World of Warcraft

An Interview With WoW's Lead Designers

Kody — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:04:58 GMT

During our visit to Blizzard's HQ in Irvine, CA, we had a chance to sit down with both Jeffrey "Tigole" Kaplan and Tom "Kalgan" Chilton. This wasn't a one-on-one interview, though, so credit needs to be given where it's due. Also in on the interview was Ten Ton Hammer and MMOGAMER. We all took turns grilling both Tigole and Kalgan, to see if we could get any juicy info out of them on the expansion, and to hopefully learn more information gleaned from the demonstration. This is an extremely long, but very informative interview, so buckle up and enjoy the ride.

TTH: I thought it was a pretty interesting decision that you guys decided to go with the dual raiding system thing. How did you decide to go and do that, was it just a lot of community response to we need 10 man and 25 man raids going at the same time or was it just what you saw from the numbers?

JK: No, we wouldn't do anything we saw from the numbers. I think when you look at statistics you can bend them any direction you want, to make a case for or against anything. I think it was really an evolution of a lot of things. You touched on one of the things which was community reaction, another thing was that we were really just trying out the Heroic system with Burning Crusade and getting a feel for it and what would be successful and what wouldn't be.

At the same time with Karazhan, it [Karazhan] in and of itself was a bit of an experiment to treat a 10-person zone like a full-blown epic raiding zone and see how that could come off. It came off pretty well and was very popular, and then Zul'Aman was an evolution of that. "Ok we did this kind of good entry-level 10-person raid." People treated it as raiding, came up with strats for fights, got stuck on bosses for a week or two, and I think Zul'Aman really showed we could do pretty elite raiding at that point and pretty hardcore and epic fights. Fighting a major storyline character like Zul'jin and defeating him with 10 people, that it came off ok.

And then on the flipside of the coin there was a lot of discontent from the 25-person raiding crowd about having to go through Karazhan, having to kill Nightbane. "Hey we're a 25-person raiding guild, that's what we want to do, why are you forcing us to do this other content?" The goal with the 10 and 25 thing is not that we want to have sort of easy mode and that's 10, and then hard mode and that's 25. We really do just want to have two separate, clear progressions. And even within those we want to have easy 10 and 25 raids, and then medium 10 and 25, and hard 10 and 25; we want to have progression through those.

So it seemed like an overall good decision, it also seemed like a way that we could get a lot more people to experience the content, and not just feel like "Why are you making this stuff? It doesn't make any sense to us. Who are these people who go in there; I never see them." So it gives us a way to sort of address a lot of issues at once.

Curse: Touching on that, how drastic are the encounters going to change between 10 and 25 man, because like Naxxramas Four Horsemen may not really be viable in a 10 man, meanwhile 25 it may be more [viable].

JK: Yeah um, the Four Horsemen's actually just a gnome on a puppy dog now [laughing]. It's just Mr. Bigglesworth and we put him in that room. No we definitely recognize that as a challenge to us as a development team; something we need to overcome. What we've been doing is analyzing all the fights in a place like Naxxramas, and trying to come up with what was the heart of what made Naxxramas cool, or the Four Horsemen cool. Was it the fact that you needed lots of tanks? Is that what made the fight cool? Or was it the fact that it took a high level of coordination, the stacking buffs, the movement, and really trying to find the essence of each encounter.

And we'll have to do different things between 10 and 25. Already the Four Horsemen doesn't work in 25-person raiding; we're gonna have to make some changes to the encounter. But what we don't want to do is just come up with the gnome on the puppy dog, or like we don't want to just gut the encounter and start over. We want to hit whatever that core was of the initial 40-person Naxxramas, and then come up with a version that doesn't force weird class composition in the 10 and 25.

One other note about Naxx that I've been trying to communicate to people too is, it's gonna feel very different anyway, even if we hadn't done the 10 and 25 thing because of where we're placing it in the raiding progression. It really is that entry-level raid, so that means it has to be tuned to be more at the bottom of the curve, rather than at the top of the curve where it was before. So Naxx will be pretty accessible in both the 10 and the 25 man versions. And then later on as we get deep into Ulduar and some of the deeper raid dungeons after that, that's when it'll start to get crazy again.

MMOGAMER: So, are 40 man raids gone for good? 25 seems a little low for, say... Arthas.

JK: That's a great question. I don't want to say 40 man raids are gone for good, because if we ever felt like the quality of the gaming experience would be better if we did a 40-person raid, we would do it. I don't know what the right number conceptually is that would defeat Arthas. I could make the same argument for Illidan or Zul'jin. Why are these powerful guys dying to so few? What I hope, and I'm sure the community will correct me if I'm wrong, because they are excellent at doing that. But what I hope is that, in the essence of those encounters, we've captured something that was epic. And for those that were present... sure you might hear "Yeah Illidan died to 25 people and that sounds weird or wrong," but for anybody whose been there and killed Illidan... man was that an epic moment, and that's what we're hoping to deliver on. I want anybody who fights Arthas, whether it's with 10 or 25 or that one guy who figures out how to solo him... god forbid, to say "Man, that was the most epic fight that I've ever been a part of."

TTH: How are you guys handling Death Knight in PvP? It seems like... I wouldn't say an overpowered class, but you're introducing a whole new system with the runes and that sort of thing. How do you guys blend the Death Knight into the current classes as far as PvP goes?

JK: That's a really good question. I was thinking of that when we were watching Tom do the demo, and I'm like "Man this is gonna freak everyone out" when he showed the pull ability, or the chains of ice, or the Death and Decay with the fear going off. I mean, you can see some of the arena implications behind that, but even if we hadn't introduced the Death Knight with Wrath of the Lich King... we have the talent panes disabled on the machines in there, if we were to show you the talent panes right now for the remaining classes, and the new abilities that they're getting... sort of the class balance as you know it today is going to change pretty drastically without the introduction of the new class.

Because we're adding 10 new talent points, new tiers across all three trees for every class, we're adding those new core abilities, and we're also retuning some of the old abilities. Some of those you can probably notice in there, like take a look at Warrior Rend or Thunderclap. There are ones in there that are like old abilities for classes where they didn't use them or felt they were ineffective. We're going to have to rebalance PvP in this expansion anyway, so if anything it's the perfect time to introduce the Death Knight, and then make sure it just works within that balance.

Curse: Resilience was introduced in The Burning Crusade. Can PvP players expect anything new with this expansion?

JK: We haven't finished completely itemizing PvP. Resilience is here to stay, we like the statistic. I don't think we'll be adding anything else to Resilience at this point, it's a pretty powerful statistic, and I don't know if we'll be adding any additional PvP-specific things. Itemization is still up in the air in terms of what exact stats will be PvP desired and PvE, but Resilience is a very clear PvP stat at this point and we're going to continue on that trend.

MMOGAMER: Staying on the topic of PvP, you're adding your first open world zone... some would say Hillsbrad is the first open world zone, but on that subject are the open world PvP zones going to be exclusive to expansion content, or are you thinking about going back and adding them to some of the unused areas in the old world?

JK: Well, that's a great question. I think before we commit to adding open world PvP to the old world, we really want to see how Wintergrasp plays out. We have a really good idea how we want it to play out, and what mechanics we want to work there, and what we don't want it to degenerate into. So we have some pretty good ideas behind that, but before seeing it play out in action we don't want to immediately go back to the old world and affect some of those areas. I hope though that we've proven, like in the patch where we addressed Dustwallow Marsh, that it's on our agenda to hit lots of old world areas whether it's PvP revamps or PvE revamps, and just taking a hard look at the old world and keeping it viable, keeping it cool. It's one of our favorite areas; we put so much time into building it so it's sad when people move on from it.

I'm really excited about Stratholme for that reason actually. The Caverns of Time Stratholme event, I think it's great not just for the War 3 players, since it's based on the culling mission, but just for all the hardcore WoW guys who spent a lot of time at 60, doing a lot of Stratholme runs, it's gonna be cool to see the city pristine as it was.

TTH: How are you handling item inflation and that sort of thing in the upcoming expansion? Because I know with each expansion you have to increase the power level to make players want to get it, but is there a certain point where it becomes ridiculous when you get to higher levels and the shoulder pads can't get any bigger, and the swords can't get any wider?

JK: Our artists have assured us that we haven't even seen the beginning of how big shoulder pads can get. [laughing] We would say that to them, we were like looking at something... "Man that's awesome, but that's the shoulder pads you get when you get off the boat," ... "Artist: Dude don't worry about it, we can go bigger than that." In terms of item statistics, we planned out World of Warcraft with inflation in mind, knowing we were gonna have to inflate the item curve and the power curve of players as the game went on. What we didn't do is just plan 1-60, we planned it out very far. It's always shocking to players, and they sometimes look at it as a mistake in the game where they say "What's going on? The items are inflating!" It's next to impossible to come up with items that are exactly equal in power but for whatever reason you'd want item X rather than Y. So we don't look at the item inflation as a shocking surprise that happens, it's no different from us giving 10 new levels to the character.

We planned for it, we're hoping we can do a better job of smoothing out some of the bumps. Examples are making sure that the green items as you're questing up or the random world green items aren't over-optimized or split too many ways, making sure that the dungeon blues are better than the quest blues so that when you go into a dungeon that has more risk involved to it you feel rewarded better for it, making sure that Heroic dungeons exist on their complete separate tier. We're also obviously going to make 25-person raids far more rewarding than the 10-person raids to keep that sort of prestige to that, and then in the PvP spectrum... season 4 is a good example where really the top gear all has rating requirements on it and you really need to earn that prestigious gear. There will be lesser gear that you can earn out of that system that won't have rating requirements, but it won't be at the insane power level as the current arena gear.

And the same goes for the Honor gear; will be brought much more in-line with the other tiers of content of things that you'll be experiencing. So there won't be these crazy jumps of, you know... "Should I do Black Temple or should I hang out in Alterac Valley and get a pair of boots?"

Curse: Isle of Quel'Danas was honestly probably the best introduction to the game patch-wise; the world event, Magisters' Terrace, Sunwell Plateau, all of that... can players expect events similar to that in Wrath of the Lich King?

JK: I hope so. We do want to do an event to kick off Wrath of the Lich King; it will be different than Isle of Quel'Danas, but I think why Isle of Quel'Danas feels really good to players right now, is we've sort of embraced the philosophy... we've always thought along these lines but we're really trying to prove it through what we deliver in patches, that there isn't a right or wrong way to play WoW. It's not that WoW is about the hardcore 25-person raiders, or WoW is about the guys who like to do dungeons, or WoW is about the guys who like to solo and do quests. All of those players exist in WoW, and none of them are right or wrong, and it's our job to make sure that they're all getting content, and that they feel their way of playing is right and supported. I really hope that that's what Isle of Quel'Danas represents. It really just proves that there's kind of something for everyone out there, and that philosophy is going to translate directly into Lich King with how we're itemizing, and how we do content.

And in terms of the event, we also want to do a "kick off Northrend" event too, and then more events where areas build up... I think that's cool; players feel like they're contributing. We always wrestle with the dynamic event idea; players in MMOs always go "I want to go into the village and burn it down, and from that day forward the village is always burnt down," and like the guy who comes a week later "Dude, where's the village?" ... "Oh it was epic, we burned it down!" ... "Well I wasn't there for it!" But an event like this, you feel like everybody, even if you miss the event, you gain from it having happened rather than feel like something was taken away from you.

MMOGAMER: Probably the number one complaint when speaking to the average WoW player who logs on an hour every night, maybe raid with their guild on the weekend, is once you get 70 their daily existence in the game consists of: farming primals, farming reputation, or doing daily quests... and they seem to feel that's slightly monotonous. Do you personally feel that that's a problem in the game, and if you do, do you have any plans to address it in Northrend?

JK: Yeah, I do think that it's a problem, and it's a very true statement like you said. What I really hope is that getting level 80 is not the end, but just the milestone... a very momentous milestone. I think some of the issues with The Burning Crusade is that the barrier to entry to some of the endgame content was very high, and it made it hard for players who were doing this nice leveling segue through the game. Once they hit the end of the line, they didn't feel like they could make a nice smooth progression through anything... everything felt like a brick wall to them. I want to try to smooth out that progression that takes place when players hit the endgame. Even in the daily quest example, which I think is a great example for players who don't want to go PvP, or they don't want to do 5, 10, or 25-person content, they just want to play by themselves and do quests.

I think we can do a better job with the daily quests. The daily quests that I've really enjoyed lately are things like the fishing daily, the cooking, the battleground, the dungeon dailies because they have randomization in it, so you don't feel like you're in a set pattern of activity every time you log in. I would rather players do daily quests for money than farm primals, which is a very repetitive sort of behavior. So I think we can do things to smooth out what feels like a grind, and make it not the same every day that you log in. That's when it becomes an issue, is when you log in and do the same activity every time, because certainly when you're leveling up that's not your experience.

At about this point, Tom "Kalgan" Chilton entered the room as well.

TTH: My next question has to do with customization -- character customization -- not at the creating a character level, but like with socketing and gem socketing, I think you guys really created something that was very interesting for players, that allowed them more customization for their character after the initial creation process. Are you looking to introduce some more types of those elements in Wrath of the Lich King? I don't know if you're just gonna introduce more gems, or more socketed items, or something completely different... are you planning to do anything like that?

JK: The biggest thing in that regard will be Inscriptions, the new profession which is gonna allow you to modify your spells. That will give players a lot of customization. There are other aspects too, just the new talent trees... being able to spend those points again. Then there are some sort of fluff things like the barber shop, being able to change your hair, change the way your character looks. Do you have any other parts? [directed at Tom Chilton]

TC: Potentially like... Legacy Items; we haven't really talked about those in the past. We are planning to do certain types of items that essentially bind to your account, so they're deliberately created as twink items. So you might be able to find one of these items when you're doing an endgame instance, or a raid, or something like that... and you might get an item that binds to your account and can send that off to your other characters, but it does have to stay within your account. So you can deliberately overpower a character to help level up or whatever.

TTH: Does it go server to server, or is it just on that one single server?

TC: Yeah on that server. You have to still be able to physically give it to that character, or mail it to them, or whatever.

Curse: New battlegrounds... are there going to be any introduced?

TC: Yep, there will be a new battleground. Set up as sort of an attack-defend scenario; features siege vehicles, and destructible building components.

JK: Both sides have to attack and defend.

MMOGAMER: This is a morbid curiosity question. One of the executives at THQ... I think it was last month, said he believed WoW had peaked and from here it was all downhill. I'm sure that was somewhat wishful thinking on his part, but what do you think about that statement?

TC: I think it's inaccurate.

Nethaera: I don't think anybody actually knows where the peak is... you know? We won't know until we get there.

TTH: I have a question since you're here Tom, about the Death Knight. With the Death Knight's DPS and tanking ability, how will Warriors and Paladins continue to have a presence in groups and raids, since there are going to be so many Death Knights when the expansion comes out. There's gonna be like 8 million of them running around.

TC: 8 million level 55 Death Knights; there won't be 8 million level 80 Death Knights. Well, I think in a lot of ways you can actually make the same comparison to Warriors also, as a hybrid DPS/Tanking class, but that doesn't mean necessarily the Paladin has no role in tanking. I think it's in terms of the way we set up their tanking niches. We're kind of designing the Paladin tank to be the best AE tank, and we're designing the Warrior to be the best sheer mitigation tank, and we're designing the Death Knight to be the anti-spellcaster tank. At the same time we want those lines to be blurred enough to where in a 5 man run you won't notice a difference, or all of them should be viable for a Heroic run for example. But at the cutting edge of the competitive endgame, when you kind of cross into that spellcasting boss, you'll probably want the Death Knight to tank it, for example.

TTH: Sorry to follow up, but why'd you decide to make another tank class?

TC: Well, we felt like that's where the biggest need was, as far as the whole looking for group activity. We felt like the Death Knight both fits the kit of the Northrend expansion, and also fills the biggest need. Seems like most often people are looking for a tank, and then possibly a healer after that.

Curse: Going back to Daily Quests really quick, you said that you want to introduce a lot more for the expansion and have them there at launch. Is this for leveling as well as max-level, for max-level, or?

JK: We've actually experimented in the build... I don't know if you guys got to any of them, but we're trying it out and having some Daily Quests in the level-up experience, which is something we have never had before. We want to make sure it plays out as a cool bonus if you happen to be in the area, but not as a driving force to keep you in the area. So we're gonna keep a real close eye on that in the Alpha and the Beta to make sure that you're not hovering around one area just because there are dailies there. But we are gonna try new things with the dailies.

At this point, Jeffrey Kaplan departed, as his schedule saw many more interviews throughout the day. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Jeffrey!

MMOGAMER: I remember elite classes or something that were mentioned back in beta, and then on the upcoming features page since that was launched. Is it going to take 4 more years to see the next one?

TC: It could, I don't know. We'll have to see how the Death Knight goes in terms of how well does it slot in with the overall kind of scheme of the classes. Really what's taken so long is that one of our core values is we have distinct character classes, and I think on some level the original idea of Hero Classes and have all this kind of forking Hero stuff that would go on, like each class could go on to become one of multiple Hero classes was... that was kind of what our imagination was before we even shipped the game, but the realities of... ok if we want the game to ship, we have maintain the integrity of the game and make sure we don't screw it up over night by tripling the number of character classes in the game all of the sudden, or even adding two or three of them at a time. So really looking, now that we've had a couple years to look at how character classes play out, we don't feel comfortable adding several character classes to the game at once.

So with the Death Knight there's a very specific role we want it to fill, and we feel like it fits the kit of the expansion very well so we're doing that, and kind of watch and see how it plays out. If it doesn't cause huge problems for us, then in the future if it feels like, hey there's a need for some other kind of hero class to fill this particular role, or we have this really cool idea for this Hero class, and we do, there are several different hero classes that we have different ideas for, then you know... the time might be right again to introduce another one. But how long that might be exactly, I don't know.

TTH: Can you tell us a little bit more about the PvP vehicle system, or the vehicle system in general? I saw a little bit of it from playing in there, and it's pretty neat, but how is that going to work in PvP and how's that going to work just in the general world, and that sort of thing?

TC: Right, right. So, the vehicle system we're in the process of integrating physics into it. We'll have a variety of different vehicles and they have different kind of handling characteristics. Some of them are one-man, fast-moving Forsaken Catapult kind of thing, or the lumbering Demolisher that packs more of a punch but doesn't move as quickly or turn as quickly. We have different dynamics going on like that, we have flying vehicles, kind of like as flying machine that's like fast... kind of like a bomber where one person drops bombs and the other guy is flying it around. What we do is kind of integrate them into Lake Wintergrasp and the new battleground in a way where, what we'd like to achieve is that everybody feels like they have a chance to use vehicles, but not everybody is in a vehicle all the time. So we want it to be pretty fast-paced, we want players to be in a vehicle and blow each other up, be out of a vehicle and fight normally, go back to using a vehicle, etc.

So we want players to mix it up quite a bit; we're hoping to keep the action pretty fast-paced, trying to keep it pretty simple to get a vehicle, and pretty accessible. Because it can also equalize the playing field between if a player doesn't have very good PvP gear, once he's in a vehicle his class and his gear doesn't matter anymore. So it gives him a shot to have a lot of fun and participate on a meaningful level without having all that.

Curse: Ok so Death Grip being able to pull mobs and players to you. You also mentioned that knockback effects can affect mobs in the expansion. Is that kind of hinting that other classes may be able to do it too?

TC: Indeed, indeed. It's quite likely that somewhere for a couple different classes we'll probably make use of the knockback mechanic. So, yeah... you can probably expect that.

MMOGAMER: With Naxxramas moving into Northrend, do you guys have any plans to makeover any of the older pre-expansion dungeons, and move them up to level 80? I wouldn't mind doing Blackwing Lair again.

TC: Right, right... exactly. Heroic version of them, etc. We do still have ideas for doing that, but it just comes up to when the time is right. We've definitely thought of it as the way to add endgame 5-person content in subsequent content patches. The idea is definitely possible, but we don't have any specific, kind of concrete, yes this is when this patch will happen.

TTH: In this expansion you seemed to place a lot of emphasis on your environments, like you know making them different elevations, making them slopy, putting lots of different environments in a small space. Was that, I mean it was obviously a conscious thing, why'd you decide to go down that route instead of having like an expansive zone?

TC: Well, it all comes back to our original kind of WoW level design philosophy as far as varying the environments and keeping things interesting for players.

TTH: This even seems more extreme than The Burning Crusade was.

TC: Yeah, yeah... we actually are trying to push it more. We feel like the landscape has to feel cohesive; you should be able to look around and not feel like it was just a kid with a paintbrush. But at the same time, within that, we really want to vary the environments as much as we can get away with, because otherwise the environments will feel oppressive, monotonous, and it just starts to get boring to see the same things over and over. And it gives the world a better feeling of being alive and dense... a lot of games out there, they have kind of big open landscapes, it always kind of felt like there wasn't anything going on in the world. So we feel like it's important to make sure that every little nook and cranny where possible feels like something kind of carefully detailed.

Curse: With all the changes you're introducing -- 10-person instances for every raid instance -- can we expect a similar shift for the Arena and Honor systems, where the Honor system is basically the equivalent of 10-person, and Arena is 25?

TC: Certainly the itemization is going through some changes to reflect that. The way we have it set up is, the highest end of the Arena gear and some of the Honor gear that has Arena requirements on it will actually be equivalent to 25-man raid instances. So when Season 1 starts for level 80 Arenas, the best stuff that has really high rating requirements, kind of like what you're seeing for the Season 4 rating requirements, will mirror the 25-man Naxxramas quality. Then we'll have a middle tier that's below that, that has lower rating requirements and is much cheaper, but it parallels the 10-person raiding quality. And then we're also going have a tier below that of PvP gear, that has no requirements at all, and it parallels the Heroic dungeon quality gear. So we do plan to start out with multiple tiers right out of the gate, and we're going to make sure that the best stuff also feels, from PvP, kind of equivalently difficult to get as the best stuff from PvE. So we're trying to equalize the balance a bit better.

MMOGAMER: When the Reputation system for PvP Battlegrounds was first implemented, I remember everybody in my guild being very excited to go out and get this reputation, yadda, yadda, yadda... it's gonna be great. Within one or two weeks it devolved into a 'Korean leveling grind' where they weren't even concerned about the PvP anymore, they just wanted to get in and farm the team. I'll be honest, I haven't played WoW in about a year, but the people I've spoken to seem to maintain that that is still the case.

TC: Well, certainly not with Reputation. The Reputations for Battlegrounds don't really do almost anything anymore... they just get you a title. But you can make the argument that it's that way for Honor now, where players will try to do Battlegrounds very repetitively to try to maximize their honor-per-hour. We've done a few things over the last year to try to mix that up, for one the introduction of the Battleground Daily Quests, so that it can be very beneficial to go in there and do your one Battleground per-day because you get a whole bunch of extra bonus Honor for doing it and some gold. Then any subsequent Battlegrounds you do are worth the normal amount of Honor. So we're trying to do things like that to help the more casual players who don't want to feel grindy or don't want to be compelled to grind, to help them get the rewards they want by spending a little bit of time. So we'll probably do more of that kind of thing in the expansion, also I think a lot of it is that we have to make sure to vary up the content.

We're adding another Battleground with Lich King and we're also adding Wintergrasp, so those are almost like adding two new Battlegrounds there. The more different places and ways people play, the less grindy it feels.

TTH: What tier level is the equipment going up to in the next expansion?

TC: Well, it'll start off at like tier 7 quality gear, or tier 8. It depends on whether or not you consider Sunwell to be sharing another tier of gear, and then Ulduar beyond that will be another tier of gear. There are even tiers within that for the 10 and 25-person, so while the art is shared between the 10 and 25-person instances, there are color variants of it, so for example you'll be able to see the difference, but thematically it's the same. Also the sets within that tier, within that instance, work with each other. So a lot like right now the Season 1 Gladiator, Season 2, Season 3 are all part of the same armor set, you can mix and max the pieces and still get the set bonuses. That will be the case for 10 and 25 man instances, so with Naxxramas 10 and 25, if you have the leggings from the 10 man zone and the chest piece from the 25-person zone, you'll be able to wear them together and get the set bonus.

Curse: Something that just popped into my head regarding the 10 and 25 for each raid instance. Are you concerned that guilds at the cutting edge will put together 10-person groups just to learn encounters, and then take that knowledge into the 25-person instances?

TC: Yeah, we have talked about that possibility. One thing we're also talking about doing -- we haven't finalized it yet -- but one possibility would be that the instance actually has to be defeated by somebody on that server in 25 man mode before it can be unlocked for 10 man. With of course some kind of fail safe, so that if some amount of time goes by and it still hasn't been beaten, it would unlocked for the 10-person anyways, just in case there doesn't happen to be a guild on the server that's capable of doing the content. That is definitely a concern we're actively talking about how to approach.

MMOGAMER: The thing that perked my ears up the most during the demonstration this morning, was that the Arthas encounter would not be patched into the game until the end of the Wrath of the Lich King cycle. Does that mean we might see the third expansion announced before players are able to fight Arthas?

TC: No, it would definitely be in a patch that happens before the third expansion. But the idea is that it would be the final patch before that expansion. Oh I see... before he actually dies. Not likely because it tends to be those patches come out far enough in advance of the expansion launch so that if players haven't beaten it, it's because we mis-tuned the encounter in some way, and we get that fixed pretty quickly. Some good examples would be Naxxramas... you know, it came out several months in advance of The Burning Crusade launch, and it was a huge, huge raid instance, but players still got through it and killed Kel'Thuzad. A good chunk of guilds were able to do that before the expansion launched.

TTH: So you also, in the presentation, talked about different kinds of raids and loots that would be dropped in 25 man versus 10 man. Do you think there's going to be any kind of backlash from people that enjoy doing 10 mans more, since there's gonna be better loot in the 25 man raid, or are they just gonna be content with having x amount of raids?

TC: Well, you can argue that that's kind of the case already. Zul'Aman loot isn't as good as Black Temple loot, so I don't think it violates our expectations too much. As long as they're getting content at the same time as the 25 man raids are getting content, then I don't think it's too much of a problem. When Ulduar is opened up for players they'll be able to do it in 10 man very quickly thereafter, and the same goes for subsequent raid zones.

If you haven't had a chance yet, be sure to check out our recap of the demonstration's key points, as well as 10 new Wrath of the Lich King screenshots

Interview with Antiarc -- Omen

Kody — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:51:47 GMT

Guillotine recently had a chance to chat with Antiarc -- creator of Omen Threat Meter -- about what 2.4 means for the combat log, Omen, and of course its future. This continues our WoW patch 2.4 coverage, so read on for the interview with the author of one of World of Warcraft's most popular AddOns!

Guillotine: I would like to welcome Antiarc, author of Omen and ThreatLib to the Curse Word. Let’s get right into the interview!

Guillotine: So most people have heard that there are some major UI changes coming in 2.4. In what ways will these affect Omen and the Threat library?

Antiarc: We'll, I've had to do a full rewrite of Threat to compensate. However, this is a very good thing, since it means we now get true per-target (not just per-target-name) threat readings. Also, tons of encounters that were somewhat buggy in Omen before are going to be far less so now. Finally, some of the changes have reduced reliance on translators, so non-english locales should have accurate threat without waiting on translators to translate. Since I did a full Threat rewrite, I decided to do a full Omen rewrite as well to address many of the issues the original Omen had. This new version should be a lot faster and more accurate, and should also very hopefully provide more useful information to various raid members. The traditional threat meter view is awesome for DPS and tanks, but it's not too useful for everyone else. This new version of Omen will provide some additional views (such as an AOE view for Mages and Warlocks that can be used while AOEing trash) and a Healer/Tank view, that shows threat lists for the target of each of your raid's tanks

Guillotine: Can you give an example of an encounter that these changes to Omen will make easier?

Antiarc: Well, Illidan is a big one. No more threat problems with the Flames of Azzinoth. You'll also see Reliquary of Souls perform more accurately, since you won't have that annoying healer "bleed over" effect in the threat readings. Basically any fight with mobs that spawn part way through the fight will have a lot cleaner readings.

Guillotine: Many people have set up a custom look for the old Omen. Are people going to have to readjust their settings for the new one or do these settings transfer over?

Antiarc: Unfortunately, this version has an entirely new setup, and thus, will require new settings. However, it should also be even more customizable, and should allow you to integrate it into your UI even more cleanly. To be honest, the customization features of the new version aren't completely finished - you can't set custom settings for a single bar yet, unfortunately - but those will be coming back. I just got too busy and ran out of time

Guillotine: On that line of thought, what features can people look forward to that won't be included in the initial release?

Antiarc: The biggest missing features will be the single-bar customization (that's dependent on a good dropdown library - there isn't one for Ace3, but I'm writing one), pullout bars (the old implementation sucked, but the idea is still good. I'll be re-doing those except with the suck removed), and FuBar/Minimap integration (again, a product of Ace3 being new and there not being integration libraries for it yet). I expect all those features to show up pretty soon though.

Guillotine: What advantages do you see in using Ace3 over the old Ace2?

Antiarc: Ace3 is a LOT leaner than Ace2 was. It's a completely new framework, designed from the ground up to provide powerful functionality without making the same mistakes Ace2 did. I've really enjoyed using it. There are some disadvantages, such as lack of supporting libraries, but that's really just a function of time. Also, Ace3 is built on CallbackHandler and LibStub, two non-framework libraries that allow for addons on any framework to talk to each other. This means that it's really easy for anyone writing any addon on any framework to talk to ThreatLib and get threat information from it.

Guillotine: If you had more time to work on Omen and ThreatLib, what features would you like to add?

Antiarc: I'd definitely like to finish the config features. One of Omen's big selling points has been its customizability, and I want to maintain that. I'd also like to extend the boss module system so that in fights that require staying below a tank that isn't the main tank (Like Void Reaver or Gurtogg), Omen is more intuitively useful and doesn't require you to play find-the-tank. I'd also like to play with other display modes. Threat means different things to different roles, and ideally, I'd like to find ways to make threat information useful to every role in the raid. I've had this idea for a Threat Hero mode kicking around. Mash your buttons in time to earn threat - when you've accumulated enough, activate your cooldowns for AGGRO POWER!

Guillotine: Are there any other major changes that people should know about?

Antiarc: Well, Threat-2.0 is not, as of right now, KTM-compatible. Both KTM and Threat-2.0 have undergone some pretty heavy changes in the 2.4 transition, and Threat-2.0 doesn't currently support KTM's data format. This may change in the future if lots of people still need this feature, but the KTM-Omen interoperation has always been sketchy at best, and most raid groups are either fully transitioned to Omen or are fully using KTM at this point

Guillotine: Obviously you spend a lot of time testing and developing Omen and ThreatLib. How can people contribute to the project and you yourself?

Antiarc: The biggest thing is just for people to file bug reports when stuff doesn't work, and provide translations and encounter info for me. Omen's done well because I've had so many people provide such great feedback and bug reports and such. I'm pretty much always on the lookout for ways to make it better, and really appreciate all the help and support the community has given me in that regard. In general, the project is extremely well-supported by the community, and I guess the best I could ask for is for people to keep it up :)

Guillotine: Thanks for your time and I think we all look forward to seeing what the future holds for Omen!

Guillotine: Any other things you'd like to say?

Antiarc: People are always getting "out of date" messages. The latest is always available from files.wowace.com - this is the primary distribution point. However, unless something is broken, or you're explicitly advised to upgrade, you probably only need to update every couple of weeks, at the most. Don't stress too much if you get an out-of-date notice. It's probably just a change to localization or a supporting library.

Thanks, Antiarc! So, what does everyone think of the changes to the combatlog in 2.4 so far? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Blizzard supporting online tournaments

Teza — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:40:28 GMT

Gosey of SK-Gaming published an interesting interview about 2 days ago, in that interview David "Shawn" K, head admin for World of Warcraft at the ESL answered to several questions, in one of them he is telling us Blizzard will be supporting ESL to set up an online tournament.

Does ESL have any plans to host more wow tournaments?
Since the public's response to the Dreamhack tournament was really positive we definitely plan to stick to WoW. One of the big goals that we have is to establish a 'pro'-scene, especially for European teams. The American scene is a lot more evolved right now with their small offline-tournaments on a regular basis, their infamous BG9 and their 'star-players' that actively write blogs and discuss strategies. The European scene is a lot more cluttered right now and only a handful of teams could prove their worth on a more international level. Our first step will be an online tournament on an event realm that Blizzard is providing us with. There is not set date for that yet but it's definitely going to happen quite soon.

More details at SK-Gaming

Interview: Wrath of the Lich King

Indelible — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:58:35 GMT

Four years ago, World of Warcraft was released to the masses and Blizzard expected a player base of around 1,000,000 at peak. Roll the clock forward and we have the single most successful MMORPG, boasting 10,000,000 active subscriptions and the game is still getting bigger.

In 2007, Blizzard Entertainment released the first expansion for World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade. In this expansion, we were treated to new abilities and spells, new talents, new levels, a whoe new continent and much, much more. The expansion was a hit, selling over 2,000,000 copies in the first 24 hours but for all the success it saw, there were still a lot of things to be learned from this frist expansion.

Now it is 2008 and we are expecting to see the second expansion for World of Warcraft at some point in the next 12 months. It looks like there are things that have been learned and yet more to learn from this new content rich add on.

CVG sat down with Jeff Kaplan, the Lead Designer for World of Warcraft and talked to him about what the future holds.

Jeff Kaplan: When people heard the expansion was going to be set in Northrend, they freaked out, saying 'No, I can't go to a continent that's all snow!' Just visually alone, we've made sure that all the zones are not full of ice. For example, the Howling Fjord is completely green, and it's modelled after the Redwood Forest on the Pacific north-west.

There's another zone called the Borean Tundra that has typical autumn colours, and we're really going out of our way to make sure the zones are visually distinct. Another cool part of Northrend is the big PvP zone. It's about the size of Westfall, and will be all-PvP - in no way, shape or form will we support PvE players in it.

It'll be optional, but it'll be completely non-instanced, have multiple objectives, siege weapons, and destructible buildings.

You can read the full article here.

Pros And Cons Of WoW Powerlevelling, Part 1

deaddrwho — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:35:52 GMT

There's an interesting article over at Kotaku Australia that talks about a player's experiences with powerlevelling. Here's a snippet:

"For me, I couldn't face levelling from 1-60 again. The thought gave me stomach cramps. Brain cramps. Cramps in my hair. The simple logic of the statement "If something's not fun, don't do it" should have prevailed. But it didn't.

So, I whipped out my credit card and perused my choices."

The whole article can be read here: Pros And Cons Of WoW Powerlevelling, Part 1

What's next for Blizzard?

asp — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:07:51 GMT

Executive vice-president of product development Frank Pearce talks WoW 2, StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3

Blizzard is sitting pretty at the moment. Having just announced that the world's most popular MMO, World of Warcraft, has got even more popular, with an astonishing 9.3m subscriptions across the world, the US developer can afford to employ its famous mantra "it will be ready when it's ready" whenever it's asked about games in development. And clearly its legion of fans wouldn't want it any other way. We here at VideoGamer.com thought we'd try anyway when we sat down for a chat with executive vice-president of product development Frank Pearce to talk World of Warcraft 2, StarCraft 2 and the mystery surrounding StarCraft: Ghost.

Read the entire Article at videogamer.com

No sequel for WoW... yet

Kody — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 02:05:32 GMT

videogamer.com recently sat down with Frank Pearce, Blizzard's executive vice-president of product development for an interview where he dashed the hopes of World of Warcraft 2.

Pearce clearly stated that Blizzard is currently more interested in expanding World of Warcraft -- going as far as confirming that the company hasn't even begun to think about the design of a sequel for the game.

"We haven't even started to think about a sequel," he said. "The team still has a huge wishlist of exciting features to add on top of what's already been implemented since launch. Not to mention, we're all still playing the game pretty heavily ourselves, and there's a lot more content that we want to see as players."

With 9.3 million subscribers happily supporting the game, there's really no good reason to consider focusing development on another product in the same franchise -- not to mention the same genre. Another disappointment for those looking for dates -- Pearce quickly shot down any chance of prying a release date for Wrath of the Lich King out of the dark recesses of his mind.

Head over to the Frank Pearce interview to read more; they'll also have StarCraft II, Diablo III (yes, you heard it right) and Starcraft: Ghost on Monday.

Death Knight Q&A and Lore

Kody — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 04:28:55 GMT

The Wrath of the Lich King website has been updated with a new Design Team Q&A regarding the Death Knight. That's not all though; that lovable subject you've grown to love over the past few weeks on the official forums - Death Knight Lore - has been touched on with the new lore section.

Some snippets from the Q&A:

One of the biggest news at this year’s BlizzCon was the announcement of World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, and the introduction of the game’s first hero class, the death knight. What made you choose this particular class?

One of the things we knew very early on during development of Wrath of the Lich King was that we wanted to add an entirely new class to the existing ones. We actually considered several other class candidates before we decided on the death knight, but we felt that this was the perfect fit for the theme of Wrath of the Lich King for a lot of reasons.

Since the expansion is set in Northrend and you’ll be fighting the Lich King, it makes sense to add a class that is directly connected to the coming conflict. The death knights you will be able to play are no longer allied with the Lich King; instead, they have joined forces with the Horde or the Alliance to fight against Arthas. So by playing a death knight, you’re engaged in the story of Wrath of the Lich King right from the start, which makes the death knight a logical class choice for the expansion from a lore point of view. And since we’re designing this class to be able to fill a tanking role in groups, death knights will also be a viable and interesting choice for them, since the tank is one of those absolutely vital group roles.

One of our main goals for the death knights is to make them mesh well with the game both in terms of the expansion’s lore context and also in terms of being a valuable addition to the current class lineup, and so far we’re really happy with how the class is coming along.

While death knights are new to World of Warcraft, they are already a pretty well-established part of the Warcraft universe. Can players expect to see the return of some classic death knight spells and abilities?

Absolutely. One thing that is very exciting about the death knight character class is that we have a ton of really cool material to work with. Just looking at the many manifestations of death knights in previous games and in Warcraft lore provides a lot of ideas for spells and abilities that will give players a feeling of familiarity with what the class is about. At the same time, the way we introduce this class gives us an opportunity to add some awesome new stuff to the “modern” death knight’s bag of tricks.

What we want to accomplish with the new class is to make players who are familiar with Warcraft lore feel right at home with the death knight, while at the same time creating a truly unique, interesting, and fun set of completely new spells and abilities. For example, the death knight’s spells and abilities will be fueled by a new type of resource mechanic – the rune system – which will be different from mana, energy, and rage. This rune system is highly original and unlike any other class in World of Warcraft, but at the same time it is very consistent with the lore and core abilities of earlier incarnations of the death knight in previous games. It’s still a bit too early to talk in detail about it, but hopefully we’ll be able to reveal more about the rune system in the not-so-distant future.

And of course, that tasty Death Knight Lore everyone has been craving, direct from the source itself.

Shadows of Justice

Orgrim Doomhammer's first act as warchief of the Horde was to crush the orc warlocks of the Shadow Council. He grudgingly spared the council's former master, Gul'dan, in exchange for the warlock's servitude; in turn Gul'dan promised to create a host of powerful new warriors to serve the Horde. After experimenting at length with the souls of the recently slain council members, Gul'dan successfully instilled the spirit of the necrolyte Teron Gorefiend into the corpse of a fallen knight of Stormwind. Thus, the first terrifying death knight was born. Gul'dan transformed other council members as well, creating unholy warriors who sowed chaos and fear throughout the land of Azeroth during the Second War.

Following Gul'dan's desertion and death, part of the Horde, including the death knights, retreated through the Dark Portal to Draenor. Most of the surviving death knights disappeared after Draenor's destruction, with the exception of Teron Gorefiend, whose restless and embittered form resides now in the Black Temple of Outland.

Champions of the Lich King

Years after the destruction of Draenor, the immensely powerful Lich King created a new breed of death knights: malevolent, rune-wielding warriors of the Scourge. The first and greatest of these was Prince Arthas Menethil, once a mighty paladin of the Silver Hand, who sacrificed his soul to claim the runeblade Frostmourne in a desperate bid to save his people.

Unlike Gul'dan's death knights, modern death knights consist mainly of paladins who lost their faith and pledged their souls to the Lich King in exchange for the promise of immortality. Death knights who fall in battle are soon raised again to continue in their master's service.

In the years since Arthas shattered the Frozen Throne and merged with the Lich King, the power and fury of the death knights has only grown. Now these unrelenting crusaders of the damned eagerly await the Lich King's command to unleash their fury on Azeroth once again.

Interview with Cladhaire - Clique, PerfectRaid and more

Kody — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:30:56 GMT

As we wrap up our patch 2.2 AddOn Author Interview series, we have an interview with cladhaire - the developer of Clique, PerfectRaid and many other great AddOns and libraries that are used by a number of other authors. He also contributed heavily to the Ace and Ace2 frameworks, as well as creating his own - Dongle - and is now assisting in the creation of Ace3.

Curse: Could you tell us a little about your background in World of Warcraft and how you got into AddOn design?

cladhaire: I began my work in the addon community when Vika (the author of WatchDog) was called away to serve for the U.S. military, and was unable to continue supporting his addon. In my time working with WatchDog, I tried to stay as true to Vika's initial vision as possible, but added features and fixed bugs as necessary. Once I was involved, the flood gates opened and I've created a number of addons that I required for my daily play, some of which have been included in the default UI.

Curse: What was the first AddOn you worked on for World of Warcraft?

cladhaire: WatchDog was the first one I worked on, but Bishop was the first addon I tried to create. Bishop was intended to be a robust healing efficiency meter, but once I got the proof of concept code done I realized that most healers weren't ready to see how inefficient they were being. Current healing meters don't properly factor in heal over time spells not ticking counting against you, which ends up inflating numbers for druids, for example.

Curse: How has being an AddOn author changed the way you play World of Warcraft and how you interact with fellow players?

cladhaire: Not much has changed, actually. My guild has another prominent addon authors (coincidentally) and apart from the people who occasionally log onto my server to bug me with feature requests, it's been pretty much the same.

Curse: By the same token, has it changed your view of the work Blizzard has done with the game?

cladhaire: I appreciate the extensible API they've created, and the fact that they use it to define their own UI. That's just an example of brewing your own that I can appreciate!

Curse: How badly did WoW 2.0 affect the AddOns you were working on at the time? Did it require you to re-design any of the core features?

cladhaire: WatchDog unfortunately got left by the wayside just due to time constraints (I had too many projects at that time), but Clique was just a matter of rewriting the system to use the new secure templates. I took this opportunity to get rid of the "plugin" mechanism that Clique was using before, and introduced a standard for click-casting that's made writing addons that support it much easier. PerfectRaid on the other hand took a very large hit, since many of the features were no longer possible. I'm still working to rebuild it :P.

Curse: Were any of your AddOns "killed," so to speak, by WoW 2.0?

cladhaire: Some shifted focus, but all still were possible.

Curse: From speaking with Kaelten, you were a very integral part of the creation of both Ace1 and Ace2; you also created the Dongle library suite. How did the previous experience with Ace help in developing Dongle?

cladhaire: Dongle was more of small addon framework for my own personal use, but it seems some developers have liked the lightweight system enough to include it in their own addons. My positive experiences with the original Ace framework inspired me heavily when defining the scope of Dongle. I learned a lot from the direction ckknight took Ace2 after he took over and set of a system to help avoid feature creep, or adding functions to a library that only my own addons used. A good community of developers helped me in the discussion of any new features or changes to the framework, and I'm happy with what we turned out as a first product.

Curse: Rumor has it you're assisting in the creation of Ace3 as well, could you comment on this?

cladhaire: The database system I wrote for Dongle is extremely small and familiar to developers, so I've contributed that code to the Ace3 project as a base. I'm also involved in the development discussions and process as just another perspective to round out conversations.

Curse: You're the creator of Clique, an incredibly popular AddOn among tens of thousands of players; what made you decide to develop Clique, and are you happy with how it turned out?

cladhaire: I'm extremely happy with where Clique is, and once I get the tooltip issues fixed (I have a good idea that was just suggested to me that I'd like to implement) I'll be ready to support it in any way possible, but happy with the feature set. I used CastParty when it initially came out, and then WatchDog when it was written, but knew the interface could work better. That's where the concept of clicking directly on spells in your spellbook to bind click-casts came from and I'm glad to see how it's worked out. Splitting the click-casting portion of WatchDog out into Clique was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Curse: For players not familiar, can you describe the functionality of TomTom?

cladhaire: TomTom is a simple navigational addon for World of Warcraft that allows you to set waypoints (notes on the minimap and world map) to allow you to better plan your travels. It helps when combined with an addon like LightHeaded, or any website that provides you with coordinates.

Curse: What other AddOns have you designed recently that players may not be fully aware of?

cladhaire: LightHeaded is an addon that takes all the user comments for quests from wowhead.com, and displays them in-game alongside your quest log. The panel is collapsable so you can experience quests fully when completing them for the first time, or open up the comments panel to get a quick list of hints or coordinates to help you complete the quest

Curse: If you could change one thing about the World of Warcraft API, and how it limits certain AddOn functionality, what would that be?

cladhaire: I'm fine with the limits Blizzard imposes, it allows us to play their game as they intend while giving us a crazy amount of flexibility. I'd like to see unique id's exposed for quests so I can more easil correlate comments, but that's not a deal breaker for me.

Curse: Thanks for the interview, cladhaire! Is there anything you'd like to say to your AddOn fans, or to Blizzard?

cladhaire: Thanks to my users for sticking with me and helping me troubleshoot any problems that might exist in my addons. With Patch 2.2 there was a change to the attribute system that affected Clique, and since I am in the middle of a move from the U.S. to England I don't have access to WoW for the time being. Immediately, I had 5-6 users working with me directly to help resolve the issue. That sort of support is what drives me forward.

Special note: Thanks to cladhaire for taking the time to do this interview at a time when he was preparing to move from the United States to England; it's certainly something that requires a lot of attention, so for him to take the time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions means a lot!

Interview with Daviesh - AtlasLoot Enhanced

Kody — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:04:38 GMT

As part of our special patch 2.2.0 event, we're reaching out to a number of the AddOn authors who have developed the AddOns we've all grown to love in World of Warcraft. Whether it's a Unit Frame, a bag mod, or a threat meter, you've probably used at least one of the AddOns these folks have developed. This particular interview is with Daviesh - developer of AtlasLoot Enhanced - one of the most popular AddOns here on Curse and in the world.

Curse: Could you tell us a little about your background in World of Warcraft and how you got into AddOn design?

I started playing WoW in the first couple of days of the live game. A few friends of mine had been in the beta, so we all sort of kicked off together. My time with Addons started when one of my guildies pointed out to me a mod called AtlasLoot that added the loot drops for Molten Core into Atlas. I liked what I saw and submitted Onyxia and Blackwing Lair data to Pernicius (the original author). Soon after that, Pernicius dropped the project and I took over and renamed it AtlasLoot Enhanced to avoid confusion.

Curse: What was the first AddOn you worked on for World of Warcraft?

AtlasLoot was the first Addon I worked on, and it still takes up a huge chunk of my free time.

Curse: How has being an AddOn author changed the way you play World of Warcraft and how you interact with fellow players?

Well, I don't get to 'play' much any more! When I log in it is usually just to test code changes. I experienced more of the Burning Crusade during the Beta than on live! As for player interaction it can be a little weird when you get a message out of the blue from a user, but that doesn't happen so much now, as I had to rename my character for a server transfer.

Curse: By the same token, has it changed your view of the work Blizzard has done with the game?

If anything, I now have more respect for the shear complexity of the game.

Curse: How badly did WoW 2.0 affect the AddOns you were working on at the time? Did it require you to re-design any of the core features?

It wasn't too bad, most of the changes were well documented and quick fixes. The whole 'taint' issue didn't effect me too much, I don't really hook any of the core interface and mine is not a mod you want to be using in combat! I did have some issues with generating chat links, due to the format changes socketed items introduced that were not all that well documented, but some forum trolling sorted that out eventually.

Curse: Were any of your AddOns "killed," so to speak, by WoW 2.0?

No, the data viewer kind of mods weren't really affected that much.

Curse: What brought about the decision to create an enhanced version of AtlasLoot?

The 'Enhanced' on the name was really just something to differentiate between my mod and Pernicius's original. The very first release was just a bugfix to deal with a conflict with ItemSync in Pernicius's mod, then I started getting data for ZG, AQ20, AQ40 etc, partially generated by what were to become my translators. I had always thought Pernicius would re-incorperate my fixes into the original mod, but he didn't have the time to maintain AtlasLoot, so I had the blessing to continue on with AtlasLoot. Within a month or so, we had pretty much all the instances at the time in there, support for EquipCompare, Dressing Room, 5 languages and it all took off.

Curse: While AtlasLoot Enhanced is an incredibly popular AddOn, there are no doubt folks unfamiliar with what it does. Could you explain its functionality to them?

At its core, AtlasLoot is a loot browser. If you are coming up to a boss in an instance and want to know what the loot drops could be and drop rates, etc, instead of alt-tabbing to wowhead or similar, you can look it up in AtlasLoot, either using the AtlasLoot Loot Browser or by clicking the name of the boss of interest in Atlas. There are lots of other little features too, covering things like PvP, Rep Factions and World Events.

Curse: Are there any new features in the works for AtlasLoot Enhanced?

The World Events section we added recently is continuing to be expanded, with the Skettis, Ethereum Prison, etc to appear in the next release. Pre-60 Battleground items have also been recently added to the work-in-progress version, so expect to see those soon. In the long term, there are lots of things that are continually requested that I would like to do, but the original database structure never had that in mind, so a lot of work is needed. Something like a wishlist to view items you want to get is something I have wanted to do for a long time, but there is a lot of infrastructure that needs to go in place first.

Curse: AtlasLoot Enhanced uses the Ace framework; looking back on the development of the AddOn, would you say it was a good decision to use Ace?

Ace is a great tool, it's just a little sad how much politics and the like surrounds its use. I didn't really gain much performance-wise from the switch, because the mod would need to be TOTALLY re-written to take advantage of everything the framework has to offer and the mod has really become much too big for that now. The use of AceDB and AceLocale allowed me to clean up my handling of saved variables and translations respectively, as I was never really happy with my cobbled together system. AceLocale in particular has allowed for some more stability in the mod. The main reason for the switch though was to take advantage of a lot of the other Ace framework helper libraries that have saved me a LOT of time.

Curse: What other libraries does AtlasLoot Enhanced use, and what is their role in the AddOn's functionality?

At the moment I use a number of the Babble libraries as it allows me to have a lot of my commonly used words and phrases continually updated by a large pool of people. In the interests of fairness, I try and contribute to that effort where I can. I also use FuBar-Plugin, so that I don't have to have my own cobbled together minimap-button code as well as DewDrop and Tablet that help out the FuBar support as well as the menus in the AtlasLoot Loot Browser.

All of those libraries work within the Ace framework.

Curse: With all the experience you've gained through maintaining your AddOns, if you could give a novice author advice on developing an AddOn, what would that be?

Start with small mods and build functionality on from there so that you are not swamped with having to learn the whole API all at once. A lot of little features in AtlasLoot started life as just a little bit of proof-of-concept code with just enough functionality for basic testing, you can learn a lot from little test mods like that. I also highly recommend the book 'Hacking World of Warcraft' by Dan Gilbert (the author of Atlas) and James Whitehead II (the author of Clique) for someone just starting out using or creating mods, it has a lot of good advice and step-by-step guides.

Curse: If you could change one thing about the World of Warcraft API, and how it limits certain AddOn functionality, what would that be?

In Patch 1.10 Blizzard made a change where 'spoofing' item links would disconnect you from the server. The motivation at the time was people using mods to spam chat channels with links to items where the text of the item did not match the item ID, you you could be fooled into thinking it was a cool new item when in actual fact it was someone 'faking' a link. The change was effective in stopping this overnight.

The problem is that now, if an item is not available on the server-side cache, you get disconnected if you try to link it in chat or get the tooltip. In my mod, this is a serious problem. People who have been playing the game for a long time understand the issue, but new players using the mod for the first time don't know why they are being disconnected and I find myself continually explaining things over and over. Before cross-server battlegrounds were introduced, my method of guessing if an item was 'safe' or not by checking the players local cache was reasonably good, but now with cross-server battlegrounds it is really hard to know if an item is or isn't safe.

What I would really like to see is instead of people being disconnected for querying an item that is not in their server cache is to have a message appear along the lines of 'invalid item' or 'item unavailable', so that people KNOW why they cannot view an item. A newer player does not associate a disconnect with an invalid item.

In a perfect world, you would be able to query any item, but unfortunately, that is open to too much datamining, something Blizzard wants to avoid.

Curse: Is there anything you'd like to say to your AddOn fans, or to Blizzard?

To Blizzard, in particular Slouken, thanks so much for supporting something that is officially not supported.

To Pernicius and all past contributors of ideas and data, thanks for your input, the addon would not be as it is now without you.

To the current team, especially Hegarol and Celellach who have gone above and beyond the call of duty, what are you reading this for? Get back to work!

More seriously, the current team in a lot of ways keeps the ball rolling. When I get bogged down with real-life work and things start to stagnate, these guys keep fixes and changes coming and flag bits and pieces I need to look into when I have the chance. Thanks guys!

Interview with pastamancer - Grid

Kody — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:06:00 GMT

As part of our special patch 2.2.0 event, we're reaching out to a number of the AddOn authors who have developed the AddOns we've all grown to love in World of Warcraft. Whether it's a Unit Frame, a bag mod, or a threat meter, you've probably used at least one of the AddOns these folks have developed. This particular interview is with pastamancer, developer of Grid - an AddOn that has become synonymous with raid healing.

Curse: Could you tell us a little about your background in World of Warcraft and how you got into AddOn design?

pasta: I've been playing since the open beta. I had been interested in addon development for a long time but had no idea what to start with.

Curse: What was the first AddOn you worked on for World of Warcraft?

pasta: My very first addon was very simple. It automatically left general chat when I entered The Barrens and re-joined it when I left. Later on, I got a better feel for addon development by submitting patches for AGUF.

Curse: How has being an AddOn author changed the way you play World of Warcraft and how you interact with fellow players?

pasta: Aside from taking a few months off from raiding to work on grid, it hasn't changed the way I play. The people I raid with have been very good at providing feedback and I used them as beta testers when Grid was still in heavy development.

Curse: By the same token, has it changed your view of the work Blizzard has done with the game?

pasta: It gave me an appreciation for the amount of work that went until the interface and the design trade-offs needed to make it usable by everyone.

Curse: How badly did WoW 2.0 affect the AddOns you were working on at the time? Did it require you to re-design any of the core features?

pasta: I was still working on Grid when the news about 2.0 came out. I had to completely re-design the layout system in Grid to use the new SecureHeaders.

Curse: Were any of your AddOns "killed," so to speak, by WoW 2.0?

pasta: Nope. Grid is my only publicly released addon.

Curse: So you developed Grid - a raid frame that has quickly become one of the most popular in the world for healers. What ultimately brought on the decision to create the AddOn?

pasta: Maia came up with the the original idea for Grid about a year ago. Square raid frames with vertical health bars and small colored status indicators. The goal was to have raid frames that provided all the information needed for a healer/decurser in a small amount of space.

I had been thinking about how unit frames should work behind-the-scenes and came across Maia's post about Grid in the WoWAce forums and posted my thoughts. We worked together to create what would be the successor to Detox and Squishy.

Curse: Are there any future plans for Grid, such as new features or maybe a revamp to the design?

pasta: Jerry is working on pet support in Grid. That's the last major feature planned for Grid. The ease with which additional information can be displayed in Grid (via modules) allows me to keep the core relatively simple.

Curse: Are there any AddOns you're working on that haven't been released yet? If so, would you care to talk about them?

pasta: I'm not currently working on any new addons because I've been very busy both in-game and in real life.

Curse: Looking forward, there's talk of 3.0 having a similar impact on AddOns as 2.0 did. Does this concern you at all and make you think twice when an idea for a cool new AddOn pops up in your head?

pasta: As long as Blizzard endorses "smart users, not smart buttons" I don't think I have anything to worry about. I'm interested in giving people the information they need to make intelligent decisions.

Curse: If you could change one thing about the World of Warcraft API, and how it limits certain AddOn functionality, what would that be?

pasta: I'd love to get target information in the UNIT_SPELLCAST events for other players. It doesn't really restrict addon functionality because it can (and is) being worked-around via SendAddonMessage (behind-the-scenes addon communications).

Curse: Thanks for the interview, pastamancer! Is there anything you'd like to say to your AddOn fans, or to Blizzard?

pasta: I'd like to thank Blizzard for opening up the user interface for customization. I'd also like to thank everyone that has contributed to Grid by writing code, writing documentation, translating, writing modules, submitting bug reports, or feature requests. Grid wouldn't be what it is today without all of you.

Interview with Antiarc - Omen Threat Meter

Kody — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:19:43 GMT

As part of our special patch 2.2.0 event, we're reaching out to a number of the AddOn authors who have developed the AddOns we've all grown to love in World of Warcraft. Whether it's a Unit Frame, a bag mod, or a threat meter, you've probably used at least one of the AddOns these folks have developed. This particular interview is with Antiarc - the developer of Omen Threat Meter - one of World of Warcraft's hottest new AddOns.

Curse: Could you tell us a little about your background in World of Warcraft and how you got into AddOn design?

Antiarc: Well, I've been playing since closed beta, and have been hooked since. I play a rogue main, am currently GM of my guild, <Southsea Buccaneers> on Cenarion Circle, and would probably consider myself to be on the more "hardcore" end of the scale.

I've been programming since I was a kid, so WoW's expandability was an obvious draw to me. I first started using Cosmos mods in beta, and it wasn't long until I started wondering what else I could do. I started looking into the source of some of the Cosmos mods, and then started working on some of my own stuff.

Curse: What was the first AddOn you worked on for World of Warcraft?

Antiarc: The first one was a silly little health frame replacement that mimicked the Legend of Zelda UI. I still have a screenshot around, in fact! http://wow.tachyonsix.com/zeldaui3.jpg

Curse: How has being an AddOn author changed the way you play World of Warcraft and how you interact with fellow players?

Antiarc: For the most part, it isn't horribly different, I think. I'm kinda my guild's designated mod guy, so if something breaks, or someone wants a mod recommendation, or someone needs a macro or whatever, I'll probably be getting a tell. :)

I do tend to see a process, or a problem, or what have you, and think "Hm, I wonder if I could write a mod to fix that?" Most of my addons are written to scratch an itch. Among others, I wrote Sanity to facilitate guild banking, Hemlock because I got really sick of calculating out the number of poison reagents to buy, and WhisperBid because handing whispered bids manually is a royal pain in the rear.

I sometimes pull aggro because I'm afk watching debug windows rather than threat meters, though.

Curse: By the same token, has it changed your view of the work Blizzard has done with the game?

Antiarc: I've pretty much always been impressed with Blizzard's job on WoW. I came to WoW from SWG, and I remember being impressed by it in beta, because things that I'd have expected to break in SWG just worked properly (or at least didn't break horribly) in WoW. My estimation really hasn't changed since. Slouken is especially good at maintaining contact with the UI community, and the constant communication and feedback does a lot for my respect for their team.

Curse: How badly did WoW 2.0 affect the AddOns you were working on at the time? Did it require you to re-design any of the core features?

Antiarc: At the time WoW 2.0 hit, my "big" addon was Sanity, an inventory management mod. I rewrote it from the ground up for a number of reasons, but I went ahead and rewrote it for 2.0 compatibility while I was at it. To that end, it didn't really affect me too much (though I had to end up using secure frames for item buttons, which was a pain).

Curse: Were any of your AddOns "killed," so to speak, by WoW 2.0?

Antiarc: A couple were, yes, but mostly just because I haven't rewritten them. They either weren't heavily used, or were more easily replaced by existing 2.0-compatible mods. The one I want to rewrite was ArmorMeter, which used static-damage abilities to calculate one-shot pinpoint accurate armor levels for targets, and then synchronize that data with the rest of the raid. It also calculated the percentage damage increase that would be granted by the use of certain abilities, such as Sunder Armor, or Faerie Fire. I found, however, that most all raid mobs have AC reduction in the 30-34% range, so there wasn't a lot of point in maintaining a running monitor of that value.

Curse: Are there any AddOns you'd like to work on in the future?

Antiarc: Well, as I mentioned above, I might be interested in rewriting ArmorMeter. I think for now, though, the vast majority of my effort will be focused on Omen and Sanity/SanityBags, as they're large projects that tend to require maintenance. If I think up any great ideas, though, I'm sure I won't be able to rest until there's something functional, though. :)

Curse: You've developed a number of Ace-based AddOns. Would you say this is the library of choice for you, as an author?

Antiarc: To be honest, I haven't used any other mod frameworks to develop WoW mods - I went straight from ground-up mod development to Ace2. However, I've been very happy with the Ace suite, and really dislike developing without it now. To that end, yes, it is my library framework of choice. I think that it is a very solid choice for addon authors due to its existing libraries (which let mod authors get into writing business logic very quickly, while bypassing all the tedious set-up) and efficiency goals.

Curse: For players not familiar with your latest AddOn - Omen - can you explain exactly what it does?

Antiarc: Omen is a threat meter. Basically, enemies in WoW decide who to attack by deciding who is the most threatening based on the abilities you use. What Omen attempts to do is provide reasonably accurate estimates of your group's relative threat level on individual enemies, so that you can see when you're in danger of pulling aggro (or, if you're next on the snack list if your tank bites it). This info is usually only critical in raids, where only tanks can survive aggro, but it's useful for any multi-player situation.

Curse: What are the major differences between Omen and KLHThreatMeter?

Antiarc: Well, Omen is obviously inspired by KTM, but I've attempted to improve on the design. The primary reason that Omen (well, its backing library, Threat-1.0) was written is because KTM brute-forces its threat estimates by polling a large number of values every so often. When we gained CPU profiling in WoW, I noticed that KTM was eating significantly more amounts of CPU time than any other of my mods, even while idle. There was a bit of a flamewar going on over this issue already, but what it basically came down to is that Kenco (KTM's author) didn't have any intent to change KTM's design to be more efficient, so I decided that I could do it better. Omen is empirically, by design, more CPU-friendly, which should improve the user's framerates, though that point is contested by Kenco. :)

Once I started development, the Wowace developers convinced me that it would be well-served to make the project a library, which could be used by any number of mods. To date, Threat is used by several mods, including Assessment, Recount, Aloft, Violation, Pitbull, and Sphere. This provides each of these mods with threat data, while the actual threat calculations (which can be computationally expensive) are only done once, and also allows any mod author wanting to incorporate threat data into their addon to do so without having to do the threat calculations themselves.

In the process, I realized that I could do multi-target threat, which eliminated the need for using a master target, and which gave useful information in multi-mob pull, like Moroes, High King Maulgar, or Kael'thas. Then, we went ahead and implemented per-boss modules. Since many bosses have special threat considerations (like threat wipes, or reductions from knockbacks, etc), we developed a general module framework that allowed each boss encounter to be handled separately, and which makes it easier for future boss encounters to be adapted to easily. This modular design tends to make it easy to develop updates for new threat mechanics as they arise.

The final difference is that Omen itself is just a display for the Threat-1.0 library. What this means is that people who don't want a display don't have to pay the CPU and memory cost of a display. They can just run the Threat-1.0 library by itself and it silently synchs your threat data with your group's without ever getting in your way.

Curse: Blizzard announced at BlizzCon that there will be a built-in ThreatMeter of sorts. During the UI panel they expanded on the comments and said it would be very simplistic. That said, is this exciting for you because of the possibility of better built-in functions that Omen can put to use?

Antiarc: This is very exciting. First of all, it's an official "acceptance" of threat meters, which is encouraging. Second, of course, it will provide an official standard against which we can benchmark new abilities, ranks, and boss abilities, which should make the process of reverse-engineering threat mechanics a lot easier. If we actually get API methods that can be integrated into Threat-1.0, all the better!

Antiarc: To be honest, this doesn't concern me a whole lot. Blizzard tends to have a persistent policy that mods should "inform, don't control", and most of my mods are informative or non-combat mods. They obviously encourage mods that streamline the user experience without breaking the spirit of the game, and I think that my mods do that. The only "iffy" area was Omen, which now almost has an official stamp of approval with the inclusion of a stock threat meter.

Curse: If there was one thing you would absolutely love to see implemented into the World of Warcraft API, what would that be?

Antiarc: To be honest, I'm really excited about the 2.4 combat log changes. The simplified parsing requirements and unique mob identifiers are going to let the mod community do a whole lot of things that weren't previously possible. Beyond that, I'd love a way to communicate with the outside world. I know that Blizzard isn't going to give that to us, but the ability to access remote data stores would be absolutely phenomenal. WoW-IM bridges, automatic DKP management, automatic stats recording and parsing...the list goes on.

Curse: Thanks for the interview, Antiarc! Is there anything you'd like to say to your AddOn fans, or to Blizzard?

Antiarc: Anytime! Hope it hasn't been too boring a read!

To the fans...I'm glad you enjoy using my stuff, and feel free to drop me a line anytime! Thanks for all the testing, feedback, and support you all have provided me. Omen, especially, has been far more widely-accepted (even in beta!) than I'd ever expected. Software is for its users, and is only as useful as its users find it to be, and your help and feedback is tremendously appreciated!

To Blizzard, keep up the good work. I still can't seem to pull myself away from the game, so you're doing something right. :)

Interview with Tuller - Bongos2, Bagnon, OmniCC & more

Kody — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:26:13 GMT

As part of our special patch 2.2.0 event, we're reaching out to a number of the AddOn authors who have developed the AddOns we've all grown to love in World of Warcraft. Whether it's a Unit Frame, a bag mod, or a threat meter, you've probably used at least one of the AddOns these folks have developed. This particular interview is with Tuller - developer of Bongos2, Bagnon, OmniCC and many others.

Curse: Could you tell us a little about your background in World of Warcraft and how you got into AddOn design?

Tuller: I've been playing WoW since December of 2004 (has it been that long?) and have 3 70s: Tuller (NE Druid), Tire (Dwarf Hunter), and Esthere (NE Rogue). I basically just play with my friends from college, though we've added a few more people to our guild over time. If I had to describe us, it would be "casual hardcore." We don't do 25 mans, but we're great at 5 and 10 man content. We're all very much looking forward to 2.3 and ZA.

Addon design was something quite natural for me to get into: I've always done a bit of customization to Blizzard games, Starcraft and Warcraft III most notably. Blizzard's a big part of the reason why I chose to study computer science when in college :)

I started using addons around a few months after I started playing WoW: BibMod, GypsyMod, Titan, Perl, and Nurfed were the big ones I recall. After using addons for a while there would be simply things I wanted to change. In Bib, for example, I removed a few features that I didn't use, and added some others. Bongos, Sage, and Ludwig all started out this way.

Curse: What was the first AddOn you worked on for World of Warcraft?

Tuller: I wrote a bunch of small things when I was learning Lua: One was a replacement for an old addon called PlayerNotes. Basically, it allowed me to tag a person by name with some comment, like "don't group with this guy" or "smells." It was fairly handy for when I ran of lot of pickup group runs. I eventually got rid of it once I realized that I recognized people by name :)

Bongos was the first big addon I wrote, and the first one I released to the public, way back in December of 2005. I just basically got to the point where I decided, "Why don't I make my own action bars?" It took a while before I decided to release it to the public, mostly because I did not work on it a lot for a while.

Curse: How has being an AddOn author changed the way you play World of Warcraft and how you interact with fellow players?

Tuller: Well, for one, I typically play WoW less :) Every now and then I get someone who sends me a /tell asking a Bongos question, but my interactions with players in game have basically not changed at all. Outside of the game, I read the comments people make about my addons, and also about my "competitors" pretty much daily. A few gems have come out of reading user feedback: sticky bars is the most notable one. My friends are still the main source of influence for addon design, though.

Curse: By the same token, has it changed your view of the work Blizzard has done with the game?

Tuller: Overall, its given me a much greater respect for them. They've really given us a lot of power to do what we want, and every now and then add even more stuff for us to use :)

Curse: How badly did WoW 2.0 affect the AddOns you were working on at the time? Did it require you to re-design any of the core features?

Tuller: WoW 2.0 caused me to completely rewrite Bongos around three times :) The first thing I did was alter Bongos to simply work. In the process of doing so, I discovered two things about the new actionbar system in 2.0: First, I couldn't do a few features I had in old versions of Bongos easily: Right click self cast and friendly target paging. Second, bar switching was very, very CPU intensive.

So, I ended up looking for a way to solve those issues. The Dominos versions of Bongos were designed to do that: I used show states instead of state switching, which I learned from Trinity Bars. It was faster, but I eventually discovered my bindings system did not work for everyone. I rapidly scraped that version and went back to "classic Bongos." The good news is, by that time I had learned enough about the new system that I was able to implement some optimizations that made Bongos fast enough for the time being.

When 2.1 came around, Blizzard implemented a few improvements to the new state system. At the same time, Dongle had just been released, and I was looking to move to it because I wanted a better system for profiles (mine sucked :P). So, I rewrote Bongos again, using Dongle and incorporating the changes to the state system implemented in the 2.1 patch. I also changed the name to Bongos2 at this time, since profiles were incompatible. The end result was a Bongos that once again had a fast paging system (I think Bongos2 is actually the fastest at paging of all the actionbar addons), and also one that once again had features users I personally missed a lot: rightclick selfcast, and paging when targeting a friendly unit. Effectively, it took me until 2.1 for me to finally restore the majority of functionality I lost when 2.0 was released.

On the plus side, Sage and OmniCC were not difficult at all to make 2.0 compatible, and I gained a lot of users from other addons breaking :P

I'd also like to thank the users who wrote some 2.0 compatible versions of my stuff before I received a beta key :)

Curse: Were any of your AddOns "killed," so to speak, by WoW 2.0?

Tuller: Nothing I wrote was actually killed by 2.0. Bongos lost two major features because of it, though: Scripting was removed shortly after I learned what was coming with the patch, and ranged based paging was also lost. Sage also lost the ability for me to dynamically size frames to fit unit names, which made me a bit sad. Other than that, though, there's not really anything I can think of that was lost.

Curse: Are there any AddOns you'd like to work on in the future?

Tuller: One thing I always think about writing is some sort of HUD, since I have a bad habit of not paying attention to my own health. When 2.3 comes out, I'll be looking to make a list view inventory addon to take advantage of the new features they've added, if I do not do so sooner. When 2.4 comes out, I'll might look at making some sort of minimal damage meter or threat meter. My main focus, though, is really on the stuff I have out already.

Curse: What libraries do you typically use when creating your AddOns, or do you create your own?

Tuller: All of my more complex addons (Bagnon, Bongos, and Sage) are now written to use the Dongle framework. Bongos and Sage actually have very similar code, though sticky frames is the only thing that's actually "shared" between them, other than Dongle. Dongle is a nice framework: It gives me exactly what I need in a very small package. I actually thought about using Ace for a while, but decided there was too little to gain for the amount of overhead I would be incurring.

I typically try to avoid using libraries in my addons whenever possible, but that's mostly because there's very little common code between all of the things I've written.

Curse: You've created several very popular AddOns here on Curse; Bagnon, Bongos2 and OmniCC. Those are just a few of the AddOns you've worked on, though. Could you explain to the community what some of your other available AddOns do?

Tuller: Sure :) Other than those addons, I've released three more to the public: Sage, Ludwig, and SellFish.

Sage is a lightweight set of unit frames that I made for myself after wanting to tweak the look of Perl and Nurfed a bit. Sage is the one addon I have released that was basically designed more for my own personal use than anything. Its not very flashy looking, but is quite easy to read, and of course debuffs are very visible on friendly units. Sage is also, I think, one of the easiest unit frame addons to setup.

Ludwig is my item database addon, designed to replace LootLink for most people. It reads from the player's item cache, so no setup is required, and basically uses no memory until the player actually looks up an item. Ludwig's new frame also looks the best out of all the stuff I've designed, I think.

SellFish is my item price addon. Its quite lightweight and also comes preloaded with a large database of sell values from ItemPrice. I've neglected SellFish a bit, and plan on updating it more frequently after 2.2 is out. I wrote a little thing to parse the armory a little while ago so that I won't have to rely on other addons for data anymore.

Curse: Is there any additional functionality you'd like to add to Bongos2 or Bagnon in the future?

Tuller: There are a few things I'm looking at implementing in Bongos. The first one is that I want to redo the bindings system and save hotkeys per profile. This will allow me to fix the long standing issue people have with Bongos of, "My hotkeys don't work when I switch stances!" I'm also thinking about writing an optional addon to save action button placement per profile as well. That way, I'll be able to have my buttons and bindings automatically switch when I go to say, my tree healing profile, or my pvp profile.

In the long term for Bongos, I'm contemplating overhauling the layout system so that people can have true variable length bars. Again, its not something I'm planning on doing anytime soon.

I have no real plans for changes to Bagnon in the future, though I've made a few performance tweaks that'll make it into the 2.2 release. It really depends on how Combuctor goes.

Curse: In a recent blog post here on Curse, you mentioned a new project you're working on, Combuctor. Is this could to be a plug-in for Bagnon, or a standalone AddOn?

Tuller: Combuctor, for people who do not know, is my next big project. Basically, I want Combuctor to be an inventory addon that allows me to visually find an item really rapidly. Right now Combuctor is planned to be an addon that's completely separate from Bagnon, though they'll both use Bagnon_Forever.

Combuctor is very much a sandbox for me at this point. I'm trying out a lot of ideas and seeing what I do and do not like. There should be a beta sometime after 2.2 is out.

Tuller: No, not really :) I do not actually expect Blizzard to do anything as dramatic as they did with the (much needed) restrictions implemented in 2.0.

Curse: If you could change one thing about the World of Warcraft API, and how it limits certain AddOn functionality, what would that be?

Tuller: I'd get rid of the 120 action button cap. Doing so would allow me to implement Bongos in a much cleaner matter: just create a bar, add buttons for stances, and off you go.

Curse: Thanks for the interview, Tuller! Is there anything you'd like to say to your AddOn fans, or to Blizzard?

Tuller: Fans: Thank you.

Blizzard: Thank you. Also, can I have a job?

Interview with KarlKFI - Cosmos

Kody — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:24:29 GMT

As part of our special patch 2.2.0 event, we're reaching out to a number of the AddOn authors who have developed the AddOns we've all grown to love in World of Warcraft. Whether it's a Unit Frame, a bag mod, or a threat meter, you've probably used at least one of the AddOns these folks have developed. This particular interview is with KarlKFI - Lead Developer of Cosmos and many others.

Curse: Could you tell us a little about your background in World of Warcraft and how you got into AddOn design?

KarlKFI: I've been playing WoW since the first Stress Test Beta. I leveled a human paladin in both stress tests and then again in live. And I've never been able to level another character past 20 since then, big surprise. I didn't get into addons until live, though.

Curse: What was the first AddOn you worked on for World of Warcraft?

KarlKFI: I first worked on a 1337 speak cross faction translator which then lead to a collaboration with a few other authors to make UniversalTranslator. UT then became the first and only addon ever to get you banned and we were told to stop distributing it. Soon after, they disabled it's functionality in WoW and decided that they would no longer ban for addons using their API, but instead break the addons they didn't want used.

Curse: How has being an AddOn author changed the way you play World of Warcraft and how you interact with fellow players?

KarlKFI: Well I use a lot of addons for one thing. I also have a handful of other people's addons that I've tweaked to have other features. Thankfully, in game I don't get many addon troubleshooting requests. Some of the people in my guild use a few of the addons I maintain, like DamageMeters and Wardrobe, but mostly they just treat me like any other guildie. I made a point to not go for any officer position, I don't really have the time to do that, raid and maintain my 50 some addons.

Curse: By the same token, has it changed your view of the work Blizzard has done with the game?

KarlKFI: I get kinda annoyed when Blizzard breaks or even incorporates an addon of mine. I kinda wish they put in some "Inspired by" comments or something into the code. I try to take it as a compliment anyway. I think they've incorporated 5 of my mods now and broken another half dozen. I'm not krka, they broke his only (awesome) addon (AutoTravel) and he basically quit WoW. I've got lots of addons to work on and a decent raiding guild. I've also gotten a fair number of changes put into the game through various means, like the 2.1 UIParent.lua changes to allows for more customizable UI Panels.

Curse: How badly did WoW 2.0 affect the AddOns you were working on at the time? Did it require you to re-design any of the core features? Were any of your AddOns "killed," so to speak, by WoW 2.0?

KarlKFI: MobileFrames had to be scrapped because it now tainted everything and its parent. It was replaced with FluidFrames and UIPanelOptions, both written from scratch. TrackerToggle also got scrapped and never revived (I now use TrackMenu). PopupPower, a lib I worked on for a short while, also became unusable due to tainting popups. I ended up writing DynamicPopup to allow for multi-line editbox popups, but its only used in Khaos.

Curse: You're one of the lead developers of Cosmos, a suite of AddOns that has literally stood the test of time; it was first introduced in the World of Warcraft Beta and has continued on since. How has Cosmos changed from its original incarnation to now?

KarlKFI: Oi, basically nothing from beta Cosmos still exists in it's original form. The first couple of months I worked on Cosmos I spent converting FrameXML files to full fledged addons. This is when I first wrote Archaeologist, ChatScroll, and FriendsFacts, which still work today and are maintained today. Also, when I joined the team AlexanderYoshi was the lead dev. He retired from Cosmos in 2006 and handed me the lead. He's now works as a game designer for Blizzard. Since then there have been a lot of challenges, losing authors to the abyss of apathy and subsequently having to drop their addons, but we've been able to pull on a few more authors and keep the ship moving. I basically maintain half of the Cosmos addons now.

Curse: How valuable has user feedback been in the process of developing and improving Cosmos?

KarlKFI: User feedback is ALWAYS appreciated. They thing that really gets on my nerves tho, Is people that don't read the available materials. Of course sometimes that means it's not accessible or detailed enough, but most of the time it's just lazy people who can't use the forum search or read the wowwiki FAQ. But when it comes to constructive criticism, suggestions, thanks or bug reports we can never get enough! There's nothing that makes my day more than someone just writing a little note to say they use my software and it makes their WoW time all that more enjoyable (of course donations make me smile too =D ).

Curse: For users who may not have experience with the Cosmos package, could you describe what Khaos is?

KarlKFI: Cosmos is a collection of addons written by a select group of authors dedicated to user friendly GUI configuration and lots of options. To do this we use a subset of libraries that also helps to consolidate and reuse code. Khaos is the main GUI library in Cosmos. It manages stored variables in one place and allows users to create personal configuration profiles that they can swap between at will. Khaos is also available standalone for non-Cosmos users.

Curse: The Cosmos package now has 74 AddOns in its "Complete Distro." Looking back to the World of Warcraft Beta, did you ever imagine Cosmos becoming this big? What is it like managing a project that over 50 authors have contributed to?

KarlKFI: Cosmos has been large for as long as I can remember. Granted it's grown larger over the years, but not too substantially or quickly.

KarlKFI: Meh, not really. I'm not gonna make any major revisions to DamageMeters or work on many addons that parse the combat log due to the massive changes in store for it. Other than that I don't think they're introducing anything as catastrophically different as the taint system and the secure templates and state headers that.

Curse: If you could change one thing about the World of Warcraft API, and how it limits certain AddOn functionality, what would that be?

KarlKFI: Things get changed all the time. I think for the most part those changes are reasonable and have been for the better of WoW, but that doesn't mean I like them all. I want AutoTravel back!

Curse: Thanks for the interview, KarlKFI! Is there anything you'd like to say to your AddOn fans, or to Blizzard?

KarlKFI: Don't be a noob, read the Stickies!

Interview with ckknight - Cartographer, Fubar and more

Kody — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:40:08 GMT

As part of our special patch 2.2.0 event, we're reaching out to a number of the AddOn authors who have developed the AddOns we've all grown to love in World of Warcraft. Whether it's a Unit Frame, a bag mod, or a threat meter, you've probably used at least one of the AddOns these folks have developed. This particular interview is with ckknight - the developer of Cartographer, Fubar and Pitbull, CowTip and Parrot.

Curse: Could you tell us a little about your background in World of Warcraft and how you got into AddOn design?

ckknight: Basically, I had a very shoddy computer back in the day (around February '06), and I was trying to get the "perfect" UI, as many seem to do. I was using all sorts of addons like Discord and Titan and the like, and they were great, but they weren't really lightweight enough for me, so I decided that I'd better bite the bullet and put my programming capabilities to good use.

Curse: What was the first AddOn you worked on for World of Warcraft?

ckknight: My first addon was BossPanel, which I later renamed to FuBar. This was created mostly as a response to Titan. I had originally planned to help the author of Titan out, make it better, more efficient, etc., 'cept that he had been defunct and there was absolutely no good documentation for it. Therefore, it was more effective for me to create my own addon (which I learned a lot from the process) than to try to hack Titan.

Curse: How has being an AddOn author changed the way you play World of Warcraft and how you interact with fellow players?

ckknight: Well, players tend to give me gratitude if I mention in passing that I've created an addon that they use, but all-in-all, it doesn't seem to change all that much. I really don't play all that often, since I find coding more fun. Just the other day, I dinged 51 for the first time. Currently, I'm in a guild with a fellow addon developer, which means that all the other guild members have already been broken in, which has made things a lot easier with regards to trading advice and the like with them.

Curse: By the same token, has it changed your view of the work Blizzard has done with the game?

ckknight: Yes, it's certainly a different light. If addons didn't exist in WoW, I sincerely doubt that I'd play, and I know that quite a few others would have less reason to play as well.

Curse: How badly did WoW 2.0 affect the AddOns you were working on at the time? Did it require you to re-design any of the core features?

ckknight: All-in-all, no. At the time, my only big addon was FuBar, as well as accompanying plugins. For Ace2, which I am also a prominent developer of, I had to change how the hooking system worked, since the old version was then unusable due to the new securities system. Also, because of WoW 2.0, myself and andreasg (another developer) created the addon Click2Cast, which allows for click-casting of spells on unit frames.

Curse: Were any of your AddOns "killed," so to speak, by WoW 2.0?

ckknight: No, though I'm glad I didn't start PitBull (Unit frames addon) before WoW 2.0, since it would've had to have been completely redesigned.

Curse: Are there any AddOns you'd like to work on in the future?

ckknight: I'm not 100% sure. Something will create an itch that badly needs scratching, and on that day, a new project will be made.

Curse: You were one of the coders of the Ace2 set of libraries. Are you happy with how they've turned out and what they've changed in terms of AddOn design?

ckknight: Ace2 is a relatively good framework, I wrote a significant majority of it. There are some warts with it now, which I'd like to see fixed in some way shape or form. I've recently began work on another addon framework, similar to Ace2, but written with proper hindsight about the scope of addons, the role of the community, what is needed in a framework, and what other frameworks (particularly Ace2) have gone through.

Curse: You're the creator of two incredibly popular AddOns, quite possibly some of the most popular in the world: Fubar and Cartographer. What lessons in AddOn design did working on these teach you?

ckknight: I have other addons than that, specifically PitBull (unit frames), CowTip (tooltip), and Parrot (floating combat text). The general lesson I've learned from these addons and all the libraries I've written is that modularity, componentization, and generally proper management of addons is the key. I made Cartographer component-based from the beginning. You're able to take out what you want, put in what you want, all in a very easy to handle way, both from the end user's and the developer's perspective.

Curse: Are there any new features you're working on for Cartographer?

ckknight: Oh, I really don't know, due to the modularity of the system, anyone's welcome to write what they want against it, and if it's good enough, I would be more than happy to include it.

Curse: One of your latest AddOn creations is called Parrot. For those not familiar with it, could you explain what it is?

ckknight: Basically, it's very similar to SCT or MSBT or Blizzard's Floating Combat Text addon. I made it in the hopes that everything would be decoupled from each other, and I've succeeded quite well. It's very featureful because of this, and very manageable. I basically took all the best parts from MSBT and all the best parts from SCT (just ideas, I didn't steal any code), as well as a few of my own ideas to make Parrot.

In reality, though, it's an addon made to eat crackers. It being a workable floating combat text addon is merely a side effect.

One feature that I put in Parrot that wasn't in other addons was icons. Next to each spell cast or heal or mana gain, etc. the spell that caused it to happen will show up next to it, it's very handy for visually oriented people like myself. (Fun fact: A week or so after I put this in, the author of SCT put it in his. Competition hooray!)

ckknight: I doubt it, honestly. As far as I can tell, they've reached a point where the only changes will be iterative and evolutionary, not revolutionary like WoW 2.0 was. I'm not concerned about the 3.0 move any more than I am about any other patch.

Curse: If you could change one thing about the World of Warcraft API, and how it limits certain AddOn functionality, what would that be?

ckknight: I want status bars that can be reversed properly. I've asked for this repeatedly, but neither Slouken nor anyone at Blizzard not responded to my requests. *sigh*. It's very useful to have them be able to go right-to-left or down-to-up, and it's currently done with addons through very nasty means.

Curse: Thanks for the interview, ckknight! Is there anything you'd like to say to your AddOn fans, or to Blizzard?

ckknight: It's important to know that I do this for free, and as a result, I'm relatively poor. If you use my addons and like em, please give a donation through paypal to ckknight@gmail.com - it really means a lot to me when my users do, and it's what keeps me going.

Alternatively, if anyone is willing to offer me a job, I'm looking for one and am relatively competent.