So, after having fixed the worst bugs during closed beta (with a sensational amount of two or three beta testers!) I want to announce it here, too: During the last weeks I have been working on a page for comparing WoW items.

WoW Item Comparison

The idea had already been given to me earlier by the site wow-item.info, but I never had a mind to fiddle about with it.

The idea of a page like that is to compare WoW items by entering a weighting for the attributes that are most important to you. On the basis of this weighting the page will then generate lists of items that fit your preferences most. Of course, such a page cannot relieve you of thinking – yet it can be very helpful gaining a complete picture of all possible items. And once in a while you may even discover an item you didn’t know yet or just hadn’t thought of anymore.

Principally, there’s nothing wrong with wow-item.info – the only problem are the extremely infrequent updates. Whenever there is a WoW patch you can forget about the site for months because the newest items haven’t been imported yet. One day this annoyed me so much that I finally started programming a page like that myself.

These are the appreciable differences:

Weekly updates

The most important and biggest advantage of my site (and besides the reason why I wrote it at all). With the aid of a script, I scan for new items weekly – mostly Thursdays –, so the lists are always very up to date. By way of comparison: wow-item.info still welcomes you with the proud announcement “Patch 2.3 Updated !” on the home page. (For information: That patch came out on 2 November 2007 – quite ancient then –, and meanwhile we’ve already reached patch 2.4)

No “profile spam”

What disturbs me a little about wow-item.info is the fact that you cannot change a profile anymore once you saved it. So if you have made a mistake or changed your mind about a certain attribute, you cannot edit your profile, but have to create a new one with the changed value. In this way, dozens of “multiple profiles” have already been created, bearing names like “BleedsFrostPvP”, “BleedsFrostPvP2” and “BleedsFrostPvPFinal”. This problem is not existent on my page. After a short registration, you can create profiles which you can later edit or delete at any time.

Weapon display

Another small improvement is the Weapon overview on my page. In contrast to wow-item.info, when looking for a one-handed weapon for example, you do not have to browse through the categories “1H-Mace”, “1H-Sword”, “1H-Axe” and “Dagger” and then check them against each other again; instead, all one-handed and two-handed weapons that a particular class can use will be listed together. That makes weapon comparison much easier.