So, my wife was running Karazhan for nostalgia's sake, and man ... that was a fail PUG.  I've seen bad pugs before, but this one was like taking kindergartner's on a field trip.  Everybody was just wandering around saying "I wonder what's in this room.  Oh look, more mobs!  Oops, I just pulled two groups and a pat, lol!"  I joined up on my feral tank to try to help lead this thing and actually finish it, and after two (inadvertant) pulls, everything stopped.  We were disconnected.  I hate that limbo where you're just sitting there, nobody's moving, and you're just waiting for the graphics to freeze while it logs you out, and then says "You've been disconnected from the server".  (Gee, ya' think?)  Usually, if we d/c, either it's just a network blip and we reconnect, or my (aging) router needs reset again, or our Comcast service is out for an hour or two.  This time was ... quite different.

I was trying to figure out exactly why we had lost Internet connectivity, when I heard squelching radios and running feet in the corridor outside my unit in the apartment complex.  When I poked my head out to see what was happening, one lady ran down the hall yelling that there was a fire on the 6th floor, get everything important and get out.  We thought someone had a cooking fire in their apartment or something, we were all going to go freeze our butts off for a half hour outside, then go back in.  But ... just in case, I unplugged my desktop, grabbed my laptop, and we evacuated.  Then the firetrucks started arriving.  Then more.  Then more.  Then we could see the smoke coming from the roof.  Then it erupted in flame.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=5068603

I'm now homeless.  We're staying with my in-laws for now.  <sigh>  As soon as we can get allowed back in the building to see if anything survived, I expect funds are about to get a lot tighter for us.  Plus, I'll be needing to put in a lot more time at work.

So, it's been a great ride.  I've loved the chance I've had to make some (amateurish) mods and host them here.  I've loved pugging Mag with you all pre-nerf.  I loved getting into the beta when DK's had to make a quest turn-in macro to get past their 4th quest because the quest giver was hovering too high off the ground.  I've loved every class I've played (76 mage, 70 feral druid, 70 ret pally (I meant to go holy with him, but he only finally dinged 70 after wotlk), 63 dk, 30 shaman).  I've loved it all, but I just can't continue with it for awhile.

Anyways, thank you all, and goodbye!

I remember one of my first friends in my guild, Shinerbok... He loaned me some money for my epic ground mount when I was 63 and sick of my slow one, and we enjoyed leveling together. He just about stopped at 62 or 63, though. I was sad, but ... as they say, Real Life Happens. Sometimes I'm tempted to say, "Real life, schmeal life! What could be more important than WoW?", but ... I know that tha's not a very good attitude to have.

Recently, my guild has been in need of my 1337 DPS for Kara / ZA, but sometimes ... I just can't go. Why? Cuz I had a date with my girlfriend. Or cuz it's not an official date, but we're working on homework together, etc. etc. etc. They've been patient with me, cuz it's good to be nice to people in the RL world, and it's not like that could really affect my WoW time all that significantly...

Oops, scratch that. Now my girlfriend has finally overcome her fears, concerns, worries, doubts, and reservations, and we're ready to move on with this relationship. So I proposed last week, and we're getting married on December 28th! (Yes, I know it's a little fast, but we want to be together before the homework starts again...)

Now that we're more than "just dating", I find myself wanting to spend ALL of my time with her, and what I spend on WoW is mostly time that I can't spend with her. And once we're married, I know I'll have a lot more demands on my time. Although I'd like to think I'd still get some decent raiding time in with my guild, I'm fairly certain that I'd almost never play, and certainly, my $15 / month would go to waste. And if it doesn't, then that would mean I'm not focusing enough on the things that I need to.

The end result is that I think this upcoming month is my last in the World of WarCraft. Maybe I'll pick it up again when WotLK comes out. Maybe not, I don't know, but for now, my path is clear. I shall certainly miss this place. My time here has been one of wonder and excitement, deep and true friendships, and bitter hot fury (stupid allies!!!). It's been a time for me to put my Computer Science major to good use (I've been maintaining two mods), and relax from the stresses of regular life. It's been a challenge to learn the mechanics and complexities of so many different classes, and a stress-reliever to just sit in UC and fish up [Old Skulls] till I hit 375!!!

To everyone who has helped make my time here what it has been, I wish to express my profoundest thanks and gratitude. As my addons folder has 221 subfolders in it, that means most everyone who's ever published a mod. (lol I know, a slight exaggeration) More seriously, even if I don't use your mod, your mod has inspired others to learn modding, as I've been inspired. It's a grand, self-sufficient community that I'm proud to have been a part of.

My thanks are also out to my guild, my friends, the people who have randomly given me 10g for ports, and everyone I've ever pugged with. My whole server rocks. There have even been times where I'll meet an Ally questing, and instead of ganking me, we work on the quest together and do our best to communicate with emotes! To you allies, my hat is off. And lastly, to Curse for having a beautiful, well-organized, and well-populated addon site, I thank you.

I mentioned earlier that I have two mods. If anyone is interested in taking over them for me, send me a message and tell me. I want them to have nice responsible homes. I always wanted to make OnScreen Aced, but I never got around to it. Hope someone can do it for me.

Enjoy your time, don't gank the opposing faction (too much), and PLEASE go dominate ZA for me!

Love, ~Jzar (70 frost mage, Spirestone)

Before I began playing WoW, I played Guild Wars. <gathp!> I actually really enjoyed it and still do, though it's different enough from WoW, I'm sure most players couldn't go from WoW to GW and enjoy it. One of the things that bugged me about Guild Wars was that you could walk into Lion's Arch anytime of day or night, and general chat would be full of people spamming the "golds" they wanted to sell. No, not gold, in GW, "golds" means the highest quality, or gold, items. And they would spam this over and over and over. I never made any money with GW, because even when I got a decent gold item I could sell, I didn't have inclination to spend my time in game sitting around in the cities spamming the poor general chat with my endless pleas for a buyer to care about what I had for sale.

So you can see how much of a revelation it seemed to me when my 10-day trial of WoW expired, and I was finally forced to begin shelling out the fees for a monthly subscription, and I finally gained access to an auctionhouse. It was like my world had summersaulted!!! No more crappy spam about everything you're selling, just go plop it on the ah, go to bed, and you wake up and all your primals are sold, and you've got 100 more gold. Great!

Except ... the trade channel is STILL full of spam!!! Some of that is people who are looking for a more immediate buyer for high demand goods, some of it is people looking for items that may be on someone's person, that aren't available on the ah. These are fantastic uses of the trade channel. The remainder of what makes up trade chat, however, is the focus of today's blog: Tradeskills.

Tradeskills in my mind, are just like any other item for sale in an MMO. A service is rendered for a fee. The auctionhouse does a great job of hooking people who already have a finished product to sell up with a buyer. So why can't we have something that hooks people who don't yet have a finished product up with a buyer? That would reduce traffic in the trade channel tremendously, and further expedite us being able to get on with our game.

There exists a forum for each server, with a list of rare tradeskills, and some people who have them. I browsed that list for some of the enchants and cloth patterns I need, added everyone it listed to my friends list, and was able to easily get some great new stuff. But obviously, something external to WoW itself is insufficient.

What I envision is something similar. A forum perhaps. You register with it, it scans your tradeskills and for a daily membership fee, say, makes all your craftables listed on the tradeskill auctionhouse. List what prices you charge along with any skills that are more valuable, if you wish. Then when I have the mats and am ready to buy my [Spellstrike Hood], I go to the crafting ah, and search for it. I find three people who are listed as having it, and currently being online. Player A charges 70g for the nether, B charges 80g, C charges 90g. For a small percentage of the value of the good being negotiated, the ah allows me to see the names of Players A B and C. I whisper Player A, but alas, he's running Kara right now. Darn. So I whisper Player B, and he's farming [Netherweb Spider Silk] in Terokkar. We party up, meet, and 30 seconds later, I have my [Spellstrike Hood].

That's one image I have of how this works. Perhaps the mechanics would have to be tweaked tremendously to make it actually work. I don't care about the specifics. I just like this thought because he's off making money farming, and I don't have to spend all my time in the city just trying to find someone to craft my junk.

I've thought of a few ways to create some kind of private registry of people who have patterns using a mod to farm the trade / general chat channels and then it just tells me anyone it has in its database associated with that skill, and spits out a list of names. But that would never be as useful or efficient as if Blizzard were to implement this themselves, because ideally, I don't want to have anybody NEED to be wasting away their day in a city hawking their services OR trying to find a tradesman for them.

In one of the blue summaries I read recently, it said that Blizzard was still hanging onto the idea of someday providing housing in WoW. I think that would be cool to have a house. However, I think it would be much cooler to buy a SHOP. Perhaps instead of my previous idea, they create a "shopping mall". Since most tradesmen will be out doing stuff rather than sitting at their booth, those who ARE there will have their booth moved to a spot in the center of the enchanting sector. Those who aren't, but have purchased a stall, will have a sign which is visible with a small menu of craftables and prices sitting on their stall in an expanding ring (or square) around the people who ARE sitting in their stall. Then you can literally go window shopping! Wouldn't that be fun? Or perhaps if I want to pay more, I get a bigger shop with two levels. Then maybe I get two apprentices and go farm lots of mats to help them level their enchanting up, as long as they stay and man my shop and whisper me when someone wants to buy one of my chants.

Anyways, I think there are a lot of ways, more efficient and / or more creative to mandate dependency on other players through tradeskills than just making us shout in trade chat till we're horse that we're looking for Enchant Weapon - Soulfrost, or whatever freaking rare chant you may be in need of.

Granted, QuestIon is not *MY* mod, in that I didn't code it from scratch. Much thanks go to Celdor and Jefftyjeff for that. But I picked it up, added several good features to it, and I feel a certain amount of satisfaction when I see it's download count rising, and when I hear good things about it.

Back when I first posted QuestIon, I remember it was on the "Curse - New" list for several days, at least. Maybe close to a week. It good some really good attention in that time. Its downloads for a few days looked like it might very quickly supercede Monkey Buddy (forgive me for naming the beast...). However, it left the "New" list eventually, and now people cannot find their way to the addon nearly as easily. Which is too bad, really, because I've heard nothing but good about it.

That's OK, there's always the Curse - Updated list to help people see the mod's name, and see that it's still in active development. The first update to QuestIon I posted, like the "New" post, stayed up for a few days. Did it ever occur to me to post a new "bug fix" every few days or so to make sure it's always on the list so people can see it? Of course it did. Would I, as a programmer, stoop that low? Of course not! I'm content with the time in the spotlight my baby is given. Fair's fair.

I just posted my first all-original addon yesterday, OnScreen. Did it receive the same treatment QuestIon did? Not by a longshot! Today, it's already off the What's New list. And what is it that's put it off the one place where somebody might actually notice my little mod? Mostly guild / raiding packs, and UI compilations.

Here we go, I'm ready to rant... I'm a fan of modding your UI, as much as the next guy. There are some really impressive looking ones out there. Granted, I haven't tried any of them, because pretty much, I really like my UI just the way it is, after having fiddled with it every day for 70 levels. So, all these UIs that people keep posting... Seriously, how many different versions of "There Are So Many Buttons On My Screen's 1337 Rogue UI" do we need? I seriously think people should quite wasting their time on UIs, with the exception of those who make genuine contributions to the package (e.g., Mazzle) and do more than "This is a collection of my mods, along with the savedvariables files that tell the UI elements where to go".

What we need is a UI shopping center. You go, and check that you want replacements for your actionbars, your bag, your minimap, your buffsframe, your unitframes, etc. Then you look in the extras section, and say "Ooh, those look nice. I'll also take a damage meter and a boss assistance mod, plus my guild would really probably appreciate me having a threatmeter. Then, just like buying a computer, it takes you through your options one screen at a time. It shows you what the UIs look like for Bartender3 vs. Bongos2, vs. Trinity, (with screenshots and short explanations of the major differences). You check the one you like.

Same thing for all the UI elements. When you're done, the website prepares your zipfile for you, you download the whole thing into your Interface/Addons folder, and when you get into wow, you have to spend 5 whole minutes configuring it and sticking it all in convenient locations. No more time and space wasted with "I updated the version in the .toc for one of the mods in this UI I once found on some random website, and also unwittingly contaminated the zip with a virus. Now I'll upload it to curse!"

What else pushed OnScreen out of the "New Mods" list? Guild raiding packs!!! Even more than full UI compilations, these irritate me. Seriously, how hard is it to say, "If you want to benefit from the guild bank, get DuckieBank. If you want to raid with us, get KTM (or Omen, if you're me...) and DBM or BigWigs. and GroupCalendar." Just make a bloody list, and give it to your members! There's NO NEED WHATSOEVER for these stupid guild raiding packs!

And on that note, these so called "Guild Required Addons Packs" have the most ridiculous mods in them! Auctioneer is not required for raiding. AtlasLoot is not even required for raiding. MobInfo2 has nothing to do with guilds! These are three of my favorite addons, but why in the world would you say, "This is the guild required pack. You must have these to be in our ub3r guild!" when the mods don't even have any effect or bearing on the guild or its interaction with the player? It's ridiculous!

Anyways, once again, I put forth my petition for some way to share "My Favorite Mods" with people by just pointing them to my Curse profile. See my first blog entry on that point.

<sigh> Someday, I pray that Curse will once again become a good Addon repository. For right now, WoWInterface is a much better place for getting actual work done, and seeing quality addons. Curse has quickly become the MySpace of WoWAddons, and it nearly makes me cry.

OK, so I got a great idea for a new mod yesterday in Karazhan for my first time ever. When you're raiding, there's too much on screen general, so I realized that I really don't usually need my minimap when I'm fighting, and I usually don't need Omen when I'm not. So I thought I'd just write something that switches them for me, so I can make them overlap with no serious consequences.

As I was testing it out last night (and there several bugs in version 0.01) some stupid effing hunter came up to me and ganked me while I was in the middle of a /console reloadui. (Well, /rl for me, but you get the idea)

I was so freaking upset! Here I am, not trying to steal his kills, or his bloody motes of fire, or kill him or anything. Just standing there reloading my UI and he ganks me. Not only does he gank me, but he camps me, and it takes me 15 minutes to get back to Shadowmoon Village and try to cool down so I could get back to my code.

I was sorely tempted to write a function that extracts the server name and player name, and if they matches that SOB ally, write blank hooks into every function I could think of and break his entire freaking UI. lol Not that in reality, I expect most of the WoW user base would ever even hear of my mod. But it was a comforting thought.

For anyone who's a big PvP person, I just ask this: Don't gank the opposing faction when they're just standing there. He may be writing an update to your UI, to KTH (or better yet, Omen) or just about anything. Just let him reload his UI and get on with the coding!

Well, I've looked at LUA files before, when I wanted WoW to behave differently than default. I'm a CS student in college, so I thought that programming background would make it EASY! I mean, how hard could just swapping around a couple of variables and stuff be?

Well, as it turns out, not only was I unfamiliar with LUA (and familiar with Java / C++ / C#, which have very different syntax for ... well, pretty much everything...), but I didn't realize how big the WoW API was, or the Widget API, or how many different events, etc... The method of combining XML and LUA (and macros, at times!) is still rather foreign to me, I don't really understand it. So given all of the previous, I pretty much abandoned every attempt I would periodically make at doing anything significant to my UI by myself.

Until a few days ago when I found QuestIon. The original author hasn't been heard from in almost a year, and then it was picked up four months later by another, who released like, three versions or so, and then he too was never heard from again. "Too bad," I thought. "There are lots of good ideas in the comments on wowinterface.com for good additions to this mod."

The cool thing about QuestIon is that it's flexible enough to dynamically make a list of quests to watch, and it gets out of your way and disappears when you're not using it, but comes back quickly with just a teeny tiny mouseover. The problem that I first discovered with it was that if you tell it to show all the quests within 2 levels of you, it would display that. And if you told it to show all the quests in your current location, it would display that. But if you checked both options, it would display the UNION of those two sets, where to me, I thought very naturally that it should display the INTERSECTION instead. So, I was once more motivated to start digging into the code.

It was frustrating at first. For one, this is not an Ace2 addon, meaning that all the code for creating the cascading menu is all right in the addon. It's BIG! (Or at least, it looked that way at first). First, I tried searching for the text on the button I'd click to toggle the filtering. After a while, I found the text, and sure enough, it was in the localization.lua!!! So I linked that text to a constant, found THAT in the addon itself, and finally had myself a starting point!

Eventually, I did fix it. But then I had another idea. So I was able to hack that one out real quick. And I read all the comments that others had made on other sites, and I thought, yeah, that'd be really cool if someone could do that. Someone who ... knows the code. At that point, I realized that was me. I DID kind of already know the code, I was getting familiar with the method of registering events, parsing them, controlling structure, etc. So, I tracked down the easiest to implement items first, and went for it.

I looked all over inside other mods to understand how they achieved their effects. I like to think this was more because I didn't know the WoW API than that I suck as a programmer. (Thanks here go to the respective authors of CT_Core, Fizzwidget Levelator, and TipTac) Then I incorporated them into QuestIon!

Good to go! With a few minor last polishing tweaks, and two bugfixes later, I have a once-more stable mod, with all new features. I've posted it here (check it out, if you haven't already) and on WoWInterface.com. (Curse is apparently by far the more popular site. Certainly, it looks nicer.  :) ) Anyways, I feel very satisfied to have been able to contribute to the community, finally. School's starting again next week, and I may just have to cancel my WoW account for the semester, but I was glad to be able to at least be some small benefit to my fellow Horde.

Too bad there's no way for Curse to filter out players who's mains are Allies and prevent them from downloading this...  ;) Just kidding!

I wish Curse had some kind of notepad sectino for my profile. Oh well, I suppose blogging will suffice. The following are the mods that I have installed. Please use them ALL!

• !Swatter
• AdvancedTradeSkillWindow
• ArkInventory
• Atlas
• AtlasBattlegrounds
• AtlasDungeonLocs
• AtlasFlightPaths
• AtlasLoot
• AtlasMajorCities
• AtlasOutdoorRaids
• AtlasOutlandsMaps
• AtlasQuest
• Auctioneer
• BeanCounter
• BetterItemCount
• BigGuild
• Blizzard_AuctionUI
• Blizzard_BattlefieldMinimap
• Blizzard_BindingUI
• Blizzard_CombatText
• Blizzard_CraftUI
• Blizzard_GMSurveyUI
• Blizzard_InspectUI
• Blizzard_ItemSocketingUI
• Blizzard_MacroUI
• Blizzard_RaidUI
• Blizzard_TalentUI
• Blizzard_TradeSkillUI
• Blizzard_TrainerUI
• BonusScanner
• BtmScan
• CECB_Debuffs
• CECB_Options
• CECB_PvEModule
• CECB_PvPModule
• CEnemyCastBar
• ChatMOD
• CleanChat
• ClickInvite
• CraftList2
• CT_BarMod
• CT_BottomBar
• CT_BuffMod
• CT_Core
• CT_ExpenseHistory
• CT_MailMod
• CT_MapMod
• CT_RABossMods
• CT_RaidAssist
• CT_Timer
• CT_UnitFrames
• CT_Viewport
• DagAssist
• DBM_API
• DBM_AQ20
• DBM_AQ40
• DBM_Battlegrounds
• DBM_BlackTemple
• DBM_BWL
• DBM_GUI
• DBM_Hyjal
• DBM_Karazhan
• DBM_MC
• DBM_NAXX
• DBM_Other
• DBM_Serpentshrine
• DBM_TheEye
• DBM_ZG
• DoubleWide
• DrDamage
• DruidBar
• DuckieBank
• DuckNet
• eCastingBar
• Enchantrix
• EnhTooltip
• ErrorRedirect2
• FB_OutfitDisplayFrame
• FB_Titan
• FB_TrackingFrame
• FishingBuddy
• FlightMap
• GFW_DisenchantPredictor
• GlowFoSho
• GroupCalendar
• HatTrick
• ImprovedCamera
• Informant
• KLHThreatMeter
• Klik
• KlikCast
• KlikConfig
• KlikTooltips
• LevelRange
• LevelSnap
• LightHeaded
• LightHeaded_A20_Data
• LightHeaded_A40_Data
• LightHeaded_A60_Data
• LightHeaded_A80_Data
• LightHeaded_deDE_Data
• LightHeaded_H20_Data
• LightHeaded_H40_Data
• LightHeaded_H60_Data
• LightHeaded_H80_Data
• LightHeaded_NPC_Data
• LightHeaded_Quest_Data
• LootCount
• LootLink
• MapLibrary
• MobInfo2
• MobMap
• MobMapDatabaseStub1
• MobMapDatabaseStub10
• MobMapDatabaseStub11
• MobMapDatabaseStub12
• MobMapDatabaseStub13
• MobMapDatabaseStub2
• MobMapDatabaseStub3
• MobMapDatabaseStub4
• MobMapDatabaseStub5
• MobMapDatabaseStub6
• MobMapDatabaseStub7
• MobMapDatabaseStub8
• MobMapDatabaseStub9
• MozzFullWorldMap
• Nauticus
• Omen
• OptionHouse
• Outfitter
• QuestIon
• ReagentRestocker
• RecipeRadar
• sct
• sct_options
• SC_ChaChing
• Sea
• simpleMinimap
• Skinner
• Spellcraft
• Stubby
• SuperInspect
• SuperInspect_UI
• SW_FixLogStrings
• SW_Stats
• SW_Stats_Profiles
• SW_UniLog
• TheoryCraft2
• TipTac
• TipTacOptions
• Titan
• TitanAggro
• TitanAmmo
• TitanBag
• TitanClock
• TitanCombatInfo
• TitanCoords
• TitanDagAssist
• TitanEmoteMenu
• TitanFriends
• TitanGuild
• TitanItemBonuses
• TitanLootType
• TitanMail
• TitanMoney
• TitanNauticus
• TitanOutfitter
• TitanPerformance
• TitanRegen
• TitanRepair
• TitanRider
• TitanSkills
• TitanTradeCooldown
• TitanXP
• TNE_LowHealthWarning
• Trinity
• TrinityBars
• XPerl
• XPerl_ArcaneBar
• XPerl_GrimReaper
• XPerl_Options
• XPerl_Party
• XPerl_PartyPet
• XPerl_Player
• XPerl_PlayerBuffs
• XPerl_PlayerPet
• XPerl_RaidAdmin
• XPerl_RaidFrames
• XPerl_RaidHelper
• XPerl_RaidMonitor
• XPerl_RaidPets
• XPerl_Target
• XPerl_TargetTarget
• XPerl_TeamSpeak
• XPerl_Tutorial