It's been almost a full year since I last saw this brought up, and we still haven't seen anything from Blizzard on it. Eric over on WoW LJ brings up the issue of tracking alts within a guild. As we found out last time, most people just use guild notes (or helpful addons) to keep track of whose alt is whose inside a guild, and it works OK -- assuming people are up front about when they're logging in on another toon.
But still, it seems like an official interface would work much better. And especially considering that Blizzard is actually going to start encouraging alts as a part of the gameplay (you have to have a character at least 55 on the account to start up a Death Knight, and there are rumors that alts will benefit from reputation grinds as well), it seems like they might be interested in making the connection between characters on the account a little more obvious.
And as we said last time, there are benefits to the guild as well -- you never know when that lowbie leveling through Westfall might actually have a Death Knight ready to tank for you. I'm still not sure about marking alts in the Armory, but if you join up to a guild, I'd think guilds should have the right to know, officially, who's an alt of whom.
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.
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.
Today's Reader UI of the Week comes from Zerfall, and UndeadWarlock on server Eonar. He has many addons working together to support his game play. What I particularly like about his UI is that it's not cluttered, allows for good visibility, and uses what I would consider to be critical addons that everyone should at least try out.
I always find that Warlocks and Tanks have the most complicated UIs. Tanks because of the necessary information they need to have about everything and everyone, and Warlocks because of the large amount of spells at their disposal. Zerfall does a good job at organizing all his abilities using his action bars. One area is for miscellaneous items, one area for his pet bar, one for his curses and often used spells, and another for his lesser used spells and abilities. I always find that this kind of distinction is critical in a successful UI.
Sure, there's a new zone, including a 5-man dungeon, a raid, and a truckload of loot in patch 2.4. But what about the important stuff? It turns out we're in for a few UI changes as well. Every time Blizzard improves their interface it builds my admiration for them more, because the truth is they don't have to -- we have some fantastic Add-On developers in the community. However, incorporating must-have changes into the default UI is good for all players, and I'm glad they do it.
Damage meters in World of Warcraft can be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, they can give you detailed information about incoming and outgoing damage in order to help you decide on the best gear, the best talents, and the best spell or ability rotations to get the most out of your character. On the other hand, their list format can turn instance groups into a competitive game where the person at the top "wins" -- a dangerous thing when a DPS chart can't tell you anything about threat or deaths, nor utility abilities such as crowd control or dispels. However, I always like having Recount -- not only because it collects a metric ton of data about you and anyone you group with -- but because the information it tracks can help put DPS in the broader perspective.
To the right you see Recount's main window. Right now it only lists two items -- my Rogue alt and the elemental pet of someone I was grouped with before taking this shot -- but in a large group there will be a line item for every group member and pet, showing total damage, DPS, and what percentage of the group's overall damage they've done. If you mouse over anyone on the list, you will see the pop-up to the right, listing the top three attacks, top three attacked, and the damage done to each.
But Recount goes in to much more depth than this. Want to know the wealth of information that awaits you? Keep reading!
The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do:
Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window.
Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example)
Add keybindings for various chat channels.
Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target.
Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message).
Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names.
Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about.
Turn on chat logging.
Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location.
Copy text from the chat frame.
Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.)
As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.
By now you've heard of the Orc shoulder problem (and maybe you've even confronted Azeroth's Greatest Male Orc about it), but as MMO Champion shows, that was definitely not the only major bug that showed up in 2.1.3. There's a huge list of things going wrong-- Dwarf females' offhands are huge, Blood Elf males can walk through chairs, Cyclone can prevent players from getting their BG marks (!), and ghost wolves, when attacking, can now be seen carrying weapons. What happened?!
The problem becomes even stranger when you consider the patch notes-- almost nothing got changed compared to previous patches. All we saw were a few graphical changes, an added interface option, and some high level raid tuning. As someone asked yesterday, how can all of this seemingly unrelated stuff be breaking? If all Blizzard is doing is updating the mail system, what does the size of shoulderpieces on male Orcs have to do with it at all?
The answer is probably more complicated than we can know. As commenter Okoloth said yesterday, object-oriented programming (which Blizzard uses to code the game) is full of parent/child relationships, which means that a change in one class ("wearable items in the mail") can have strange effects all across the game ("Orc shoulders shrink"). And then there's the whole fact that even though the patch notes for 2.1.3 are small, that most likely doesn't mean Blizzard is slacking-- they could be implementing more subtle changes on the system (in preparation for future content that we don't know about yet), and those changes might be having an effect on the actual game we play.
Of course, just because we aren't being told why these things are happening doesn't mean we should give Blizzard a pass on fixing them ASAP (in my opinion, they shouldn't wait until the next patch to fix my shoulder size, thank you). But just because seemingly unrelated bugs are popping up doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.
Finally! A UI that some of you may have been waiting for - I know I was. It's frequent commenter Chronnick and his UI! I'll get out of the way and let Chronnick explain:
Here it is!
After a month of delays due to nitpicking every single element of the UI, I hereby humbly present my interface. My focus here was to leave as much of the world visible as possible, while still showing a ton of information, and not using a ton of memory or cpu time. So I've thrown it all towards the bottom of the screen and made it as pretty as possible using Skinner and Clearfont. Clearfont anti-aliases all my fonts, and Skinner gives me a pretty, uniform background on all my windows.
I'm still working on making Damage Meters and KTM a little less ugly and I think there is a way to do that with Skinner, but that's still a work in progress.
For the unit frames I've got ag_UnitFrames using the ABF skin that i modified a bit for to hide the background of the target's caster bar. My buffs are shown using Buffalo, which allows me to place them to the right of my health/mana bars the same way my party member's buffs are shown. But by using Buffalo instead of agUnitFrames' own buff display, i can right-click my buffs to remove them.
Do you guys like the new AutoDismount option built into the interface? There's now an option that you can check or uncheck (in the interface window) that will automatically dismount you from your flying mount whenever you start casting a spell-- and that includes dropping into stealth, shapechanging (for druids-- Hugsy of Thunderhorn tested it for me), and mining and herbing.
I used to use an addon called EZDismount a while back that did exactly this, but I eventually ditched it because it seemed like it kicked me off my mount too much. But since the patch, the AutoDismount seems to be working perfectly-- it saved me tons of clicks farming herbs while flying around (and towing my orphan behind-- what can I say, I'm a multitasker). I don't know if Blizzard has theirs set up differently, because I haven't used the old addon in so long, but so far it just seems to work better.
But I do realize that not everybody likes it, and unfortunately, it seems the checkbox only seems to work for flying mounts-- AutoDismount is set on by default for all ground mounts now. If you want to turn it off for all mounts (so that you get an error message, just like before, when you try to cast a spell while mounted), you can simply type this: /console autoDismount 0. That, we're told by Slouken, the UI blue guy, is all you need to type in once, and it's set off for all mounts. I'd assume to turn it back on, you just type /console autoDismount 1. And there's a few helpful dismount macros in that thread as well-- you can use a hotbutton to select a random mount in your inventory, or use a hotbutton to turn on or off AutoDismount (if, for example, you want to use it in battlegrounds, but not in PvE). Interesting stuff. I'll be autodismounting, I'm sure, but with all that info, it's good to know that you have control over when you get on and off your mounts.
Guild banks and VOIP are great, but here's one thing for guilds that I'd like to see: a way to tell whose alts are whose.
If your guild is like mine, it's easy to have trouble keeping track of who plays which characters. The guys and girls in our guild play quite a bit, so everyone is usually working on an alt or two, and it's really helpful to know that that 23 mage on right now is actually a well-geared 70 warrior who can tank your instance. But in the standard interface, there's no real way to know who's who-- either you have to learn who plays which alts over time (which leaves you stuck not always knowing exactly who just said hi to you), or you have to come up with a makeshift plan. My guild sticks the main's name in the alt's guild notes, and while sometimes that gets messed up (because an unsuspecting officer changes a note), it usually works OK.
But still, I'd like to see an official interface for it. Now, some players probably use alts as masks to hide behind, which is fine (I have a few secret alts of my own), but if your alt is in the guild, your guild has a right to know the other guild members you play. And an official interface would make it easy-- it would get entered automatically and be easily accessible for everyone. As long as we're working on guild banks and other guild-friendly features, I'd like to see an alt-tracking interface (for just within the guild-- I'm sure that if the same thing hit the Armory, lots of players would cry foul) as well.
"www. Buy cheapest WoW gold pwns4hire. We live to serve your every need! com And we certainly don't ruin the game for everyone else who just wants to play without cheating."
Ah, gold spam. It's a bigger problem now than ever, and getting bigger every day. I feel like I get an average of one spam whisper per ten minutes when I play my level 70s, and about a mail a day or so. No, it doesn't really cost me anything, but it sure is annoying. Blizzard are allegedly working on some improvements to the situation for 2.1; one rumor says that trial accounts will no longer be able to whisper people who don't have them friended. I don't buy that, since Blizz have said several times that they want trial accounts to convey the full social nature of WoW, but we'll see.
At any rate, there's something you can do about the problem now: SpamSentry. It's a mod that automatically catches and hides spam whispers and emails, and provides a two-click solution for reporting them to GMs (which you should definitely do so they can catch the buggers). It almost makes getting spammed enjoyable, since it's so easy to report and hopefully hinder their foul goals. It plugs in to FuBar and Titan, which is always convenient, and in general is a pleasure to use. Recommended to all who get spammed (but isn't that everyone?).
This is a big one, and one I've been waiting for for quite some time (about six months, I'd say). I don't usually bother even looking into compilations of mods, since I've found I can always put together a more satisfying solution myself, but MazzleUI may well prove to be the exception. Here's how Mazzlefizz, the author, describes it:
MazzleUI is a comprehensive, customized user interface for the World of Warcraft that attempts to be clean, symmetrical, provides lots of information, use minimal space and be highly efficient.
Sounds great, right? However, for most of MazzleUI's life, it's been in closed beta. MazzleUI 1.0 was just released today -- I saw the news when I woke up, and haven't done anything but install and play with it since. I'm just taking a break to tell you all about it, and then I'm sure I'll be diving right back in
[Note: Hopefully this will be a valuable resource for new players. If you know any, feel free to send them here. If you already know how to use AddOns, there is probably very little in this post that will interest you.]
You just got WoW, or maybe you've had it for a while. You heard about these neat things called "AddOns" and you want to try them out. How do you do it?
I like efficiency. If it lets me skip a click, I say, it's worth a download. And AutoSelect lets you skip many, many clicks. What it does is jump past the "gossip" screen at NPCs that offer one, going straight to the vendor interface/flight path map/whatever it is that NPC is actually for. And if you really feel the need to see Innkeeper Firebrew say "Fill your tankard and pull up a chair" one more time, just hold down control when you right-click the NPC -- that disables AutoSelect.
The author has quit developing the mod in dissatisfaction over WoW 2's restrictiveness, but not before updating it to work with 2.0.1. Hopefully someone will take it over when it needs changes; for now, it works perfectly.
The new patch is coming this Tuesday to a realm near you, and when you run off to find updated versions of your latest addons, you may be in for a surprise -- because favorite addon site Curse Gaming has undergone a complete redesign. (If you're trying to find the addon section of the site from the main page, it's a big purple button on the right.) Their addons section looks quite a bit different and no longer sorts addons by familiar categories -- instead, there appears to be one giant list of addons, which is searchable by labels attached to the addon. For better or for worse, the new layout is going to take some getting used to -- and I can only again encourage everyone to go and download addon updates in advance of Tuesday's patch!
It's been almost a full year since I last saw this brought up, and we still haven't seen anything from Blizzard on it. Eric over on WoW LJ brings up the issue of tracking alts within a guild. As we found out last time, most people just use guild notes (or helpful addons) to keep track of whose alt is whose inside a guild, and it works OK -- assuming people are up front about when they're logging in on another toon.
Damage meters in 
To the right you see Recount's main window. Right now it only lists two items -- my Rogue alt and the elemental pet of someone I was grouped with before taking this shot -- but in a large group there will be a line item for every group member and pet, showing total damage, DPS, and what percentage of the group's overall damage they've done. If you mouse over anyone on the list, you will see the pop-up to the right, listing the top three attacks, top three attacked, and the damage done to each.
By now you've heard of 
Do you guys like the new AutoDismount option built into the interface? There's now an option that you can check or uncheck (in the interface window) that will automatically dismount you from your flying mount whenever you start casting a spell-- and that includes dropping into stealth, shapechanging (for druids-- Hugsy of Thunderhorn tested it for me), and mining and herbing.
Guild banks
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