On Torhead and TORCommunity

I removed Torhead from the "SWTOR Resources" section of my sidebar today, because the site has officially ceased to exist. Rav wrote a thoughtful post on the subject matter a couple of weeks ago when the news was first announced, and I don't have much to add that I didn't already express in the comments there.

I liked Torhead and went through a phase of trying really hard to support it, but in the end it had already been apparent for quite a long time that the owners' hearts weren't really in it anymore, so the site's closure wasn't really much of a surprise at this point - though still sad. (Interestingly, all the old Torhead links now point directly at SWTOR's official website.)

I was all the more pleased when I found out that TORCommunity is currently running a Kickstarter to get a proper SWTOR item database running on its own website. The campaign currently has 10 days left to go and they've had to make new stretch goals because they kept meeting the old ones so quickly, so even if you don't want to donate anything, the project is already funded and everyone should get to enjoy the results of their work for free. I chipped in anyway, simply because I had a bit of money to spare and really want to support community work like this. Not to mention that I simply want a new database! Even when its updates slowed to a crawl, I still visited Torhead quite a lot simply because a database site is a damn handy thing to have in an MMO, whether you want to look up where a certain item comes from or need help with a quest.

Today I found out that there's apparently at least one other new database in the works: swtordata.com. It seems to be developed by the same guy who runs SWTOR Conquest, and unlike TORCommunity's work in progress, this one already has a shiny looking front page. At the same time the site doesn't seem to be very functional yet, as I couldn't find a list of pets on any of the drop-down menus, and all the item lists looked chaotic and unsorted. I guess we'll see who comes out ahead in the race to provide the community with new database functionality to attract visitors.

The guys at TORCommunity may not have a visual database to show yet, however they recently implemented item tooltips like Torhead used to have. After a lot of clumsy faffing about with Blogger I managed to integrate them into my blog, and my first test in my last post seems to work fine now (the first link under the third picture). My only gripe is that the tooltip takes several seconds to load after the rest of the page has already finished loading, which initially made me think that I hadn't copied the code properly, even though I had. Also, as far as I can tell the supposed ability to override old Torhead links doesn't actually work - or at least not with any of the links in the old posts I've looked at so far. But hey, it's still a work in progress.

I'm quite intrigued by the work of TORCommunity in general. One of its staffers was on TOROCast the other day and pointed out that the site has apparently existed since 2008 - but I hadn't ever heard of it until a couple of months ago. If you look at the site now, its visible archives only go back to December 2013... so you have to wonder what the site actually did during the five years before that. Whatever it was, they have clearly been trying to push their visibility lately in what seems to be an effort to compete with Dulfy. This competition has apparently been laced with quite a bit of drama, but as a fan looking in from the outside, I have to say it's nice to see multiple sites working on supporting the community and (hopefully) pushing each other to try harder.

The one thing that currently worries me a bit about TORCommunity is that they have so many grand plans, I'm a bit doubtful whether they'll actually be able to go through with them all. You just have to take a look at their Kickstarter page - they don't simply want to build an item database, but also a character builder, interactive maps, leaderboards and who knows what else. They also swallowed up TORParse, yet that part of the site has been languishing in a barely functional state for months. (I was super-stoked when it re-launched originally... then I uploaded my first log and it couldn't even show me my healing done, only my dps - which, as a healer, I found to be utterly pointless.)

Nonetheless this hasn't stopped me from contributing to the project, because I really want to see them succeed, and I'd never pledge more to a Kickstarter than I can afford to lose. And while everyone has to make their own decisions on whether they want to support TORCommunity's current development or not, I think it's definitely worth drawing attention to.