Project Lore

For a brief period today, the World of Warcraft Armory showcased several new features before they were quickly pulled down again. According to MMO-Champion, this update was live for about an hour, meaning that Blizzard was either testing the new additions or someone on their end simply hit the wrong button. A news post accompanying the update was also available, detailing the new features, and indicating that they may appear sometime after the new year (perhaps January 5th, with the next wing of Icecrown Citadel?):

3D Model Viewer: The 3D model viewer displays a character as he or she appears in-game. You can pan and zoom the camera, play animations, and save a default pose (for characters on the logged-in account) that will display for all visitors to the profile. Refer to the Character Sheet FAQ for more details. Character Activity Feeds: Each character's activity feed shows the most recent in-game actions of the character that can be recorded by the Armory. These include achievements, boss kills, item acquisitions, and more. Character feeds can be customized using our customization tool, then exported as RSS feeds to your RSS reader of choice. Refer to the Character Feed FAQ for more details. Player Calendar Feeds: Another new Armory tool allows you to export in-game player calendar data to calendar applications such as Outlook, or to online calendars such as Google Calendar. The tool can aggregate up to five characters on your account in a single feed, and is automatically synched with the characters' in-game player calendars. Refer to the Calendar Feed FAQ for more details. Character Profiles: Character profiles have been redesigned to accomodate these new features and with the goal of improving usability and clarity, such as the Gear List view for a character's items.

These sounds like some fantastic changes, bringing WoW's comprehensive web-based character profiles closer to those of, say, Bungie's HALO community. At this rate, one might wonder how long it is before  Blizzard starts nicking ideas off of third party sites and features things like gearscore evaluators and more detailed progression monitors! But if none of these upcoming tweaks float your boat, there's still a good reason to visit the Armory these days anyway: they now feature loot tables for the entirety of Icecrown Citadel aside from whatever drops off of the Lich King (since his fight has not been externally tested or revealed in any form yet). So, do any of you readers plan on using these upcoming features? I think I might make use of the Character Activity feed if I can do something like, say, link it to my Twitter account, lest I become too annoying to those who follow me!