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!

Add rivals not yet signed up

Due to popular (UserVoice) demand Path of a Hero now lets users add rivals who have not yet signed up. This can be achieved by going to http://www.pathofahero.com/addnonuserrival/ or alternatively you can follow the link from your Rivalry page.

On this page you simply enter the details of the World of Warcraft player that you want to add as a rival. You can also optionally enter in their email address so that they will receive a welcoming prompt to stop being a n00b and sign up to PoaH.

Non-signed up rivals will appear on your journal page like other rivals however their image will consist of the phrase 'Not signed up yet'.

When the player does decide to sign up, you will receive a rival update to let you know. Also the player will be notified of all the characters who have added them as a rival before they signed up.

This feature satisfied 29 user votes.

I hope everyone enjoys the functionality, I think that it has good potential to expand the user base of Path of a Hero :)

It's Twitter Time

I am very excited to announce that Path of a Hero now boasts integration with Twitter.

Users will notice that there is a new 'settings' page that can be accessed from a link next to the existing 'logout' link. This page only contains settings for twitter at the moment however in the future it will be a place to manage all sorts of things for your PoaH character account.

From the settings page you can enter your twitter username and password to integrate your character account with twitter.

What will this do?

It will post several updates to your twitter account when you make a new journal entry:

• An update explaining that you have made a new entry in your character's journal and a link to the new entry.
• A summary of any changes to your level, gear score, guild, talent spec, health and mana among other things.
• A summary of all of the new items that you have obtained and equipped for the first time.

In the process of adding this feature I cleaned up the rival updates that are currently sent to rivals when journal entries are made.

I hope everyone enjoys the new feature and don't forget to use UserVoice to suggest any other things you think would make PoaH even more awesome :)

Follow me on twitter

I have started to use twitter both personally and for Path of a Hero and I am really enjoying it so far. I think it will be a really good way to keep everyone up to date with what is happening with PoaH and what I am working on at any given time.

You can follow Path of a Hero here.
Or you can follow me personally here.

Happy twittering :)

Merry Christmas PoaH users :)

Yes it is that tragic time of the year again.
The time of year when you keep getting dragged away from the computer for RL commitments.
The time of year that possibly might require human interaction.
I feel your pain.

But rest easy loyal PoaH users because what sort of a site creator would I be if I did not provide you with a present or two during this festive season :D

Character Connections

The most highly voted up idea in the Path of a Hero UserVoice since it launched has been support for players with multiple characters. This has been satisfied by the addition of character connections.

From your journal page you will now see a new section on the right hand side entitled 'My Characters'. This section shows all of your different Path of a Hero characters or alts. You can add a character connection by clicking the 'Add existing character' link and filling in the details of your other character. Path of a Hero will also infer character connections from the set of connections that you enter.

The cool thing of course is that you can also see the other characters of your rivals and the authors of the journals that you find interesting.

This new feature satisfies 100 user votes. Woot!

View other character's rivals

Whenever you now look at a character's journal page you will see a new section on the right hand side entitled 'My Rivals'. This section contains a picture grid of all of that character's rivals. Not only does this look visually interesting but it is fun to navigate around and see who is a rival of who :)

This was suggested in a UserVoice page and satisfies 6 user votes.

How popular are you?

Everyone's journal pages now record how many views they have had and also allow viewers to vote up the journal. This allows readers to flag interesting and worthwhile journals so that other users can enjoy them.

Path of a Hero then combines the number of views and points a journal has to come up with a measure of popularity. The top 4 most popular journals are displayed on the front page of Path of a Hero when you are not logged in. Also everytime you view the search page you will be presented with a random 15 of the 150 most popular journals at that time. You can also sort your search results by ascending and descending popularity.


I hope you all enjoy the changes :)

Defects in journal images

Quite regularly whilst browsing journals on PoaH I come across journal images that have some sort of defect at the top, like the image in this post. I played around a little with this problem a while back but could not seem to fix it... until now.

I want to give a big shout out to Graven of Mok'Nathal for giving me the screen resolution of the image that was causing him to experience this problem and hence help me fix it.

Hopefully this fix will work for other characters as well. If it still happens to you though, please send me the resolution of the file you are uploading and I will hopefully be able to make it better.

Ads are back for the moment

Some of you may remember that back when Path of a Hero first launched I experimented with placing some Google Adwords. All the ads that came through however seemed to be associated with gold and account selling; two things I disagree strongly with.

Andrew Hintz, a PoaH user read my blog post and suggested that I take a look at the nogold.org blacklist of gold sellers. I would like to thank Andrew for his advice because the list seems to be working quite effectively and I can now place ads without feeling ashamed.

Anyway just thought I would let everyone know and I hope you don't find them too interfering.