version of WoL’s log browser and expression editor, although it is admittedly incomplete still. You can show events directly on graphs so that information can be combined easily (e.g., if you want to plot casts or buff uptimes on the same graph as your damage done).
8. WL can show Resource information so you can track your Mana over time or Hit Points over time.
9. Combat Replay lets you see your position at any given point in the fight, so you can tell if someone made a positioning error easily.

How do you feel you could improve on the concept?

One of my big goals is to offer a much better experience for novice users, i.e., I eventually plan to have some basic fight analysis that will tell raid leaders who don’t want to grovel through a bunch of panes what went wrong in a nutshell. For example, if a belt target on Blackfuse doesn’t die in time, I’ll just say that somewhere.

What do you think about AskMrRobot joining the logging scene?

I think it’s great. The more the merrier! I know that the WoW logging scene has been pretty stagnant for a long time now, so I’m excited about anyone coming along to try to innovate in the space.

How do you think Warlords of Draenor will change the logging scene as well as WL?

It’s very hard to guess. I plan to keep the site current and working with the WoD beta as much as I can. One of my main goals with the site is to respond promptly to changes, and to ideally have everything ready to go when new patches hit.

What are your thoughts on Mythic Raiding?

I think it’s a great change for the health of the raiding game. At the very least all of the 10 vs. 25 flame wars will die down.

Are there any new or interesting features you are getting ready to unveil?

Combat Replay is the latest feature that I unveiled recently. I will be working on polishing that for the next month or so.

Any shout outs or anything else you’d like to mention?

I’d like to thank all of my alpha testers. People have been very supportive and given me lots of constructive feedback in email, on Twitter, and on the forums. The site has improved directly as a result of all of this support and feedback, and I’m very appreciative of that.

Thanks to Kihra for taking the time to sit down with us. As a user of the site I can’t wait to see what is in store for Warcraft Logs in the future. They have already built an amazing platform that can only get better. If you have any questions for Kihra or want to follow the production at Warcraft Logs below are the usual social links.

KihraOfTemerity’s Twitter
Wacraft Logs Forums
logs@warcraftlogs.com