on XML for characters

I've been taken to task for not making more public the existence of our character XML feeds, but instead publicizing the players who have taken that raw data and done something with it. It's also somewhat questionable that we don't have our own canonical character sheet.

So first of all, obviously I'm mentioning the XML feeds right now. Beyond that... at some point we'll have character sheets on our site. For us, the priority was to get the data out to players, and see what the community wanted to do with it and how they approached it - this is our general approach, to let players see what we're doing and where the game is going before the whole thing is finished and perfected and polished. The polish phase of character XML has already begun, and we're hoping we get most of the way there with our upcoming patch - at which point, naturally, we'll start looking at what else to put up on the web. First as pure data, probably, and later as fancy web pages with useful information. :-)