Thank You for a Great Year: Looking Back on 2022!
It's hard to believe that another year has passed, and what a year it's been! I've been busy at work, constantly improving and updating this website to bring you the best possible experience.
I wanted to take a moment to thank all of our amazing users for their support and loyalty. Without you, none of this would be possible. I am so grateful for your continued use of this website, and I hope you've had as much fun using it as I have had building it.
In this article, I'll be looking back on all of the big milestones we've had over the past year, and sharing some of my plans for the future. Thank you again for being a part of this community - here's to another great year!
What did we achieve
D2Runewizard started out as a small project to create a runeword calculator that was better than anything out there. This site out-grew its intial purpose and is now a full-fledged knowledge source with a multitude of tools and a vibrant community!
Community
My goal is to make this a real community hub for all D2R players, to encourage feedback and improvements that really benefit the player. I'm happy to say that the site has come far to reach its goal.
Over the last year we have grown to over 17k registered members, together you have placed over 700 comments, and voted more than 40k times on various polls.
Diablo Clone Tracker
Patch 2.4 changed the way Diablo Clone is spawned, and made it more accessible for everyone. Diablo Clone and the hunt for an Annihilus charm is now a real community effort. To make it easier for everyone to track the Diablo Clone status and get notified of an upcoming walk, I've created the Diablo Clone Tracker.
This tracker was a huge success and I'd like to thank everyone that helped make it a success: the people reporting updates, the people reporting planned walks, and the great moderators that verify updates and keep the tracker clean!
The tracker received over 13 thousand reports, was viewed close to 1.5 million times, and shared more than 300 planned walks!
Giveaway Raffles
July 1st marked the date of our first raffle. We started out by raffling Annihulus charms for everyone that couldn' t get one from Diablo Clone. Throught the year, many amazing people started donating and we ended up with a completely decked-out Hammerdin build.
Thank you so much to all the people that have donated over the year and kept these raffles going!
Terror Zone Tracker
Patch 2.5 introduced Terror Zones, a new feature that allowed people to farm more areas and improve the leveling experience to 99. I've also introduced a tool to keep track of the current Terror Zone, our Terror Zone Tracker.
Over a short period of time, the tracker received over 19 thousand reports and was viewed over 700 thousand times!
Hero Editor
In november I've launched a new Hero Editor, dedicated to Diablo 2 Resurrected. This editor allows you to edit your offline characters, edit your inventories, create items, and change stats. Thanks to the many feedback I've received, I've been able to improve and extend it a lot over the last few weeks!
Search Overhaul
The general site search bar also got a massive overhaul last month. Now every important page is easily reachable through search. The searchbar will give you instant result when you start typing and has also been improved to ignore typos. The search results are also more informational, and will show you related information, like what base a certain unique item is, or which runes a certain runeword use.
This also prompted me to make detail pages for all unique items, sets and set items, and affixes!
What features did you like most?
Challenges
Seeing such big growth over the past year, this brought along some challenges too. With around half a million unique visitors, the cost for infrastructure also started to take its toll.
Optimizing data usage
Many cool stuff can be done with real-time data, like instantly showing updates made by other users without having to reload the page. However, when scaling to many users, it turned out to become a huge cost. For this I looked into smart data fetching, cached data, and unfortunately had to abandon some ideas.
Ads
Even after optimizing, data storage and cloud hosting is still a big cost. To offset this cost I tried placing and optimizing ads. When placing ads, I always place the user experience first. For example, ads will never display before the main content of the page, or make the page slow or jump around.
Premium Membership
To make sure I don't have to cramp the site full with ads, I also looked into alternative methods of monetization. I introduced different membership levels that give access to multiple perks like an ad-free experience, personalization, and premium API integration
Looking forward
This project is a continuous work in progress, and this will also continue in 2023. My main focus for next year is to focus more on the community aspect and give users more tools to contribute, think of user-created articles, builds, ... For improving the community experience, I'm continuously looking for feedback and suggestions!
I also want to expand the network of partners to reach even more players. Currently I'm working closely with the Sanctuary Discord and GGM, so big thanks to the people running those channels!
Special thanks
I want to say special thank you to all regular users that consistently update the Diablo clone Tracker, and Terror Zone Tracker. Also, big thanks to our moderators who keep an eye on the quality of the trackers. Let's not forget all the great people that have donated for the giveaway raffles. And last but not least, my premium supporters, your continuous support truly keeps this site alive
What do you wish for coming year?
Share your new year's wishes, suggestions and feedback below, or just wish your fellow Diablo player the best of luck in the next year!
If you want to provide feedback, it would be very valuable to fill out this questionaire.
