Scraping game servers is an old practice that has been used to obtain information such as player stats, server information, and in-game content.
This information can be used for various purposes such as developing new software or mods, cheating, or simply understanding how a game works. Today, scraping is also used to gather data for marketing purposes.
This article explains and gives a comprehensive overview of scraping game servers for beginners.
1. What is Scraping?
Scraping is the process of extracting data from websites or software for data analysis. It has become an essential part of modern software development as more and more APIs (application programming interfaces) have become available.
The concept of scraping and specifically, using online API documentation to extract data from a website has expanded far beyond just websites as well to include games, chat applications, and any other type of software that has an API.
When you scrape an API from a game server, you’re getting all the player stats and in-game information about other players and items that are found on that server. Example of a popular game server is hostari.
This means you can then use this data to create your own player statistics sites or applications in order to provide players or users with better gaming experiences or analyse the performance of various strategies.
2. How do I Get Started?
When you start scraping, the first step is to find a game that has an API.
In order to do this, look for websites that have information about the game such as its website and developer. A good way to find the data you want is to browse through the documentation for the particular game that interests you.
Another way of doing this is by checking out a blog written by someone who has experience with scraping. If there’s no documentation available from which you can extract information, then in order to scrape the data from a game server, you would need to identify where the data is stored on their website and write your own script or application that can extract it properly.
It’s worth mentioning that some games require certain credentials in order for an application like this to work properly; so make sure you contact any developers or publishers of these games before starting your project.
3: How Do I Find the Proper API Key?
Finding the proper API key for a game is vital to scraping it.
You first need to know what your goals are for doing this and then find the most appropriate API.
For example, if you want to give players an in-game breakdown of their stats, you would need to scrape the game server that provides information about all the players on that server.
Another example is if you wanted to create a similar application for other games in your portfolio but only had access to the data from one of those games, then you would need to scrape that one game’s API instead of all of them at once.
4: How do I Collect Data from the Game Server?
The proven way to collect data from the game server is to use tools that are specifically designed for this purpose, among other tools Scrapfly turns to work more effectively and efficiently.
Scrapfly allows you to crawl websites, databases, and extract data automatically.
They have a wide range of uses, including data gathering for research purposes, data mining, and content extraction. Additionally, this tool can be used to retrieve information from unindexed websites or web pages that are no longer available online (archived servers).
They are easy to use and provide a lot of flexibility.
To parse the data, you need to make use of a programming language. It is important that you choose one that is flexible but also powerful enough to handle any type of data.
Python is commonly used for scraping and parsing as it is an easy-to-use programming language with lots of libraries available for different types of data.
5: How do I Store my Game Data Files?
Storing your game data files is incredibly important. Without it all your efforts will be in vain.
You need to find a way of storing the data that will be generated by scraping it with Scrapfly or other scraping tools in a format that you can easily access and manage.
It’s important you can easily get access to your data when needed, having it all stored on one computer or hard drive would make it more difficult to access it in difficult situations.
The most basic file type for storing your data is HTML, which many browsers can open and read. However, if you want to share your scraped data with someone else, you would need to export the data from HTML into an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file before sharing it.
The easiest way to store these files is on a cloud-based storage service such as Google Drive or Dropbox. This means that you’ll be able to access any of your scraped data from any device at any time with no limit on how much you can save or share.
6: What Information Can be Scraped from a Game Server?
The information that can be scraped from a game server includes player stats, items, and item stats.
These are all of the things that can be found on the game server that would help players in-game or when it comes to building applications related to the game.
In most cases, this information is contained on databases that follow strict SQL syntax rules.
Specifically, you can get player’s IDs by scraping their name and character ID as well as their character level and experience points.
This means your application could then provide players with customised stat charts in order to give them an idea of where they stand against other players of similar levels and experience points who are playing the same game but on different servers.
