I wanted to create an addon that would tell you if you’ve completed all of the quests that are available in Shadowlands.
The first thing I did was used api to get all of the ids of quests that were added in Shadowlands expansion. Not hard, okay- I’ve got all of the ids, but then found out that a lot of quests were just junk from development and were never intended to be obtainable in game, so why are they still in the api? Well, surely there must be a way to sort those out, so I can have just ids of quests that were atleast at some point obtainable on live servers, right?.. Well it was pretty hard to figure out, but I found out that about 30% of the quests didn’t have quest titles, so using function ingame, I sorted those out. Finally, there must be just quests that players can/could get left! Right?
No, there are for some reason still a lot of junk quests left… Please Blizzard, why are you making it so hard? Just delete that junk or give us option to sort those junk quests that are just unused data. I tried everything!
You could try querying wowhead for the quest IDs in question and parsing whether or not the quest is unobtainable. That should tell you which IDs can be removed from the list.
Try filtering Shadowlands quests that are unobtainable on wowhead yourself. It’s fresh expansion and the data is just not there yet. And I found out myself that not all information that is on wowhead is 100% correct.
Blizzard does not like addons so you can forget that. They only leave them alone because the community would cry like there is no tomorrow if you take away their toys that make them feel significant and in charge.
Oh ok, so if they don’t like data about quests so much, why are they promoting wowhead.com in every article? I am not creating anything crazy, I just want to know which quests were at one point/still are obtainable ingame
The main issue with the WoW API is not even the implementation quality, but the documentation that is not even worth being called documentation.
I’m pretty sure if you spend 20+ hours digging through unmaintained communities that have been dead sicne Wrath, you’ll find a solution to your problem, including a memory-leaking semi-working code-snippet
Because they have no choice but to accept them but they don’t like wowhead either. I am not talking about some random nobody but the leadership that originally made WoW never wanted WoW to be riddled with addons and websites containing all data. They meant it to be an exploration game and they also don’t like the competitive aspect that people obsess with. A few years back a dev tweeted that arena was a mistake and they regret it but he had to delete his tweet. If they could go back in time they would probably make WoW a lot more like FFXIV is today and we know that they are good friends with FFXIV devs and even took a lot of ideas from there for SL. They obviously cannot do anything about it now so they just accept it and linking wowhead on their site saves them a ton of work and resources.
I didn’t say filter search results. I said query wowhead.
As in HTTP query wowhead for each questID in the list you have and then parse the resulting page for something like “This quest was marked obsolete by Blizzard and cannot be obtained or completed.”
Well it’s better than whatever you have now, no?
Because wowhead is a trusted 3rd party that saves blizzard a metric ton of money and work setting up their own database site. And they’re also mostly correct because they get their information from extracting and parsing official client files. You’d be surprised the information you can glean from the internal DB files in the client.
