World of Warcraft®

Greetings denizens of WoW forums!

This post will be short and to the point. I have no affiliation to the site in question, and I'm not trying to sell you anything or get any clicks.

The Undermine Journal (www.theunderminejournal.com) is a site that tracks auction house data LIVE and helps players track competitors, markets and individual items. It helps the serious raider and the average player alike, providing real-time notifications if certain items reach the user's specified price point. Looking for a [Cat Carrier (White Kitten)] for 100g or less? Want to buy flasks at 7g and under? Need a [Kang the Decapitator] for your alt? TUJ can and DOES help players find needed items for cheap, every day.

Unfortunately, recent changes in Blizzard's remote AH infrastructure is going to kill TUJ. Here are notes from Erorus, the developer:

Over the past 48 hours, the wowarmory.com site has not been cooperative. There are more error pages than usual, so many that my scan completion rate is around 60% when just last week I had a 98% completion rate. I have one idea that may help, but that's only if the problem is where I think it is on Blizzard's end, and it might not be. Still, I'll probably tinker with the crawler a little bit tomorrow to see if it helps.

Then I notice that Blizzard's shiny new battle.net auction interface is up. "Woo, maybe I can use that." Doesn't look likely. It's no longer presented in XML, so I would have to use horrid regular expressions against the html to pull data out. Ugly, but still workable. However, that whole "search beyond 200 results" thing I've been using doesn't appear to work there. Search beyond 200 results and it just returns none. Trying to narrow down by category won't help, since it takes so much longer, and even if you go down to the item level, it's possible that there are more than 200 auctions for a given item.

I went so far as to look at the packets going between the mobile armory app on my android phone and their servers, hoping it's using XML and HTTP somewhere. No such luck; looks like proprietary protocols that would take me a very long time to reverse-engineer.

So, someday soon, wowarmory.com will no longer present its current interface to the auction house, since Blizz wants people to use the shiny new battle.net one they've developed. And I won't be able to pull auction data after that. I've emailed them a few months ago and haven't heard squat. They probably don't know this exists. And I have no good way to get in contact with them.

Um, panic? If you want The Undermine Journal to stick around, you might want to get Blizzard's attention and have them contact me, or start hoping they'll have some bot-friendly interface for some reason.

All this, just in time for me to buy the last accounts I need for full US realm support... fantastic.

I'd like to lay out some questions to Blizzard:

1. Could a work-around be provided for TUJ?
2. Were these changes intentional? Does Blizzard have a problem with what TUJ is doing?

I'm very saddened that such a great website is seeing an early demise, and would love to hear from Blizzard about this.

Kind regards,
Nuggets.

This was indeed a great site. I would love to be able to make use of it again, if a work-around could be found. I'll definitely miss it.

Many thanks to Erorus for the work put into the site. :)

Ohhh no :( That's horrible! Bump for a great site lost : /

12/22/2010 6:38 AMPosted by Slammed

Obviously no-one uses it but you so noone cares but you.

Whoru?

12/22/2010 7:15 AMPosted by Trollfailbot

Obviously no-one uses it but you so noone cares but you.

Translation: Ive never heard of it so clearly nobody uses it.

The Undermine Journal was a great tool.

Blizzard doesn't make, or unmake, policy/game mechanic changes based upon what other sites (obscure or not) are doing.

So no, it is unlikely that Blizzard changed it so that the site did not work on purpose. They may not even really know about that site.

However, they also do not purposefully not do a change because it would affect some third party site; They make changes they think need to be made, for whatever reason. They can't hold back making those changes because it would impact some third party site, tool, add on or whatever.

They've said this in the past, many times, when other things such as addons stopped working. Its up to that site guy to make things work another way, just as it is up to an addon worker to make things work if a change breaks them.

I too would love to know the reasoning behind this change.

Thanks for the support, folks. At this time I'm content with letting the web devs do their thing. Code doesn't appear out of thin air -- it takes time. They said they're aiming for some Armory XML data in early 2011, so we'll wait a bit and hope that includes auction house data.

Consider this: Every bot that crawls that data eats up Blizzard's bandwidth. Now let's say that ONLY the Undermine was doing this. They're basically making the mobile armory obsolite by providing AH details online. Blizzard worked really hard on the mobile AH presumably.

To have someone 'undermine' all their work (yes I know it refers to the Goblin location), costing them money on that level, and eat up all their bandwidth, costing them, AGAIN, even more money...

...

At a given point, Blizzard has got to stop people from taking their money. They have a right to do that.

I was paying Blizzard $140/month for the 10 accounts needed to crawl all US realms. I also know for a fact that many players subscribed to WoW's $3/month Mobile Auction House because of the information that my site provided (namely, email notification when items became available to buy).

At a given point, Blizzard should realize the business potential of XML data feeds and allow people to give them money. They have a responsibility to do that.

It has been extremely disappointing to lose this site. It provided a lot of great data that the RAH does not provide.

I also find it extremely hard to believe that Blizzard could not know about this site. They have an incredible amount of interaction with their community and seem to have a finger on what's going on surrounding the game. This one would have been tough to miss.

This is saddening.

12/22/2010 7:22 AMPosted by Kybeorie

Blizzard doesn't make, or unmake, policy/game mechanic changes based upon what other sites (obscure or not) are doing.

Blizzard has made these decisions in the past. In a patch that was released, Blizzard intentionally broke the AVR addon because they didn't like what it did. It made raiding too easy (to sum up a long blue-post). It isn't a stretch to break the functionality of a website, especially if that site provides competition for their $3/person service. They could've just changed the way things work, and never thought about this website. But, I just thought I'd give you an alternate view of things.

The Blizzard websites have been getting hammered ever since Cata released. That is all.

12/22/2010 10:26 AMPosted by Mageshadow

I want the site back, it's a great resource and blizzard shouldn't intentionally break something purely because it's "competition". As a matter of fact, the remote AH service doesn't even come CLOSE to what TUJ does.

A sad day for us gold makers.

Why shouldn't blizzard break something that is its competition? While I highly doubt it was intentional as TUJ doesn't directly compete with the blizzard auction house service, I don't quite understand the logic that blizzard should have to play nice with a site that is providing a service that competes with one they offer.