Database queryFollow

I've only been playing Rift for a few weeks & found this section of ZAM from an in-game prompt form another player - "Great; I use ZAM 'product' for WoW", I thought, "this should be a useful place to find info..." Not the case, a lot of the time...

Are there any plans to implement more of the Thottbot style search criteria & functionality to the Rift Database so that gear/recipes, etc can be found by 'Quest Reward' or "needs reputation with <Faction Name>"?
Aside form the general speed of search data being returned, the whole ZAM Rift setup here shows a lot of promise, but a year in - from game release - it seems to be still at the WIP stage.

Before you fire up your vitriolic response artillery, tell me I'm the only user who has to wait 10s of seconds for search queries to be returned &/or point me at what I need to do to make my whole experience here a more enjoyable one... I have ZAM Premium membership & the performance of the World of Warcraft sections of ZAM are infinitely superior in their server-side response.

Look forward to input from more seasoned veterans of Rift...

I get what you mean, Cal, that the variety of data sourcing is what determines it's reliability... as in if more people uploaded - or even used - the discovery log tool, we'd get a better database.

Thottbot is now a part of WoWHead (they merged) and has a lot more search criteria for determining what results are return by the database search; I think WoWHead was originally a discussion site/forum, where Thottbot was primarilly a searching engine/database - the merger (?) seemed to add the discussion from WoWHead into the item data held on Thottbot.

The kind of things that I had in mind are options to:
1) expanding the boolean operator options to actively exclude stat's (stat = 0) in item searches; like Valor =0, to stop PvP items returning
2) adding a recognition check-box for crafted gear (only) to be returned for those who have skills, similar to (maybe as an alternative to) the 'no augmented items' option... or is that what the crafting items 'switch' is & I've misinterpreted it as 'return crafting materials'...?
3) where items are craftable & said items are made from recipe that require Faction reputation (or crafting Marks), maybe include these details in a tab with the Dropped By/Discoveries tabs; though it sound like that might involve more work than the benefit seen would generate. I know that Faction QM's can be looked up, but maybe if the there was a link-back option via the recipe to add to the awareness that the Factions offer crafting recipes and/or which ones they offer.

(LOL @ no V.R.A.)

Hi. Cal; had a chance to play with searches & found where the seach feature shows room for (possible) improvement as far as Boolean searching goes.

Use this URL & you'll notice that the top cpl. of items have Toughness...

Dunno if that's been earmarked for a 'future improvement', but it would be nice to see the functionality added at some point.

Edited, Mar 28th 2012 2:18pm by Eighjan

Faction filter for items added! http://rift.zam.com/en/itemlist.html?1

I think he's trying to filter out stats by setting them to 0. In this case, setting valor to 0 to filter out PVP items.

Apologies for the revisit, but I've had a 'different approach' thought on a suggestion:

As an enthusiastic advocate of using crafted equipment, is it possible to add a new column to the database results listings to show the Source of an item - Drop/Crafted/Vendor - (even time-line the option to be added, for such time as datamining allows for this information to be seen)? Yes; items that are dropped have listings of who/what has been found to source the drop, on their item pages, but you need to know that it IS a drop & what it's called before you look to see who/what it drops off as the database stands.
By adding a Source column to query results, it could (would?) promote the use of the database as a source of equipment progression.

How many crafters wonder if they can make a better piece of equipment for themselves & find they have exhausted all Trainer avenues?
Posit: Need a better Sword; what's available? I'm a Weaponsmith; can I make one? Dunno... not with what I know. Trainer/Marks vendor... nothing left to learn.
*interrogate ZAM database; crafted items are shown* Ahh; where do I get the recipe for THAT...? *Faction Z* Damn; not enough rep., but close. What's the drop-rate for alternatives? Only from Raid X or Y?? Rep. grinding time... :-/
Gotta be a scenario played out by 00's if not 000's of players... listing that an item is crafted in the database results gives crafters a better insight into other-than-Trainer-sourced recipes. Or am I the only on that doesn't check out what every Faction has to offer by way of Crafting options before I learn a Skill on a character?

Further to that, we have 'Exclude Augmented items' - is 'Show ONLY Augmented Items' possible to do, now/later?


Final thought by way of bringing home the fruitlessness of asking what I have in this whole thread - are Rift players sufficiently knowledgeable about gearing progression to not need a database to help them?

Edited, Apr 28th 2012 7:05am by Eighjan

Edited, Apr 28th 2012 7:06am by Eighjan

No, please don't stop! We're bound do lose some gems if you do!



That's tremendously flattering, thank you! One reason to keep asking is Trion keeps adding to and fine-tuning the data, so something we couldn't do at launch might be possible now. And since most of us work on multiple sites, we might need it brought to our attention :)

Edited, Apr 28th 2012 12:10pm by Calthine

As of right now, the source isn't really easy to find out (i.e. it's not in their data). I have it doing some determining and putting it into a meta tagble. Crafted isn't on there yet. Let me see about that.

Cheers, acprog - I've seen the updates to the database searching & love them... nicely done.

Our parser runs automagically almost as soon as Trion releases the data. So unless something has changed that would cause us to need to tweak the parser, stuff goes in pretty quick.

Right now all our data except Planar Attunement was updated today. PA needed a tweak :) If it's not in there then it probably hasn't been disco'd.