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Both sc2ranks.com and rts-sanctuary provide stats on starcraft 2 rankings. where do they get their data? is it a special deal they have with Blizzard, or are they accessing a public feed that Blizzard supplies, or are they scraping the battlenet web site somehow?

UPDATE: After reading the post linked to in my comment, maybe a rephrase would appease the masses: Let me phrase my question as a question about the features of StarCraft 2. "Does Starcraft II have a feature or API by which a player can download data about match histories for themselves and others?" Hopefully questions about the features of games are considered on topic :)

ps - in an attempt to find out why people were voting for it to be closed, i accidentally voted to close it myself :). And now I can't unvote. oh well.

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    Not sure how asking whether blizzard, a game manufacturer, has a feed that supplies statistics about a game, doesn't belong on a gaming Q+A site?
    – Peter Recore
    Commented Aug 23, 2010 at 1:05
  • 5
    before anyone else votes to close this, please consider this post, which argues that questions about resources for looking up statistics are on topic: meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/869/…
    – Peter Recore
    Commented Aug 23, 2010 at 1:12
  • I know I originally closed this, but I'm very on the fence about this question...
    – tzenes
    Commented Aug 24, 2010 at 1:55

1 Answer 1

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As stated on Starcraft 2 Rankings' FAQ page:

Blizzard does not provide any easy to use list of players, we rely on cascade spidering through saved players, manually entered players and spidering through Blizzard forums to find players.

If you do not see a character, adding them through the character tab above will queue them and their division.

So they're simply scraping all the data Blizzard does supply, however little.

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  • that sounds like a royal PITA
    – erik
    Commented Aug 23, 2010 at 14:12
  • It is, yeah. The same goes for most stats websites, including one for BFBC2. At least most SteamWorks games expose the games directly.
    – user56
    Commented Aug 23, 2010 at 14:18
  • Does not sound like a PITA at all. The programming does all the work. You just input the character and the program does the rest.
    – Strawberry
    Commented Aug 30, 2010 at 1:02
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    @Doug - I believe that @espais was referring to programming the site itself.
    – user56
    Commented Aug 30, 2010 at 11:24
  • @Doug the programming itself is a pain in the arse indeed, because blizzard can change their markup any minute and it will screw up all the scrapers
    – JohnIdol
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 12:48

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