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Posts with tag addon writers

Have you hugged your mod writer today?

May 1st, 2007

This week's issue of the Escapist has an excellent article by Greg Tito discussing the difficulties of being a mod writer in World of Warcraft. And we're not just talking about learning LUA or fixing bugs after Blizzard has released a major patch, but about the community itself. You've all read the official forums, so you know the community isn't always friendly. And when a mod you've written goes from being something you coded for yourself (and uploaded on a whim) to something used by thousands of people (each of them asking -- or demanding -- different bug fixes and improvements), I'd say things stop being fun. Mod-writer Gello explains some of the stress of the situation when he tried to help his users out by writing a German localization:

I had spent a couple very intense months working on the localization of Recap. It got so I could understand combat logs in German.... It was just causing way too much stress and time for something I would never see or use.

And when French players began requesting a French localization of mage water-summoning mod WaterBoy, Gello refused, suggesting that native speakers could make a localization themselves. And then, as Gello says, the flames began:

When I stood by my position (probably not in the nicest terms), they continued in earnest. I got an email with an attachment I thought was safe and apparently it wasn't.... I basically abandoned the email address, formatted my pc, ditched the mod and didn't look back.


Really, people: go give your favorite mod writer a hug. It can be an immense amount of work to maintain a good mod and most of it is thankless.

Analysis / Opinion, AddOns

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