Battleground General

Battleground General is a small panel that appears in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. It shows you where all your team-mates are, and allows you to give specific orders to multiple people at once, along with other useful and fun features.

Getting started:

Once you have downloaded Battleground General and put it into your AddOns folder, you can open up WoW and set some keybindings. The most useful bindings are Show, Hide, Order by Class and Order by Position. I use Ctrl-S, Ctrl-H, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-P for these commands. Once you enter Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin the panel will appear and you can place it where it suits you. If the BGG panel doesn’t appear (which occasionally happens), using the "Show" keybinding or typing /bgg show will show it. It will show you where all your team-mates are and a red dot will indicate if they’re in combat. Ordering by class is self-explanatory. Ordering by position sorts players by where they are, with Alliance areas at the top and Horde areas down the bottom.

Giving commands

You can select players by shift clicking on them. This is different to targeting them as you can select multiple players. To order them around, use the Battleground Whisper command. For example you may select three players you want to defend the flag in WSG. Then you type:
/bgw stay on defence
The message "stay on defence" will be individually whispered to each selected player.

When you start, this won’t actually work, as BGG is by default in Sandbox Mode. Once you are confident to send real whispers, type /bgg sandbox off

You can also right-click on the five red buttons near the top for pre-made, hopefully grammatical, commands. I like the Battleground Whisper concept a lot more, so am deprecating using the buttons.

Do Not Whisper List

Not everyone will respond positively to being whispered to. As a responsible Warcraft citizen, you can maintain a list of players to whom whispering is not productive. Target the offending (offended?) player, or select them in the BGG window and type /bgg dnw on to avoid sending them more whispers. Type /bgg dnw help for more information about maintaining the list. This list will be valid for the whole account.

Organizing Groups

You may wish to issue commands certain groups of players. Use the the Store Group # and Recall Group # bindings (I use Shift-Ctrl-1 to store and Ctrl-1 to recall) to save and bring back your groups. Alternatively you may want the groups to follow raid groups (players in the same party can share auras and make use of Vampiric Touch for example). Type /bgg group on to be able to recall raid groups (ie. BGG groups will follow raid groups).

Advanced Stuff

If you’re not American you may prefer the area above the Flag Room floor in WSG to be called "1st floor" instead of "2nd floor". To change this, open up the file BGGConfig.lua and change the first line to ABGUseAmericanNames = false.

The Toggle Enemy List keybinding shows or hides a panel showing which enemy players have been seen where in Arathi Basin. It is useful for knowing whether a node can be defended or whether it will probably by overrun. Note that this information is imperfect, and that there may be enemy players as yet unseen. The panel automatically hides if you enter combat.

You’ve grabbed the enemy flag in WSG and got all the way back to your base. Someone on your team returns your flag, but you don’t notice until too late in the desperate struggle to keep yourself alive. Battleground General can help! Type /bgg warn on to get BGG to warn you that you can now capture the flag with a sound you can’t miss.

Lastly, for fun, type /bgg cheer on to get your character to perform a suitable positive or negative emote when you or the opposition capture the flag in WSG. You raise your fist in anger at Dumbflagcarrier.

1.3

(The previous (deleted) version of 1.3 had the wrong version number in the TOC file)

Ratios have been reversed in Arathi Basin to be more intuitive. 3:2 now means 3 friendlies and 2 enemies in an area.

Introducing the Battleground Whisper command! This will send a whisper to all selected friendly players. So if you select 3 players and type:

/bgw come to stables

"come to stables" will be whispered to each of these three players.

This is a powerful and potentially annoying feature, so it includes the ability to maintain a Do Not Whisper List:
/bgg dnw help - Show DNW options
/bgg dnw list - List DNW players in your current battleground
/bgg dnw list all - List all of your DNW players on every realm
/bgg dnw undo - Undo the last operation (only one level)

The following commands require either a targeted friendly player, or one or more selected players in Battleground General:
/bgg dnw on - Add player(s) to the DNW list
/bgg dnw off - Remove player(s) from the DNW list
/bgg dnw - Toggle the player(s) status (individually)

All chat and addon messages now go through ChatThrottleLib (thanks Mikk).

Battleground General can now warn you in WSG if you have the enemy flag and your flag is returned (ie. you can capture). To use or disable this, type:
/bgg warn on|off

Installation Guide

1. Exit "World of Warcraft" completely
2. Download the mod you want to install
   • Make a folder on your desktop called "My Mods"
   • Save the .zip/.rar files to this folder.
   • If, when you try to download the file, it automatically "opens" it... you need to RIGHT click on the link and "save as..." or "Save Target As".
3. Extract the file - commonly known as 'unzipping'
   Do this ONE FILE AT A TIME!
   • Windows
     • Windows XP a built in ZIP extractor. Double click on the file to open it, inside should be the file or folders needed. Copy these outside to the "My Mods" folder.
     • WinRAR: Right click the file, select "Extract Here"
     • WinZip: You MUST make sure the option to "Use Folder Names" is CHECKED or it will just extract the files and not make the proper folders how the Authors designed
   • Mac Users
     • StuffitExpander: Double click the archive to extract it to a folder in the current directory.
4. Verify your WoW Installation Path
   That is where you are running WoW from and THAT is where you need to install your mods.
5. Move to the Addon folder
   • Open your World of Warcraft folder. (default is C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\)
   • Go into the "Interface" folder.
   • Go into the "AddOns" folder.
   • In a new window, open the "My Mods" folder.
   • The "My Mods" folder should have the "Addonname" folder in it.
   • Move the "Addonname" folder into the "AddOns" folder
6. Start World of Warcraft
7. Make sure AddOns are installed
   • Log in
   • At the Character Select screen, look in lower left corner for the "addons" button.
   • If button is there: make sure all the mods you installed are listed and make sure "load out of date addons" is checked.
   • If the button is NOT there: means you did not install the addons properly. Look at the above screenshots. Try repeating the steps or getting someone who knows more about computers than you do to help.

Translations

When you download a mod, please be sure that the mod is compatible with your translation of wow. Some mods only work on the US versions, while some only work on some of the various European versions. These variations are called "Localizations".

TOC Numbers (Out of Date Mods)

When Blizzard patches WoW, they change the Interface number. This means that all mods will be "out of date" unless or until the author releases a new version for that interface. Some people go into the .toc files and update the numbers themselves, but this is STRONGLY advised against as it will cause problems locating possible incompatibilities addons. When you log into WoW after a patch, you DO NOT have to delete your interface directory. All you have to do is simply tell WoW to ignore the interface numbers and load all the mods anyway. All you have to do is, while at the "character select" screen, look in the lower left corner and click on the "addons" button. A window will pop up listing all your installed mods.

If you look in the upper left corner of that window there should be a box that says "Load Out of Date AddOns". You want to CHECK this box. Now simply go into WoW normally and all your mods should load. As of the 1.9 patch, you will have to do this after EVERY patch/update that Blizzard posts! If you encounter any problems with a mod after a patch, please be sure to let the author of the mod know so they can fix it.

See also: About "Out Of Date AddOns"

Mac Support

WoW addons are not platformed based. As such, they can be used on either Mac or PC. You can extract both .zip and .rar files on a Mac using StuffitExpander.

Directory Structure

World of Warcraft
    |_ Interface
        |_AddOns
            |_*AddonName*
                |_ *AddonName*.toc
                |_ *AddonName*.xml
                |_ *AddonName*.lua
                |_ (possibly others as well)...