So, what is RealID?

At the moment, each individual current Blizzard game offers basic “friends-list” functionality. For example, within WoW each character has its own friends-list to which a player may add the name of another character of the same faction (Alliance or Horde) that exists on the same realm server.

Whenever this character then logs on or off, a chat-window notification is provided to the player and at any time, the player may access their character’s friends-list to see if any of their friends are currently online.

The basic WoW friends-list functionality is therefore character centered. If a player’s friend is playing a WoW character of a different faction or realm, there is no mechanism for them to see them or contact them provided within the game. The same is true if a player’s friend is playing another game entirely, be that another Blizzard game such as Starcraft or a game from another publisher.

Most WoW players will probably be aware of the existence of the Battle.net platform even if they don’t know exactly what it is. Some months ago, all WoW players were forced to create a Battle.net user account and to switch to using the credentials for this account (an email address and password) to login to WoW in place of the WoW specific login credentials they had been using up until that point.

Battle.net is simply the name Blizzard has given to its ‘online gaming platform’ and for most intents and purposes, one might say that Battle.net is to Blizzard’s games what Xbox Live is to Xbox 360 games. It is a platform of ‘online services’ that support the various needs of Blizzard’s games and its players.

In the same way that an Xbox 360 owner playing an online game can see if any of their Xbox Live friends are online and if they are, what games they are playing (or what movies they are watching, etc), Blizzard wishes to be able to offer that same level of functionality to its customers via the Battle.net platform. So far, all very sensible and all very pleasant sounding in principle.

RealID is therefore in some ways a little bit like the ‘Friends-List’ functionality of a platform like Xbox Live. To begin with, you add friends to your RealID friends-list by adding their ‘Battle.net’ user ID. Your friend is then sent a ‘friend request’ message and they have to accept and agree to be a RealID friend with you. Xbox Live requires the same mutual agreement between friends.

Once a friend request has been accepted, both players will appear on each others RealID friends-lists whenever they are playing any Blizzard game that supports the RealID system. To begin with, this means WoW and Starcraft 2.

It does not matter what each player is doing – one could be playing WoW whilst the other is playing Starcraft 2. The RealID friends-list shows each player is online and reveals both what game each is playing and what activity within that game the player is currently involved in. (Within certain limits: After all, it would be easy enough for Blizzard to spot when a WoW player was running a dungeon or a raid instance and report that but less clear if a player was simply exploring the world map, looking for herbs and mining nodes.)

Thus, no matter what each player wishes to do, so long as they are logged in, they can be seen by their friends and contacted making it trivially easy to keep in touch with your friends and exchange messages with them. This is exactly the sort of good idea that has made Xbox Live such a pleasure to use. I’m playing Gears of War, you’re playing Trials HD and you’ve just beaten my time. You send me a quick message to crow and within a few moments I’m loading up the same game to steal back my honour with a better time. Forget the specific games mentioned in the example above, the ease with which friends can interact is the key point of focus here.

Thus, the basic premise of what Blizzard is aiming to provide to players with the RealID system is generally sound; a cross-game communications service to allow players that have agreed to be friends to keep in touch with each other. It will now be possible as a WoW player to keep in contact with friends playing on other factions or realms as well as in other Blizzard ‘Battle.net aware’ games such as Starcraft 2. So far, so ‘awesome’.

However… there are some very important points to be aware of with the manner in which Blizzard have announced that they plan to implement the RealID system that have some significant and, in some edge cases, possibly dangerous potential consequences. We will examine these issues further in the following paragraphs.

The RealID system WILL reveal your full real name to your RealID friends.

Blizzard have stated very clearly and adamantly, if you accept or issue a RealID friends request with someone else and become RealID friends with them, whenever they see you on their friends-list they will see your full real name. That is, your first and last name as stored on your Battle.net account. Typically this WILL be your real world name (eg: Peter Smith, Jane Brown, whatever.) because you will have needed to give your real name for the purposes of billing since WoW and Starcraft 2 have recurring fees to play.

Thus, if my name were Peter Smith and I was logged into WoW playing my rogue Broliant, then my friend Jane Brown who was playing Starcraft 2 would see me on her friends-list as “Peter Smith (WoW: Silvermoon-EU: Broliant) or something along those lines.

Blizzard have been very explicitly clear. It WILL NOT be possible to withold your real name from the people you agree to be RealID friends with.

So, why might this be important?

There are a handful of well known and generally accepted reasons that range from being able to protect children from unwanted attention to mitigating the risks of possible identity theft why any individual may wish, need or require to withold personal details such as their full-name.

Most other platforms respect this and permit the player to create a ‘virtual ID’ such as Xbox Live’s GamerTags under which they can conduct their gaming relationships. If two friends wish to accept each other as Xbox Live friends, they simply exchange GamerTags and nothing more is required. Should either of them wish to share more personal information with the other, the decision remains theirs to make.

This forced ‘exposure’ of a player’s full real name in order to take advantage of the RealID system’s ability to enable cross-game communication has been widely criticised for the obvious reasons described above. What has not been seen so far in other coverage is a compelling argument that clearly explains why Blizzard have chosen to implement their RealID platform in this manner.

Since it is clearly not necessary to force players to reveal their full real name for such platform services as cross-game communications to function, the question is why Blizzard wants to push such an agenda. It is clearly a decision that is hostile to the individual and the preference they may have for remaining anonymous and it is highly unlikely that Blizzard is not aware that this is so.

The most likely driver for choosing this course is that genuine personal information is an incredibly valuable resource. Blizzard have already announced their plans to integrate Facebook support into the Battle.net system so that your Facebook friends can also be your Battle.net RealID friends where you are both players of Blizzard games that support RealID. Facebook is designed around the principle that a person is identified by their real name rather than by the assumed identity of a fictional avatar ID. In this way, Facebook is able to exploit its user data via various means, advertising being the most prevalent means currently employed to monetise user data.

By ensuring that the advantages of the RealID system are only available to those who implicitly choose to reveal their personal data, Blizzard is indicating that such attractive features as cross-game communications are only for those willing to relinquish full control and protection of their personal information.

Blizzard have stated that the simple answer for those concerned about revealing their personal information is to NOT use the RealID system but to stick to using the default friends-list functionality of the individual games.

Their official stance appears to be that the RealID system is only for use by people that either know each other already or that do not mind to reveal their personal information (even if it is only their full real name) to another player.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re a WoW player in a WoW guild and you have a guildie who plays a hunter called Bandycat. You have no idea who this person really is. Male, female, eunuch, it doesn’t matter. All you know is, you enjoy playing with this person in WoW and would like to be able to keep in touch when you are playing on an alt-character that might be on the other faction or on another realm. Or perhaps you also like playing Starcraft 2 and want to remain reachable by Bandycat in case he (or she, or it!) arranges one of the weekly retro-fun raids to BWL that you love so much.

Would it not be more friendly to allow these players to become something like ‘BattleNetFriends’ where they could still keep in touch across the Battle.net platform without having to reveal their personal information? If Blizzard were genuine in their position that RealID were only for friends who actually know each other or were fully happy to exchange full real name information with each other, it is unlikely that they would be able to justify developing the RealID platform software. After all, how many of the people on your friends-lists are actual genuine real-life friends, the kind you’d fully trust with your personal identity information?

(Pure speculation: Considering the number of ‘real-life friends’ playing WoW. Do you think it’s less than 10%/20%/30% of all WoW players? Do you think Blizzard would develop a costly feature that would only appeal to less than such a small percentage of its player-base?)

The much stronger liklihood therefore is that Blizzard is either seeking to tempt players to open up and reveal their personal information more freely or to ‘trick’ them into doing so on the promise of the communication advantages the RealID system provides. The longer one examines the matter, the more likely seems the possibility that longer-term financial ambitions are the cause of the chosen design for the RealID system.

According to Blizzard, there are NO plans to offer players the chance to either withold their full real name or to use an alternative ‘avatar’ name as their RealID name. In other words, do not expect Blizzard to adjust their stance on this matter.

The RealID system will ALWAYS show your RealID friends where you are and what you are doing.

At the moment, if I have three characters on the same faction/realm and want all of them to be friends with your character, I have to add the name of your character to the friends-list of each. I can either do this manually or, in WoW for example, I can use a game addon to synchronise my friends-list between characters.

With RealID, two friends must only perform the single act of becoming RealID friends with each other and from that point onwards, they will be able to see their RealID friend no matter what character, faction or realm (in the case of WoW) they are playing on or whether they are instead playing a different game that supports RealID such as Starcraft 2.

On the one hand, it’s nice to be easy to find in those moments when you don’t mind people contacting you. However, there are plenty of occasions that most players find themselves in where they appreciate being able to ‘drop off the radar’ whilst still being able to play.

Although you might be happy to be ‘visibly online’ whenever you are on your main character, perhaps a character that belongs to a guild for example and the alts you have within that guild are you happy to be ‘visibly online’ no matter what character you login to? What about if you are on a minor alt, one used as a bank or auction house ‘mule’ for example. Or perhaps you split your time between different groups of friends, playing on one realm with one group and on another realm with the other group.

Do you really want to be visible to every RealID friend 100% of the time you are logged into a Battle.net game? I can state from personal experience that as much as I generally love playing among the regular faces of my guild and the friends on my standard WoW friends-lists, there are times when I simply want to be free to put on some music or a podcast or two, get my head down and immerse myself in some questing or levelling fun without having to keep one eye on guild chat or be ready to make polite excuses for why I’d rather not join a dungeon run at the moment.

Right now, I can achieve this by jumping onto a ‘private’ character, be it one outside my guild or not known to my friends. It’s not ‘wrong’ or ‘seedy’ to want this option, it’s just for those times when you want the game by itself without the ‘massively multiplayer’ type baggage.

For me personally, both of the above issues are deal-breakers that will ensure I do not use the RealID friend system. It’s a shame, because the cross-realm/faction/game communications would be a nice thing to have but if I have to surrender my personal identity information and my online privacy, they are “nice to have” things that are not worth the cost of admittance.

Blizzard have again stated categorically that there will be NO opportunity for players to set their online presence to an ‘invisible’ or ‘offline’ status should they choose to use the RealID system. They are introducing several ‘status’ flags for RealID though along the lines of “Available”, “Busy” and “Don’t disturb” but whichever you choose, other RealID friends will ALWAYS be able to see you are online and what you are doing and be able to contact you if they wish.

Conclusions:

The RealID system offers a range of features that any user of other modern ‘social’ gaming or network platforms will be mostly familiar with. It makes perfect sense that players of Blizzard games, actively using the Battle.net platform, would appreciate having the ability to communicate with each other across game and faction/server/realm divides. For wanting to offer such features to players, Blizzard can be commended.

It is abundantly clear however that the design of the RealID system is incredibly hostile toward concerns of user privacy and security when it has no need to be in order to provide the features on offer.

The only credible explanation for choosing such a design appears to be that new streams of revenue generation will be created along similar lines to those used by other social gaming platforms and the new communications features provided by the RealID system are being used as the “enticement crowbar” to compel you to surrender your valuable information. In this regard, Facebook offers an informative preview of the templates that are likely to be introduced to Battle.net in the coming months and years.

Blizzard do not have a reputation for selling their customers down the proverbial river in order to make a ‘quick buck’ and therefore the announcements being made here regarding the ‘costs’ of the RealID system are in many respects surprising. Their parent company Activision however are gaining a firm reputation for ‘over-mining’ their franchises as the handling of the “Guitar Hero” and “Modern Warfare” products have shown over the past year.

Whether or not Blizzard’s choices and motivations in this matter are fully their own or are shaped by ‘guidance’ from Activision is a matter for rampant speculation.

What is clear however is that the RealID system is simply a small collection of additional new communication features that most users would find convenient and useful but that come at a cost that most users would find unreasonable when the implications are made clear to them.

-B-

First, let me start by saying that if any of you reading this have already done the Hodir rep-grind to get your revered or exalted shoulder inscription, please simply stop reading this post right now to avoid getting really annoyed. For the rest, I’ll see you in the next paragraph…

Being the type of player that does not mind the repetition of raiding (an activity of my choosing) but that hates with incredible intensity the enforced labour-mechanic of rep-grinds to get things like the Hodir shoulder inscriptions (an activity NOT of my choosing), Broliant had never pursued the Hodir rep for the new shoulders and simply “made do” with the Aldor enchants of TBC. Even when the venerable ‘Relic of Ulduar’ became BoE and purchaseable, I still could not find within myself the justification to spend around 1000g+ on the relics needed.

So, there I was on the eve of patch 3.3′s release chatting to the guys on vent and I mentioned one neat thing I’d heard that was supposedly in the patch – the fact that all top-level Arcanum (Head Enchants) and Inscriptions (Shoulder Enchants) were now BoA (Bind on Account) items, meaning that you could do the rep-grind on one char only then buy the Arcanums and Inscriptions you needed for all your characters. “Pretty sweet” I said, “I may even do the rep-grind now, it almost makes sense!”

Then one of my fellow officers said something along the lines of “you can buy rep-tokens with badges, don’t you know” and so off I went, straight to the Badge of Triumph vendor in Dalaran, to check it out. I’d already confirmed the “BoA” status of Arcanum at the Ebon Blade vendor in Icecrown. Now I was also able to confirm what my team-mate told me… and so I bought one “Sons of Hodir Commendation Badge” for a cost of one “Emblem of Triumph“. Normally it awards 520 rep with the Sons of Hodir… but I’m Human so add 10% and I got 572 rep. And went from having “no standing at all” with Hodir to being somewhat “Hated”. Ooops.

Hmm, I thought. Even though I have many Badges of Triumph which I have no other use for, this will take some doing. Maybe I should do the quests first. Off to Stormpeaks I went, spent a couple of hours doing all the quests leading up to the Hodir quest-line and eventually there I am standing in front of Thorim ready to hand in his two main quests – the main “Mending Fences” quest and “A Spark of Hope”… and hahahahahahaha… see the image below…

That’s right – each quest hand-in awarded me with 31,460 rep with the Sons of Hodir. I went directly to revered with that nice jump! I then ran back to Dalaran, bought around 35-40 more of the “Sons of Hodir Commendation Badge” and hit exalted. I then went straight back to Dun Niffelem and bought an exalted-level Arcanum for Broliant and another for Balgardner.

So, the instances might be borked entirely while we wait for the “new patch smell” to die down a litte… but there are still some nice discoveries to be made.

-B-

Following the recent release of patch 3.2, many rogues have been playing with various forms of weapon-swapping macros in order to attempt to gain a small boost to their DPS. The premise is that whatever spec you are raiding with, and currently this should really be a standard Assassination-Mutilate build or a standard Combat build, you’ll typically be running with Deadly Poison (DP) on your off-hand weapon.

Now, DP has an uptime of 12 seconds and can stack up to five times on a single target. The idea therefore is to begin a fight with an off-hand weapon coated with DP, wait until DP has stacked five times and has a full 12 seconds or so of uptime remaining and then to switch your off-hand weapon to a good alternative/equivalent that has been coated with Instant Poison (IP). You then continue as normal until your DP stack has about 5 seconds of uptime remaining at which point you perform another weapon-swap to reequip the DP coated weapon so that you can refresh the stack before it drops.

If all goes well, you’ll have gained some additional DPS due to the extra DPS that IP can provide on top of the DPS that DP is already providing as it continues to tick. This whole concept relies very much on you being able to stand relatively still and maintain DPS on a single target only – it does not work on mobile fights or on fights where you are required to switch targets regularly.

Depending upon your spec (Assassination or Combat) and what gear you have will determine how easy it will be for you to perform the weapon-swapping due to the 1 second enforced cooldown (CD) that occurs after each weapon-swap. Additionally, you ideally should have a second off-hand weapon comparable in terms of DPS and speed to the normal weapon you use in your off-hand so that when you switch you don’t lose a significant amount of DPS through raw weapon-stat reductions.

We’ve included a trio of simple macros below and to use them, simply replace the “Dagger of BLAH Poison” with the name of the weapons you are off-handing in each case. And no, they don’t have to be daggers! Once you have some macros, we’ll assume you can cover the basics of keybinding them and of using a simple addon like class-timer to track the points when your DP stack is full and refreshed and when it’s getting close to expiry such that you need to swap back. If you pop on over to Elitist Jerks (EJ) then you’ll find some people there are creating automated weapon-swap macros that run in addons like Outfitter.

The Deadly Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Deadly Poison

The Instant Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Instant Poison

The Wound Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Wound Poison

However, we’d suggest that if you can’t at the very least track your DP stack yourself and manually select when to switch weapons using macros like these, then you’re essentially letting the addons make your decisions for you and frankly you then neither deserve nor should you be swapping weapons. Do it manually by yourself or leave well alone. Blizzard already made their position clear on who should be thinking on behalf of your character when they locked addons down previously, meaning decursive users had to learn to do more than simply stab a single bright red button labelled “Decurse the cursed person please!”

In ideal circumstances where you are able to fit the weapon-swapping into your rotation, have an identical OH weapon to switch to and are on the ball with the changes so that you don’t let the DP stack expire, you can expect to see anywhere up to a 500 DPS increase from doing this. It’s likely going to be a smaller proportion of this figure for the “average you or me” once all non-ideal parameters are factored in but from our early experiments, it’s certainly worth doing on those “stand still and fight me” encounters.

-B-

Patch 3.2 was released in Europe on Wednesday 5th August, 2009 after being released one day earlier in the US. With it came many changes including the overhaul of the PVP Battleground system. At the core of the changes were three major new features:

1: By default players now “earn” XP in Battlegrounds when achieving the various goals of the battleground. (Thus endangering twink existence.)

2: Players can opt to turn off the gaining of XP on any character they own by paying a 10g fee to one of several NPCs located throughout the game. (Thus preserving twink existence.)

3: In battleground “matching”, players with XP gains turned off will only ever be allowed into games with other players with XP gains turned off.

On face value, the first two new features seem to add value to the game and to preserve the status quo for those players who have enjoyed twink-play in the past and would hope for that to continue. The last feature however, as feared and suspected prior to the release of patch 3.2, has proved thoroughly destructive in certain scenarios.

As noted in a previous post, my twink is a level 39 resto-druid. It was always fairly uncommon to see many twinks in a game, perhaps one or two being the most in any team. The fear was that this “twink vs twink only” idea would mean there would never be enough players to make a match has been born out.

It is now, at the time of writing, some three weeks since patch 3.2 was released and in that time, it has not been possible to get into a single PVP battleground. Admittedly, I have not been sitting still for three weeks waiting to get into a battleground but instead have been proceeding as normal, spending the majority of time in-game raiding.

However, it was always possible previously to jump onto Gosling after the end of a raid and let off some steam with a quick game or two in WSG or AB. Since the patch, nada, nil, nichts, nothing.

Most of the time, joining a BG queue (of which there is only ever one lifeless looking option available) reveals a predicted wait time of “Unavailable” and a real-world wait-time of “as long as you can bear to wait, and then some.”

Here at the towers, we’ve even logged in and left ourselves queuing for hours at a time whilst watching a movie or doing anything else around the castle ramparts while keeping a keen ear alert for the sound of a BG “popping” to absolutely no avail.

Following up our own personal disappointments within the group of people Gosling used to run through level-39 BGs with, a scan of the official forums reveals more evidence of the same problem being experienced widely across the wow-playing world.

There is no light currently in this particular tunnel. All advice from Blizzard gives no indication that matters might be relaxed to allow twinks and non-twinks to rub shoulders once more which is about the only way we can predict that the problem could be solved.

Certainly, the liklihood that a sudden influx of players wanting to join the “level-39 twink brigade” is surely close to flat-zero – who in their right mind would level and build a twink for a category for which there is no chance to play a game?

Of many disappointments, this is perhaps one of the ones that will have the longest lasting effect on those players for whom twink-BGs were a fun hobby in past times. We can’t comment here on what is going on in the 19 and 29 twink-BGs although the feeling is that they should be less affected given their greater accessibility and numerical levels of player activity. If any of you are running in twink-BGs now, how are you finding things post 3.2?

Strike 1 for Blizzard here though – a bad bad bad decision that has removed an enjoyable aspect of the game and has not replaced it with anything else of value.

Regular raiders are always on the look-out for ways to improve their raiding performance and will commonly take advantage of the output of tools such as WoW Web Stats (aka: ‘WWS’) or World of Logs (aka: ‘WoL’) to provide them with detailed reports on how much damage or healing was done and by whom, what abilities were used, who died and how and much, much more.

Typically, there will be one or two people in a given raiding team who have been given (or have assumed) responsibility for producing these raid reports and the steps they typically have to go through are generally as follows:

- Create an account with the reporting system. (WWS, WoL et-al.)
- Enable the logging of all combat data to the WoW Combat Log file at raid start.
- Upload data about the raid from the WoW Combat Log file to the report website.
- Stop logging of all combat data at raid end.

In general it’s not a terribly hard task but there are a few caveats that can catch people out from time to time, the most common ones being:

- Forgetting to enable the logging of combat data.
- Not managing the size of the WoW Combat Log file.
- Being unable to upload combat data due to the size of the WoW Combat Log file.

As a result of these potential caveats, being the one responsible for combat logging can sometimes be a more stressful and annoying job that it needs to be. Therefore, we’d like to offer a few useful nuggets of advice to those burdened with such a task.

Automatic Logging:

To get woW to record all combat data to the combat log file, one simply needs to enter the following command into the WoW chat window:

/combatlog

This should trigger an acknowledgement message to be displayed in the chat window indicating that logging has been enabled. To stop WoW recording the combat data to the log, simply type the same command again and once more, you should see an acknowledgement message indicating this.

Naturally, it’s quite tedious to have to be responsible for manually starting and stopping the logging of combat data and if you find yourself forgetting to start or stop the logging from time to time you wouldn’t be the first. Step forward therefore magically-useful addon “LoggerHead”.

Loggerhead is a small addon that detects when you switch zones and the first time it detects a new zone it does not know about it pops-up a small window asking if you’d like combat data logged whilst in this zone. It then remembers your answer so it doesn’t need to ask again the next time you enter the same zone and eventually, you’ll move freely around the world and if you enter a raid (for example) it will automatically trigger the logging of combat data to the wow combat log file on and off as appropriate, assuming that you answered ‘yes’ for logging in that zone!

You can download LoggerHead from here.

Log File Overload:

It’s great to be able to have LoggerHead manage the switching on and off of logging automatically on our behalf and commonly means that the task becomes one we never think of again. There is however a potential problem with this that we have not mentioned yet.

Whenever you enable logging, WoW simply appends the current combat log data to the WoW Combat Log file, growing the file over time. As a result of this, without proper management, the log file can grow to uncomfortable extremes. Here at ‘BW-Central’ we’ve recently taken on the mantle of managing our raid’s ‘WoL’ report creation and had never spared a thought historically to looking after the WoW Combat Log file. The result? The file grew to about 4.5gb in size before we noticed which is rather a lot of data and wholly unnecessary.

The quick and dirty solution to this problem is to simply wait until you’ve closed WoW down, finished uploading any data you care to upload to either WWS, WoL or wherever and then simply delete the existing WoW Combat Log file. The next time you enable combat logging WoW will detect the file does not exist and will create a fresh new log file accordingly.

We’re huge fans of ‘automation’ though so we’d much rather not have to even remember to do this job on the occasional basis. Far better for us to find a way for it to be taken care of on a repeating and regular basis without any interaction from us. Step forward ‘Chomp’, ’7-Zip’ and a simple Dos batch-file.

First of all, get hold of the following two utility programs and install them onto your computer:

- Chomp – Enables the splitting of logs files into smaller individual pieces.
- 7-Zip – A free archiving tool in the same vein as Winzip and Rar et-al.

With these tools downloaded, the next step is to copy the following batch-file code into a new text file on your PC and save it somewhere safe that makes sense to you. Although you could save it into the default ‘log’ directory (typically ‘…\World of Warcraft\logs”) we’d recommend against that simply because there might come a time when you need to reinstall the game and if you’ve saved it there, you might then delete it in the process of reinstalling. A user-profile directory or similar would do just fine. Save the file with the filename “WoWCombatLogRotator.bat” in the location you chose.


@echo off
REM WoWCombatLogRotation.bat
REM Rotates the WoW combat log file.
REM Notes:

REM Delete unzipped log-file extracts.
ECHO Deleting uncompressed log files matching "WoWCombatLog-*.txt"...
Del WoWCombatLog-*.txt


(NB: See comment #5 and comment #6 below.)

Note that there are several lines in the batch file code that you need to customise to point to the locations on your system of Chomp, 7-Zip and the WoW logs directory. Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to jump on to the next stage of the proceedings.

We now have a program to split the log file (chomp), a program to add the bit we chop-off to an archive and compress it down to save space (7-Zip) and a batch-file to marshall the whole process. Let’s give a quick explanation of what this batch file does.

We could run this batch-file now to test it and by all means, if you’d like to do so, please do. We’ve set it to empty the combat log file completely so if you run it a second time before you play WoW again, it won’t have anything to do.

What we’d really want though is to set this program to be run automatically everyday on an automatic basis. Under Windows we have something called “Scheduled Tasks” which you can find in your control panel.

Open the Scheduled Tasks window and create a new scheduled task. Configure it to run once per day at a time you would generally be sure not to be playing WoW (5am seemed like a good option here at the ‘BW-Daycentre!’) and save the task with a useful name and description such as “WoW Combat Log Rotation” etc.

With the task setup to run everyday at 5am, the first new session of WoW on any given day after 5am will have a fresh and empty combat log. Should you for any reason need a previous day’s combat log, you will be able to find it archived inside the Zip format archive in the WoW logs directory under the name “WoWCombatLogs.zip” with each day’s log data referenced in the name by day and date.

At first it seemed like a random isolated incident. Our guild tends to leave the optional bosses of Ignis and Razorscale as pleasant little ‘fillers’, an easy way to round out an evening when there’s just enough time left before raid end for an easy kill. About half-way through the fight, I realised my Tricks of the Trade button was not activating. I tried my keybind, I tried clicking manually on the button. Neither worked – all I got was the “That action is not ready yet” error message. Grrrr.

We regularly run with two rogues in our raids, me and one other, and the two of us trade our tricks once aggro is settled to get a nice mutual damage boost on a 30-second cooldown. Except now I wasn’t able to oblige my rogue buddy. Got to the end of the fight and was about to send a quick whisper to explain and apologise for my ‘apparent slacking’ but received a whisper before I could send mine. “Tricks bugged. ” it said. “Mine too” I replied.

That was the end of that raid and I wouldn’t have thought anything much more about it were it not for the fact that it happened again on our most recent run. Sometime after or during XT it simply stopped working again for both of us and stayed that way until sometime during the pre-Freya trash clearance. I have no idea what’s causing it at the moment but it’s now near the top of my list of things to check up on over the weekend should I get the time.

Not only does it drop our potential DPS on fights where my rogue buddy and I would be trading the buff but it also makes every pull just that little bit more clunky because we can’t help with the aggro-redirection. I’m nowhere near a machine from which I can check the official forums as I type this but I’m hoping it’s got a decently sized collection of duplicated ‘QQ, this is bugged’ posts that will at least show me I’m not suffering this irritation alone.

I’ll update here if we find out what’s causing this issue, but for the moment venting was therapy enough.

-B-

Update: Cause found, solution pending…

It turns out that the cause of this problem with Tricks of the Trade appears to occur in certain instances where the target you expect to apply TotT to is made somehow immune to its effects. A standard example of this is when your target has been placed into the slag-pot on the Ignis fight. If you are not monitoring the status of your target closely and you use TotT on them as they are in the slag pot, they will be immune to its effects and you will be unable to use TotT again until you re-zone or relog.

Dieing/wiping generally clears the problem up but simply reloading the interface (“/console reloadUI”) does not. Logging out of the game then back in also fixes the problem generally.

It’s probably not too much to ask on a fairly static (for melee dps) fight like Ignis to check their target is not “slag-potted” before hitting TotT on them – no doubt simple laziness had been the cause of our past problems in this matter since I know I for one had not been paying such close attention – do forgive me though since it’s normally a warm-up or cool-down fight for us hence ultra-ultimate performance is not generally gut-busted for here.

Blizzard will probably hot-fix this issue away at some point but in the meantime, just pay closer attention to the combat status of your target to avoid such irritations and simply relog (or wipe/die!) if you get unlucky and do catch this nasty bug!

Although Broliant has engaged in numerous PVP encounters over the years, it’s never been more than a fun diversion for him in between raiding activities and when PVP has been pursued for its loot rewards, those rewards have always been coveted for the benefit they might grant to PVE endeavours. Raiding regularly takes plenty of time by itself and these days a typical raid lasts about three hours. Within that time you’ll need to use three flasks (1hr duration each), numerous potions (healing, haste etc) and bandages and you’ll incur expensive repair costs once you get some decent gear. Perhaps as much as 150g per night on a day of progression attempts and continual wiping. Plate-wearing tanks can probably double that figure.

Thus, a three-hour raiding excursion can swallow upwards of 350g a time on the worst nights and despite the assertion that money now grows on trees, it still has to be earned somehow. Combine the responsibilities of going raiding with the additional time-costs of helping to run a guild and very little time (actually none typically) is then left to explore the PVP side of the game.

As a result, the continual arms-war of current-day PVP arena contesting long ago lost its lustre for this rogue since to compete at a decent level really does require the kind of time investment that can earn rankings and reward points sufficient to purchase each new season’s gear. The alternative is to soldier on with outdated gear and that becomes tiring quite quickly once you begin encountering people with the next ‘tier’ up of gear in comparison to what you own.

Broliant had always been a fairly single-minded pursuit and represented the only max-level end-game character on the account when the end-game max-level was 60 and the raiding menu consisted of MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxxramas. By the time the end-game max-level had settled at 70 Broliant was joined by the warlock Koyaanis who expanded the horizons of a melee minded player into the realms of the finger-wiggling caster classes. Koyaanis later became a staple of early pushes into Mount Hyjal where the value of the warlock’s Seed of Corruption spell on the waves of pre-boss trash was immense.

Christmas 2007 saw the birth of a new project, a baby druid for whom the parental ambitions were that the druid would grow-up to become an additional support healer/tank for those rare but occasional guild nights where a key member was not available and a hole in the raid needed plugging. Given the very limited amounts of free time, this was to be a long-term project with a 9-12 month run-time for the completion of the 70 levels required to reach the TBC end-game.

After several months had passed Gosling, the said druid, was approaching the late-mid thirties. Although instance runs were naturally sparse due to time constraints, it had been notable through the Scarlet Monastery phase that on the server he was levelling on, healers were far more in demand than any other role. Not wanting to embarrass himself by being the worst healer in existence, he took himself off to the trainer, respecced fully into the restoration tree and then signed up for a few battlegrounds – AB and WSG being the only options at that stage – to gain a little emergency triage experience.

Unbelievably, healing in the 30-39 BGs was a blast, pure and simple. Levelling concerns were quickly forgotten in order to let this experience be savoured and as the enjoyment continued, web-searches were undertaken in earnest to find the best gear available within that BG category. It was already too late to run enough instances to get all the gear without tripping over the level 39 limit but since this was a slow process conducted over many weeks, it was a pleasureable process, scoping out what was possible before the druid inevitably had to confine himself to “known quarters” lest he ‘discover’ his way beyond the glass ceiling of level 39′s XP cap.

Unlike max-level PVP, there was a simpler purity about this ‘new’ experience. Resilience, the perfunctory stat that had been created in the usual heavy-handed manner to mitigate critical damage in end-game PVP encounters, did not really exist in a meaningful way at this level. Similarly, due to the self-imposed and therefore artificial level-cap, the game enjoyed a kind of stasis that was not possible at the level cap. Only a finite amount of gear and corresponding enchants and buffs were available meaning that it was possible to slowly build on a character here over an extensive time-frame.

Thus, Gosling could remain in mothballs for months at a time and yet each time he was unpacked once more, he was able to jump straight back into the fray without too much difference. Of course, the game always has slight changes going on – a talent tree overhaul here, an imposition on the ability to use certain enchants there… but overall, it was a far more stationary set of goalposts to aim for than would be the case if one were engaging in arena PVP at the level cap.

It was a genuine pleasure to discover this hidden gem of a game within a game. Just like PVE, the PVP side of WoW had always previously been viewed as a game in continual motion, where to stand still was to be left behind and thus, where inactivity for any period of time was detrimental to future plans and activities. The decision to halt the levelling of Gosling, at least for the time being, was soon made and it seemed an easy decision to make at that time.

Over time Gosling earned himself a number of items that are available via the honor points system and was grandfathered a few additional niceties from the auction house by Broliant, whose spending power was naturally greater as an end-game character. For those that don’t know, the practice of using a higher level character, or characters, to source more powerful equipment and consumables for a lower level character is known as ‘twinking’ and thus Gosling was now a confirmed twink. Twinking as a practice is in equal parts enjoyed by many and vehemently disliked by others.

The enjoyment is easy to understand since almost every single WoW player seeks to find better equipment and the like for their characters on an on-going basis. Better equipment normally equates to a more powerful character and thus improves the chances of success in any encounter. However, that increased power can be such that it unbalances encounters to the extent that players that are not ‘twinked’ have lower chances of success should they encounter a fully twinked character.

Battlegrounds divide entrants into level ranges along the lines of 10-19, 20-29, 30-39 and so on and since 19 and 29 are the lowest and easiest to reach levels, the most common twinks are either level 19 or level 29. Furthermore, they are invariably ‘DPS’ twinks since a majority of people prefer playing a DPS role to any other in such PVP encounters.

Broliant didn’t enter the BGs until he was well into his late 40s where twinks are generally very rare therefore the experience of being thoroughly beaten by a full-power twink was unknown to him. Equally, Koyaanis only began PVPing at level 70 and Gosling at around level 36/37 or so.

At the 39 BG level, you see far fewer twinks than one imagines you’d see at the two lower brackets, presumably due to the extra effort required to reach the level. What twinks one does see do seem invariably to be DPS twinks as normal though. Let’s pitch the balance at say 99 in every 100 twinks at the 39 level are DPS, taking a rough guess based on past observations.

Gosling has encountered his fair share of these DPS twinks and boy do they hurt if you get caught within the range of their attacks. It’s not hard to understand why non-twink players would find the contest to be imbalanced. However, it’s rare to find more than one or two in any single BG game and thus the many cries of “foul!” screamed from some quarters at the world of twinking surely follows the expectations of a player who is disappointed to learn that all is not fair in life. There have certainly been occasions when I’ve not been thoroughly in the mood to be easily killed by the same player over and over again but such times have normally resulted in my most creative and exceptional playing – adapting simply to survive at times, to overcome at others.

As a dedicated and fully specced healer, Gosling has all the DPS punch of the proverbial asthmatic ant with a couple of heavy bags of shopping, walking up a steep hill. Never one to go toe-to-toe with any other character, his power lies in his ability to remain alive and to keep others alive at the same time. His HKs are earned by healing his team-mates and very occasionally by moonfire-spamming the last 2% of life from that rogue who’s desperately running for cover.

It’s a good game to sharpen the senses of one that spends most of their time in PVE DPS roles and certainly improves the whack-a-mole reflexes immensely. Heal, heal, root, heal, run, shift, shift, run, heal, heal, root, sleep, etc etc. It’s just fun.

So, Gosling remains to this day a level 39 twink healer destined to spend his days fighting the good fight against the Horde in Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch. Certainly he is a more potent healer than a non-twinked level 39 character would be but on reflection, the game-changing ability this twinking provides is nowhere near as pronouced as it would be were Gosling a dps twink.

As stated earlier, Gosling had been intended for our guild’s raid team as a backup healer/tank. Some of the guilt of parking Gosling at 39 was subsequently overcome by the birth of a second druid, Balgardner, who did indeed manage to make the full climb all the way up to the level 80 end-game of the modern era and become a relatively well regarded stand-in healer for the team. Balgardner thus continues to make it possible for Gosling to live the guilt-free life of a permanent twink. In the words of one of his fellow officers, “Huzzah!”

Patch 3.2 is encouraging to Twinks?

So, that’s the history to date of Broliant’s “other life” as a twink and in this other life, he was recently very interested by the annoucement made by Blizzard regarding the forthcoming patch 3.2. In this patch, Blizzard are introducing a feature which is currently described as the “turn off XP gains” feature and essentially describes the premise that any character will be able to access a setting whereby they can stop their character from gaining XP when they otherwise complete actions that would normally result in XP being gained.

This of course will make the life of a twink far easier to control if the feature operates as its early descriptions suggest it will. Furthermore, battlegrounds will for the first time also offer XP gains to the people taking part by the completion of the battleground’s aims. This has not been clearly defined but one might assume that winning the various games would be the primary XP scoring criteria here. Blizzard have gone on record to say that HKs will not score XP since that would simply encourage players to farm HKs instead of completing the game which is not something they wish to promote.

So far, so good. All sounds rosy and wonderful does it not. XP from BGs could well lead to more people entering the BGs as a means of levelling their characters which would make the BGs more populous and therefore reduce queue-times and improve match-ups. Sounds awesome. And then the wheels fall off the cart…

Blizzard have indicated that players queueing for BGs will only be matched against players whose “XP gains” setting matches their own. Thus, if you have disabled the XP gains feature to create a twink, then you’ll only be matched into games with other “XP gains off” twinks. Likewise, if you are levelling along with the “XP gains on” setting, you’ll only be matched against other people with the XP gains flag set to on.

At face value, this simply appears to be a mechanism to prevent players from being ganked repeatedly by over-enthusiastic twinks – and although here at BW we’re not entirely in agreement with that idea, we appreciate its community spirit, misplaced though we feel it is.

What does concern us is the on-going viability of BGs at our preferred level of twinking after such a policy is enacted. As noted previously, it’s rare to see more than one or two twinks in such a BG and therefore one should guess that unless there is a fallback position, level 39 twinks may never be sufficiently numerous to enable a game to take place.

Perhaps at this point, it is worth considering whether twinking is something Blizzard should continue to allow at all or not. The objections are almost always levelled against the DPS twinks whom the non-twink players regard as being too powerful for them to overcome. “Ban them” or “stop twinks” you’ll often hear such opponents to twinking cry.

Looked at rationally though, battlegrounds already permit players of greatly different levels to enter the same game (10-19, 20-29, 30-39 etc) and the ultimate effect of twinking is to improve a character beyond their perceived ‘normal’ ability for their level. In essence, a level 39 twink is probably as potent as a non-twinked character of a few levels higher. Thus, the sum effect of twinking is to extend the ‘virtual’ range of a battleground – think of it as 10-22, 20-32, 30-42 for example.

This might mean then that for the non-twinked players that are just “passing through” they won’t be able to claim the status of being ‘top dog’ in the battlegrounds simply by the quality of the gear they have but if they can play well, make intelligent decisions and have good general knowledge of the game then they can still be a vital and wholly valuable member of their team.

It will be interesting to see how these plans that Blizzard have announced work out finally for those of us that do enjoy participating in PVP via ‘twink’ characters. If the queues are short and the games plentiful, then the outcome will probably be good for all. It will naturally be a shame to be held separately from the non-twinked players and note that I write that as a healer and not a dps. By segregating the battlegrounds into two separate categories, Blizzard might well be ‘protecting’ a group of players that want nothing to do with twinks but they’re also denying players the opportunity to mix freely.

It would be far better to create two queues that players could sign-up to independently and freely. One would be the normal queue and the other would be for ‘XP off’ (aka: twinks) only. Twinks would most likely enter both queues and take whatever came first. Although it seems plausible that twinks would simply choose the easier option and more easily farm HKs, this argument would only be valid for a limited time. There is a finite amount of loot that players can get via Honor points and once this is collected, Honor points and battleground tokens simply accumulate to a maximum level. Honor points would likely not have any real use to a proper ‘twink’ player at that stage.

However, it’s highly unlikely at this stage that Blizzard will do something like this. As they have already demonstrated numerous times, their aim is to homongenise the game such that near equality exists across all classes. The idea of there being a “rock/paper/scissors” relationship between classes seems now to be abhored because it would break arena balancing. Given the choice though, I would prefer a World of Warcraft where there were genuine differences between classes. Let Broliant as a rogue find mages an appealing target but warriors a genuine nightmare. Let warlocks run riot against other casters but sweat feverishly at the thought of a good melee getting in their face. Right now, the insipid differences between classes are hardly worth considering.

Furthermore think back to even earlier times when, as an Alliance rogue, the only time one would encounter a Shaman would be in the battlegrounds and boy could they be trouble to fight. It was probably a reasonable decison for the PVE game going forwards to give Shamans to the Alliance and Paladins to the Horde but that old factional difference sure was a delicious ingredient in PVP and it’s yet to be replaced by anything as memorable.

Perhaps the best observation that can be made about PVP is this one: The more constraints Blizzard place upon PVP, the less compelling it becomes. Tarren-Mill/Southshore battles remain the highlight of many people’s PVP experiences simply because in a single zone, level 30s could rub shoulders with players 30 levels above them and still feel that they were part of the experience. You might not have the ability to solo-kill at that stage but you’d join the pack and as your levels increased and your skill improved, you’d branch off by yourself more and more. You could come and go from the battles as you pleased since this was no falsely walled garden affair and although it was of course having a detrimental effect on the ability of players to complete quests in that zone, the sense of effecting real change in the otherwise static world of the game by siezing an enemy town and locking them out of it for a period of time was genuinely satisfying. Likewise, the effort of retaking your own town ellicited ad-hoc groups and rapidly agreed strategies to be formed. Communication and collaboration were at least as developed there as they are in the modern BGs where PVP is relatively ‘produced’.

PVP is changing soon and in fairly significant ways. It’s going to be hard to predict how these changes will play out over time and hopefully it’s going to be a lot of fun in the discovering.

-B-

Microsoft recently released what they call the “Release Candidate” of their latest desktop operating system, Windows 7, via their website. It’s a free download and can be used until the summer of 2010 completely free of charge. We won’t explain here all the many new features of Windows 7 because there are plenty of reviews already published to great effect on that subject but we will give some thoughts on why it might be a good choice for the WoW player to consider.

Here at ‘BW HQ’ we’ve been using the “Release Candidate” or ‘RC’ on our main machines for about one month now and thus far it has behaved itself impeccably. It’s definitely an improvement over its Windows Vista predecessor although when we say that, it is worth adding the qualification that our experiences with Windows Vista over the past two years have been quite excellent. Despite the many voices that jumped onto the “we hate Vista” train with claims of preference for the earlier Windows XP, we’ve preferred Vista as our desktop OS of choice at all times. We get plenty of exposure to XP in our corporate offices and with our business clients but when it comes to what we rock with on our own kit at home, it’s been Vista every time. If you understood the few basic changes between XP and Vista and could cope with that, it was no problem.

In fact, the only problem we ever truly had with Vista came towards the end of our time with it (we’re confirmed Windows 7 converts now for reasons that will become immediately clear) after we replaced the main workstation in the office with a bigger more powerful machine. As part of the upgrade, we kitted it out with a fancy 30″ screen with a 2560×1600 resolution display and it was here that some problems were encountered. Essentially, during day-to-day operation the machine worked flawlessly however it would quite regularly trip-over when running WoW (the only game we have installed onto the machine bar those that come supplied with Vista) and cause us to have to either restart the game or restart the machine. It didn’t happen often but it happened enough for us to recognise that it only happened during game-play and thus, it was never a welcome occurrance.

Since switching to Windows 7, this problem has simply disappeared. It’s not possible to tell if it’s the new OS, the ATI driver for the graphics card under Windows 7, the fact we’ve gone from running 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 or some other factor that is to thank for the improvement but any improvement shall be considered a good thing, whatever its cause. Unsurprisingly therefore, we’re firmly attached to Windows 7 now and with our experiences from Vista in hand, there are some very useful tips to be passed on to anyone considering trying the new Windows OS.

Installing WoW on Windows 7:

The first important decision to make after installing Windows 7 on your PC and before installing WoW on top of that is where you are going to install WoW. On a traditional Windows XP machine, all standard program installations went into the “C:\Program Files\” directory which thus meant that WoW generally ended up in “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\” if you simply followed normal convention. There was no problem with this under Windows XP but come Windows Vista, this way of doing things could have a subtle but significant effect.

Windows Vista introduced some new and more stringent security settings and one of these was the increased protection of what it termed ‘Important System Folders’ and of course, the “C:\Program Files\” directory was one of these. Thus, if you first installed WoW into the normal “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\” location and then attempted to make changes to WoW folders that used to be stored inside there such as your “Interface\Addons” folder or your “Screenshots” or “WTF” folders you’d find they no were longer located inside there. Instead, to preserve the protection for the ‘important system folders’, Vista had moved the folders you might need to change to a location inside your personal profile, typically under…

C:\Users\<name>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\World of Warcraft\

…where <name> is your Windows Vista username. Handy huh? And easy to find… we think not!

Thus, our personal solution to this ‘problem’ was to install WoW to a different location where this separation would not occur so that we could more easily keep all of WoW’s data in one place. On our machines, we would create a single directory called…

C:\Program Files Public\

…into which we installed WoW. This ensured that all WoW’s folders stayed in the same place and kept things tidily organised. Remember that a good Windows Nerd seeks to minimise the number of directories directly under “C:\” so things don’t get cluttered.

Moving to Windows 7, we have exactly the same matter to address so we were all ready to create our “Program Files Public” folder under “C:\” when we noticed something new to consider. We’d chosen the 64-bit version of Windows 7 given that we have a modern PC and almost all the modern Intel chips in desktop PCs these days are essentially 64-bit chips. They’ll still run quite happily if you only install the 32-bit version of Windows but there are limitations on things like how much memory you can access with a 32-bit operating system thus we’d elected to go 64-bit this time around.

In the same way that your PC with a 64-bit chip can run both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, so too can your 64-bit Windows run both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows applications, no doubt to ensure compatibility for business users and the like. What this generally means though is that if you install a 64-bit application on 64-bit Windows (XP/Vista or 7) then it will default to the normal “C:\Program Files\” location. However, if you install an older 32-bit application on 64-bit Windows, it will instead default to the alternate “C:\Program Files (x86)\” location in order to help it (and us!) identify the 32-bit apps from the 64-bit ones.

Thus, with Windows 7 we created our new directory as…

C:\Program Files Public (x86)\

…before installing WoW since we knew, after doing a bit of research via Google, that WoW’s client is only available in a 32-bit version. We then installed WoW to this location giving us an install-location of…

C:\Program Files Public (x86)\World of Warcraft\

…and once again were forever more blessed with being able to find all our ‘Interface\Addons’, ‘Screenshots’ and ‘WTF’ files under the same basic location. Everyday geeks have a word for such things as this… bliss!

Thus, if you choose a 32-bit version of Windows 7 then we’d recommend installing WoW into the normal ‘Public’ folder whilst under a 64-bit version of Windows 7 we’d recommend installing WoW into the ‘Public (x86)’ folder instead. Either way, it’ll make your life simpler in the long run.

Running WoW on Windows 7:

In general, the experience of running WoW on Windows 7 should not differ from the experience you’d have received when running it on Windows XP or Vista before it. Former users of Windows XP will probably find the performance of WoW under Windows 7 to be about the same whilst former Vista users should see a minor performance improvement due to the refinements that have been made to the core Windows systems between Vista and 7.

We’ve noticed a few other areas where WoW seems to perform better under Windows 7 than under Vista although again, it’s not clear for us whether the performance improvements are coming from being under the new version of Windows or from our step-up to a 64-bit version of the OS from the former 32-bit version we used before. However, running Fraps alongside WoW under Windows 7 is notably smoother than it was under Vista previously. Fraps, for those that don’t know, is a small utility program that allows you to record the game-graphics as you play for the purposes of making game-related movies afterwards.

We’re running WoW in a 1920×1080 window to mirror the default resolution of modern ‘High Definition’ or ‘HD’ television sets and Fraps will comfortably grab the game graphics at 30 or 60 FPS as we prefer without causing the game to become in any way laggy, choppy or notably affected. At approximately just under 4GB per minute of footage captured in the raw ‘avi’ format that Fraps saves, handling the large files produced is a problem/joy of its own when we later attempt to stitch our movies together. However, this should clearly bode well for those wanting to capture their own gameplay via Fraps-like tools. Again, we’re guessing, whatever performance you managed under XP will likely be the level you’ll get with Windows 7 and Vista users should find performance slightly better than before.

In Conclusion:

Windows 7 is a truly excellent continuation of the Windows desktop operating system line. It has proven itself to be both rock-solid stable and a pleasure to use over the past month and furthermore, WoW runs very nicely on Windows 7 offering perhaps the most enjoyable WoW experience due to the combination of all the modern Windows finery with no notable performance penalties over the more basic XP versions of Windows.

We’d certainly recommend all Vista users to strongly consider it a good option to explore since it is basically “more of the same but just plain better.” To XP users we’d also recommend it highly however we’ll happily pull our punches with the recommendation here because we know many XP users have tried and disliked Vista in the past and really don’t want to move forwards beyond XP. That’s cool – WoW certainly works just as well on XP as it does on Windows 7 and if you’re not itching to try the newest version of Windows then why make needless ‘upgrade’ work for yourselves. However, we will say that one day you’ll probably be in a position of having to make the step forwards to a new version of Windows and if that version happens to be Windows 7, we think you’ll be really quite okay.

As for us here at the BW-HQ, we’re all for Windows 7 now and won’t be going back to Vista or XP where we have the choice. Windows 7 and WoW is a very satisfying combination.

-B-

In a previous edition of Cheapshots we defined a focus macro for using our Tricks of the Trade (TotT) ability on a friendly target that we’ve set our focus target upon. This macro works well and does exactly what it says on the tin (to use a somewhat cliched expression) but there are occasions when our focus target is not set to the character that we wish to use TotT on. Today’s improvements to our TotT macro should help to address that problem.

The original TotT focus-macro:
/cast [target=focus,exists] Tricks of the Trade
/ra Broliant cast Tricks of the Trade on %f.

It only takes a few seconds if we’re quick to target another character, set them to be our focus target and then switch back to our previous target but it’s still time we have to stop doing DPS and therefore that’s time we would be glad not to waste.

Our macro can be improved fairly simply to become a little bit smarter about the way it works and that extra “smartness” might just help us to save a few precious seconds of on-target DPS time. Here’s how the improved TotT macro looks:

The new and improved TotT macro:
/cast [help] [target=focus, help] [target=targettarget, help] Tricks of the Trade

As you can see, this is slightly more than a straight-forward focus-macro. Let’s explain what it’s trying to do:

• If your current target is friendly, use TotT on your current target.
• Else, if your focus target is friendly, use TotT on your focus target.
• Else, cast TotT on the target of your current target if friendly.

Note: The last condition here essentially causes TotT to be cast on your tank typically in a group situation or on yourself in solo/rogue-tanking situations – not that you get any benefit when you’re the target sadly.

Hopefully, the end result of this improved TotT macro is the ability to use TotT in more situations without having to spend DPS time setting a suitable target on which to cast TotT.

You’ll also notice we’ve removed the “/ra Broliant cast Tricks…” line from the macro. It’s not really that important to be spamming raid chat with such a notice and we’ve not quite learned the required macro-mojo yet to know how to select the name of the character on which our macro ultimately casts TotT.

We’ll report back again here if we find out how to announce the correct name but for now, perhaps it will suffice simply to have the improved functionality this macro-update provides.

-B-

When the game first launched to an eager public the only “official” way to find other players to group with was to make use of the built-in “LookingForGroup” chat channel, otherwise known as the ‘LFG’ channel. If you had this channel switched on in your chat-window then you’d normally see a fairly constant stream of terse messages of the form “LFG – SM Cath – Lvl 30 Lock” or “LF2M – UBRS – Tank,DPS”.

These messages were simply an efficient short-hand language that described what the player was looking for. In the above examples the respective translations would be:

“Looking For (a) Group (to join), (that is going to the) Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, (I am a ) Level 30 Warlock”

…and…

“(We are) looking for 2 more (players to join a party going to) UBRS, (we need a) Tank (and a) DPS”

As you can see, it’s fairly simple to understand although there is no readily available help text to guide new players on what all the various abbreviations are. However, a new player could simply type their requests more fully until they learned the short-hand versions and the system still worked.

There was one single major drawback to the ‘LFG’ channel however and it was one that ultimately caused its demise, as far as the original form of its existence as described here was concerned. It was the only truly global chat channel available in the game. This was irresistable to those players that liked to settle themselves in a capital city somewhere and advertise their various wares and services, reaching as wide an audience as they could for the least amount of effort.

Thus, the ‘LFG’ channel became a secondary ‘trade’ channel and although it was generally considered to be “bad form” to post adverts for goods and services in the LFG channel, there was always a sufficient number of people playing the game to ensure that there were always one or two people online for whom posting an ‘LFG’ advert was perfectly acceptable behavior.

On top of that, there were also those players that found much amusement in spamming messages into the LFG channel revealing the latest Chuck Norris joke they’d just heard or abusing somebody they’d encountered in-game who’d earned their ire. The joys of a global spam-heavy LFG channel were legion and significant numbers of players disabled the channel in their chat windows as a result.

The debate on how to fix the problem with the LFG channel was argued endlessly on WoW’s official forums and probably every other major discussion site concerned with the game’s community. Nobody really found the basic function of the channel to be the fault, it was simply that the level of spam in the channel was drowning out the genuine LFG messages that did get posted.

And then one day an addon called “Group Finder by Moncai” was born. And lo did the world rejoice, for they saw that this addon was a good thing, and they sang and they danced and they smiled. What was this amazing addon? Let’s take a look…

“Group Finder by Moncai” was quite a simple addon at face value but it’s simple facade betrayed a fairly decent level of hidden sophistication behind the scenes. Offering a single window as shown in the screenshot below, it provided a list view of categories for which people were posting genuine messages in the LFG channel.

The vast majority of these ‘categories’ were simply the names of the game’s various instances from Deadmines through to UBRS, Scholomance, Stratholme and occasionally even the raid instances of the time; Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. Next to each category appeared a list of any players that had recently been seen posting ‘LFG’ or ‘LFM’ messages in the LFG channel. Clicking on any of the names showed a description of the message the player had posted in the lower frame of the window.

In essence, all this addon was doing was monitoring the LFG channel and parsing all the posts made in it. If a message was spam it was discarded and if it was a proper ‘LFG’ message then the addon attempted to understand what the player was looking for and then categorise the message appropriately.

Since the addon had built-in ‘knowledge’ about all the game’s existing instances, this meant that most messages were categorised as one might expect. Thus, as you can see in the screenshot, a list would form that would allow you to quickly see what instances/zones/quests were in need of more people and if anything took your fancy, you could delve deeper with a simple click of the mouse.

The joy of all this was that you could now switch off the LookingForGroup channel in your chat window thus cleansing the window of the large amount of now unneccesary text and whenever you were curious about what was going on you could sneak a peek at the addon’s window and if anything looked appealing, a quick whisper to the player or players involved and you would be off and running towards something fun.

And that in a nutshell was the main reason why the original LFG system was essentially better than the version of it that exists today and why this addon made it work nearly as well as it possibly could. The ubiquitous status of the LFG channel meant that is was always possible to ‘surf’ the channel, watching the calls for help going by and when inspiration struck, it was a moment’s effort to jump in.

The other reason that this addon worked as well as it did was that it simply extended the usefulness of the LFG channel. It did not matter to you when using the addon if you were the only person on the server with the addon – it was still the same basic LFG chat channel that you were interacting with. Only now, you had a clear view of what people were looking for and saw none of the spam that made having the channel switched on annoying.

A mere couple of months after this addon reached the height of its functionality, Blizzard finally changed the LFG system to what it currently is today. There have been a few revisions of the system since the overhaul but what you see today is roughly what you saw on the first day following the overhaul. Now, if you want to find help in the game, you open the new ‘LFG’ window (press “I” in-game typically) and then click buttons and tick boxes to indicate your preferences about what you are looking for.

All this sounds like a good idea and in theory it is a good idea. After all, if there was nothing wrong with the original system then addons would have not been able to offer improvements to the degree that they did. However, in implementing their solution, Blizzard chose to incorporate a number of restrictions that removed functionality from the LFG system, thereby making it harder to find help. In short order…

• The LFG chat channel is disabled by default for everyone.
• Access to the LFG channel is only possible by using the GUI tool.
• The LFG GUI tool is limited by “level appropriate” restrictions.

The consequence of these changes meant that it was no longer possible to simply “surf” the channel, watching casually what activities people were looking for assistance with whilst getting on with other pursuits in-game. Similarly, it was also no longer possible by default to choose to run a dungeon instance that was deemed lower than your level because the GUI tool only offered options “appropriate” to your level. As a level 60 player, this meant Dire Maul was fine but Deadmines was not. And that’s when LFG stopped working.

Today, you can seek help via the GUI tool and maybe if you’re playing during a fairly busy period on a well populated server then you might just get lucky and find enough people to do whatever it is that you want to do. Strangely though, once you have entered some options via the GUI tool, Blizzard then switches the LFG chat channel back on. The first question one might ask is “why?” because if the tool was doing the job it was meant to do, the channel would not be necessary.

Regardless, if your level-60 self wanted to run a lower-level instance or gain help with a particular quest in Tanaris, you would first have to open the GUI tool and select any option available simply to gain access to the LFG chat channel into which you could begin typing your requests once more. Except now, the number of people able to see your request had dropped exponentially – being now limited to only those people who were already looking for help with something else for which they’d already made a selection from level-appropriate options provided by the tool. And since your LFG chat request was not supported by the GUI tool, only those actively watching the LFG chat channel would be viewing. From a pre-tool audience of “almost everybody” your potential audience was now “almost nobody.”

And that, to cut a long story short, is the state of affairs that remains with respect to the current in-game LFG system today. It barely works and then, only for the most mainstream and common types of LFG needs. It’s clunky, unsophisticated and is very limited in the options it presents. It’s a bad piece of design and a bad piece of work.

It seems somewhat rare to say that about a feature of the game. Blizzard’s default user-interface for the game is relatively simplistic and many people, myself included, find it inadequate for playing the game at the level-cap end of the spectrum where raiding or ratings-based PVP are the order of the average day.

However, that’s exactly where Blizzard made a perfectly smart decision in leaving the game open to the development of addons. I can build the user-interface to my own preferences and needs via addons and that’s great. There’s a basic interface provided for free for the new player and the option to go “fully customised” via addons once we’ve learned how to play the game.

The LFG system though precludes an addon from being able to remedy the poor design of the default Blizzard GUI tool. Thus casual surfing of “LFG requests” is not really possible and the token effort one can make to gain access to the LFG chat channel by lying to the GUI tool simply compounds the issue further.

There does not appear to be any indication from Blizzard that they feel the LFG system they now have is not working adequately and although they have tweaked the GUI tool a couple of times, the basic limitations described above are still the cause of its lack of usability. Until Blizzard undoes these limitations, the LFG system they provide will continue to provide poor service to the player community seeking other players for whatever part of the game they want to play.

In recognition of this, today’s “Remember When…” is therefore dedicated to the memory of the brief period of time when LFG really worked. And for that happy memory, we send a grateful nod and a respectful salute to Moncai, the developer of the addon that Blizzard should have used as the inspiration for their GUI tool!

-B-