Guild Wars 2

This is more of an open question than an answer, because the presence and absence of certain items in the list is starting to baffle me.

I’ve been checking the contents of items and item_details every few weeks for a bit over a month now, but this week I had the bright idea to actually save out the results separately and compare the two lists. There were around 200 new items added since midJune or so; of these, I only bother with the weapons and armor, which accounts for around 30 items. What I find odd is that among these new items are the full set of Whispers medium armor, the heavy chest piece of the Vigil armor (and ONLY the heavy chest piece) and the Wayward Wand. None of these are actually new items. They’ve only just now appeared.
The Wayward Wand I bring up specifically because I made one last week when I was gearing up to fight Liadri, so I may be directly responsible for it showing up. But I can’t believe that in the two years that this game has been around that none of these things has been created before, particularly the Whisper armor. So what gives? What does it take for the API to ‘see’ an item?

Other things I found, if you’re curious: several spelling changes, a few name changes to karma armor pieces, and one item possibly removed from the API (a modniir axe). Not sure why that would happen, so I’m thinking it was a failure in my get-request.

After reading this, I deliberately bought a piece of karma armor that wasn’t already in the API (item id 4438: Stentor Leggings) just to find out if it would show up in the API afterwards. It doesn’t. There has to be some other trigger.

https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/item_details.json?item_id=4438

Unlocking items in the api is complicated.
Some items just never appear, mostly karma items (see this). Some items just appear after they were moved out of your inventory (mail/trading post/vault/…)(source). After an update it takes about 1 week to discover most of the items. And sometimes anet is resetting the discovered status of all items, so that they have to be discovered again to show up in the api (that happened just once for now? cant find source anymore).

In case you are interested, here is a RSS feed for all renamed items: http://gw2wbot.darthmaim.de/rss/renamedItems/
And here are the recently added ones: http://gw2treasures.de .
I still need to make a better overview for that.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I wish it was a little more transparent.

And I AM interested, since I’m tracking skins, so thanks again

darthmaim.6017:

And sometimes anet is resetting the discovered status of all items, so that they have to be discovered again to show up in the api (that happened just once for now? cant find source anymore).

There you are: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/API-errors-bugs/page/2#post3478842

I think that items discovery is necessary in GW2 API, to not preventively spoil items and to not show “service items” such as items with id 1,2 or 6 (although sometime doesn’t work as expected!). I think that this kind of discovery have more sense with recipies than with items, but that’s what we have.

I’ve noticed that Hero’s Rare weapons are not all discovered, contrariwise to Exotic ones. Aren’t they been bought? Maybe, but it’s not “clean” to have only half of them in GW2 API.

I hope that APIv2 doesn’t suffer from same bugs!

For those interested, I’m tracking new items (within 10 minutes from discovery) and updated items (within about a week from the update) at this page (rss feed also available) http://www.gw2services.com/items/news

Alcarin.9024:

For those interested, I’m tracking new items (within 10 minutes from discovery) and updated items (within about a week from the update) at this page (rss feed also available) http://www.gw2services.com/items/news

That’s pretty much the changes I was alluding to and presented far better than anything I could have made I’ll have to start watching this.

Started to make a better overview of new items, but still much work to do: http://gw2treasures.de/stats/items/new

Sariel V.7024:

Alcarin.9024:

For those interested, I’m tracking new items (within 10 minutes from discovery) and updated items (within about a week from the update) at this page (rss feed also available) http://www.gw2services.com/items/news

That’s pretty much the changes I was alluding to and presented far better than anything I could have made I’ll have to start watching this.

Thank you! I’ve forgot to mention that other than RSS feeds, updates are spread trough Facebook, Twitter and Google+, so you may get updates just following the website on one of those social network!