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Share Your Thoughts: Uploading Bank Data
Aug 25, 2007 at 09:35 AM
in General
We would like to make it easier to mass upload Guild Bank data and would love to hear any suggestions you guys may have. For example:
- If you play World of Warcraft and use an addon to manage your Guild Bank that has an export function let us know about it and see can see if it can be supported. *if you could email us a sample output from the export function that would be helpful =)
- If you play another MMORPG that has a similar feature to WoW's addons that allows you to export bank data let us know.
- If you use a speadsheet or another means currently to handle your Guild Bank and find it easy to do so let us know, and we can look at adding a comma seperated list or xml import feature.
Basically any method that would make it easier for you to import Guild Bank data we would love to hear about it so we can look into supporting it during this update.
Please either post here in the comments section or send us an email to staff@mmoguildsites.com
My guild currently uses RPGOutfitter to upload it's bank info. The program is called Character profiler.
Sample link:
http://www.rpgoutfitter.com/WoW-GM/char.cfm?char=Vilebank@US-Rexxar&action=inventory
I have heard there are other mods out there, such as Ducky (think it's called), however RPGO is constantly and consistantly updated and I've never had any problems with it.
If you want to contact the developer to see if it would work with this site (it would be a great addition to the wonderful features you already provide), you can go to www.rpgoutfitter.com or you can use the link above to gain ideas and such. If needed, I can also provide another bank character, and also an individual character linking as well.
Thanks and great job so far!
Forgot to add:
This is for the game World of Warcraft. :)
Hi,
Our guild has used Duckiebank, an ingame add on that scans what is in the bags and bank of the bank character.
I want to integrate as much as i possible can onto our guild website so that the website will become an active place for members to visit, sign up to events, and use our guild features - such as the guild bank.
We currently have six bank character maxed out with big bags and all bank slots bought. This means there are a good few thousand of items.
At this moment im manually inserting every item on the guild website page. It takes a very long time and a lot of the items cannot be found in the armory, even though they are spelled correctly.
The guild bank itself is very good overall but here are some features that can make it even better:
- Picture with the item
- Timestamps when the item was added
- When inserting an item into the guild bank, make an option to select a bank character , or type a bank characters name in a box. So when a member requests something ... i know what bank to look for.
- At the top of the bank page it says : Available Items | Bought Items | Overview,
it would be great if you add a page for admins / moderators (that have bank options enabled in the permissions section) only, that can see outstanding "wanted" items or "requested" items.. so members that clicked the "ask for this bank item" button.
Now i have to scroll down to pages and pages trying to find names of the people that want items.
-more categories for items (you already implementing that , i read in your post)
-fix armory errors
-make option screen to manually add points / withdraw points as our guild has competitions where you can win guild bank items for half price etc.
-make a new block with "latest added guild bank items"
i cant think of anything more but if u try and implement this , it would be fantastic :P but dont get me wrong its already a very good system, whole of mmosites is amazing!! GOOD JOB!! the updates are very frequent and the support is so fast !
Maybe add a few features a week or something, so we dont need to wait months for a big release? KEEP IT UP!! :) great work on calendar too !
This is such a vital aspect of a well run guild, but an increadibly daunting task to do right. Without the help of an export mod for the guilds bank, I have found it impossible to manualy keep up with an ever changing guild bank.
In my personal experience with various other manually updated options for a guild bank (spreadsheet, competitor guild hosting site with a manual bank), they just do not work in the long run. They are just too much work to keep up to date.
The mods seem the best way to go about it. WoW is the only exp I have in such mods (as mentioned above, RPG Outfitters). I am unaware of LotR or WAR supporting such mods. My hope is that WAR will allow mods. Unfortunantly DAoC did not (same game devs that are doing WAR, as I am sure you know). We shall see.
I will google around and see if I can find any other mods.
Keep the updates coming. It is why I am here and not at our old guild webhost of 4+ years. =)
Thanks guys.
-Gams
We've been using a simple addon called itemtophpbb that merely exports all the items to a string that you can copy into a post on a forum.
5x[item]Primal Mana[item]
3x[item]Void Crystal[item]
and so on...
It's not sexy, but it works and I know of several guilds on our server that use it.
I have little experience with games other then WoW, but at least in patch 2.3 there will be a built in guild bank system. An article on the system can be found at http://www.wowinsider.com/media/2007/05/wow2.jpg . Odds are we're looking at a time frame around 3-5 months for the feature to go live, but I'm sure it will change the whole "guild bank landscape" quite a bit. The article makes mention of bank transactions being tracked though the WoW website. Perhaps the upcoming bank listing here could draw information off of the WoW site as it does with the armory.
Also if you weren't aware of the feature, there it is :)
rpgo_Character Profiler.
We currently use this addon to upload a list of the banks contents to our roster (wowroster.net). I run the website with loads of facility however I'm looking at your site as I dont really want to manage this myself. You've covered most areas well, if you can get this bank import sorted then i'm certain you will have a great deal more people sign up. I dont want to polute this thread with off topic but it's worth noting that the addon also has other data that you could use, quests, keys, hearthstone location, etc. Couple that with an automatic uploader like uni-uploader and your onto a winner in my book.
Keep up the good work and if you want an export all you have to do is let me know.
The guild I run was using Duckie Bank but as mentioned before the task of manually entering in items and updating the list really is impossible. Really if you could design a system that would accept an import from rpgo-CharacterProfiler Mod. I think that would pretty much solve my problem. I can do a single bank character dump rather quickly for updated items.
Buying items section. For my guild it more important for me to know who is requesting items. The value of the item is not really of importance. ONe way to help with this would be to have a certain accounts have banker permission. when a player requests and item all bankers receive a PM for the item so someone can get the item for the player and mark it given to them.
Though I guess Blizzard is putting in an In Game Bank but I still feel it will be important to note who requests what items on the website.
With the pending Guild Bank feature from Blizzard that's due in patch 2.3 iirc, I'd spend my worktime on other projects if I were you. :)
To give everyone an update:
When blizzard does release guild banks, if the information is available on their website, similar to how the armory is, we will be supporting this.
For this update, so far we are looking into adding two methods of uploading bank data - the first will be a script that parses data generated by rpgo character profiler (if anyone wants to email us a sample output from it that would be helpful) - the second will be a simple comma separated list, so you may enter a bunch of items at once (in a format such as item name, quantity, donator, value).
While Duckie Bank does look like a nice bank addon, it unfortunately does not appear to have an export function.
I recommend you look into a wow addon called item2phpbb for getting a nice string to import items into your new bank. Tiny addon used for grabbing bag/bank contents on a character to paste into phpbb with the [item]Some Item[/item] tag. Maybe this could work for you?
Our guild has over 4000 items, I really want to integrate the guild bank into the website, so the website becomes more active but if i still have to add all 4000 items manually by a simple comma separated list - i will keep on using duckiebank :(
Why dont u make an add ons that MAKES the simple comma seperated list for you, then all we have to do is and then on our admin bank page and it will all appear there sorted and all?
Hi Elvaleryn:
I believe you should be able to just login with rpgo profiler addon installed with your bank chars then paste that to the website; and continue to use duckie bank also if you wish =)
I've been reading bout all the suggestions (thank all)...but was still wondering as the possible implementation/status on the "tweakin" of the current bank feature.
Hi Rajun:
could you give an example or explain tweakin of the current bank feature, I'm not sure I understand what you meant.
if you meant when will the bank changes be finished and put live, we are almost done =) this update has taken a little longer than most as we came up with many improvements and new features for the bank =)
if things go well the update should go live early next week and at the latest it will go up next weekend.
Sweet...
you answered my unclear question perfectly...Right-On Toe-Man!
lol, excellent =)
if i can just export data using a simple mod like >item2phpBB< and then add that to my mmoguildsite where it will display it in a organised way (sort by - item category, number of item, alphabetical etc..) it is good enough for me. i prefer not to have an option whereby guild members can bid on items. if that feature will remain, please could u implement an option to disable it?
Thanks
Yo Toe-Man...
I love the features that you provide with the service and commend you guys on always looking to to make things better (here it comes) But, im hanging on the edge waiting for the Bank update. I know, I know, im an ungratefull bastid and shouldnt look a gift horse in the mouth...but when you said "...early next week and at ... next weekend" you got my motors started and ive been anxiously waiting. This weekend maybe. =)
Seriously though, you guys Rock!
hehe, thanks for the comments rajun, and I feel I should explain a little on the delay.
While adding the "stacking/unstacking" functionality for items to the bank, we came up with a system of transactions; where buying and donating items from the bank are treated as transactions, that can be listed as a history, and each item acts as a holder, and all transactions for it are listed when viewing the item; for example, viewing Silk, would list all of its donators and buyers as transactions, with how much they donated or bought on the date. ie a simplified view of the Silk item, without member totals, wanters, etc. would be:
Silk
Available: 5, Donated: 8, Bought: 3
Transactions Log
Sept 10 - 8 Toes donated 6 Silk
Sept 14 - 8 Toes donated 2 Silk
Sept 18 - Severed Pinkies bought 3 Silk
The transactions system is a very nice way to handle the bank, as each item in the bank acts as a holder for all its transactions and there is no duplicates in your main list then; and it is very easy to see a full history of the bank and of individual items, as well as transaction logs of individual members.
We came up with the idea of transactions part way through the bank update, and were forced to re-write the entire bank to properly support them. We also had to come up with conversion scripts to convert all the old bank data to this new transaction-oriented bank, which had to be thoroughly tested so we don't risk losing your existing bank data.
So this update has unfortunately taken longer then we wanted, but the end result should be a nice improvement to the bank. We're working hard to get it finished as soon as possible; I mentioned this weekend at the latest earlier, and there is a chance we may be able to put it up sunday night; but it may slip to monday or tuesday night - we're being very careful to test our conversion scripts which is taking a little longer, once they are ready the update will go live =)
Now with the guildbank showing up on the wow armory, perhaps a block could be made where you supplied the login credentials (account name, password) necessary and it displayed the items in a custom window here on our mmoguildsites page.
Wonder if there's a way to inject the username/password straight into the URL rather than having to login :p
8 Toes,
I realize this thread has been dead for a long time, but I have to say, I am honestly surprised that you guys haven't done anything more with Guild Banks since the release of wow armory. I have searched high and low for a decent export mod (and yes I've looked at rpg profiler - hasn't been updated in more than a year!).
So the real question now is, are you guys planning to do anything more with the guild bank system with all of the options now available?
Thanks for all that you guys do!
Hi Imajicaan,
We have looked a few times at options to integrate with but haven't managed to find any options which seemed decent...
We originally wanted to integrate with the bank data on the wowarmory.com site, but as that requires your wow account password we passed on that option...
We would love to integrate with a bank addon, but it would need the option to export its bank data into some format we could consume, such as xml or even html; if you know of such an addon please feel free to toss me a link and we would definitely look to see if we could support it =)
8 Toes,
2 possible thoughts for you here:
BankItems (current version: 30200)
this in game add-on allows any user to quickly do a sort and display of all items within the Guild Bank and then to simply cut/paste that entire list into anything they want. (Excel/Word, etc.) I could see you guys setting up a set of rules on the Mass Add Items function to allow for a direct cut/paste from within Excel, or even from directly in-game depending on the filter options of this Mod.
Armory
This add-on allows a user to also sort/search/access everything within the guildbank in a list format. Have yet to find an acceptable export add-on for it though. I know there's an export add-on for this mod which allows for all the RECIPES from the guild to be exported, but not sure on the actual items.
Hope those at least point you in a possible direction :-) Also, I'll be more than happy to play guinea pig/alpha tester if you need to try some things!
Have a great day, and thanks for all that you do!
Hi Imajicaan,
Ah thanks for mentioning those two, I'll take a peak at them shortly after the next 2 updates and see if it would be possible to integrate with either of them =) [they will need an export option though so the 2nd one may not work]
8 Toes,
I found my bank offers CSV format. So I searched on the web and found a few programs that "no touch" upload my details into a database for personal marking and tracking.
Currently I am using a program called bank2budget free trial and it looks good so far. It offers my bank format so you would have to check to see if your bank is offered.
Good luck to us all.