Project Lore

A Tribute to Addons is a column featuring new, cool, or useful addons. Send a tweet to @Projectlore with your suggestions, or leave a comment.

Gevlon's little experiment

Today, I'd like to share a questionably moral addon. Its called TooltipWealth, and it might reveal more information about your fellow players than they are willing to share.

One of the features of the Achievements system is that it tracks various statistics about your gameplay. For example, it remembers the greatest amount of gold that you have ever held and how much gold you have acquired over the lifetime of your character. This is interesting data, but not just for the player. Pretty soon after the achievements system hit live realms with patch 3.0, gold spammers started using the achievements interface on the Armory to target wealthy players to buy gold or to find poor players to sell gold. It was promptly removed from the web interface of the Armory. Players can still view this data in their statistics tabs of the achievement pane in-game.

Well, TooltipWealth comes and blows the top off of all of this. Using the achievement API, the addon queries the server for wealth data from the server for any player that you mouse-over and displays it in their tooltip! You can choose to display the most gold they have ever held, or how much gold they have handled. These numbers can be significantly different; a player who spends a lot of time buying and selling on the auction house may have only held 20,000 gold at one time but traded hundreds of thousands. It can be configured to show only players from your faction, and only in capitol cities. It is very prying, as you can see level 80s who have only held around 1,000 gold, and it also reveals the super-rich who have at some point held several dozen thousand gold.

I don't know how useful it is, but it definitely raises some questions and provides some entertainment. Do you think the addon has gone too far, or is there no right to privacy about wealth in WoW? It could be useful; for example, a suspicious person who is identified as very wealthy could be attempting to scam you. I will continue to use it, and chuckle at passersby in Dalaran

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