Blizzard has gone ahead and implemented their own blue tracker on the official forums, easily showing every blue post made throughout the day.

Now personally, I don't like theirs compared to MMO-Champion, World of Raids, or WoWRaid. All those have a nice layout that allows for quick viewing and easy summaries of posts. It's much preferable to the "tool" Blizzard has put up.

Additionally, the Blizzard blue tracker lacks an RSS feed and the ability to search through the posts.

It's clear that Blizzard did this to dissuade the use of third party blue trackers and other sites.

Some folks in Blizzard like to try to control the flow of information and all that. But in the long run I don't think this will do very much to dissuade other sites from having their own blue trackers since the Blizzard one lacks many necessary features, and this new tool really won't help control information release (since all we see is "soon" and other word games anyways).

If Blizzard really wanted to make this a tool that would be useful they could implement the following things:

• Tagging of all blue posts (ie: warrior, paladin, dps, ghostcrawler, gin-in-coffee)
• Search
• RSS feeds based on any number of criteria (tags, post location, poster)
• Links on each blue post to previous relevant posts
• Filter (I often only care what Ghostcrawler has to say and not a mod banning some troll)
• Read this item check marks, to help you track that you've read the given blue post

Of course these are only a few suggestions off the top of my head. But they're not really far out there and are already implemented in one form or another using tools already available.

Next up: Blizzard starts running its own blog and actually release information about patches and in-game events in a timely manner.

Tags: blizzard, blizzard-blue-tracker, blue-tracker, buzz-tracker, forums, official-forums

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items