Gloroth's new adventure

It really is amazing how fast time goes by. PoaH has now been live for 8 months or so and the user count is still gradually growing, who knows it may even get to 10k users eventually. 

You may or may not have noticed that I have not really been around the site during the last 5 months. The reasons for this are plentiful but the major ones are:

• I got married
• I bought my first house, then painted it, then moved in
• I was flat out at my job
• I started my own company, CrystalPearl Solutions

As a result of all of this stuff, I actually stopped playing WoW and thus stopped participating as Gloroth on PoaH (It is kind of like ex-smokers staying away from smokers :P). I have however still been active behind the scenes with maintaining the site and server.

Anyway I just thought I would let everyone know what is going on. At this stage I am not planning to release any new features for PoaH as I am diverting all of my attention to my new company. I will however continue to maintain the site for you all to enjoy. 

So what does CrystalPearl Solutions do?

You can check our website out for more information but basically we specialize in using cutting edge technology such as Django, Flex and jQuery to bring your vision to life. 

For example we could build a site like Path of a Hero for you, if you had a vision of what the next big thing is going to be.

I managed to grab a few Australian domains which was good

• www.jquery.com.au
  
• www.djangodevelopment.com.au
  
• www.djangohosting.com.au
  
• www.djangoexperts.com.au

Doing that kind of stuff is how we pay the bills however what I am really excited about is the original ideas that we work on. 

At the moment we are working on a game, an Adventure RPG for PC. I don't want to reveal too much at this early stage but I think it is the type of game that could really appeal to some of you. I expect a demo to be released in about 3 months. 

What I can tell you at this stage is that it is called Land of Livia and it will focus on having a strong storyline and intricate puzzles. The aim is to make a game that is as challenging as games used to be :) 

If you liked Diablo 2, Full Throttle, The Neverhood or Normality then you will like Land of Livia.

Slideshows, a treat for epic users

So I seem to keep implementing new features that you have requested and voted for in UserVoice and not only do I keep surprising myself at how fast I can get these new things released, but I seem to be increasingly happy with the results.

As of about 5 minutes ago the slideshow feature from UserVoice was released, satisfying a total of 40 user votes and it has really made my day.

You are only able to view slideshows of epic users since it is an epic account feature but if you want to have a look at one, check out my journal or any other epic user's journal.

I find the slideshows very entertaining to watch and I am looking forward to more people becoming epic and making their slideshows viewable.

The next step from here is to make the slideshows highly sharable as either a url or embedded content in other pages/blogs.

Enjoy!!

New rivalry page and the ability to filter rival updates

I don't know about everyone else but I was personally getting very irritated with the rivalry page. It was not nice to look at and I found it difficult to quickly find and comprehend the information I was interested in.

So what did I do?

The selfish thing of course, I devoted some resources to fixing it up so that in my eyes it was awesome :) I am extremely happy with the results and it leaves the page ready for all sorts of extensions in the future. I can now easily browse my rival updates without getting a headache.

Whilst I was re-designing the rivalry page I thought it was the right time to implement the next epic account feature, rival update filters. This was a UserVoice suggestion and it satisfied 12 user votes.

This feature allows you to use buttons and filter your rival updates by

• new comments
• new rivals
• new entries
• new gear
• stat changes

You can see what the interface looks like in the screenshot of this post. Everyone should also note that this filtering only works for rival updates made from now on since I have only now started categorizing them.


Anyway enjoy the new rivalry page and the new epic feature, I know I will be :P

Account pricing tweak

Yes I know the account prices have not been live very long, but I have already decided to tweak them :)

Based on some really useful feedback from users I have decided to lower the prices of both the epic and legendary accounts and also mention some of the features that are coming soon. The price changes are basically a result of me not really knowing a good place to start and also working in a foreign currency.

I hope this has not caused too much of an inconvenience for everyone. You can now all however enjoy the lower prices of $2/month for the epic account and $4/month for the legendary account (when it gets released). It is also worth mentioning that the epic account now removes the advertisements from all the pages on the Path of a Hero site.

Naturally all existing subscribers will have their subscription amount altered to match the new prices.

Anyway enjoy yourself and keep an eye out for new epic account features.

Are you Epic?

Alright after a few tiring nights, the Path of a Hero Epic Account is now live and ready to go. If you want to get a taste of what the epic account provides you can view Gloroth's journal. You can also take a look at the Account Types page.

The full screenshot functionality on journal pages is really sweet and it features some nice effects that make viewing the screenshots a joy. Also being able to see the talent trees of everyone's journal entries is a neat feature and I didn't realize how handy it would be until I actually tried it.

If the benefits of the epic account don't seem tasty enough for you to bite just yet then don't worry I am going to continue to beef up the offerings and also work on the legendary account. Eventually something might take your fancy. Don't forget of course I am open to suggestions either via email or in UserVoice.

That said the account is here for the taking at the moment for those that want to be epic before everybody else.

By the way the epic account satisfies 69 user votes by completing this and this.

I would also like to thank the Path of a Hero community for giving very useful feedback and support up to this point and I look forward to giving you more of what you want in the future :)

Anyway I am off to take a break and run some heroics. Have fun :)

Preview of Epic and Legendary accounts

I have decided to give everyone a sneak peek of what is in store for Path of a Hero in the coming month.

I am going to be introducing 3 different sorts of account types - Common, Epic and Legendary. For details on what is involved in each of these account types you can visit the Account Types page (there is a link to this from both the settings page as well as from the footer links on every page).

I think that some of the new features involved with the Epic and Legendary accounts are going to be really fun and I am looking forward to letting them loose.

Anyway as always I would love to hear people's thoughts and of course you will still be able to enjoy PoaH as it is now through the Common account. If people think that I have missed some good ideas then don't hesitate to contribute to the Path of a Hero UserVoice because I would be really interested to know what other stuff you would find useful. Besides, I am smashing through this stuff anyhow.

Peace.

Gear score system

One thing that has really bugged me since I launched Path of a Hero is the unreliability of obtaining gear scores from beImba. No offense towards the site, it does an awesome job of providing a very detailed audit of your character, but the web service always provides cached scores instead of up-to-date ones. Relying on an external site like this is also another point of failure.

I am sure most of you would have seen the multitudes of 'zero' gear scores that occurred because people did not manually update their score on the beImba site. Also beImba does not provide gear scores for characters lower than level 70. On top of that for quite a while there was no support for levels beyond 70.

Well all of these problems have now gone away my friends, for today I am launching the first cut of Path of a Hero's in built gear score system. It is based at the moment off of the Fubar in-game gear rating mod however it will be diverging soon as I make it more intricate. Now every single journal entry will be given a gear score greater than zero. This should make rivalries on the site more interesting and also make the search sort on gear score accurate.

But wait there's more...

What I am going to be in the process of doing over the next day is updating the gear scores on all existing journal entries. That's right all of your journal entries will be updated to have an accurate gear score and you will be able to see how your gear score has grown over time. This was of course my original intention with including a gear score in the first place.

Enjoy!