Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
FlagRSP and its descendents have long been the de facto standard addons that most roleplayes use to "flag" themselves, letting other roleplayers know at a glance not only that they're interested in roleplaying, but also sharing character descriptions and basic information about what sort of roleplaying they prefer. The original FlagRSP is defunct, but the torch has been passed to two worthy (and superior) successors: FlagRSP2 and MyRolePlay. Both use the same methods to communicate with other roleplayers, so you need only choose one and you'll be able to share information with players who use the other (be careful not to use both at the same time, however). Both addons help a lot with the problem of roleplayers being hard to find.
FlagRSP2 and MyRolePlay both give you a space to write things like your character's first or last names, a character title (such as "Priestess of the Dark" or "Wacky Troublemaker"), as well as some description about what your character looks like; and of course they both enable you to see the information other people have written about their characters too. Both have "roleplaying flags," which can tell other people whether you are a "casual" or "fulltime" roleplayer, as well as whether you are in or out of character at any given moment.
FlagRSP2 has a cleaner, more intuitive interface, in my opinion, and it has nice little popup windows for character information which can appear whenever you mouseover or target someone. MyRolePlay only has a popup button which you must click on to see other characters' information, but it also has two separate spaces for physical descriptions and story backgrounds, which FlagRSP2 users sometimes mix up together. MyRolePlay also uses less computer resources on my system, and keeps things running a bit smoother. I often switch between the two since I can't really decide which is best.
I want to apologize to the other writers for dominating the Add-on Spotlight feature for a few weeks. I think it's an obvious I'm an add-on superfreak. I'm constantly upgrading add-ons, trying add-ons, ditching add-ons, and replacing add-ons. This feature, therefore, is something I really enjoy.
I want to talk to you today about "the little add-on that could." This little piece of programming brilliance has been around forever and over the course of time some of it's features have even been worked into the default World of Warcraft user interface. Auction Filter Plus won't die though. The author just keeps honing and refining it for all of us to enjoy.
What does it do? It allows you to manipulate auction search results in ways that the default auction interface does not. How many times have you been to the auction house looking for silk cloth for example, typed "silk cloth" in the search field and had results that included "bolts of silk cloth" as well? One of the things AFP does is allow you to do "exact" name searches which allows you to find precisely what you're looking for without a lot of "bogus" (as my guild leader would say) search results.
Suppose you need a lot of that silk cloth, fast. Your wallet is heavy, you're not worried about the price, and you just need a ton of silk and you don't want to mess around with the vendors who are selling it one-piece-at-a-time. AFP also allows you to specify what stack sizes you want to search. So in this example, you could click the "Stacks of 20" box and it would only show results that were stacks of twenty.
The most obvious and beautiful feature of AFP though, is shown to the player on a budget who is shopping for stackable items. I used to only buy big stacks, because I assumed people who were selling the items in bulk were offering better prices. I've found since installing AFP that this isn't always true. Once you have your search results in the auction window, you can click "Show Best Deals" which will then categorize auction offers based on the cost-per-item. Sometimes the lowest buyout is not always the best deal!
You can also hide items that don't have a buyout, or (if you're a gear freak like me) hide items you can't afford. There are other features, but the best way to find out about them is to download the add-on, or check out the write-up on one of the add-on sites. In my books, this little gem will always be a "must have" in my add-on arsenal.
I wasn't going to write about this "so soon" after discussing Trackmenu, but after The Blog King presented appetizer and entree courses on hunter management, I thought this add-on would make the perfect dessert helping. The cheesecake, if you will. (Cherry cheesecake, of course.)
Our friend Gazmik Fizzwidget is a goblin of many talents, and unlike most goblins, his inventions do not tend to blow up. As I said, I spoke about Trackmenu not too long ago, but he has also created an excellent add-on to aid in the sometimes arduous task of keeping your pet fed. Keeping your pet fed is important because, after all, if it's happiness drops too low for an extended period of time, the pet will desert you. Hunters who have invested an extended amount of time and money into their pets will tell you that losing your pet is a bad thing. Re-training from scratch is not a pleasant experience, especially if you acquired a rare pet at a low level that you're particularly fond of.
So what exactly are you to do to keep your pet happy? With the default user interface, you are forced to continually monitor that tiny little tri-colour box beside your pet's unit frame (that I swear looks like a coffee cup) and click the feed icon, and then click the food. It's time consuming, repetitive, and tedious.
Our friend Gazmik has written another gem called Feed-O-Matic that makes feeding your pet so gleefully simple it's the next best thing to total automation! Installation is simple and typical of most add-ons. Probably the most difficult thing is choosing a key to bind to the pet feeding process in the Feed-O-Matic configuration window. Once you have defined your key, Feed-O-Matic will intelligently monitor the contents of your inventory and only feed your pet the food that your pet likes, each time you press the feeding key. It will choose foods in the order of your pet's preference. So if one food will give a higher happiness yield, it will use that up first before moving to the next type. It will also optionally ignore food items that are cooking or quest items. It can also be set to consume "shorter" stacks first to maximize your bag space, although this is less of an issue since the recent changes to the stacking mechanism. Lastly, (and this is perhaps my favourite feature) it can even be set to make your pet growl audibly when it's hungry so you don't have to watch the happiness monitor at all!
I don't know Gazmik personally, and I wouldn't normally review two add-ons from the same person in such rapid succession, but it just seemed like a perfect topical flow today. Remember: He's got what you need!
Do you suffer from buttonitus? (I'm amused that word didn't trip a spell-check alert.) Symptoms of this dreaded disease include having more spells and abilities than you have buttons, exploring assorted action bar add-ons that allow you to have more buttons than the default UI, and overall general frustration. Although this plague is not limited to a single class in World of Warcraft, hunters in particular have it worse than most.
In addition to the usual combat abilities, the shots, the traps, and whatever other profession-based buttons a hunter may have setup they have an added burden: tracking skills. I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that nobody can track as many different kinds of things as hunters, especially if the hunter is a miner or herbalist as well, or even a dwarf.
So, listen to me hunters (and others). Look at your action bars and all the tracking skills you have hot-keyed there. Now describe to me in a hundred words or less (in the comments section if you wish) the happy dance you will launch into if you could reclaim each and every one of those buttons and use them for something else. Allow me to introduce you to Fizzwidget's Trackmenu.
Installation of the add-on could not be simpler. Simply open it in your archiver of choice and extract the folder into your \Addons folder as per usual. Then launch World of Warcraft and look where the tracking indicator used to be on your mini-map. In it's place is the Trackmenu button. Click this button, and a list of all your tracking skills will drop down allowing you to make a selection. Unless there are some you want to hot-key you can now safely remove all your tracking abilities from action bars.
Enjoy one of my absolute favourite add-ons. You can look forward to further reviews of other Fizzwidget products in the future. He's got what you need!
I should warn you in advance before we get too far into this review that Possessions has been known to be very addictive, meaning that once you use it, you may not be able to play the game without it. One particular hunter who is very near and dear to me started acting like a drug addict who had just gotten her fix when I showed her this add-on. For people who have multiple characters on the same server and especially characters devoted exclusively to storage, this add-on may send tingles of pleasure through your body that you have not previously experienced in an online game.
Once you install Possessions the first time, you should immediately login to each of your characters and open all your bags in your inventory and in your bank. Once Possessions has scanned all the information into it's database initially, all updating is then done on-the-fly. This is where the sheer beauty of Possessions begins to shine.
Let's suppose you're playing on your warlock who is an engineer, and someone in your guild is looking for silk cloth which would be stored in the bank of your tailor. You can either type "/poss" by itself to bring up a dialog box (and type "silk cloth" in the search field) or type "/poss silk cloth" right in the chat window. Possessions will give you a search engine style report of all the items you have that have "silk cloth" in the name. You can even "link" these results back into chat by shift-clicking the item icons in the search results. Mousing over these icons will give you the usual in-game description of the item, but at the bottom of the tooltip it will also tell you how many you have, and where the items are located on what character.
There are other options in the search dialog you can explore that accomplish a variety of other filtering tasks and that allow you to search a specific character or a specific location, but that's for you to play with later. Packrats of Azeroth, download Possessions today! I should note that I've hot-linked a much larger screenshot of the Professions search window to the tooltip thumbnail above. Click it to behold the true beauty of Possessions!
As we have noted before, the standard chat interface is not very user-friendly. One of the ways in which it doesn't work, is that all sorts of different text channels are crammed together into one window. This is particularly unhelpful when you're trying to maintain several different whisper conversations, as well as talk in your party or guild channel all at the same time. I used to have gobs and gobs of trouble with this, wishing that the chat interface were more like... an instant messenger!
Well now it can be. WoW Instant Messenger (or WIM for short) brings you the best of the Instant Messenger features out there and packs it into one nice addon. The main thing is just that it separates each conversation into a different window (or tab!) so that you can keep them straight and not miss any messages. You can set these windows to appear whenever a message comes in, or to wait for you to click on the icon, just like an answering machine. They also display the name, level, class, and guild of the person you're whispering with, and there are several buttons on the side, which allow you to do several things, such as add the whisperer as a friend, or find out where in the game he or she is at the moment.
So if WoW is not only a game to you, but also a place to meet up with your friends and just talk for hours, be sure to have this addon to make your social life a little bit easier.
In previous weeks we've looked at Lightheaded, which helps you understand how to do your quests, and Fubar, which can present all sorts of information concisely. Today's addon is a Fubar plugin that can work with Lightheaded to show you everything you need to know about your quests without having to click a lot of buttons or obscure your screen with your entire quest log.
QuestsFu presents you with a handy quest list in two ways. First of all, you can hover over its space on your Fubar and it'll give you a collapsable list of all the quests you're working on in a tooltip. In addition, you can have QuestsFu put up its own little quest tracker to replace Blizzard's standard tracker. The advantage to either of these color-coded quest lists is that you can just click on any of the quests themselves to open up a little window with all the quest information in it (pictured on the right). This is great for when you're in the middle of a quest and you don't want to stop moving, but you still forgot where exactly you were supposed to go or what the quest rewards are.
If you have Lightheaded installed too, then you can arrange an additional Lightheaded comments popup on the other side of your screen, and get hints about your quest without opening the big old quest log.
There are other quest managers out there, but this is my favorite because it feels so light weight, looks so attractive, works together with other addons so nicely, and also has such nice features, above and beyond what I've already mentioned:
Edit the questlog on the fly, adding or removing quests with ease.
Display quest levels, difficulty, zones, and objectives clearly.
Put objective info into monster and item tooltips
Show the quest level before you accept the quest
Show other party members' completion of quest objectives (if they have the addon too)
Optionally (I have this turned off) notify party members in /p chat when you complete a quest.
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.
Quests are a pain sometimes. You may already know that database sites like wowhead.com can help, since players reliably contribute their wisdom about the best way to solve quests there. The comments these players left have helped me many times when I knew that a certain series of quests might be hard and wanted to make a plan for it before logging in.
But after I've already started playing, I typically don't like to bother with external programs and websites. To illustrate, consider the following hypothetical situation: you're in the middle of a quest you thought would be simple and those Disgusting Whosamawidgets simply refuse to drop the required Sticky Yellow Fluid. You've been wandering around for an hour killing (and getting killed by) these horrid creatures, and you feel stopping to open up your web browser and check Wowhead would only add to your frustration. Finally you call out in desperate all-caps leetspeak on the general channel, only to be thoroughly ignored! Then finally one wise and tender-hearted player informs you that were actually supposed to be killing the Grotesque Whosamawidgets just next door, not the Disgusting ones. You thank her, of course, but in your gut you're still feeling dumb and regretting having wasted so much time and energy.
It's enough to make you feel lightheaded indeed! Thankfully that's where Cladhaire comes to the rescue with his addon designed to bring those helpful sorts of people and their comments on Wowhead right into the game for you. Lightheaded (the addon) opens up just to the right of your questlog and shows whatever wowhead's commenters have to say about the quest you click on. It only loads that portion of the quest comment database your quest is in, too. This helps to save on memory usage, save on trips to a website, and also save on massive frustration all in one lovely addon.
And... on a related note, consider using DoubleWide (shown above, working with Lightheaded) to make the questlog into two panels instead of one. This makes quests and quest lists so much easier to read, Blizzard really should incorporate it into the standard interface.
In the last few weeks we've covered some very useful and beautiful addons that work with the Ace2 framework to provide customizable flexibility to otherwise static elements in the game, such as unit frames and nameplates. This week's addon integrates with PitBull and Aloft as well as many other Ace addons, to give you more choices for the graphical bars and fonts that appear. Simply install SharedMedia and the additional choices will become available to you when you select textures and fonts in the other Ace2 addons. Some of my own are pictured here, with PitBull and Aloft. SharedMedia is not essential obviously, and it doesn't win the game for you, but it immensely enhances the inherent beauty that I love about the World of Warcraft visual experience.
I couldn't find an actual download page for Shared Media, but it is available from files.wowace.com in two parts, which you can download directly here: SharedMedia, and SharedMediaLib.
Click on the link below to read about other addon updates related to inspecting and unit frames:
I've been putting off writing about this addon, mainly because it's one of the greatest addons out there, so it's hard to do it justice -- what doesn't PitBull do?
Well it won't win the game for you by itself, and its name doesn't really describe anything about it, but other than that it does pretty much anything and everything you could expect from a unit-frames replacement and then some. You can, of course, personalize your unit frames to your heart's content, more than any other unit frames mod I've seen, and that in itself is worth the download. On top of that, though, you get a ton of other features, all of which can be enabled for functionality or disabled for performance, whichever you like. Here are a few of my favorites:
The addon known as Aloft solves many of the problems I've had with nameplates in World of Warcraft. Nameplates, or names and health bars floating above the heads of all characters within a few yards, were great at first for letting me see at a glance the status of a battle, but they quickly got too confusing and frustrating to be useful anymore. (Some people may have never known they could turn nameplates on -- by default they are toggled on and off with the "V" key.)
The main problem I experienced with the default nameplates was that they kept jumping about as characters moved in a tight space, and there just wasn't room for all the entities' names and healthbars floating above their heads. Some nameplates inevitably got pushed off to the side, far away from the characters they were supposed to represent only to bounce up to the top or the right or the middle unpredictably as the character ran along. Furthermore, the default nameplates are largely the same and it was difficult to tell which ones belonged to whom.
Aloft, though, lets you modify the nameplates and their presentation of the information you need. You can, for example, make the nameplates relatively small to fit more nicely together in crowds, and then assign different health bar colors to various types of characters, from hostile, neutral, or friendly NPCs -- to players (friendly or hostile) of different classes -- or even to distinctions as fine as pets within your group or not if you want. You can set up all sorts of textual information too, such as name, health or guild affiliation, and make everything appear just as you want it so that it means the most to you at a glance. You can even make the nameplates of friends who are being attacked appear in a special warning color for as long as they are under attack, or add combat text to health bars just like that which normally appears scrolling up above characters' heads or over their portrait on the unit frame.
Aloft is the addon that makes nameplates actually usable for me, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you have any interest in nameplates at all. You can get it at Curse, or download the frequently updated version directly from wowace.com
Nowadays you can inspect someone's items from a full 30 yards away, but back in the day, you had to be within 10 yards in order to do it. And if someone moved out of that range while you were inspecting them, then the window showing all their items would go away.
I got fed up trying to catch up to people all the time when I wanted to inspect them, so as soon as I realized that an addon could help with this, I adopted it and never went back. SuperInspect has truly been the super hero addon of player inspection because not only does it preserve the inspecting window no matter how far away your target gets, it also gives you a good view of the target's graphical model, whether a player or an NPC. This feature lets you rotate or zoom in on the target model to your heart's content. Just love the look of that monster or enemy player in front of you but can't get close enough without getting attacked? Just use SuperInspect and zoom in!
There are several more features which make SuperInspect feel fleshed out and useful, such as colored borders for displayed items that indicate their quality, and total item bonuses added up from all your target's gear. It can also save the various characters you've looked at in each session so that you can look them up later. Mainly, though, SuperInspect just looks good, with a movable, scalable window, and even a pretty background behind each character that adds that certain flair that all good addons should have.
Fubar is one of those addons that I didn't know I needed until I tried it out. It lets you display information in a bar at the top and/or bottom of the screen -- all the numbers and meters that you want to always have handy, without having to click on anything or hover your mouse for tooltips. Fubar itself provides a framework for the Fubar modules (downloaded seperately) to display this information for you -- anything from your durability to your current experience (with rest) to the time of day (both in your time zone and on your server).
I personally find one of its most useful features to be that it can show you how many of your guild mates and friends are online at any given moment, then let you hover your mouse over the number to see a tooltip list, with clickable names for whispers or invitations, just like a regular IM program.
To be honest, I actually tried out its competitor, Titan Panel, long before I had heard of Fubar, and then switched to Fubar because it feels more flexible and lighter on my system. Fubar is made with Ace, which usually helps addons feel smoother somehow; the difference between Fubar and Titan is what made me go looking for other Ace addons. Also, the other thing I love about it... is that it's called "Fubar!" and most of its companion module addons end in "fu", as in "QuestsFu" and "MoneyFu!" I just love my addons with a extra helping of humor sauce.
It's so easy to lose track of time when playing World of Warcraft. You start out grinding this reputation, leveling that alt, then get invited to go run an instance, then come back and check the auction, then inspect some people standing around in their pretty epics... and suddenly discover that it's 1 in the morning and you've spent many more hours playing this game than you had planned.
Then again, for some people, limiting themselves isn't at all the problem -- it's limiting their kids they worry about! Their children agree to only play for 1 hour, but then 2 or 3 hours go by and they're still in there at the computer, saying, "But Daaaaad, I forgot!"
If either you or your loved one needs a gentle reminder about how much time has gone by while adventuring in Azeroth, WoWTimer may be the addon for you.
I wasn't going to write about this "so soon" after discussing 
Do you suffer from buttonitus? (I'm amused that word didn't trip a spell-check alert.) Symptoms of this dreaded disease include having more spells and abilities than you have buttons, exploring assorted action bar add-ons that allow you to have more buttons than the default UI, and overall general frustration. Although this plague is not limited to a single class in World of Warcraft, 
In previous weeks we've looked at 
Nowadays you can inspect someone's items from a full 30 yards away, but back in the day, you had to be within 10 yards in order to do it. And if someone moved out of that range while you were inspecting them, then the window showing all their items would go away. 
