MoP Launch Changes

Hey guys, I've been hard at work updating the api documentation. Here's a summary of the changes coming to the API tomorrow, and some of the updates we're planning for very soon after launch.

Biggest Breaking Change
In order to avoid confusion later on, and to keep things in sync with the game, we're going to change some of the character field names:

• pets is now going to be hunterPets
• companions is now going to be pets
• The data in both as well as the data in mounts is changing (with more information)

Documentation Updates
The api documentation has been moved from docbook to plain markdown. Hopefully this makes it easier to edit and contribute to. If you guys have any ideas or changes that you want to see in the documentation please let us know. You can directly submit pull requests to github or just post here on the forums. I don't mind github issues being opened, but please keep those limited to issues with the api docs and not the api itself.

Docs http://blizzard.github.com/api-wow-docs/
Repo https://github.com/Blizzard/api-wow-docs

The documentation has been updated with new examples for all apis. Please give it a read and let us know if you have any questions. We want to improve this documentation as much as possible.

New Features
These will be added to the API tomorrow:

• Challenge Mode realm and guild leaderboards will be added. Character profile and region leaderboard will be added very soon.
• Battle Pets are now included in the pets field of the character profile. Their stats, custom name, favorite status and other information has been added.
• Battle Pet Slots information is now added as the petSlots field of the character profile. This contains information about your current battle pet group and their chosen abilities.
• Battle Pet APIs have been added letting you look up the data about a certain species or ability. We also allow you to look up what stats a pet would have depending on their level, breed, quality and species.
• A Pet Types data resource has been added
• A very miminal Spell API has been added. Please let us know what other data you'd like to see here
• A list of items ids have been added to the ItemSet data.
• Item SubClasses have been added to the item classes data resource
• A talents data resource has been added with specs, talents and glyphs for each class.

As always there may be bugs in some of the new features and other changes may have snuck their way in. Please let me know if you have any questions about all of the new data. Hopefully the examples in the new api docs make the data formats for the new API's clear.

Upcoming changes
These are changes that are currently in the works:

• As mentioned above, we will be adding a region challenge mode leader board as well as challenge mode information into each character profile.
• One of the next things happening to the game site is a revamp of the progression system. Due to many bugs and account-wide achievements the current system is in need of some work. We will be tackling this very shortly. This will include adding some date and LFR information to the progression character profile field.
• Some account-wide achievement data is not being pulled into the game site (resulting in inaccurate achievement total numbers). We will be looking at this very soon after the launch.
• Static data: we are looking at a way to provide some large json data dumps of the static data contained in this API. These data files would be updated about once per large game patch. The idea is that you can download one static zip file that contains a bunch of json data so that you don't need to use the API for battle pet species, item, spell, achievement and data resources. If you have something you want to see be included in this please let us know. I don't have an estimated time for this but it is something I'm actively trying to make happen as soon as possible.

That's about it for tonight. These changes should hit the API tomorrow. I'm very sorry for the late notice regarding some of the breaking changes, but it's been busy over here (as you all can imagine). Please let us know if there are features you want, or changes to the documentation that would help out!

Edit: Added talent data to the new features instead of upcoming, it was added.

09/23/2012 08:00 PMPosted by Chaud

Please let us know if there are features you want, or changes to the documentation that would help out!

Character statistics is still on the todo list, right?

The changes we want to make to raid progression, and the changes needed to pull in account level achievement criteria means we have to rewrite a bit of the system that calculates your public achievement and statistic totals and criteria. Adding character statistics to the API is waiting on this work.

This is on the to do list, it's just not something we were able to hit for MoP launch.

09/23/2012 08:21 PMPosted by Wrathslash

I don't make any addons, or know how to do website coding, etc, but I have one question: any chance you'd add back in the Most Deadly Boss statistic to the Statistics tab? I liked being able to see that xyz boss was the most deadly boss for a specific expansion.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this statistic was removed from the game since it was outdated. If that's the case you'll have to post in the general forums asking for it to be added in before I could add it to the API or the website.

09/23/2012 09:10 PMPosted by Delritha

Will you guys be adding multiple item sources when you guys tackle the item dump feature?

We would like to fix item sources in many ways, but I don't have a timeline on when we're going to get to that. At the moment it would take a lot of work in order to get information anywhere close to what wowhead (and others) provide.

09/23/2012 09:41 PMPosted by Zeherah

Thanks for the update. Can you tell us when the change actually goes live? (specifically I'm interested in the change from pets to hunterPets) Is it when the expansion becomes active or are the API updates on a different schedule?

Tomorrow morning sometime around 9am (but subject to change).

09/23/2012 09:25 PMPosted by Skltnbirdcat

Isn't API change implementation when the servers aren't (holding breath) going down, just asking to create addon issues?

This is for the community web API, this has nothing to do with in game addons.

Is there a way that you can make the Battle Pets Stat information include decimal places? On the in-game displays, the stats are rounded to whole numbers and this makes determining the true values of their stats (i.e. how much they will gain per levelup) an arduous process (my last few days: http://i.imgur.com/nA1Jx.png)

I would love it if (for example), a Speed Value of 11 that was actually 10.5 would be returned by the Web API as 10.50 or something similar. It would be very simple for users of the API to round this information themselves, but it is difficult for inquisitive people such as myself to get the data through other means.

Thanks either way for updating us on these changes <3

I'd have to check into this more. If the game uses the rounded values in battle, I'd rather leave it at the rounded values.

Either way you could use the pet stats api in order to see what it's stats would be like at any level: http://blizzard.github.com/api-wow-docs/#battlepet-api/stats

API is working good this morning.

However, the qualityID number is not being read. Despite what you enter, the system always assumes it is 1 ("Common").

http://us.battle.net/api/wow/battlePet/stats/258?level=25&breedId=4&quailtyId=3 should be an example.

There's a typo in the example url. If I knew how to spell quality it would work:
http://us.battle.net/api/wow/battlePet/stats/258?level=25&breedId=4&qualityId=3

09/26/2012 02:34 AMPosted by Kalence

I just thought of something. Can we get emblem information for arena teams?

Added to known issues, I will try to get this added very soon. We do have that data, just have to include it. It will be the same as the guild emblem data however, just IDs.

I noticed a "bug" looking at the glyph item data structure.

There is a spell named "Learning" (ID 483) that is flagged as ON_USE. However the description is empty. Could we get a description inserted here? For glyph's it should be "Permanently teaches you this glyph."

This spell doesn't have a description in the database.

I will look into what data on the spell is used to generate this description but my guess is any spell that is marked as "teaches item" or something like that, gets a description like this. I could be way off but I will try to look into it later on. Added to known issues list regardless.