Project Lore

There's so much going on here, that there's little room left for any of the real action!

Where would we be without the advent of add-ons? In the dark ages of pre-packaged interfaces and a serious lack of Peggle, that's where! Every time I get back on the PTR, I find myself tossing curses left and right, having the default UI foisted upon me once again and not knowing where any of my buttons are. It's not that what Blizzard gave us was bad, it's just that it ended up being so ultimately... standard.

With a surprisingly open policy towards modification (of the non-cheating variety, of course), one might think that Blizzard predicted, nay nutured, such a robust add-on scene. Visit one of the many sites that feature these applets for download, and you'll see thousands. Certainly, many are nigh worthless or badly programmed -- the pinnacles quickly stand out -- but they're there nonetheless. You can't deny the response the community has given.

But as much as I'd like to believe or pretend otherwise, I really am a creature of habit at heart. Change scares and mystifies me more than I care to admit. There are certain add-ons that I play with every day and would dearly miss the moment they stopped working. But there are others, even very popular ones, that I've tried my damnedest to learn using, to no avail.

They feel too bloated, have too many customization options, profiles that somehow end up changing setups on my other characters when they shouldn't, or they just end up making my interface look like Satan's ass after a trip to the Indian buffet. These are add-ons that can work quite well in ideal circumstances, but I never seem to be privy to them.

As a reference for what I still use: X-Perl Unit Frames, Titan Panel, Recount, Deadly Boss Mods, and AtlasLoot are my bread and butter. The first is largely for cosmetic changes and the ability to drag frames around, the second is for convenient and easy-to-access information that stays largely in its own space, the third is for measuring my DPS, the fourth is for reading timers on bosses, and the last is simply a luxury that stays out of my way until I need it.

As I've already made clear, there are others out there, though. I see videos or screenshots of other players' user interfaces and ooh and aah about how pretty they look, I figure out what they are, go download them, and attempt to set them up in the game. It is only near the end of this process, after fiddling with configurations for awhile, that many of them simply offer me no added functionality. In fact, they sometimes decrease it.

One add-on that I tussled with for awhile was IceHUD. You may have seen this one before. It's got those cool, curved bars (though there are options for several shapes) that hover just to the sides of your character, like a protective bubble of pure, strategic data. It took me awhile to get everything squared away, adjusting the spacing and size of each bar, as well as attempting to create custom ones that monitored certain timed abilities on my rouge (like Slice and Dice or Hunger for Blood). And even then, I wasn't happy.

I realized two things very quickly that I never took notice of before: One, I had already trained myself to look into the corner of the screen to find out things like health or energy. And, two, the area that the bars occupied was a huge visual dead zone for me. I was used to finding my vitals elsewhere, and I would get lost in the middle of a fight, because I simply didn't know where they were.

A similar thing happened when I installed Elkano's BuffBars, a sleek set of timers that you could stack together on one side of the screen or the other. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I thought I could save space and make my interface look cooler if I could get rid of the gaps between the normal buff icons. Likewise, I could have the add-on name them for me, so I would actually know what half of them were.

But I had the same issue. I was looking for things in certain places and not finding them. I ended up having to chop up the bars into smaller sections and take the time to ensure that pertinent info would be sorted into the correct columns. Once this happened, I had already divorced the add-on. It was time for BuffBars to go. Another revelation: the reason why I didn't know what some of those buffs were was because I honestly didn't need to. I knew what the ones I needed to find looked like, so it ended up being better just leaving in the defaults.

What all of this amounts to is something called information overload. My experience is not like everybody else's, and certainly other players can glean more from these add-ons than I can, but I'm sure that we all have some installed that just infuriate us every time we load them up. Quest Helper? Pshaw! I know where most everything is by now and that GPS arrow just got annoying, urging me in directions I didn't want to go. Bartender? OK, I do use this one, but every time I change my bars on one character, it seems to change those on others, causing me to lose icons (and many times, not realize it).

There are a lot of important things that Blizzard's default UI doesn't supply us with, and they know it. The demand for certain applications has caused them to release versions of their own, such as the recent Equipment Manager or the upcoming modifications being made to the Quest Log (skulls for important mobs or goals on the map, anyone?). But going overboard with add-ons can quickly lead to fatigue. Too much useless information prying its way into your eyeballs, scrambling important messages as they make their way to your brain.

My advice? Scale it back a bit. Relax a little. You can have convenience without sacrificing that all-important data. Take a look at what your class or characters really need to pay attention to and largely restrict what you install to those add-ons that focus specifically on that sort of information. Be wary of sweeping cosmetic changes that end up obscuring instead of clarifying. My interface isn't beautiful, but it is usable. Yours can be like that, too!

In fact, I'd like to hear your success stories, as well as the failures. What does your user interface look like? Have you found a happy medium with your add-ons, or are you currently suffering from too much information? What popular add-ons have you failed to connect with? Please school me on your experiences in the comments section!