Project Lore

ZOMG, No Deadly Boss MOBS!? Gkick! Major combat operations in /World of Warcraft have ended.  By dedicating a healthy bit of time before bed, and using my own advice, I was able overcome the horrible lag I was experiencing in all of my World of Warcraft endeavors.  No more 30% drops in framerates, lost DPS or accidental dives off cliffs to large for a gnome to survive.  WoW has returned to normal. Onyxia will rue the day she returned to these lands! There are a few things that I learned during my hour-plus battle.  Most important is that I am absolutely terrible at keeping my add-ons up to date.  The majority of them haven't been updated since the Wrath launch patch (v3.0), or at best v3.1.  I refuse to use the various auto-updating services because of my fear of hackers, unsavory add-on authors and the notion that such a program will clutter my computer.  These ridiculous reasons mean that the blame falls squarely on my shoulders for being lazy.  At least suggestions four and five, after already narrowing things down from 1-3 earlier this week, fixed the problem. In addition to my disorganized /AddOns folder - it in no way reflects the cleanliness of my slop pit house - I came to the realization that I have far too many add-ons.  During my campaign to capture the latest versions of my tools, I cut my add-on list from 49 memory suckers to a slim 26 user interface enhancements.  It wasn't even difficult, no hard decisions made.  Simply, do I use this or not? Here's my list:

• Auctioneer: This add-on is the key to my financial success in World of Warcraft, arguably responsible for the Mo' Money, Mo' Problems column, among many other one-shot posts.  It scans and records data from the Auction House, and automates putting items up for sale at competitive prices.  I roll with the suite, which includes numerous supporting add-ons like BeanCounter, Enchantrix, Informant, and Stubby.  Norganna's add-ons have proven to be so helpful to me that I have even made donations.  Yes, plural.
• AutoBar: An easily customizable and maintainable bar that is populated with all your hot items and abilities, like hearthstones, mounts, potions, food, food with buffs, etc, by default.  I set it up to be a third default action bar, just one with collapsible buttons.  It's proven to be a clutch addition.  Contains class specific bars as well.
• BankItems:  Enables player to look at their bank, their alts' banks, and even the guild banks from anywhere.  Good enough?
• CT_Basic: The CT_Mod team was the first team to create an ubiquitous collection of add-ons.  Some of their tools were so common that they've been enshrined in the Add-On Hall of Fame (Blizzard implementing an add-on's capabilities in the default UI).  CT_Basic is still an incredibly useful package thanks to the CT_MailMod, allowing players to loot their mailbox via a 'Select All' button.  There is a perfect synergy between it and Auctioneer.  I nuke CT_PartyBuffs though.  I used to use CT_RaidAssist when I was a raid leader, but no more.
• CT_ExpenseHistory: A good expansion to the basic CTMod package for the gold nuts like myself.  Tracks your expenses - repairs, reagents, even mail postage - to see where all that gold went.  It's pointless, but I love numbers and finances.
• Fishing Buddy: I used to be huge on fishing, and that's when I fell in love with this mod.  It previously automated almost everything about fishing, but Blizzard disabled some of that functionality.  I continue to use it mainly out of nostalgia, but also for the tracking (numbers!), and easy casting.
• Gatherer: This bad boy records where you've looted gatherable items (mining, herb and even treasure nodes) and displays them on your minimap.  The best part is the ability to share the data with friends, party members and even your guild!  I always kill Gatherer_HUD.  It's a resource hog that offers nothing but fancy visual effects over the normal add-on.
• QuestHelper: What can I say? I like saving time, and it's even more useful after you've already run through the zones on your first toon.  QuestHelper is another mod that has entered the Add-On Hall of Fame due to its ease of use and immense quest database.  There are many imitators, but I've found QH to be the best.
• Recount: Allows me to see my mad deeps, overall damage or how many times I die.  Recount tracks healing and useless stuff like that too.  It doesn't matter how much healing they do, it's never enough and always their fault when someone dies. :p
• RoguePowerBars: You may have noticed that I don't use Deadly Boss Mods (eh GM?). I may have died a few times because of that decision, but I find it to be too informative for my taste.  I mention DBM in this RPB snippet because they effectively do the same thing, scream information at you.  My justification for RPB is that the standard UI is laid out poorly for rogues (and many other classes).  We have so many buffs and debuffs on short timers that need to be kept active for maximum DPS that they really should be in your face.  RPB accomplishes that goal superbly.  I rarely ever lose my spell rotations since I began using it.  That obviously increases my DPS.

Once Solidsagart becomes a raid healer - sometime in November I assume - I'll have to add a few more add-ons to the mix for healing.  I still haven't decided between Grid or Clique, but other then new raid frames I can't really see Solidsagart needing anything special.  Raid frame changes are her version of RoguePowerBars.  I'll likely grab Omen though, something Vanish makes rather pointless.  Anyone have additional selections for either toon? I just realized that only two of my add-ons have anything to do with combat.  Everything else is time saving or money making.  Maybe I need to get my priorities straight so I can nail 15k DPS on a regular basis. The whole downside to nuking all of my add-ons was that I lost all of my macros.  I don't know exactly how that happened, they are supposed to be server side, but it did.  My next task is recreating all of them.  Oh, how I don't look forward to finding the correct icons for everything or remember which abilities had which other abilities bound to them...

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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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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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Last Friday Blizzard put the kibosh on charging for any and all World of Warcraft add-ons.  In an update to their World of Warcraft UI Add-On Development Policy, the company's lawyers added three points to tackle monetary gain by LUA creators.  To sum up the associated points, developers can no longer charge for their add-ons, or premium content.  Nor can they ask for donations or display advertisements inside the game client.  The Add-On creators can still make ends meet through donations and ads via their website, but that may not cut it. It took a few days, but the weight of the changes have begun trickling down to us end users.  According to Zorba, "Questhelper's dead."  The author's decision to end QH's run after upcoming v1.0 is not due to Blizzard's addition of some of its functionality, but because donations via the webpage do not compare to the in-game nag.  Outfitter has also been killed by the change. Blizzard is creating its own equipment manager to support its Dual Spec feature, so that won't hurt much. It appears that there are three key things Blizzard had an issue with:

1. Blizzard doesn't want other people making money directly off their work.

2. Blizzard is trying to stop end users from getting harassed by advertisements, pop-ups and donations.

3. Authors have few - and easily adjustable - rights because without WoW, their creations are worthless.

The last point, is probably the most troublesome.  QuestHelper has been downloaded millions of times.  If even a fraction of those people use the mod, that means Zorba is providing a service to more people than most MMORPGs can count as subscribers.  With such a huge base, shouldn't an author have some rights?  I am going to put my neck on the chopping block and say that they do, just not as much freedom as they previously did. Since day one Blizzard has been playing with the add-on community.  During the Molten Core days, add-ons were used as automated decursing utilities, and macros were far more powerful than they are now.  Blizzard nerfed both because they felt that gameplay was being compromised, and as unfortunate as it is for the authors, that is what they did here.  Blizzard saw add-ons like Carbonite - the mod that reportedly kicked this off - adversely affecting a users experience due to the ads.  And if it wasn't the ad-based flavor, then they directly made money off Blizzard. Blizzard has laid down the law and there is little we can do to stop them.  Striking is a possibility, but could easily backfire on many authors by driving users to mods that serve the same purpose.  A general strike would be required, and I just can't see that happening.  The changes and incoming losses are just something that we will have to live with.  These hardworking Add-On developers do deserve our money, but they are going to have to come up with more creative ways to shake it out of us.  Although I believe I could easily live without any of my mods, I have and will continue to support the more complex ones (Auctioneer is the love of my life). Unfortunately, I don't have a golden suggestion for the developers to keep the green coming.  That being said, one way to guarantee more revenue for your work would be to host your own website, and attempt to create a community for the creations.  This will drive traffic directly to you, your advertisers and your donation button, rather than allowing sites like Curse or ZAM to reap those benefits. As personal as it may seem, Blizzard has removed an important part of your freedom, not your rights.  You can still pour your heart and soul into the add-on.  You can still make a living off it, you just have to do it by their new rules.  It won't be easy, but don't be like the RIAA and demand that the old standard remain in place through hell or high-water.  Come up with creative ways to draw income and attention to your creations.  Give those casual users yet another reason to feel guilty about ignoring the donation button.  Please, don't just throw your hands in the air and give up.  You owe it to yourself, your contributors and the add-on to at least try some new techniques before walking away. We will likely see more big name add-ons shutting down in the short term, so be prepared.  Which mods could you not live without?  I could manage to live without all of them, but my Auction House days would be far less profitable without my beloved Auctioneer.

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