Mac-based WoW players have been dealing with an odd little bug for quite some time. (More than one, actually, but I'm just going to talk about one here.) Whenever WoW is launched, it clears your Exposé hotkeys (by default, F9–F11). Oddly, it doesn't clear my Spaces hotkey, which is set to F12, just Exposé. I was hoping this bug would be gone in Leopard and/or patch 2.3, but apparently that's not in the cards. Going back into the Exposé & Spaces preference pane and resetting them isn't that hard, but it is annoying to have to do it every time.

Fortunately, the official forums have provided me with a solution. Temari of Kil'jaeden wrote a simple Applescript which sets your Exposé hotkeys back to their default settings. Run it after you quit WoW, and everything is once more as it should be. Here's the application version of it; if you want to tinker or investigate, here's the source code [edit: links fixed]. The script's creator suggests adding it to your dock next to WoW. I don't use the dock much (Quicksilver forever, baby), but that's probably a good idea for those of you who do. By the way, this is apparently an Apple bug, so don't blame the blue.

Edit: Please stop posting your platform war comments. Whether they're pro-Mac or anti-Mac, I don't care; don't post them please. I don't want to have to start deleting people.

Here's an awesome tip from amib over on WoW LJ. Sometimes, we all could use a little location check from time to time. While I usually am OK with finding quest coordinates, every once in a while, I'd just kind of like to know where I am. So here's amib's tip-- a macro that will easily and simply tell you (no addons required) where you are in game.

/script px,py=GetPlayerMapPosition("player")
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:
AddMessage(format("( %s ) %i,%i",
GetZoneText(),px *100,py *100));

(As commenters have noted, the formatting is weird here on the blog-- it's meant to be two lines, both starting with script. The other line breaks will need to be taken out.)

Just put that on a button, call it "Where am I?" or something like that, and then click it to get your current ingame coordinates in the chat channel. Considering how poor my addon-updating abilities are, that's perfect.

Of course, there are lots and lots of addons floating around that will do this even better-- showing your coordinates and cursor coordinates in the window, and all kinds of other ways. But if you only use coordinates every once in a while, and never remember to update your addons, this little macro could be pretty useful to have.

A little while ago, we asked what a good PvP video looked like, and so it's only natural that we should ask, as Relmstein did recently, what makes a good machinima? Yes, PvP vids are technically machinima, but in this case, I'd say we're talking about videos that tell a story that doesn't necessarily center around PvP-- stuff like Illegal Danish, Time Gnomes, and even music videos like Big Blue Dress (which is also a PvP video) and Code Monkey.

Relmstein tries to make a spectrum between professional production and a strong script, but I'm not sure those are on opposite ends-- it's definitely possible to have both. I'd say a good, strong script is important for sure no matter how your movie looks. Humor tends to be popular, but I think that's only because non-humor stuff tends to be overly dramatic RP stuff so far-- it's hard to convey real emotion, as my friend recently said when I showed her the Code Monkey video, with characters who don't change facial expressions.

And maybe this is just me, but I kind of have a pet peeve with some machinima-- I really tend to dislike overuse of the Model Viewer to create improbable situations. It has it's place, I think-- Hardware Store is a great video that uses the Model Viewer almost exclusively for all sorts of fun. But I am more impressed by the folks who are able to shoot great stuff inside the actual game engine rather than flooding the screen with their own creations, effects, and graphics. Yeah, it takes skill to come up with all your own stuff, but if I'm watching a WoW video, I'd rather it was made with WoW, not five or six other programs just using the WoW models.

But maybe that's just my own personal opinion. What do you think makes a great machinima video?

Caster has posted his "first successful pull" of an exhaustive list of arena PvP stats about class and spec over on the forums. There are tons of stats to play around with here-- for each bracket of 5v5, 3v3, and 2v2, he's got the average, minimum, and maximum of specs for each class, wins and losses, the low, average, and high of hit points, and even a breakdown of who's grouping with who.

Not surprisingly (though I was surprised back when Arenas first started up), Warriors and Paladins are topping the charts in terms of numbers, so it seems a good way to win 5v5 Arenas is simply to stay alive. Apparently 2v2 teams are the most volatile (since people switch around with them all the time), but the numbers there are the most interesting-- Warlocks and Priests top the charts there (thanks a lot, Fear), and it turns out Druids might have actually have a place in Arena PvP-- as long as it's right alongside a Lock.

And the big loser is apparently Hunters-- their numbers are down to single digits in 2v2 and 3v3 (as in 1 and 2 total), which means players are not taking their Hunters into the arenas. Is that because Hunters aren't useful or viable enough in the smaller teams? I'll leave that one up to you.

[ via WoW LJ ]