Project Lore

A lot of players don't seem to know about a very cool feature of Recount, the realtime graph displays. I can say this with confidence because I get a lot of questions about the red graph in the bottom right-hand corner of my UI that displays the current DPS output of the raid. So, to answer that common question I decided to write up a quick post about setting it up. First, you'll need to install Recount. Once that's done, either type in /recount config or click on the cog on the top of the Recount window to bring up the settings window. Next, navigate to the Window tab and choose which window you want to turn on. You can turn on a few different windows for the raid: damage per second, healing per second, damage taken per second, and healing taken per second. Now, these are all pretty simple and show overall raid performance. But what if you want to monitor just your own performance? You can actually turn on player specific graphs for each of those four stats (DPS, DTPS, HPS, and HTPS).  To do this, go to the main recount window and navigate to the stat you'd like to track. In my case, I want to watch my personal DPS during a raid, so I'll go to the Damage Done meter. Right click on the player you want to track and choose "Show Realtime Graph." Alternatively, just Ctrl-click on the player's name on the meter. Up pops an individualized version of the meter that will just watch one player's performance as a fight goes on. Handy! A lot of players have had recount installed and don't use it beyond the basic damage meter capabilities, so click around and check out what it has to offer. Also, if you're curious about my UI, check out the list of addons that I use.

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I recently had the opportunity to speak with one of my favorite WoW bloggers, Gevlon of Greedy Goblin. Gevlon is one of the few players in the game who has reached the elusive "gold cap" of 214,748.3646 gold. He is known for being extremely cynical and having radical and critical views of almost everything in WoW - from the game becoming too easy and the value of networking in game to more complex topics like objectivism, feminism, and welfare. I've been known to be cynical at times, and Gevlon's unique ideas often give me some great food for thought. Thanks for talking with us today. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started blogging. I've been playing WoW for 2 years. I've never had problems with making gold, had around 5-10K gold all the time. I had my first 100G before lvl 20, and 5000G before going to Outland. I thought everyone was like this. Then someone asked for 1000G for their epic flyer and promised they would "farm a lot" to pay it back. I asked him what "farming" was, and he described the terrible routine of grinding elementals in Shadowmoon for hours. Others joined in guild chat and agreed that besides buying gold, your only choice was grinding. That's when I decided to make this blog. Larísa helped with the first steps; I figured out the rest. What is the appeal of collecting gold? You often criticize gold sinks like the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth or the motorcycle mounts, so what do you spend your gold on? The appeal is not grinding. Ever. Nor doing daily quests. I haven't done a SINGLE Argent Crusade daily; no wolvar pups for me either. For me, gold has one purpose: raiding. I pay five thousand gold per week to a guild to raid despite my 20-30% attendance. You have talked about how you "buy" a raid spot since it is easier and quicker for you to make money than it is for you to spend time with groups that are just learning the encounters. Can you talk about this briefly? I like the challenge of raiding, but I don't want to spend 3-4 evenings on it, especially since serious part of it is repetitive. Orbituary is great at first, fun the second time, and just boring third. By paying, I attend 1 raid per week. I skip farm-raids and go directly to the most interesting hard mode attempt. I was present on Orbituary and Steelbraker first, and currently I'm going to Vezax hard tries. I don't even have the normal Vezax kill. I've already written that I find gear upgrades overvalued, so I don't bother farming gear. My gear is a mixture of random ilvl226 with 213 and even 200 trinkets. I still got lot of gear, since everyone else already farmed everything out of Ulduar normal modes, so I have no competitor for ilvl226. You "roleplay" a "greedy goblin" a bit on your blog, or at least use it as a metaphor for the archetype of a player out to make gold wisely. How and why did this start? Goblins are a money-oriented faction in WoW, so it was an obvious identification. I've started the blog in a roleplaying fashion, but that faded away quickly. I like the word "goblinism" since it is without the non-business aspects of real world philosophies. Terms like "liberalism" not only mean free market, but also the support of gay rights. "Neo-conservatism" not only means deregulation, but also violent crusades against the "enemies of freedom". I don't want to say anything about these things; they are simply not my topic. By being "goblinist" I don't have to struggle with comments like "how can you still support neo-conservatives after Abu Ghraib?" You have recently started a "goblin apprentice" program where you help lucky players learn how to make gold and blog about it. Can you tell us about this? From time to time I post an "apply now" post. People send me mails. I pick one, create a banker toon on their realm and start giving them advices how to make gold. Post their progress on the blog for other readers. When I write this, the second applicant is not yet selected. The first one made 5K in a week. What WoW economy-related blogs do you read or suggest?

• Just My Two Copper
• Zekta's Stuff
• Warcraft Econ
• One Copper
• The WoW Street Journal
• WoWenomics

Do you think that the professions are "balanced" for money-making? People agree on one thing: the worst professions to make money are the two they currently have, no matter what they are. Inscription is definitely the most profitable, simply because it's the most complicated (you have to juggle 350 recipes), so not many people do it. The rest of the crafting skills have a similar gold per hour ratio, and all of the crafting professions are way above grinding or even gathering. You seem to have mixed feelings on Inscription. What do you think about the profession, and what would you do to change it? WoW is made "casual" friendly (I really hate this "politically correct" term). Still, Inscription needs lot of addons, seed money, and serious time to start (after that it's running quickly). So I'm not surprised that there are not many scribes who use it to make money. I would change the glyph system so that adding glyphs does not destroy old glyphs. When you apply a new one, you should get the old glyph returned to your backpack. That way, the huge demand for glyphs would decrease (and also the huge money the common players pay to goblins). What posts do you suggest new readers read to get an introduction to your blog? The "my business" tagged posts. They are the most directly about making money. What/who is M&S, and where did that terminology come from? Morons and slackers. I believe WoW is easy and everyone who fails in it is either as dumb as piece of rock or as lazy as a welfare leech. However, real casuals cannot fail as they don't raid or PvP. There is no "success" or "failure" in fishing coins. What add-ons do you recommend or use for your daily trading? Auctioneer. The rest is for crafting: Lil'sparky, whohas, possessions. What do you think about gold farmers? Should Blizzard being doing more to stop them, or are they inevitable and even essential to the current game economy? They will exist as long as there are M&S who can't make money. Blizzard won't do anything about them since the goldfarmers also pay them $15 a month and they don't harass other players. What simple tips can you offer to players looking to pad their wallets a bit? Have the Auctioneer addon so you won't sell stuff for half price. Also, don't be a packrat. There is deflation; the items that are worth 100G today will be worth 10G a year from now. Sell everything in your bank that you don't use or plan to use in a short time. You can buy it back later cheaper if you need it. Thanks for talking with us! Thanks for the opportunity!

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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!

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Healer? Tank? Bueller? DPS? The little guild I call home is still struggling to recover from the quarterly event known as the Summer.  The hiccup in raiding, filling and scheduling, has caused me to focus my efforts on things outside of Naxxramas domination and Ulduar subjugation.  First and foremost is the leveling of one Holy/Shadow Priest that is to become an end-game healer.  This of course assumes that I don't suck at healing in a raid setting.  Another bulk of time, I am talking about a 60/40 ratio here, has been spent on my favorite past time, farming the Auction House.  With my trusty Auctioneer equipped, I have begun to refill my coffers that were plundered for recent purchases. Over the last few weeks of datamining I have come across what I believe is an undeniable trend, a drastic reduction in key supplies.  Frost Lotus, Abyss Crystal, even Deviate Fish are barely available on my realm, relatively speaking.  Following the good old supply and demand model, what items are available are made so at drastically increased prices.  For producers and investors of the market this is a good thing, while for a consumer this is a bad thing.  Upon discovery of the trend I dug further.  According to my collection of anecdotal data, the changes are for numerous items, items that span the gauntlet of locales, from Mageweave to Knothide Leather, not just top end consumables used by raiders. The question at hand is what is causing the fluctuations?  Is it normal changes in the market?  Unlikely.  Could it be a wealthier investor than myself cornering whole swaths of Azerothian goodies?  Doubtful, it'd need to be on the scale of organized crime (Defias) to have such an impact.  Or, like I suggest in the title, is my realm (Magtheridon-North America) emptier than normal?  If that is the case then it would explain the depressed amount of supplies, and why they are coming in at higher prices.  Coupled with the numerous responses of guild trouble in a previous thread, I believe we have some credible evidence that our home away from home is a little less cozy, and far more expensive, than we are fond of. This is where you readers come in.  To make any kind of overarching statement about WoW's economy we need more information.  Do your realms feel underpopulated?  Are commonly used consumables being placed on the market for far higher than normal prices?  Are you still logging in as normal, or has Summer sucked you away along with the unrelated loss of six million other players? And yes, the issues are completely unrelated.  Blizzard's troubles in China have no effect on the gold farming market.  Those players need the localized version (read North American/European) of the game to play on the same server as us.  So the lack of Wrath in China doesn't make an impact on our supply levels.

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Recently our Mount Runs have been able to include my viewpoint thanks to the wonders of screen capture software. A few of you who are following the Project Lore twitter have also caught a couple of my live streams of Ulduar raids on Ustream (Another raid is scheduled for tonight at 7pm PST!). Some of you have wondered what addons I use. I use a lot of them so I thought I'd just list off all of them. Also here is a screenshot with a few of them labeled (click it for a bigger size). Any questions are welcomed in the comments below!

• Align - overlays a grid to neatly arrange things on the screen
• Aloft - changes the nameplates over character's heads
• Altoholic - tracks all sort of useful stuff between alts and guildies
• ArkInventory - Organizes my inventory, bank, etc.
• AtlasLoot - Shows bosses loot tables
• Auctioneer - Scans the auction for tons of statistics and data. Way more than I can use
• Cartographer - adds functionality to the ingame map
• Clique - click casting made simple!
• CT_MailMod - lots of useful mail functions
• Deadly Boss Mods - tracks bosses' abilities and more
• Dominos - customizes action bars
• ElkBuffBars - shows buffs and makes them easier to see at a glance
• FishingAce - right click casting
• Fubar - along with tons of plugins, houses a lot of info
• Gladius - enemy unit frames for use in arenas
• Grid - Compact raid unit frames
• LootDB - shows where loot came from (a little redundant with Altoholic I know)
• MikScrollingBattleText - changes combat text
• NPCScan - finds rare mobs
• Omen - Threat Meter
• OmniCC - Shows cooldowns on buttons
• oRA - tons of cool raid functionality
• Outfitter - gear swapping and item sets
• Overachiever - some cool Achievement stuff
• pError - hides errors like "Not Enough Mana" or whatever you want!
• PitBull - Unit frames (health/mana/etc)
• PowerAuras - Very customizable to show when buffs and abilities are up/down.
• Prat - Edits the chat window
• Quartz - Casting bars
• RatingBuster - Compares stats with currently equipped items, shows differences, tells how stats affect you.
• Recount - Damage Meter
• simpleMinimap - Moves the minimap, makes it square, etc
• SunnArt - creates a viewport with nice art!
• TipTac - changes in-game tooltips
• TotemTimers - does what it says
• UrbanAchiever - More cool achievement functionality
• XLoot - Changes loot window, group loot, masterloot, etc
• ZOMGBuffs - shows who needs what buffs in a raid

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QuestHelper/Carbonite & Extended QuestLog/DoubleWide Features Incoming I've never been one to play on the PTR.  Like many other players I don't want to spoil the upcoming content or experience "unfinished" gameplay.  And yet I spend hours a week just staying current with the latest news and revelations, from the Live realms and the PTR.  I guess that would make me a bit of a hypocrite - I won't spoil by playing, but get spoiled by reading occasionally - but that is the price I pay for knowledge.  So when my buddy noticed that the patch notes had changed again, he knew I would be interested. Blizzard began implementing QuestHelper functionality as part of the Secrets of Ulduar patch, and I was okay with it.  They have been trying to make leveling easier for some time now, and that change was the next logical step.  The devs seemed to have found a happy middle ground between the hardcore and the casual players thanks to additions to the tooltips.  In essence you still had to read the quest text to find out where mob X or item Y was located.  Only when you were in the general location - being able to mouseover an objective - would you be tipped off.  No biggie.  Enter Call of the Crusade, which is taking it a step further.

• A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players can find creatures they must kill for a quest.
• A skull graphic with red eyes will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that must be killed in order to collect quest objects.
• A gear/cogwheel graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must loot quest objects found in the world.
• A chat bubble graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must interact with a specific NPC for a quest.
• A yellow question mark graphic will show on the map to provide the location of a NPC whose quest the player has completed.

Aside from these obvious benefits, former downloaders of quest helping mods should see an increase in available system resources and (slightly) more secure accounts. Okay, this is way further then I expected Blizzard to go.  Before the hardcore base goes all "reading comprehension" on us let's take a step back.  Remove yourself from the discussion and just look at WoW as a product.  Blizzard, the creator of said product, is looking at QuestHelper, and mods like it, and realizes that it is one of the most downloaded add-ons for World of Warcraft.  What would you expect them to do?  Would you want them to simply ignore the actions of millions of players?  No, of course not. Here's the rub, many other UI changes are getting the option to be toggled on or off, but Zarhym's updates make no mention of that for the topic at hand.  If you want to play WoW the hardcore old school way it doesn't seem to be an option.  The freedom of choice is what the hardcore should be complaining about, not the dumbing down of a part of WoW that you are no longer a part of. Under what circumstances would you accept the added features to the world map?  Would it have been acceptable to you if it was implemented back in 2004?  Should the option be defaulted off?  Are you going to abandon your helpful questing mod if the feature goes live?  With the amount of subscribers reaching a plateau, does it even matter at this stage in the game? Let the QQ begin. <popcorn>

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Master these bad habits, and you too can be a Lord of Time like Nozdormu! Despite how stressful it can get sometimes, I'm a multi-tasker at heart. When I'm doing one thing, I generally have to be doing two or three others. Got to keep that brain entertained! Though WoW is far from being the worst offender where downtime is concerned (go play Final Fantasy XI!), there are nonetheless those times when waiting on things to happen is just too much to bear, and your mind begins to wander... As I've already established, I'm especially bad about this. When my guild wipes on a boss, it generally takes anywhere from five to ten minutes to rebuff and get set up for the next attempt, and that's more than enough time for me to begin losing interest. I mean, as a rogue, there's not a whole lot I have to prepare before a fight. Often, I'll just tab out and start reading something on the internet while I wait, and it takes a fellow officer barking at me over Ventrilo about missing the Ready Check to get back into the game. I'm sorry, it's a habit! I have the attention span of an excited puppy on speed! It gets so bad at times, that I'll be multi-tasking right in the middle of an intense fight. Regardless of whether I'm just killing some time, or yawning in the middle of a stationary boss battle (hello, Patchwerk!), here are a few of my favorite ADD-friendly activities:

1. Watch TV - Television is traditonally a passive medium, and as long as you've got the muscle memory down for a particular encounter, turning your eyes towards the boob tube for a little while probably won't impact your game much. I'm guilty of watching such thought-intensive shows as LOST while raiding, which isn't the best of ideas (hey, not my fault my favorite shows come on during raid nights!), but trash television is absolutely perfect. Turn on a reality show or set your receiver to just about any Discovery Channel network and you're good to go! It'll give you something vaguely interesting to look at when you're bored without having to spare too many synapses. Optionally, movies you've seen before work, too (I'm watching The Last Action Hero while typing this article, in fact)!
2. Personal Grooming - We all play Warcraft, sometimes a lot more than we should. And, on some days, this means we may skip the shower or sit around in our dirty boxers all day. Contrary to popular belief, taking care of yourself doesn't need to be hassle, so when you're waiting for a fellow raider to come back from their smoke break or kid aggro, why not pick up a pair of nail clippers and trim those claws of yours? Try brushing your hair or your teeth. I don't think I'd recommend anything too crazy, like shaving or waxing your chest (imagine the yelps of pain over voice chat), but there are plenty of little things you can do to make yourself a tad more acceptable when you crawl out of your cave to grab some midnight burritos.
3. Eat! - Feed your face! I can't count the number of times I've come home from work, hungry as a bear in Spring, right around the time a raid starts. Grab whatever deliciously greasy snack you can and pound it down your gullet during or between attempts. Make a little game of it to see how many french fries you can consume while healing through Hard Mode Iron Council!
4. Play With Your Dog - Or cat. Or guinea pig. Or whatever. If you've got a pet, force it to entertain you! Got your face smashed in on a fight and staring at the release button? Pick up a damn tennis ball and throw it down the hallway for Fido. Guaranteed to be more fun than waiting for a battle rez! Cats will probably still ignore you, though.
5. Play Another Game - Go on. What's stopping you from loading up old classics like Minesweeper and Solitaire. I prefer console games, myself, and usually have one running in the background when there's nothing on TV. Honestly, it's even easier to ignore the raid now that semi-official Peggle and Bejeweled add-ons are available (and you can even set them to pop up when you die, too!).

That's just a small sampling of the things you can do when the chips are down (and some I simply can't mention here). Sure, it may on occasion be a detriment to your group, but at the same time, it's nice to get you head out of the game, if only for a few minutes, so that the stress of constantly wiping or waiting on others doesn't begin to consume you. We all need breaks, and if your raid leader isn't giving you regular "fivers," go ahead and give yourself one. Hey, this is the internet. Nobody needs to know what you're really up to, unless you forget to set your "push to talk" key on Vent! At the end of the day, I think my suggestions are fairly standard. How do you readers handle the downtime? I'm hoping to hear some rather creative solutions, myself!

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I've been playing WoW since the open beta. Today, I made a discovery. You can set your addons to be enabled or disabled for each of your characters! After you have logged in and are on your character select screen, the familiar window that allows you to load out of date addons or disable addons without deleting them also has a drop down that allows you to configure which addons load for which characters. I stumbled upon this when I was trying to uninstall addons. I thought it would be useful to try to manually delete the files instead of using a manager because addons have complicated configuration files; there are files in /WTF/Account/AccountName/Server/Character and /WTF/Account/AccountName/Server/SavedVariables, and sometimes its unclear where data is stored for modular addons like Cartographer, Atlasloot, or FuBar. I searched my computer for the name of the addon and a few files came up. I curiously found some files called "Addons.txt" that contained a list of my addons and whether they were enabled or disabled. More importantly, they were in the configuration folders for each of my characters! It only took a couple seconds of carefully examining the addon window to find out that I have somehow missed this feature for who-knows-how-long. This is great for enabling or disabling class-specific addons like Cutup or FaceSmasher. I disabled all my combat related addons, like Deadly Boss Mods and Outfitter for my bank alt. The GUI is easy to use, but manually editting text allows users to copy/paste among other things, such as saving "addon profiles", allowing you to switch between interfaces for PvP or PvE easily. In fact, that sounds like a great idea for an application. The load time difference was enormous! I decided to check out how many resources my addons were using. I whipped out the good old PerformanceFu and took a look at my statistics. It showed me how much memory LootLink and QuestHelper were using. Surprisingly, Peggle was not among my highest resource-intensive addons! Players with a few addons can hover over the menu button for some similar statistics. I timed a login with all my addons on and another with all my addons off. With my approximately 120 addons, it took 32 seconds to login. With no addons, it took 2 seconds. This could be faster if I wasn't in windowed mode or listening to music and browsing the web at the same time, but the fact that addons cost me 30 seconds while logging in and likely lots of Dalaran lag inspired me to clean out my addons. What tips do you have for addon management?

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Just last week, I was wondering who owned WoW.com and why Blizzard didn't just lay down a few hundred thousand or even million to pick it up. The acronym "WoW" is very common and I'd rather type "wow.com" into my address bar than "worldofwarcraft.com" to get to things like forums and account management. Well, my question was recently answered. The owners of WoW Insider picked up WoW.com and now WoW Insider has been re-branded WoW.com. They have a new layout and lots of new features. There are three methods of registration for WoW.com. You can make a new registration or login using Facebook Connect or using your AIM account. I've had a good experience using my Facebook account on other sites, like Digg, so I went ahead and did that. I didn't have to enter any information; I instantly had an account without even logging into the site. I was able to pick a username for my account (Heartbourne naturally) and had the ability to use the new features. My favorite feature are the user profiles. You can download their addon and application which tracks your activities in WoW. After entering in your user key from wow.com into the addon, it can track quests completed, zones entered or left, achievements, raids, leveling, and guild membership. You can write one line messages that are like tweets. After logging off, simply run the bundled application to upload your data. Users can "follow" or "friend" each other, like on Twitter, to receive updates from their friends and fans. I highly suggest that if you plan to use the addon that you think carefully about what information you want to submit. Chances are nobody cares about what zones you enter or leave, and it will spam your profile pretty badly, as evidenced by my escapade with the addon. I don't know why that feature is on by default; it really slowed down the upload process. The uploading application was slow and crashed a couple times for me, but that was with dozens of pages of zoning data. I was kind of hoping it would make an RSS feed or report back to Facebook or something with the updates. I don't really foresee myself using the WoW.com website much, and I already use Hearthstone to keep up with my friend's activities in WoW. My auto-updating Twitter is full of updates already and the updates are pushed out to people who are interested, instead of them having to sign into a website. Finally, you get your own blog and screenshot gallery setup. I think this may be a crowning feature if users decide to use it. Anyone can start blogging to a huge potential audience at a WoW-centric site. Its a great chance for new people to break the mold. If you are interested in following me, check out my profile. Do you think this is a worthwhile service, or would you rather spend your time on major blogs and in-game?

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As you may have already heard, Peggle was just released as a WoW addon (get it here). I've dreamt of this day for years! Ever since I pre-ordered the Orange Box and was tempted to casual gaming with its sweet nectar, I have yearned for a way to conveniently play Peggle. Now I can play the Pachinko-like pinball game while stomping around Azeroth. As the game is a WoW addon, it is free, unlike most versions of Peggle. Like Bejeweled, you install it as a typical WoW addon and they hope it entices you to buy a full version. Their strategy worked for Bejeweled; I bought it for my iPod Touch when it showed up on the app store because of my great experiences with it in WoW. I hear there is a version of Peggle headed to the iPod Touch, so I'll keep my eyes peeled. Peggle is a simple game where you have a "cannon" at the top of your screen and a playing field consisting of different colored pegs. There are maybe around 100 pegs on the screen on a given playing field. At the beginning of the game, 20 pegs are colored orange (at least that's what the game claims, they've always looked red to me), 2 are colored green, and the rest are colored blue. The color distribution is completely random and changes every time you play a given stage. You have 10 balls to start, the primary goal is to clear all the orange pegs. You can also try to get a lot of points or clear the entire board. Like WoW, you can place priorities on your goals. As you shoot balls out of the top canon, they bounce down. Blue pegs get you a small amount of points, while red pegs increase the multiplier applied to pegs you get throughout the rest of the round. Green pegs trigger a special effect. In a full-fledged Peggle client, you would have a choice of around a dozen. In the WoW version, you have a choice of 2: super-guide and space blast. Super-guide allows you to see a detailed trajectory of your next few potential shots, while space blast explodes around the green peg and clears all nearby pegs. At the start of each shot, a random blue peg is colored purple and is worth a ton of extra points. If you gets lots of points on one shot or manage to land the peg into the moving bucket at the bottom, you get extra balls. This may sound complicated, but you essentially point and click and a bouncing ball triggers all sorts of happy lights and sounds and its extremely satisfying. The WoW implementation is very true to the stand-alone versions with a great WoW flair. The stages are based on capital cities in WoW; every Horde and Alliance capital is included as well as Dalaran, Shattrath, the dark portal, and Icecrown Citadel. Pegs are mapped along a background image of the city, much like the stand-alone game. There are many multiplayer options, such as battles (where you challenge a group of people to get a high score), duels (time limited skill shot challenges between two players), and even "Peggleloot", which is a loot distribution option implemented using Master Looter and skill shots in Peggle. By clearing stages, you can earn talent points, publish high scores to your guild, see all your friend and guild-mates high scores, and more. The addon uses less memory than many heavy addons like Lootlink or Auctioneer and does not affect my WoW performance at all. However, there are some small bugs and caveats. On stages with moving pegs, performance drops in WoW mess up the timing of the moving pegs, making the shots very crazy and giving you very little planning ability. But, if your computer rarely has these hiccups with WoW or you avoid playing while in Dalaran or on Northrend flight paths (both of where I get these hiccups on my Macbook Pro), this is hardly an issue. There are some very rare pathing issues where what looks like a smooth surface created by square pegs has embedded corners, and hitting it just right sends the balls flying off in an unexpected direction. Aside from these small bugs, the game is a blast. The fact that all these physics are happening in a WoW addon and we are comparing it to a full-fledged games really speaks to how polished this addon is. It gives me something to do while fishing, during raid downtime or breaks, or scanning the auction house. I don't leave home without it! Do you think having games inside of WoW is pointless, or do you use it as a casual distraction? I'd love to see more games myself in WoW (as stupid as that sounds, as WoW is a game). Playing chess with a friend while raiding sounds immensely fun, and I'd love to see it implemented. Post comments with your recommendations for mini-games, I'd love to find more!

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