My name is Wouter from the Netherlands, author of Keystone.guru. I'm a software developer with some 10 years experience working in various parts of the field. World of Warcraft player for longer. I'm pleased to see you're visiting my website and hopefully contributing something nice, or use it to help coordinate your Mythic Plus keystones between your friends or PUGs. I truly hope it improves the quality of your playtime, I have had a lot of fun and learnt a LOT making this website, and having a finished product that I can expand upon is great. I play on Tarren Mill-EU - Horde as a Guardian Druid in a fabulous casual guild called Dark Wolves with my girlfriend and a bunch of (RL) friends. The guild is always looking for new members, so feel free to check out the website. Check me out as well!
At the start of Legion the Mythic Plus system was introduced and as a fan of a challenge, I was hooked quickly. Together with guildies and friends, we poured ourselves on the dungeons and started whacking away. We weren't very good, nor will I claim we are to this day, but we're trying! One thing that always bothered us was a lack of proper communication. We never quite had the same group of people online to do the dungeons we wanted to, so sometimes we had unsuccessful runs because of miscommunication, differences in strategies (oh we always go left here!), people completely new to the dungeons/fights etc. Never mind joining a pug, it was - as I'm sure you are aware of - hit and miss.
Something had to be done about this.
Enter the idea for this website. I thought of making such a website and figured I really wanted to build it, so at the end of 2017 I started working on getting the dungeon maps into a Google Maps map. Not such an easy task, but with some Java and image magic I doubled the resolution of the existing maps (which works, for now) and made a tool to split the images up and feed it into Google Maps. It worked and I could browse through all dungeons, levels and zoom in/out.
After that, I kind of lost steam and the project stalled for a month or two. I had ideas, but I never made a real, functioning website before, not to mention getting a proper layout going and making it look better than digital programmer vomit. I'm a software developer, not an artist! At that time, there was some reorganization going on at my place of employment which led me getting 10% of my work-time to work on projects that use technologies relevant for the company. The idea for the website was re-born.
From that point, I spent my '10% time' at work on the project, and a LOT of evenings at home to wrap it all up. After all, I had a deadline of releasing before the first Mythic Plus season in Battle for Azeroth. It included a lot of learning and integrating existing projects and libraries. At this point in time it's a week before BfA hits and I'd really like to do the pre-quests, but I gotta finish the website first. Doh. There's still a lot to be done, so I hope I wrap it all up in-time for a proper release. And that my poor web server handles the traffic.
When the website is finished, I hope it fills a gap that I currently think exists in the (for now, casual) Mythic Plus scene: being able to share pre-made routes between your friends and random people so that everyone has a common understanding of what you're about to do. It can also help new players read up about what strategies people are currently using in dungeons (by means of popularity) so they can prepare themselves better. For now the website is fairly bare. You can select your dungeon, composition, and draw a path through the dungeon. I will expand on this in the near future. There were time constraints to consider and I can always expand on current functionality. If you don't think the website has enough features as of yet, please stay tuned! I'm dedicated to turning this website into a hub for sharing information and catering to increasingly hardcore players of the scene. For now it will fit casual people best, but I'm looking to include features down the line which more hardcore players find useful.
Your feedback is important to me! No really, it is. If you got any questions or suggestions, please pop in our discord, or make a ticket on Github! There's a lot of ideas in my head to make this website better but I feel it's best to crowd-source ideas so we all get the best operating website possible.