Path of a Hero lets you blog your character
by Mike Schramm 
Nov 1st 2008 at 12:00PM
You can even follow your friends (or create rivalries with other players), and you can check "gear scores" as well, so you can track your and others' progress over time. And the whole thing is actually controlled with a slider interface with a cool fade animation -- if you update often, you can watch your character grow from level 1 up to 70 and beyond.
The only issue with the site seems to be that it's a little shakey -- it takes a while to deal with all of that data, and I wouldn't be surprised (even on a Saturday like today) if we bring the site down by linking it for you readers. But it is a good idea, and if Aaron can make sure it scales well (and maybe throw a few ads in there, just to make sure his work pays off a bit), it could turn out to be a nice place to keep track of what your character's path has been like so far.
Filed under: Items, Fan stuff, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Guides
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kuroyume Nov 1st 2008 12:34PM
looks very interesting... might be worth giving it a shot
Ruttin Nov 1st 2008 12:46PM
The only thing I don't like is it appears to crop the screen shot. I wish it would show the whole thing. Looks interesting though
Erikamel Nov 1st 2008 12:47PM
Very cool! I wish I had this when I started, since I can't use the gear I had when I took all my screenshots on my journey to 70. Also I noticed that gems don't register on your stats, but no big deal.
thrasher Nov 1st 2008 1:22PM
they DO NOT support russian realms/characters
WTF? discrimination
i would post in english but my characters are on russian realms .. geez
Cow Nov 1st 2008 2:08PM
LMFAO. Discrimination?
Jeez..
thrasher Nov 1st 2008 2:57PM
of course,
why the hell then there arent any russian realms there?
i suppose it should of been the other way
only russian realms and id like to see ur reaction :/
Ed (Sindarin, Hydraxis US) Nov 1st 2008 3:06PM
It's not discrimination because the person who spent a lot of time programming it probably didn't think "Muhahaha, this'll piss the Russians off".
They just haven't added support for Russian characters yet - which sounds to this non-programmer like a pretty daunting task for somebody who probably doesn't know one letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. :p
I don't expect every Russian site to have an English translation, so I can honestly say that I would not be bothered if this site had only support for Russian characters, as I'd understand that the author may not be able to meet everybody's needs.
Aaron Nov 7th 2008 11:04PM
All non-english speaking EU realms are now supported :) Also you can now comment on people's journal entries.
Jim Moreno Nov 1st 2008 1:39PM
Now this looks excellent! Gonna take a deeper look, and may get with you for an article about it.
Kolo Nov 1st 2008 2:35PM
Sounds like a great idea, hopefully works on EU realms, will check later
Stinkmeaner Nov 1st 2008 2:36PM
It looks like the idea is for the screenshots to be form the character screen only. In this way you can see your character "morph" as his/her gear changes.
Ironhide Nov 1st 2008 2:53PM
nice idea, I actually registered a domain name and started working on a site that parsed your logs daily (with a client) and created a blog of what your toon battled, discovered, completed, looted, bought etc etc etc that day.
never enough time for these side projects though.
zimmi Nov 2nd 2008 4:27AM
I was planning on doing something like this too, but as a mod that tracked bosses killed (via Bigwigs) and auto-generating some text as a blog entry you could copy and paste to your blog engine of choice. I wrote part of the mod, then got distracted by something shiny..
PeeWee Nov 1st 2008 3:17PM
"The system itself also grabs your stats from the Armory..."
Just what we need, another crawler to hog up the Armory.
Aaron Nov 1st 2008 6:53PM
Wow the response to this blog post has been tremendous. It is engaging a lot of users and I am getting heaps of useful feedback.
So far there are 1623 users and 815 entries but these numbers are rapidly changing. The site seems to be holding up very well in my opinion, I have not experienced any significant slowdowns.
Moving forward I am really excited about implementing the popular suggestions made by users so that Path of a Hero can really evolve to better suit players.
:D
Aaron
Turinqui Nov 1st 2008 8:20PM
Amazing work, something I personally have never seen before. I've always had my own little scrapbook, but never a medium where I could not only watch my own progress but also show friends "Hey, look at the changes I've gone through since we first started playing together!"
I have one request, and I do apologise if it's been beaten to the ground, but I would love to be able to do a realm search (as opposed to just a character search), so that I may find people on my realm who have similar interests that, for one reason or another, I've never grouped with.
Thank you =D
Aaron Nov 1st 2008 8:24PM
Hey Turinqui,
Thanks for the positive feedback.
I have actually got a UserVoice page
http://pathofahero.uservoice.com/
where users can make suggestions and vote them up.
I am already aware of your suggestion and I think it is an absolute necessity :) I think it will be the very next thing that I implement.
Cheers
Deathgodryuk Nov 2nd 2008 1:48PM
I just made a character profile and the site has some awesome potential. I can't wait to see how this goes in the future.
purplezorlak Nov 2nd 2008 2:02PM
I tried using the site, but I can't create an entry, it throws an exception mumblejumble.