Okay, I know, I know, I’m just delaying my already-delayed New Kids series finale, but this is an important post. BRK has threatened numerous times to write a post on WoW Web Stats (WWS).

This is intended to bridge the time gap between now and when he finishes it.

Meantime, there are also some really nice posts on the subject over at Priestly Endeavors as well.

This isn’t quite as in-depth as all that. I’ve noticed that ever since I started parsing out battle logs and posting WWS stats for my guild, the general response has been one of wide-eyed wonder, as though I’d done some miraculous, magical trick.

That may be true for the folks over at WWS, but what I do is so simple a monkey could do it. An emo monkey, that spends most of the day pouting and complaining about the weather.

(*aside* Sure way to win while blogging? Mention monkeys. Or weasels, or cheese. Bonus points for slipping all three in there. *winks*)

Okay, the first thing you have to realize is that WWS isn’t magic. (I know, I know, I was disappointed too.)

Create the Combat Log
World of Warcraft itself (no addons, no downloads, no need to weasel some secret bit of code into your install) has a built in function that creates a combat log.

What is a combat log? (you might be asking). Well, I shall tell you!

A combat log is a reeeeeally big text file that has a single line for every detail of combat that happens. Every time your HoT ticks, every time the rogue hits someone, every time the shaman whips out her wolpertinger….everything. (BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING).

You have to turn it on though.

The command is complicated.

Are you watching? Paying attention? You might want to write this down.

…

/combatlog

(Okay, that was a lot of buildup for nothing. Don’t get mad at ME! You people forced this upon yourself!)

Everybody standing around and the initial buffs for whatever instance run or raid start flying? Type /combatlog. Check your general chat tab and make sure you see the little message telling you that logging has begun.

Raid finishes? Everyone’s taking the mage portal back to Shattrath? (SHOUT OUT TO MY MAGES! Love ya’ll!) Type /combatlog again – this time to tell it to stop recording.

Don’t worry if you forget to tell it to stop recording, it will stop when you log out, and you’ll have to type another /combatlog to start it back up again.

Extending the Log Range
Of course, there’s more to it than that. At least, if you want accurate information, there is. The default log range for Warcraft is…pretty piddly. You’ll want to extend it to max range so that you gather information about people who are standing farther away as well. Otherwise your log may completely miss the dps for the hunter standing on the other side of Netherspite. This might make him unhappy. (Hypothetically speaking)

So, there are two ways to extend your combat log range. You can either paste the commands into your chat box inside Warcraft (which is a serious pain, since you have to redo it every time you log on, I believe — correct me if I’m wrong)

OOOOOR

Or you can edit the file /WTF/Config.wtf, and add these lines :

SET CombatLogRangeCreature “200″
SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayers “200″
SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayersPets “200″
SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayers “200″
SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayersPets “200″
SET CombatLogRangeParty “200″
SET CombatLogRangePartyPet “200″
SET CombatDeathLogRange “200″

The lines SHOULD NOT already be in your Config.wtf file. If they are, and are greater than 200, then don’t worry about it, your log range is already extended. Congratulations.

If the lines either don’t exist, or DO exist but have a value less than 200, put these lines in their place.

Ah, master – there are a few addendas, some quid pro quo…
Okay, okay. You’ve extended the log range. You’ve used /combatlog to start and stop your combat logging.

At this point you have to :
1) Get the Log
2) Clean the Log
3) Send (or parse) the Log

Step 1 : Get the Log
Step one is easysauce. The log is ALWAYS located at /Logs/WoWCombatLog.txt.

You’ll want to snag the WoWCombatLog and copy it over to your desktop or whatever your favorite temporary file holding place is.

Here we reach snag #1. While you have World of Warcraft running, you cannot delete the WoWCombatLog.txt, regardless of whether you’re currently logging or not. It’s a pain. I always forget to delete my log file after I log off, and the log process will simply append new information to the end of the old stuff.

Step 2 : Clean the Log
Okay, so you’ve got a copy of the log file. Now, if you are NICE, you will clean up the log before you parse it. Nobody’s perfect, and your log file could very easily contain information from the random warlock that was standing outside Karazhan, or the mage creating water in the Aldor bank in Shattrath.

…you don’t need that garbage. So you should open up your WoWCombatLog.txt file and edit it.

NOTE: WITH GREAT POWAH COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY!

By editing this combat file you have the ability to pretty much twiddle with the stats of the run. Not that any of you WOULD, but if you get the urge to make the warlock look bad by deleting a few of his Seed of Corruption lines….don’t. Uncool. Party foul.

Okay, so, we’re gonna edit the file responsibly. Open it with (assuming you’re a window’s user) WordPad. DO NOT USE NOTEPAD. Notepad does…weird things to it. Use WordPad. You’ll have to right click on the file and choose “Open With…” and pick WordPad from the list.

Let’s assume you’ve got a fairly gimped up log file. You’ve accidentally kept information from up to three previous days, and you started the log early and ended the log late.

Do a Ctrl+F to open the find window, and do a search for the date of the run you’re interested in. That should put your cursor at the first line with that date, theoretically giving you the first line of information logged for the run you’re interested in.

Put your cursor at the front of the line (don’t highlight anything) and then type ctrl+shift+Home (home is the key over by the numpad). That should highlight everything from that line to the top of the file. This could be a LARGE chunk of text. Press the delete key and voila! You have removed a bunch of extra garbage from the front of the log.

Now, skim the first couple of lines. Did you accidentally start the log too late? If so, scroll down till you find the initial buffs for the run, then repeat the ctrl+shift+home procedure to trim off the fat from the top.

Now (you guessed it) go to the BOTTOM of the file (the End key) and do the same there. If you’ve accidentally got about half an hour’s worth of information from the Aldor bank (hypothetically speaking…) then you might want to do another Ctrl+F and do a search for “NameOfTheLastBoss Dies”. That should give you the line where the boss died. Trim off all the stuff below it with a Ctrl+Shift+End and a delete.

Make sure you don’t have empty lines at the beginning or end of the document, then save and close.

Congratulations, you now have a clean and beautiful combat log, ready to be parsed!! (those of you who do this before sending it to me get a frillion lovepoints. If you think it’s a pain to do that to a single log, try doing it to six.)

Step 3 : Send (or parse) the Log
At this point, you have a decision to make. If you have someone in your guild who collects and parses combat logs, mail this to them. If YOU are that person, keep reading.

First off, it’s always better to have multiple logs. Even with the extended combat range, extra logs will give you more information. Which means BETTER information. In a perfect world, you want to have logs from ranged players (healers, ranged damage) and melee players (tanks, dpsers). That way you get a nice, even distribution of the combatlogs.

Okay, so you’ve got…two logs (to simplify things). It doesn’t matter what the logs are named, I’ll generally add the name of the character who gave the log to the end of the filename, so I can keep them straight.

Now you have to open up the WWS software. For simplicity, I’ll give you the link here, but you can access it from their homepage as well (along with a MUCH less rambly description of how it should be used).

This Link Opens the WWS Client Software

The link will ask you if you trust it, if it’s okay to download it, make sure you have Java installed, blahblah. If there’s spyware involved, I have it too and haven’t noticed in the past couple months. I would call it as safe as anything else on teh intarweb.

Okay, so you’ve started the software, and you see a new application pop up – the WoW webstats Client. It has its own window and everything. A couple tabs span the top. You can ignore “Configuration” and “Log Roller” for these purposes.

The tab it starts you up on is the “Logs & Report” tab, which is where you want to be.

You might want to go ahead and change the “Raid Comment” text field towards the bottom now. I always forget to do it later, and it makes the output have an odd title. I recommend going with some combination of a Guild/Team name, Raid Location, and date.

Okay, so now you want to add the logs! Conveniently, the button we want says “Add Log” on it.

Click that, navigate to your first log file, open it up, and type in the name of the character that generated the log when it asks you. (See why adding the character name is useful? Eh? See? See?! I’m not crazy!)

Do it again for any other logs you’ve got. Woot, you’re halfway done!

Now change your tab to the “Actors” tab.

If you’ve got anything in there, make sure you start out by clicking “Remove All” – you want to start with a clean list.

“Actors” is interesting terminology. What it MEANS, is “Anyone who did anything that the combat log considered noteworthy.” Come to think of it, “Actors” rolls off the tongue a bit more easily, doesn’t it.

Right, so now you’ve got an empty actor list, so hit the “Auto-update” button.

A frillion names fill your little window. Don’t panic, we’ll go through this together.

The first thing to realize is that the Auto-update function is pretty stupid. It doesn’t do a great job of figuring out what class someone is. Druids in particular seem to cause some problems.

So you want to click on the header column for “Name”. This will reorganize the list based on name. All that does is keep the actors from flying around the screen while you’re trying to edit them.

Okay, now comes the painstaking part. You have to go through every single name listed, every mob, every player, every pet, every random totem, and make sure that the Class is properly set, and the Master if it’s a pet.

As I mentioned, I almost always have to change the Class from “Mob” to “Druid” when we’ve got our druids along. Shadowfiends and totems are similarly unattached. If you had more than one priest on the run, you have no way of splitting the “Shadowfiend” up by owner, so you can either leave it as a “Mob” or assign it to your favorite priest by making it a “Pet” and changing it’s master to “Vonya”….err…your favorite priest.

Double and triple check this list. If you miss someone, they will not show up on the WWS report, which will skew the results. If you accidentally left RandomMage in your log files, don’t worry. Highlight their name and choose “Remove Selected”.

This part is very important, and you’re also nearly done.

Once you’re certain the Actors are properly assigned, go back to the “Logs & Report” tab and generate your report!

If you’ve got an account with WWS (worth the money, from what I hear) then you can choose “Host Report”. If you’re a cheapskate AND you have web space somewhere, choose “Generate Report” instead.

(If you just want to see it for yourself, you can choose “Generate Report” and just look at it on your computer.)

BOOM! Zot! POW!

You have created a shiny, glorious WWS report.

If you are hosting it on your own, go to the location that you have your “Output Directory” set to, snag the folder, and FTP it to your favorite web host, then send a link to it to everyone that cares, or post it on your guild boards.

How to interpret the results is…waaaaay beyond the scope of this already ridonkulously long post.

I hope this helps! WWS is an amazing tool, I’d love to see more guilds using it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 and is filed under General Info, ~ Vonya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.