Guild Progress

No Armory. No API. No automation. Guild leaders filled out a form, reported their boss kills, and trusted each other. That's it.

Tracked server-first kills across Blackwing Lair, AQ40, and Naxxramas during Vanilla WoW — before anyone else was doing it.

The original submission form. "Update (please include date for new kills):" — crowdsourced data entry, honor system.

Blizzard launched the WoW Armory with achievement data. Everything changed. Built automated crawlers that parsed achievement timestamps to verify boss kills — no more honor system.

Also built a C# desktop application that the community downloaded and ran to help scrape Battle.net Armory data. Distributed data collection before anyone called it that.

December 2008 — Wrath of the Lich King progression. 19,689 guilds ranked. Obsidian Sanctum, Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity.

97,354 guilds tracked worldwide. 5x growth in six months. Multiple raid tiers tracked simultaneously. Real-time "new kill" indicators. Crawlers running four times daily to keep rankings fresh.

July 2009 — Ulduar Heroic worldwide rankings. 97,354 guilds. Hard mode tracking (9/10). "new" tags for kills in the past 36 hours.

The ranking algorithm rewarded speed over breadth — first kill on a boss was worth more than the second, which was worth more than the third. Guilds that pushed cutting-edge content ranked higher than guilds that cleared more bosses later.

Expanded beyond WoW to cover every major MMO with end-game raid content. Each game had its own progression model, crawling strategy, and community. Migrated the entire platform from PHP to .NET along the way.

Individual guild pages with full progression history across every raid tier. Per-boss kill dates, embeddable guild badges, score comparison tools. The platform had become exactly what it set out to be.

May 2012 — Method, World Rank #1. Full Cataclysm progression with per-boss kill dates. Dragon Soul Heroic 8/8, Firelands Heroic 7/7. The last Wayback snapshot.

Six years. Five games. Nearly 100,000 guilds. From a manual form on shared hosting to a multi-game platform with automated crawlers and a community that kept it running. Eventually the ecosystem caught up — official APIs matured, well-funded competitors emerged, and the mission was accomplished. Closed the chapter, kept the lessons.