5000 users

Just when I started to think that maybe the growth of Path of a Hero was slowing down, WoW Insider posted another article about it. This of course resulted in a traffic spike and a few server problems (while I was sleeping) but not nothing that can't be taken care of.

As of about an hour ago PoaH has over 5000 users, which is 5000 more than it had a month ago :P. It is still a long way away from reaching my dream of having enough players per realm to make the rivalry features really useful, but it is definitely heading in the right direction.

I just dinged 78 earlier today and so it won't be long before I am 80 and can start implementing some more exciting things.

Happy leveling and I hope you continue to enjoy Path of a Hero, don't forget to spread it to your friends. Thanks for all your support.

(In case your wondering the picture above is the grand city of Melbourne)

Yep, it is still addictive

Over the last 2 weeks I have been doing the same thing that I expect a lot of you have been doing, that is playing WoW just a little bit too much :P

Blizzard has certainly not lost the skill of creating an engrossing, powerful and highly addictive experience. I love it. I am currently level 76 and I am looking forward to getting to 80 to start doing heroics and raids. I have stopped making journal entries for the moment because I want to wait for my actual appearance to change. The only gear that I have replaced so far is one of my trinkets.

I hope everyone is finding Path of a Hero useful, I know I enjoy reading the experiences of characters. I think I personally find the site more useful for tracking raid progression rather than leveling because you seem to level so fast and it is hard to keep up.

I basically just wanted to let people know why there has not been any further improvements to PoaH recently. Basically I will be working on implementing some new features after I reach 80. I am aware that some of the item icons for new Northrend items don't seem to be working in the journal entries. I will fix this once I can find a reliable source to get all the icons. Rest assured though, I am storing all the necessary information so that all the entries will be corrected over time.

UPDATE: The icon issue has now been resolved :)

Gems and Enchants on gear tooltips

A few days ago I updated Path of a Hero so that it displays gems and enchants on gear tooltips in journal entries. It also displays the relevant information about items in sets and set bonuses. I didn't announce it straight away for two reasons:

1. I wanted to observe it working in the wild for a while to ensure that it was working correctly.
2. It is designed such that it can only retrieve gem and enchant information when someone makes a new entry but once particular gem or enchants are stored, all old entries (for any character) will now display them correctly. Basically the system evolves to the point where all existing journal entries will have correct tooltips, so I just wanted to give it some time to start doing this.

Anyway I am really glad that I completed this feature, it is actually a lot more difficult than one would think. As a a raider I really appreciate being able to see the gems and enchant of my gear. By the way it satisfied 31 user votes from UserVoice.

Enjoy the feature and I hope you are having fun in Northrend :)

Good Luck in Northrend

The Wrath of the Lich King is finally upon us (or will be soon if you live in Australia like me). I just wanted to wish everyone best of luck in Northrend. My advice would be to take your time and enjoy yourself on the path to 80 because who knows how long it will be until there is another expansion (if there is even going to be one). Don't forget to regularly update your Path of a Hero journal so that you can look back on your path once you are wearing full tier 7 or better. Enjoy the brilliant and meticulous experience that Blizzard has worked so hard to provide us with and savor every moment.

The response to Path of a Hero has of course been great and it is continuing to grow. I really hope that eventually a larger amount of characters from each realm join up and the rivalries can really start to flourish. If anyone has any ideas on how PoaH can be made to spread better, I would be very interested in hearing them.

Some of you may be wondering how the expansion will impact on the further development of Path of a Hero i.e. is Aaron going to be too addicted to WoW to program. Well I am going to aim to keeps things balanced because too much of anything is hardly ever a good thing. I am really excited about some of the things that I have in the pipeline for Path of a Hero and I am going to continue to work diligently on them. At the same time of course I will be leveling Gloroth to 80 and hopefully get back into raiding.

Rest assured that my commitment to Path of a Hero definitely matches my commitment to WoW and being uber :P

Send messages to each other

In UserVoice there were 52 votes for 'Provide a way for users to send messages to each other'.
Journal commenting went part of the way towards satisfying this suggestion however I am now proud to announce a new feature which completes this suggestion... private messaging.

From any journal (except your own) you can now click the 'Send private message to [Character Name]' link to go to a new page where you can enter and send a message to that character. This message is private and users can view their messages from the bottom of their rivalry page. Hopefully this feature allows more social interaction and fun between characters :)

Enjoy!

Incorrect Gear Scores

A lot of users of Path of a Hero at one time or another have probably made an entry and not been happy with the gear score they received. It may have been old, incorrect or even zero.

Firstly you will only receive a gear score if you are level 70 at the moment (not sure what will happen when Wrath comes out).

Secondly if you are level 70 but receive a gear score of zero, then I will be notified and I will have a look at what the problem is. I have made a few fixes to the way gear score is retrieved recently so hopefully the amount of people with a zero gear scores decreases.

Lastly the problem with obtaining gear scores from Be Imba is that you always receive a cached version. This is a limitation of the web service and there is nothing that I can do about this at the moment. Worst still, if you have never used Be Imba it is very likely that you will get a gear score of zero.

Therefore I encourage everyone to manually look up (force update) their gear score on Be Imba before they make a journal entry. I know this is annoying however unless I implement my own gear score system, it is the only option if you want to receive a correct and up to date gear score.

Support for non-english speaking EU realms

bienvenue, bienvenido, Willkommen, Добро пожаловать

For those of you who don't speak French, Spanish, German and Russian, I was just welcoming the new non-english speaking users to Path of a Hero. Yes that's right non-english speaking EU realms are now completely supported by PoaH. Now don't forget that 'completely supported' does not mean 'bug free', but it does mean you can sign up, give it a go and let me know if you encounter any problems.

It was not actually that difficult from my end, it was just an exercise in charset encoding. However it was complicated by my use of external services such as Be Imba and WoW Armory.

If you are a French, Spanish, German or Russian player using Path of a Hero, be sure to tell your friends and post about it on your native sites since I have no way to publicise the site to those market. The site is more enjoyable if there are more people from your server/country using it.

Journal commenting

Some of the regular users of Path of a Hero may have noticed that you can now comment on journal entries. This was a suggestion from UserVoice and satisfied 26 user votes. Hopefully this new feature meets everyone's expectations.

It appears that this sort of 'social networking' aspect to Path of a Hero is something that you are all craving and thus a few more exciting features are in the pipeline including a way to send private messages to other characters.

The update to PoaH also brought with it a significant amount of bug fixes, especially for users running Internet Explorer 6 (if you have not yet descended into the depths of hell). Rest assured that I am taking note of every issue/bug that exists in Path of a Hero and am working towards eliminating all of them. I am however glad that the majority of users seem to be having a bug free experience.

Advertising

Some of you may have noticed that I placed some Google AdWords on the journal and rivalry pages. I was absolutely appalled with the types of ads that were coming through... stacks of Gold Selling and Power Leveling sites. I do not want Path of a Hero to be associated with these types of filth in any way, form or shape.

I attempted to start blocking these sites from the admin interface of my AdWords account. The problem was that it felt like for every site I blocked, another evil site would step up to fill it's place. It felt like a damn scourge invasion. Even the non 'evil' sites were annoying because they were advertising stupid things that I am confident Path of a Hero users would not be interested in.

The longer I left the ads on the page, the dirtier I felt, until it reached a level where I was forced to remove them. The problem that remains is that in order for Path of a Hero to continue to grow and be enjoyed by people, I need some income to cover the infrastructure costs as well as my time and effort (passion and love can't buy bandwidth :P).

Basically what I would like is to advertise some products or services that would actually be of interest to the users of Path of a Hero. The users obviously love World of Warcraft, probably games in general, some like role playing and they are tech-savvy in most cases. If these sort of people sound like your target market, contact me and we may be able to work something out.

Apologies for today's craziness

I am quite upset with the quality of service that Path of a Hero has provided today. There have been a whole series of problems affecting the site. I will be the first to admit that they were all caused by ME.

Basically I was in the middle of implementing some new features when I went off on a tangent and started implementing something completely different. I was then stupid enough to attempt to launch these new smaller features, this resulted in a server with incomplete and partially untested code.

I was then running late for other commitments which lead to more pressure and more mistakes. The whole situation was a big sloppy mess however I think that I have rectified the situation now and definitely learnt some lessons along the way.

1. Iterate fast, but not too fast. Make sure that things are solid and tested before they are released. A broken site is more offputting to users than a site missing a few cool features for a while.
2. Instrument code to allow problems to be easily identified and fixed. I am in the process of making the system much more defensive and allowing it to email me as soon as any sort of problem is encountered (rather than having errors pop up in front of users in dialog boxes).
   
3. Only work on one feature at a time. As soon as you start working on more than one thing at once, the uncertainty increases and it is unclear what feature is causing what problem. It makes it very difficult to roll back to a working system since you have interwoven changes.
   

I apologize to everyone that was affected by my errors and I hope it does not impose on your Path of a Hero experience too much. Also please let me know if you encounter any more problems.

A shout out to the role players

Whilst using the 'View Random Character' link yesterday I came across a whole bunch of journal entries written by role players. Some of these entries consisted of around a dozen paragraphs or more; so they were quite extensive and very interesting to read. Amaxe of Thunderhorn is a prime example.

I think it is great that people are utilizing Path of a Hero in this way, as it provides really interesting content for everyone to share and enjoy. So keep up the good work :)

If you are bored or have some spare time I encourage you to use the 'View Random Character' link and see what interesting paths you come across.

Introducing Uber Search!

There have been so many great suggestions for Path of a Hero so far and thus today I went about implementing a couple of them.

The suggestions I targeted were

• Add filters to Character Search
• Let people search by Realm for other players
• make it possible to show a link to a random profile

All up this equated to 107 user votes.

Enter the Uber search
To satisfy the first two suggestions I modified the Search page to allow both simple and uber search. Simple search is what existed before and is still preserved to provide quick and direct access to users. Uber search allows users to search on any combination of

• Character name (note that this searches for character names *containing* what you enter)
• Zone, US or EU
• Realm
• Gender
• Faction
• Race
• Class
• It also allows you to order the results on either gear score or level

The results are also displayed in pages to make browsing easier.

I am really excited about this new functionality because it enables you to create some really interesting search queries, for example

• Give me the human mages on Khaz'goroth US ordered in descending gear score
• Give me all the paladins on EU realms
• Give me all female orcs
• etc

I think people are going to be able to have a lot of fun with this feature.

Speed Browsing
I noticed a new suggestion on UserVoice the other day to allow jumping to random journals. I instantly loved this idea and since it is not very difficult to implement, I decided to quickly add it. You can now 'View Random Character' from the Search and Rivalry pages. You can also just type in the url

http://www.pathofahero.com/random/

It is very entertaining browsing around and reading everyone's interesting journals.

Bugs: Gear score exception and deleting an entry

Luckily Path of a Hero has not contained to many bugs and the vast majority of people have been able to use and enjoy it without problems. That said there have been two bugs that stood out and I am glad to say that I think I have fixed them.

Gear Score Exception
Some users were experiencing an exception (which would pop up in a dialog box) when they attempted to make an entry.

Something like this

Exception: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/pathofahero/common.py", line 85, in wrapper
return func(*args)
File "/home/pathofahero/Entry/views.py", line 67, in makeEntryAsync
score = getScore(hero.zone, realm, character)
File "/home/pathofahero/Entry/beImba.py", line 31, in getScore
result = result['result'][zone][realm][character]
KeyError: u'Sentinels'

To fix this I first made the code more defensive so that if something like this happened the gear score would just default to 0, so that an entry could at least be made. Secondly I made the server email me with more specific details about what went on.

Within 10 minutes I had received an email and it was quite clear what the problem was. I was expecting realm names to stay in the same casing as I passed to Be Imba however it was returning realm names in lowercase (only sometimes) . For example I would pass in 'Sentinels' to the web service and it would return 'sentinels'. This obviously threw my system because it was not expecting this to happen.

After identifying the problem it was obviously trivial to fix and now hopefully users will not have any more problems.

Deleting an Entry not working
Quite regularly I was receiving emails telling me that something was going wrong when people deleted an entry. This was quite difficult for me to diagnose because I could not reproduce the problem. Any programmer will tell you that 'unreproducible bugs' are the worst thing to have to deal with.

In the end through a process of elimination I believe that the error was caused by the flex app (journal) caching when it is not supposed to and thinking it still has access to entries that are in fact deleted.

My solution to this was to once again make the code more defensive. I gave the journal the ability to be dynamic. If it tried to access an entry that no longer existed, it would be told this by the server and it would then request a *true* list of all current entries so that it can internally update.

Whilst my solution is sound on paper, since the problem is unreproducible, only time will tell whether this correctly solves the problem. :)

Now it is time to move on to suggestions :D

3000 users :D

As of the writing of this blog post, Path of a Hero has just passed 3000 users. Firstly I have to say I am still in absolute shock about how fast the site has grown. Secondly I am both happy and relieved that the site has managed to scale to this size with no signs of weakness. I have analyzed the server performance and bandwidth usage etc and I am confident that Path of a Hero still has a lot more room to grow. So tell your friends :P Yeah baby !!

The whole experience so far can only be described as surreal. I could spend hours just browsing the web and reading all of the positive stuff people are saying like here and here. I have even found this Hungarian site talking about Path of a Hero, pity I have no idea what they are saying, hopefully it is positive :)

Well I would spend all my time browsing around however there are two little things that I have to worry about, bugs and suggestions.

Thanks to everyone who has been letting me know about issues (bugs) and making suggestions. If you are not already aware of the Path of a Hero UserVoice, check it out and contribute :)

In coming blog posts I will be detailing bug fixes as well as new features that have come as a result of suggestions.

Will Path of a Hero scale?

Scalability has always been part of my thinking as I developed Path of a Hero. I was concerned that it had the potential to 'explode' under the right exposure. Well my concerns are possibly about to be tested. Mike Schramm of WoW Insider has made a very complimentary blog post about Path of a Hero. This provides me with feelings of happiness, excitement and shear fear.



Mike raised some interesting questions about the scalability of the site. As I told him, the server side processing involved with making entries is quite minimal, it is the uploading of the large screenshots that is responsible for the seemingly slow response time. At this stage there is not much that I can do about this. The good news is that I don't believe that this necessarily affects the scaling of the application as it will more or less remain constant. It is a constraint of the bandwidth not the server hardware.

If the server side processing does start to become a bottleneck then I can easily upgrade my server hardware.

So at this stage all I can do is wait and see and be adaptive if problems occur. The good thing is that this blog is hosted externally and thus will be unaffected by any server problems Path of a Hero encounters. Therefore in the worst case scenario I will at least have contact with the users to explain the situation and the path forward.

So please be patient where possible, remember 'your call is very important to us and we will be with you shortly' :P