The Future of the Neverwinter Uncensored Toolbase

As you probably are aware our Toolbase was inevitably being halted with the shutdown of the Gateway. Almost everything we do there was dependent on our automated crawl engine, which pulled the necessary data out of the Gateway automatically.

Most modules still work but of course now deal with outdated data. Others simply contain empty tables. It’s impossible to maintain our tools in the same way without an automated crawl. All tools obviously need the data, but some of them even very frequently to do certain comparisons. The Heat Maps on single item pages for example won’t work with only a few inputs per day.

Sorry, a few stuff has to go

We are currently awaiting response from the devs whether there is a possibility to access some sort of API to continue our service, but it’s very unlikely. So we are most likely forced to remove the following functionalities:

• Auction House Bargains
• Topseller Data
• Auction Data
• Item Grabber Script (A special thanks to those that helped keeping our database up to date with this! It was an amazing amount of help that we never gave proper credit for!)
• All associated API calls
• Auction House Scalping Data

Other modules don’t need to be removed, but since data can no longer be generated for them, we look to transfer them to static pages for historic context. This includes:

• Auction House Heat Maps and Trends
• Auction House Population
• Item Database

Character Manager

So much for the bad news. We plan to continue to maintain the Item Database to an extent that the Character Manager will still be working. It’s one of the greater tools this game has and should absolutely stay. We can’t make any promises though. At this point forward every item has to be manually inserted into the database, which will take a while after Modules and such. We might consider crowdsourcing options, but looking at the up-to-dateness of the official wiki we’re not very optimistic.

What we will definitely crowdsource are Auction House prices. It’s impossible to track every single auction, but we might collectively be able to at least keep the latest prices for important items up to date. We were tracking 2,351 items but will severely cut down this number and only include those necessary to maintain our RNG Tools and Market Tools. We will see how many updates we actually are able to get from the community, but looking at our daily visitors and overall user base it could work. On the bright side such a system will also finally enable Xbox, PS4 and Russian users to collect data for their servers and fully use the Toolbase.

Users gather data for users

This change unfortunately also effectively means we can no longer offer our tools to unregistered members. We feel it’s important that not only a few users gather data for everyone else. So we are most likely switching to a subscription model, where users “pay” by inserting data into our database. We’ll see how that goes and adjust from there, but we hope that with this step we might be able to retain at least some of the tools.

Some work to do…

This change obviously needs time. We need to set up the “subscription” model and rework some of the pages. The site will go into vacation for two weeks starting next Monday and we hope to have some sort of timeline ready after that. In the coming days the Toolbase will also finally be updated to version 1.0.7 although most of the added functionality and usability upgrades are no longer that useful.

Thanks for supporting the site fellas and we sure hope you stay with the #1 independent source of all thinks Neverwinter through these massive changes! If you have any suggestions or thoughts make sure to add them in the comments below or visit the corresponding thread on our message board!