Website Cleanup Incoming

Like any good webmasters, we look at World of Warcraft site stats on a regular basis, and we're always evaluating which aspects of the site people find most useful. Over time, we've identified a few areas that players don't really seem to visit but that still require a bit of effort for us to keep updated each time we release a new content update. For most of these, it's pretty obvious why they don't draw a lot of attention-they tend to focus on things that are simply more compelling to look at inside the game, are a "given," or are already well-served and readily available elsewhere, like on fansites.

Early next week we'll be doing some cleanup and removing the following rarely visited, higher-maintenance sections from the World of Warcraft website:

Game Guide

Pets & Mounts Gallery
Factions
Professions

Guild Profiles

Perks and Rewards sections

Character Profiles

Pets & Mounts
Hunter Pets
Professions
Reputation

Here are just a few fansites that provide a wealth of information on the above topics, as well as a whole lot more!

Wowhead
Warcraft Pets
Warcraft Mounts
WoW-Petopia

Doesn't WarcraftPets USE the pets section of the armory to update people's collections? You are going to break their site with this decision. Please don't remove the Pet & Mounts section.

To clarify, this cleanup process shouldn't affect the API fansites and other people use to pull game data.

Would be really sad to see the armory related stuff go. I use it all the time. Maybe not the profession ones though. I saw the game guide as blizzard trying to keep things in house. Is this a sign that you guys are going to let the fan sites handle the information repositories?

If there's game data that third-party sites present well, we're not opposed to directing the community to them. Our goal was never to compete with fansites in that regard. We just want to ensure players have easy access to good information. That's something we've taken into account, and weighed against the resources required on our end to maintain specific sections of the website that aren't utilized very much.

You can already find links to fansites throughout the Game Guide, and you'll likely see more of that result from this cleanup process.