Yes, you read that name right. I'll be doing Addon Spotlight while Sean is away for a little while. Don't worry though as The Creamy GUI Center will still be around for all your in depth addon needs, and I'll do my best to keep Addon Spotlight's tone and feel as close to Sean's as possible. Today in the spotlight is a duet of addons inspired by Apple OSX. Apple has always had a polished interface, with all sorts of options added with a graphical flare that sets it apart from others. Let's see if we can spice up our WoW UI with dock and dashboard addons that hope to bring some of that flare to WoW.
Reader U.I. of the Week is looking for your user interfaces that you're using in the beta right now. With Wrath of the Lich King and patch 3.0.2 around the corner we want to get the word out there to everyone about what is working and what isn't in the upcoming patch, and what better way to do that then to show off what other readers are using!
Send us screenshots and some information about your U.I. to readerui@gmail.com and you might see it featured here soon enough!
We'll also be compiling a list of working addons for the upcoming patch, along with where you can get the latest and greatest versions when the patch drops on October 14th. With a little bit of work all your addon needs should be a-okay come patch 3.0.2.
PopCap's Bejeweled addon for World of Warcraft is coming out today (we did an in-depth preview of it earlier this week, in case you missed it), and to celebrate, we sat down with the addon's creators to see how it came about, and why this addon release (officially endorsed by another well-known gaming company) is so important.
Michael Fromwiller is a student at San Jose University, but in the WoW community he's better known as Moongaze, creator of the popular Lunarsphere addon. He also created another addon called Besharded a while back, which was an unofficial clone of PopCap's Bejeweled, a game he'd played a lot on his cell phone. PopCap heard about the addon, and when word got around to T. Carl Kwoh, a senior producer at the company, they decided, rather than shutting down the unofficial version, to try and hire Moongaze to make it official.
Our interview with both of them, which starts after the break, covers how the game came together, how Moongaze took influences from both PopCap and WoW to fit one game inside another, and why inserting another game into World of Warcraft doesn't exactly mean there are holes in Blizzard's game.
WoW Insider currently looking to expand -- but not, as you might have guessed, in the writing category. We're blazing new trails and looking for an addondeveloper to add to our staff for... well, an addon-related project! However, we can tell you that we're looking for someone who's able to commit a serious amount of time in the short-term to completing a large project and some amount of time over the long term to provide updates as needed. Think you have the coding skills to pay the bills? Then send an application to apply@wowinsider.com with the following information:
What sort of gameplay experience you have. (We don't need a detailed resume of your work, but give us an idea of how much you play, what you play, and how you play. Raid? PvP? RP? Paladin? Priest? Warrior?)
Your previous coding experience -- we're especially interested in any addons you've developed.
How much time you'd be able to commit to working on our project (how many hours a week on average).
If you have any questions, please send them in to apply@wowinsider.com. Otherwise... what are you waiting for? E-mail us your applications! We'll be accepting applications for the rest of the week and hope to start contacting candidates the following week to talk details.
Violet_helix asks a good question over on WoW Ladies LJ -- is there a way in the official UI to form up guild alliances. And unfortunately, as the commenters answer her, there is not. Guilds who want to raid together just have to kind of do it.
The only little workaround that is available, of course, is the chat channels -- those can be created and even moderated in an ad-hoc way (though I believe that they can't be given permanent moderators, which means that if someone leaves the channel, they could lose moderation privledges). But even if a guild alliance is able to keep up a chat channel and keep it moderated, they can't do things like leave a message of the day, or store ingame information on guilds or members as regular guilds can. There is an addon called Guild Alliance that will do lots of that stuff, but there's nothing official.
Should there be an ingame UI for creating alliances? We've been promised more backend guild-based content (like guild battlegrounds and even guild housing), and if Blizzard does choose to heavily update the guild system, there could be a lot of benefit to guilds aligning. Not to mention with the 10/25 main raiding split in the expansion, it's not unexpected that we'll have smaller guilds who join up with each other for the big raids rather than huge guilds with big raiding teams. On the other hand, the practice isn't so widespread at this point -- there may not be enough alliances out there to start officially recognizing them within the game world anyway.
One of my favorite people to read online is a fellow by the name of Pjammer on Livejournal. He's smart, funny, and a gifted writer, and if you are not sobbing by the end of "King of Masochists" then you are pretty much a terrible person. But another great entry is "The 16 Essential People In Your Life," which lists such valuable acquaintances as the Computer Security Guru, the Wolf, the Consigliere, and (most importantly) the Best Friend. Pjammer, quoting Harvey Mackay, correctly notes that 2 am is a bad time to make new friends. These are the kind of people you want in your life as early as possible, and to exercise a positive influence on its course.
My realm's seen a number of guild instability issues of late, which is something most of us have come to expect with an upcoming expansion. I've found reason to mull over how the virtual world differs from the real world with respect to friendship, backstabbing, greed, betrayal, honor, and how people choose to handle their problems. In my considered opinion it doesn't differ at all, and your experience ingame is largely determined by the network of players assembled around you, whether that alliance is a recognized one in the form of a guild or simply a more informal group of friends.
So, from my own experience and with a hat tip to Pjammer, these are the people you want in your posse for the best possible experience in the game:
I'm not the world's most sophisticated interface tinkerer. In comparison to people like Taeo, my UI looks like it was a low-bid government contract job by Oog & Sons. I'll grant that Taeo's UI probably isn't a fair comparison anyway (I maintain that it's hands-down the most beautiful UI we've ever run on Reader UI of the Week), but the point still stands. I download mods I need. After reading Addon Spotlight and getting curious, I often download mods I don't need. I get them up and running while trying to navigate an oft-bewildering number of options. If they're movable, they're irritably shoved around the screen depending on the job I'm doing in a raid or just ignored entirely (e.g. Decursive while tanking). Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Where'd my screen go?
Man, it's a cruel world out there for the lazy. But every so often you find offbeat but amazingly helpful mods that just work, and best of all, work unobtrusively without having to be diddled with every day or between characters and specs. For my part, I am completely ready to nominate OptiTaunt for whatever Total Slacker's Mod prize might exist. It's a tiny mod for tanks that tells your group, raid, and the player you're trying to taunt off of when a taunt is resisted or when the target is immune. It can also announce when you've had to blow mega-cooldown abilities like Challenging Roar, Shield Wall, and Frenzied Regeneration. Best of all, it whispers cute class-specific messages to the player who's pulled aggro (e.g. for Priests: "Warning! My Growl was resisted! Time for a final prayer!"). And you don't need to spend time worrying about settings between characters or specs as the mod will simply never activate on a toon that won't have to (or can't) taunt anything.
I love Titan, Cartographer is amazingly helpful, and we all depend on things like Omen, but OptiTaunt still wins the proverbial desert island contest for me. Sean could probably name dozen of mods like it off the top of his head, but I find any mod announcing a thinly-disguised version of "YOU'RE ALL SCREWED NOW!" pretty tough to beat. With that said, I'm trying to level some taunt-free classes to 70 before Wrath hits, so I'm on the lookout. Any suggestions for, say, a Shaman?
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.
Welcome addon and interface enthusiasts to this week's The Creamy GUI Center. I hope my American readers are having a relaxing and safe Labor Day weekend. Because of all the positive feedback I received on my review of the Logitech G series gaming keyboard, I decided this week to look at another set of hardware accessories. In the coming weeks I'll be featuring more gamepads such as the Belkin Nostromo series, and Wolf King Warrior gamepad, but this week's showcase is the Ideazon Fang Gamepad and Merc Gaming Keyboard. How do they fair and will they be an asset to your WoW game play? Let's find out!
Gnomewarrior, a site devoted to tracking Arena matches, has a growing database of over 23,000 Arena matches contributed by over 400 players. It's a pretty small player sampling right now, but the match data that the site shows are pretty interesting. Even with a small overview, visitors can check out specific Arena teams (that have contributed their data) and details on their matches such as match duration, their Team Rating, the maps they fought on, and the all-important team compositions. Mousing over a class icon will show that player's spec, which is extremely useful.
Arena enthusiasts looking to contribute should download ArenaHistorian from WoW Interface and upload their data on Gnomewarrior. The mod itself tracks pretty much everything in an Arena match such as the "exact race, gender, talents, healing and damage done for both the enemy arena team and yours, along with which map it was in, how long it took and if you won or lost." It's a lot of data, and as with all databases, the more data you've got, the better. Gnomewarrior collects all that data and makes it extremely searchable, allowing visitors to search for how teams or even how certain class / specs performed.
Perhaps we'll see tools that will parse the data, like finding out the average time for matches depending on the brackets and maps (glossing over the lists, for example, it looks like most matches last from 3-6 minutes). It's also interesting to see how certain -- sometimes oddball -- comps do against others. As it is now, it's interesting enough to browse through and visualize the tons of matches they display. With a big enough sampling, I'm looking forward to Gnomewarrior working alongside other sites like Realm History's Arena Statistics in becoming a valuable resource for analyzing Arena play.
Fixing "their" bugs which in turn breaks "our" addons and mods. The suggestion is that they don't care, or could take steps to prevent this.
As you can imagine, all sorts of responses cropped up, including the usual people who get into arguments with other posters, players in agreement, joking and sarcastic responses, and of course, an awesome string of blue responses.
World of Warcraft allows all of us an unprecedented ability to modify our user interface to meet our needs. Each week WoW Insider will bring you a fresh and detailed look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send it, along with your character name and server, to readerui@gmail.com.
This week I want to take a break from reader submitted user interfaces and profile my own. Pictured above is a compilation of what I like to call "my baby." It's a UI that's taken me over a year to perfect, and I like it quite a bit. What we'll do is take a look at the philosophy behind the interface and what addons I use.
I wear many hats in my guild. I'm the GM, the main tank, and help drive the raids. My UI serves me well in all these roles, and it allows me a plethora of options at my disposal. My multiple duties in my guild means that I not only have to be fully accountable for everything the boss does to me (and for a tank in and end game guild that's a lot), but I also have to keep an eye on everything else that is happening in the raid.
The Philosophy Behind My UI
Information and functions need to be easy to access, and be accessed quickly. In addition to the ease of use, it is vital to have a clear view of the play field when engaging in raids and groups. When getting the raid ready and driving the trash pulls, I need to be able to see everything and hear everything. It's unacceptable to have information more than a click away – if that. If someone sends me a tell, I want to know about it right away, and if someone dies I want to see it in bright colors in my chat windows.
Since my in-game responsibilities are numerous, I have to be able quickly switch between them. To do this I have to utilize both my keyboard and my mouse.
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.
Welcome folks to this week's The Creamy GUI Center. This week I tackle one of the great suggestions left by you the reader in the comment's section. We're gunna examine bag replacements and inventory managers in a special two part series. This week we'll see how to organize your inventory with bag replacement addons. And in the following week we'll look at which addons help you change gear around for different situations. But let's not put the cart ahead of the horse, first we have to organize all that equipment, so let's get to it!
If you're a machinimist or just someone who likes to poke around the game files trying to see what The Ultimate Druid would look like (yeah, I'm guilty), good news; Wow Model Viewer has been updated for patch 2.4.2. I haven't used it since the patch hit, but according to the mod's site a few twitchy issues popped up that have since been fixed.
The developer warns that this version will not work with any version of Wow pre-2.4.2, so if you haven't downloaded and installed the patch yet, don't install this update until you do.
If you haven't had the chance to use WoW Model Viewer previously, give it a shot -- it's a wonderfully addictive little mod and a great way to get a closer look at the detail that goes into the game.
Yesterday my guild was getting ready for our nightly foray into the Black Temple (we downed the first five bosses in 3 ½ hours, not too bad). Out of the blue, a member who has been having some "issues" as of late decided it was high time to leave the guild. And he didn't just stealth gquit, he went out in style.
Instead of being adult about it, which everyone in my guild is, he posted a long winded and rambling message to the guild and then left. His tantrum was quite good, one of the most epic I've seen. But the epicness of his lack of class wasn't the best part. The best part was that he had enough foresight to do it all with a macro. So after a bunch of us got done laughing about him leaving on ventrilo I thought to myself, "Self, I should post this on WoW Insider tomorrow. After all, a gquit macro sounds like a good idea!"
Take a look after the break to see some screenshots of this ex-guildie's gquit macro, and how you too can make your own gquit macro!
World of Warcraft allows all of us an unprecedented ability to modify our user interface to meet our needs. Each week WoW Insider will bring you a fresh and detailed look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send it, along with your character name and server, to readerui@gmail.com.
Draxyl from the Turalyon U.S. server submits to us his Warlock UI. It's actually very reminiscent of the UI that I had for quite some time until I upgraded my graphics card and started using a lot of alpha-blending (transparency). He uses Fubar across the top with several key pieces of information and quick to reach options, and then has the bottom of the screen filled with status indicators, chat, and action buttons.
I think it's a common theme amongst most UI enthusiasts to focus the information in one or two places. This has several benefits, from limiting eye movement when trying to pickup information, to allowing more space to see what's going on in the rest of the environment.
Creamy GUI Center will still be around for all your in depth addon needs, and I'll do my best to keep Addon Spotlight's tone and feel as close to Sean's as possible. Today in the spotlight is a duet of addons inspired by Apple OSX. Apple has always had a polished interface, with all sorts of options added with a graphical flare that sets it apart from others. Let's see if we can spice up our WoW UI with dock and dashboard addons that hope to bring some of that flare to WoW.
PopCap's Bejeweled addon
Violet_helix asks a good question over on WoW Ladies LJ -- is there a way in the official UI to 
If you're a machinimist or just someone who likes to poke around the game files trying to see what The Ultimate Druid would look like (yeah, I'm guilty), good news; 
Yesterday my guild was getting ready for our nightly foray into the 
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