A fast-changing game, made searchable

Visitors come to the Hub with something specific to settle: what build fits their stats, what an item does, which magic ranks well in the current patch. Very few arrive to browse.

The brief was to make a large and frequently changing body of game data searchable, comparable and quick to read, without the clutter and stale pages that community wikis tend to collect.

Players pieced answers together from community wikis, where pages go stale between patches and a ranking rarely says which version of the game it reflects.

The homepage routes by intent rather than by site structure: new players, returning players, build planners, map explorers and PvP players each get their own way in. Behind it:

• A reference layer of magics, bosses and items, searchable and directly comparable.
• A character builder that resolves stats into a class and gear recommendations.
• Tier lists that state their criteria and the patch they reflect.
• One keyboard-accessible search across the whole dataset.

The front end was built by hand for quick movement between dense, tabulated pages on the mid-range computers and phones players actually use. A standing update banner shows the latest patch, with its buffs and nerfs, to returning players.