2017 Year In Review

Started by Aspyr and Ulsoga, Raider.IO was launched after an intense crunch to tie up all the last little details that need to happen before a new site goes live.

We set out with one mantra from launch: Release an update to the site every week. Some weeks the updates were small, while other weeks the updates were quite large.

This page captures our development highlights for the year.

Up until this time you could only navigate to guilds by clicking their names off of the various ranking pages. With search, you could type a few terms and quickly find the guild you were looking for. What we have right now is still a simple search that we are planning to expand upon in 2018.

We noticed the rising popularity of Mythic+ content, and the fact that the Mythic+ community didn't have as much fan-site representation as the raiding community. So we took a fresh look at how to score Mythic+ and worked closely with Devilnaht (a good friend of ours and a math-whiz) to build a scoring algorithm that encouraged players to push high keys in-time.

We've been avid fans of following the World First race for years, and we wanted to build a feature to help share this excitement with other like-minded players. So, we eagerly implemented our Discord Alerts system to send real-time alerts for Raid Bosses being killed, Mythic+ Records being broken, and Weekly Affixes changing.

The deadline for this release was originally set as a joke in our Discord, but we stuck to it and built all the required components to launch an account system that lets you claim and customize characters.

We were thrilled with the announcement of the Mythic Dungeon Invitational, Blizzard's first ever PVE tournament.

This started with the Proving Grounds, a period of time where teams of players would push keys as high as possible in order to qualify for the Tournament Regionals.

On September 15th, the Regional tournaments began, followed by the Finals and Grand Finals. We even had a team with our own namesake, team "Raider.IO". This was a generous gesture from the 5 team members (Meowchan, Guti, Musclebrah, Tarkam, and Thorlefulz) to show their support and help bring exposure to Raider.IO.

This may not seem like a very exciting feature to some, but it was a big deal for us. It made it possible to answer support requests much more quickly, which is particularly important since there are only two of us.

With the help of an experienced AddOn developer, Vladinator, we built an AddOn to help bring Mythic+ scoring data and progression directly into game. We're always trying to think of ways to make things easier to use, and the AddOn was just one step in that direction.

We wanted to be able to grant special rewards to any users generous enough to help support the site. This made Patreon a great fit, as it allowed us to easily offer multiple levels of rewards in exchange for a user's patronage.

We wanted to call out a few key individuals who have been pivotal to the growth and exposure of Raider.IO over the year:

Blizzard Entertainment, Cistara, Cohumulone, Deadlystrike, Devilnaht, Domain, Ducky, Isak, Jake, Ludicrous Speed, Max, Meowchan, Perculia, Radix, Relic, Shannon, Skyee & Shana, Starym, Vladinator and of course our awesome and supportive users!

Thank you for the great year. We couldn't have done it without so much support from the community.

We're eager to keep building Raider.IO in 2018, one week at a time!