f13.net

Blizzard has a new add-on policy (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/ui.html).  Short version: Don't mess with our shit, don't tease the MPAA's inbred videogame rating lovechild, and don't you DARE try to make money off of your addons.

Unlike some policy changes, this one has a very definite cause: Carbonite.  For those unfamiliar with it, Carbonite is either a stripped-down free quest addon OR a full suite of addons that costs a small monthly fee.  Last week, the developer issued a new version, Carbonite Ads, which is the full version with in-game popup ads.  There have been for-pay addons for a very long time, but not many.  There were a set of proprietary raid frames that eventually went free, WoW Econ, and various leveling guides.  All of them managed to not cross a very simple line:

Do not run ads in WoW.

It will be a cold day in hell before Blizzard allows gold spam or ads for their competitors in game, even if the user requested them.

Ahm, it's optional?

ALL addons are optional.

There are other impacts - Mundocani (the author of Outfitter http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5467-Outfitter.html and GroupCalendar) and ZorbaTHut (QuestHelper http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=9896&so=&page=2#info - who claimed he actually tries to live on QH donations) are also throwing in the towel because of the no-ads policy.

First two are going to be missed (kinda) but their functionality has been whittled away by Bliz updates to the client. QH and Carbo are competitors and if you're feeling tinfoil-hattish you might contrive this as a scheme by Carbo to get banned and put QH out of biz. (QH doesn't have a "pro" version.)

Yes, I meant the Ad Carbonite. Nothing in the text implies that they discontinued the ad-free lite version , hence the question.

The new policy is here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/ui.html

IANAL but like to pretend I'm one on da interwebs. Isn't this policy basically constraining >>me<< from using an addon like this? Can Bliz go after the addon author that >>I<< choose to use? Or is this basically Glider2 and protecting their IP/revenue stream by not (just?) banning me for using the addon but going after the author for collusion to interfere with their revenue stream?

I originally thought they were just after annoying ingame ads, but now it looks like there is no contractual revenue allowed, only donations. I wonder if addon authors can just "allow" for an "optional" recurring "donation" that comes with a "free gift" (cf my latest donation to NPR Chicago and the "free" CD I got with it.)

It's hit /. so it must be Real News.

This sucks the big one. I use Questhelper every day. Here's what zorba (he's a goon, if you didn't know) says:

Sorry, misunderstood!

The problem for people like Zorba is that there'll be another addon to replace QH. If he gives up the project the someone else will take it up or make something similar. Gives the mod authors very little leverage to use to try and convince Blizz to change this policy or make exceptions of any kind.

Competition always drives things down to the lowest common denominator and that is "free" then that's what the market will bear  :oh_i_see:

You would think, except that there was nothing really like it in what, 2.5 years prior to him releasing it. At some point it becomes complicated enough that no one can do it for free - mostly due to the fact things have to be kept constantly up-to-date.

Sorry, I'm trying to re-orient my moral outrage compass, can you point me in the direction of the outrage?

People are pissed because Blizzard is "breaking" addons that let people EZ-MODE level alts by letting you bypass wowhead or looking at actual quest text. Note, they aren't saying you can't use them, they are saying that you can't make cash off it in their domain, which the authors don't want to do.

If you don't have alts or you don't care about using quest helping addons, this effects you none.

I'm about 4 levels on my shaman from really ever giving a shit again and with 2 shots through the content I should have this stuff memorized.  :awesome_for_real:

I just really don't care though. 

As for addons that replicate QuestHelper/Carbonite... I've been using TourGuide (http://tekkub.net/addons/TourGuide) for months.  It's awesome-fantastic if you're Alliance, and slightly less so as Horde (not much Northrend stuff at this point).

Plus, it works with TomTom (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7032-TomTom.html) and Lightheaded (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7017-LightHeaded.html) which I've used for as long as they've been out.

As to the actual policy change, I know a handful of Ace/Rock that have a Donate section in their configurations (Parrot for example has a button that brings up a chat-box with a link) but don't do any sort of in-game requests besides that.  I wonder if those will need to be stripped out?

The outrage is that the new policy hurts good people.  There are several developers that live off of donations.  They are able to do so because they created a good thing and have continued to support it.  Now they probably wont be able to live off of donations.

---

I'm revising my theory.  I still think Carbonite is the proximate cause, but not because of the ads.  Blizzard's policy on addon development has been simple: If you can do it, have fun - except for cross faction communication.  They acknowledged that cross-faction communication addons are pretty trivial to write and they probably can't stop them.  It's the one thing you are not allowed to do that the Lua code does allow.  With that in mind, let's go back in time to the Suggested Addon's thread.


If Carbonite also mined data from carbonite users not from your faction and gave you their locations on your map, they indisputably broke the ONE RULE.  Until the ad-supported version came out, this feature was not widely known because very few people are willing to pay for an addon.  They knew this shit was out of line because look at their list of Map features (http://www.carboniteaddon.com/mapfeatures.aspx).  They don't mention the hostile player tracking at all, despite that being a killer app.  Now the ad-supported version comes out and everyone, including Blizzard, finds out about this secret feature.

How is this any different than if Blizzard shut-down their servers tomorrow?  Never expect money when you're tying yourself to another person's product. Think of them as a small business owner who had one client and just lost that client. Do you feel bad for them, too, or do you call them a lousy business person?  With as infrequent as WoW patches are, if they're living off the income from a single add-on they could have been doing other work. I feel no sympathy.

I feel even less, realizing if they were living off the income I doubt they were reporting it fully to the IRS.  :why_so_serious:

The outrage isn't moral, although it may be phrased as such. People are upset that their favorite add-ons may not be updated for patches and they'll have learn how to play the game without them. Fewer people will work their asses off innovating and keeping their code current when they cannot expect to be reliably paid to do so.

A lot of good people also make their living off of RMT.  But it's not Blizzard's job to keep people employed.  And if they see something that goes against the spirit of the game it's their prerogative to put a stop to it.

How is releasing free addons and asking for donations to support you in a non-nagging manner 'against the spirit of the game'?

I'm ok with this policy. I think it's a pretty clear line: you do this because you want to, you hope that if you put up a tip jar where the DL's take place, it will happen. You do it, if you're thinking about money, as a loss-leader, the same way people do blogs or a lot of other online things. You're putting up your shingle, saying, "Look, I know how to do good things, I have ideas, hire me as a programmer or a designer or a consultant". Or you just love the game or like to tinker.

The moment you're flashing ads or reminders up in-game, in-client, I really do think you've crossed a line. If that's ok, why shouldn't I write an add-on that advertises my restaurant or small business or consultancy? I made the add-on, don't I have the right to be compensated? etc. This is a slippery slope where the sliding is already well visible.

That's the way I see it as well. Not really the slippery slope part, but the pandering in-game stuff. They can't stop people from donating to you, but they can stop you from running ads, donation or otherwise, in their game. Businesses frequently let others advertise for donations in their space, and others frequently don't.

Through an amazing coincidence, the free version of Carbonite no longer works.

Through a not quite as amazing coincidence, Carbonite pulled down all its free-user downloads (adware or otherwise) this weekend.

Hopefully this policy will be selectively enforced.  That is to say, if an addon author puts a non-intrusive donation link somewhere in their addon, Blizzard won't give a damn, but if they start putting it on the main UI of the addon or popping up donation requests/ads or anything ridiculous like that, they'll shut it down.

I suspect (and hope) it will be done that way, and they won't bother the guy that has an 'about' page that includes a donation link or a 'donate' button/menu option somewhere.  Of my addons right now one that is like this is DurabilityFu.  It has a donate option at the bottom of its right-click menu.  Completely inobtrusive, and I doubt Blizzard will seriously crack down on ones like that.

I can fully understand the policy. I mean in-game ad pop-ups by third party add-ons? Which company would want something like that.

Not only because of the power-levelling and gold spam. Just imagine the first 'find another horny person in your vicinity' ad popping up on the computer of a twelve-year old, that's a potential lawsuit waiting to happen.

I didn't even think about that part. The fact that there would be ads in a game I was running would be enough for me to shut it down. The fact that they were the type of sleazy internet ads we usually see would just be icing.

I can understand no in game ads or even no paid mods, but I'm disappointed that they aren't allowing voluntary no in game nag donations. That seems a bit silly--donations are trivial--and it also seems more than a little ungracious considering the game is almost unplayable without mods. (Well minus the fact that most if not all of their interface improvements have been taken directly from mods.)

I can't imagine playing WoW without questhelper. Actually I can imagine it, I have a flock of characters that never got above 35 because I could only tolerate so much tab to a webpage then put a tack on my map with the quest location and would play for a month and then quit. Maybe that puts me in the category of people who want to bypass content, I don't know. But I wanted to get up to a level I could group or raid at and QH made it pleasant and simple. I use eq2maps which has quest locations on it as well.

I play a very vanilla version of WoW: Gatherer, Auctioneer, Omen, Recount, and at times different raid frames none of which make me totally happy. So I guess I don't feel this that much because it doesn't change my own experience of the game. I don't do Questhelper or Carbonite and I don't feel them to be at all necessary to levelling up alts, etcetera. Maybe because I have a limited number of alts and stick mostly to one main, I suppose. But I understand what Blizzard's thinking here, and it's part of the careful stewardship (and yes, overly smothering at times) control they maintain over WoW.

Imagine a mod that when you started it up had a big window that said [donate now][no thanks] everytime you started wow. I seriously doubt wow is going to crackdown hard on hobs that put little unobtrusive links in their options menus.  This part is more than likely just pre-emptive now that they've said no to paid mods and in-game ads.

While I appreciate some mobs like questhelper etc part of me(the asshole part) just wonders how these people survived in older games since just reading the wow quest text literally spoonfeeds you what to do/where to go already.

I can imagine playing without QH, because QH is shit and oft-broken.  I tried it for WOTLK and it was so often wrong it was hilarious.  Then tack-on the quests that are deliberatly designed to break QH's handholding and it gets even more amusing.  (The Hodir quest where you have to collect 5 ice cores before gathering the shards is one example.)

You still have to read the quest text to do the quest. QH does little beyond automating OLDworld content for folks.  Great, but I've got that shit memorized by now, and it wasn't that hard to begin with. (Just time consuming with so many more run here, run there bits.)

I can do without Omen these days, but DKs don't seem to generate a ton of damage-based threat.  The only mods I truly can't live without are Auctioneer and Outfitter.  After 3.1 I won't even need one of those two.

For some the UI may be "unplayable" but that's your opinion.  Mine is you're so weaned on mods you won't even try playing without them.

Eh, the only add-on I use is Gatherer.  Don't use anything else and I've never really felt a need to.  Paying for mods never appealed to me, and having one pop up any kind of random ad of the sleazy internet variety would make me never use that add-on again, no matter how helpful.

I'd try, I'd just do poorly.  :awesome_for_real:  There's so much shit to watch while playing my DK. I have my UI set up to have a lot of material at eye level and in colors/sizes that I can actually see.  Hopping on to PTR to test some new specs, I ended up copying over most of my UI even if half of the shit didn't end up working.   

It was really be nice if Blizzard would just incorporate some of the more basic button bar and unit frame addon functionality into the base UI.  Hire some of these damn people get a real UI team working on this stuff.

Actually, with too much addon breakage, I could just go back to playing my shaman.  As annoying as it was, there was less to track and I played half of my time with it with my only mod being the CTMod raid functions.

Went through wotlk in 48 hours using carbonite lite. Had to read... two, maybe three...  5, tops... quests. Had a grand time. Yes, the mod is pretty much mandatory for a (i'm willing to bet) large parcel of the population.

Let's increase the arrogance, yes?
For some having to keyboard turn may be "unplayable" but that's your opinion. Mine is you're so weaned on mouses you won't even try playing without them.
For some being punched in the dick may be "unplayable", but that's your opinion. Mine is you're such a pussy that you won't even try playing like a proper man.

Now can we please drop the pseudo-hardcore train of thought? Seriously.

The only add-ons I would really miss are Grid and Unit Frames. The standard WoW unit and raid frames are really very poor.

I've never used a quest-helper addon, having wowhead on a laptop works just as well.

Questhelpers are great when you just want to powerlevel a character. I resubbed a few weeks ago and started a priest on a new realm to play with some friends, QH really helped with getting through the old content in a reasonable amount of time.

Other than that I'd not miss them.

The only two addons that would make my game so frustratingly unplayable that I would quit if they banned them would be:

Outfitter - Manually changing sets as a warrior when you are carrying around a minimum of two, well it just sucks. I'd imagine druids would flip out as well.
Omen - Fights are designed around it's use. If you are a healer it's irrevelent, but otherwise it's mandatory.

As for the rest I use, I could do without them. Recount, DBM, Atlas/loot, they are all just addons I keep for information rather than MUST HAVE!!!

I can't even imagine trying to tank without Omen - you'd have to rely on the little built-in floating percentages thing that Blizzard has going.

And ditto on Outfitter/Itemrack/Closetgnome - they're adding a built-in one though, so that's another mod I can uninstall.

I just hope that they have an interface for binding buttons to it, as I use a weapon swap macro.

I'm calling bullshit on that. I seriously doubt 'a large portion' is more than a few thousand users.

Also you read only 5 quests? Congratulations, you paid to be a robot. Seriously...i mean fucking seriously?! Who the hell is so goddamned lazy they can't spend 30 second to read a quest? Jesus christ it's not a fucking novella, most quests are hardly more than a paragraph.  It's people like you who piss me off in raids too since you are the ones asking "so why are we killing malygos?" and then I'm the one who has to explain it to you on vent gah, nerdrage!

I read every quest, worked a m-f job and still hit 80 within a week of the expansion.
Lazy sons of bitches.

I'm an admitted altaholic.  With that in mind, losing these quest helper mods would affect me quite a bit.  Not that I can't remember what to do for each quest.  I have all of them memorized (on the 5th time through now.)  It is the pure ease  at which they make looking at the map and determining where to go next or to develop a plan to hit all of the quests as you make a circle around the zone.  I absolutely hate travelling by any means, so making my trips more efficient with questing makes the game more enjoyable to me.  Without the mods, I'll be reduced to constantly opening and closing the quest log and my map to figure out where to go next.  Invariably, I'll find out I completely missed an area 3 minutes back in the zone and I'll be very annoyed.

Will I quit without it?  No.  Do I support Blizzard in what they are doing?  Yes.  I don't believe creating add-ons should keep anyone out of a "normal" job.  If they do, great.  If they don't, great.  I don't care.  If a person is using this to get their foot in the door someplace for a "real job," I think it is an awesome thing.  Don't make more of it than it is.   I do not pay for them myself and I do not want to see ads.  

For as much quality content and polish Blizzard can produce, the default WoW UI is pretty much a giant black eye on the game for me.  I've been using various character frame, raid frame, action bar, and bag addons for 3+ years now (not to mention all the others ... gatherer, auctioneer, outfitter, omen etc.). 

I mean just the fact that there's literally zero customization available in the default UI shows what an archaic pile of crap it is.  I could play with no addons without much issue ..... and I could also poke myself in the eye repeatedly, I don't plan on doing either anytime soon.

Since the game's launch they've only added 3 improvements to the default UI, enemy cast bars, scrolling combat text, and now threat with Wrath.  All of these things were very widely used addons before being added and Blizz's implementation of them ranges between crap and meh.   :oh_i_see:   So bad in fact that I still use addons for all of those features because they do it better and allow me to customize them to my liking.

I mean you know it's bad if the failboat that is Mythic managed to put out a default UI in WAR that puts yours to shame.   :uhrr:   Being able to move, re-size, and show/hide every UI element what a novel idea....

I'd like to say I have some hope that Blizzard will eventually get their act together in the UI department and one day I won't have to update 10+ addons every time there's a patch, but that hope was crushed long long ago.

I don't approve of not reading quests!

And you paid to read bad fanfic. Apples and oranges. While I can't be bothered to spend 30 sec reading a quest, I can be bothered to read through EJ's strats and learn to perform my given role at a level that far exceeds that of the majority. Epeen is srs fckn bzns.

I paid to see the pretty vistas and to kill the fools that chose me as their tank. I had fun. Those paragraphs are trite bullshit. You think that I ask why we're killing malygos? I've never asked why I'm killing anything, the answer has been the same from level 1: for loot.

But hey, god forbid that I play their game the way I want, eh?  :oh_i_see:
--
I quit! You can't touch me!  :why_so_serious:

Don't forget; this hits auctioneer and wowecon too. Possibly curse, though that's not an addon it's a addon aggregator.

Most of us here played for well over decade and have seen it all. WotLK has maybe 4-5 quest lines total where it is worth reading. Rest of it is Kill 10 rats para-phrased in 5 million different ways.

The biggest problem with 'led around by an addon' nitwits is that they don't know their way around the world at all, because every damn place they've been has just been following an arrow or a map location.  They never had to know the names of places or even which general direction or region of the zone the place was in, because they just followed an arrow or something.  I mean, people are generally pretty damn stupid about this sort of thing in the first place but oh have these addons bred a new generation of players that are even worse than I ever thought possible.

Don't be silly. It's not the add-on's fault. Retards will always be retards.

Even a retard gets wet when he's thrown in a river.  The addons give them a boat so they don't even have to ever come in contact with information.  I'm not sure that's a good analogy at all, but I think my point comes through enough.

So you are suggesting penalizing rest of the player base just to make retards work? Well, retards will quit, now you are just penalizing your player base.

Not according to some, due to the lack of an in game UI that has all bases covered.

Like I said, retards will always be retards.


 :oh_i_see:

Even after going through leveling process for more than 4 times, I am still frustrated by large number of quests. Kill Mangy Tigers in a zone where every second mob is some form of a Tiger... and only Mangy tigers count. Having quests with no clear directions to completion point. Having dungeon quests start in unrelated zones, after unrelated quest chains are completed. WotLK made great progress with number of dungeons... where quest giver for that dungeon ether sit right outside that dungeon or right inside that dungeon.

Running first time through a zone, I will not use addons and I will enjoy "experience" ... even if it is mostly Kill 10 rats. After first run through I will only care how to get to max level fastest and addons greatly help with it.

I'm in the retards will be retards camp on this one as well. I know people who get lost inside of dungeons they have raided at least 10 times. Most of us learn the general path the first time. If it's got wings and is complicated, maybe it takes a couple times. After the place is on farm, I should be able to drop you in any room and you immediately tell me where you are, and how to get to another location. Even if you can't, there are fucking dots on the minimap that tell you where everyone is. Yet, some still fail.

Some people just have no idea where they are at any time because they never ever pick their heads up off the floor. Or their meters.

Ummmm.... does Sunken Temple count?  :awesome_for_real:

ST is three damned circles! How is that confusing!

I still got lost in Kara after getting two different characters to exalted with Violet Eye.  I have a very bad sense of direction in game.   Northrend is a whole lot easier to navigate than previous iterations of the content.  Yet, I still have problems finding some mobs/areas with Blizzard's quest directions (if you read the text, sometimes they don't even give you basic ones).   Thus, I installed QH and use it when necessary.

I'm nearly positive that I'm not retarded.

And one of those circles is a special circle of hell reserved for the person who designed that instance.

It isn't the circles, it's the transition between the circles.


Identical, spiral staircases with no sense of distance traveled, those do lovely things to most peoples sense of direction.  :awesome_for_real:

How does it hit auctioneer?

(Please, god.  No.)

The only addon I really truly need is Grid.  I cannot fathom doing anything that can be done in raid form without it.

And all in that lovely shade of dark green.

The broken minimap dots for your group never helped either.

I'm confused.

My Carbonite (free version) continues to work.  It also has always had a "Punks" portion, where I can add players who I want to watch out for on the other side.  I used to have a mod that did the same thing - I'd put in a name and it would warn me when they were nearby.  I can't recall the name of it now.

Auctioneer isn't pay to use, is it?  I've donated but it's not required, from what I recall.

So what is the problem exactly again?  People can't charge for their mods, but they can still ask for donations, right?

I'm failing to see the sky falling somehow.

They're fixing this on the PTR.  They've incorporated into the base UI the ability to mouse over a target and the game will tell you what quests, if any, killing that will progress you on.

Well, that puts the kibosh on one reason for me to use QH.  The other, as Dren mentioned, is to make questing somewhat more efficient.  Instead of running all over randomly, I can pop open the map, and see where the heaviest concentration of quests are, or if I'm having a hard time finding what I'm looking for.  I still read quest text, I know my way around the zones, and instances.  Hell, I could probably find my way around with my eyes closed.

That said, they can bring the hammer down on Carbonite.  Or better yet, just remove the ability for the mod to gather information on the opposing faction like it does.  Too close to a radar hack for my tastes.

Just use TourGuide instead, or even a web-based levelling guide?

 :awesome_for_real:

It isn't hard, especially for those who have "seen it all," to glance over quest text to find the parts you "need" to know. You don't even know to kill 10 rats if you're skimming, you just need to know "rats."

I haven't had a mod installed since WotLK. The way half of them break after every patch pisses me off way more than any "problem" they solve. I've never felt I really needed Omen, even when I had it installed. I only ran it for the people who wanted to see where I was on threat. :P

http://www.wow-pro.com/node/599

Is completely brain-proof.  The addon form uses tourguide and tomtom.  So there's an arrow that points to everything from quest givers, down to making sure you get a flightpath and hearth in the right spot.  You can mouse over the thing if you get lost and he gives you like a sentence or two, so you don't really ever need to read silly quests (yea, some people just want to get it over with - shocking - what with the complex moral argument the dwarf makes to convince us to kill 8 snow worms they're missing).  And if you absolutely have to, he links you lightheaded too.  It basically takes all the posts from wowhead and allows you to read them in game whenever you read your quest text.  No more annoying alt-tabbing.  But you hardly ever even need that.

He's not done with the last couple zones of woltk though.  But from 1-75, it's money.  So money.  It's also free.  And I didn't see any advertising, or whatever.

That is also one of their "selling points" if you will.  That it's free and they don't advertise in-game.  Just a "if you liked this, feel free to donate" link on the webpage.

Cartographer has an addon that populates the map with dots, that's all I ever need.

Which is high irony, since this is one of the things QH does that I really, really like.  Adding insult to injury by getting the QH guy to quit then nicking his shit.

 :why_so_serious:

Unfortunately I don't wish this anymore, as their track record on copying user mods to their interface is so abysmal. Look at their extra bars compared to  any other bar mod, or their calendar. The only thing they've copied even semi successfully was SCT.

Most of the mods I use are to get rid of the (IMO) brain damage in their UI. Try to write a auto mount macro now they've fucked up the flyable conditional for macros. They still haven't added the ability to hot key macros, though they did provide an interface for mods to do it.

As to quest helper, I tried it for WoLK too, and didn't enjoy it much. I don't want to be led around by the nose and that was the only way the mod wanted to play. I was constantly playing with quest priorities to do the quests I wanted to do first.  I dumped it and picked up lightheaded which is perfect for me. Saves alt tabbing and the discussion copied from wowhead is nice for any gotcha's. Having used QH, though, I confess I do find it amusing watching all the QH users clustered in the same spot hunting mobs that are a zone wide spawn, like the bears in grizzly hills.

Some of us can't find our way out of a paper bag whether we use something like QH or not. Plus, all the places it matters are in instances and QH doesn't do anything there. Out of instances, WoW's effectively a single player game.

In fairness to QH, when it points you to spawns, it also gives you a coloured 'cloud' that tells you where they spawn.

Those guys who head straight to the arrow just arnae bright.

I'm not sure what Lum was talking about, but my Carbonite free-version still works.  I did have to go back a revision a few weeks ago when their latest version broke it self for some reason.  No issue, Curse had the older version back up by the time I went looking and I fixed it.  Still doing fine.

I don't use it to figure what to do or keep me from reading the quests.  I've done that without any help once.  It isn't fun enough, in and of itself, to want to do it again that way.  I want to make the most efficient use of my time to get my alts to 80 along with the large amounts of cash after 80.  The majority of my fun comes from doing instances with my guildmates and that all begins at 80.  The journey to 80 is fine and made only better by add-ons like Carbonite for alts.

The management of daily quests helps a ton too.  I'm sorry, I'm not going to read through each daily quest in detail everytime I accept it.  You guys seem to be discussing the first journey to 80 for your characters for some reason.   I would reccomend not using these programs for 1-80 for your first time.   That "game" for me stopped a long time ago though.

I'm just strange, after my first run to 80, I just remember where all the shit is.

What does it do for daily quest management? I don't read those quests either. You do them once a day. Click ?, click accept, go about the same circuit you do every day by memory. Go kill some slimes, walk outside and spear drake, land in city, walk to lake, kill elementals, douse fires, go try and find giants that everyone is killing, done.

Yeah, that's what I was referring to, the newest revision was intentionally broken. Since then the download page on Curse, WoW-Interface, and the addon's web site has been yanked. So, um, keep the version you have! (It'll probably break with 3.1, though.)

Full disclousure, I paid for a version of Carbonite. I don't use it anymore because I got tired of the upgrade nags and the adware stuff was just too scummy IMHO. Getting used to QuestHelper now... I'm not as fond of the interface but the featureset (minus PvP autotracking) is pretty much the same for what I need when levelling alts. Most of the time outside Northrend Tourguide is more than enough handholding, though.

I have always treated addons as potentially venemous snakes, and reading this thread vindicates my paranoia.

The nerdrage i would experience at the temerity of a fucking addon to stream adds to me would cause my skull to split and spew molten grey matter.

I did use x-perl for a long time during TBC, but now that rangecheck is built into the UI i dont give a fuck about that anymore either.  The only thing i miss as a healer in pug nax25 is grim reaper, so i could shut people up when the offtank taunts gluth and dies in less time then it takes to cast a flash heal.

If you don't raid, you don't need addons for anything really beyond simplicity. The addons for the single-player side of the game are entirely based around convenience, while boss fights are designed around the fact you are using certain addons in raids. Still, addons are on the whole a good thing if you aren't abusing them. If you carry more than 10, you are probably overdoing a bit, and the updates are crazy (essentially breaking your game on patch day for a good while). If you aren't carrying any at all, you're missing the point and most likely making your life a lot harder in the game than you need to.

Yes, but bless their dimness, it also means the other spawn points are typically empty and ready for pillaging with plenty of mobs.   This is even more true in the old world where things follwed EQ's "percentage of " spawn pattern.   Kill off only one type of mob in an area and they don't all respawn as that mob, just a certain % of them, leading to diminishing numbers of the 'right' mob as the 'wrong' mobs keep getting ignored.   

Hey.  Don't fuck with my arrow.  It never lies.

The one I linked with Jame's just arrows to all the different spawn points.  So ha.

Yeah, I basically use QuestHelper to get my alts through Northrend at this point.

If it broke, it wouldn't be the end of the world, I'd just be a little more unfocused when I level alts. I get bored super easy on alts, and I need bright shiny arrows to keep my attention.

I don't use many mods and in every case, the ones I use are just for the extra information they provide.

QuestHelper:  This one I love mostly for the mouseover information, especially with quests where you have to kill 20 Red Tiptoeing Raptors and all the creeps around are Red Sneaking Raptors and Red Skulking Raptors.  The map location thing saves some time running around, but I read all the text for quests anyway since I like the lore and backstory ( :awesome_for_real: ) even though I don't take it very seriously.  It's since to tell at a glance if you can get a bunch of quests done at once if they're close together, though.

Auctioneer:  Again, I love this one more for the mouseover information than the actual auction help.  Mousing over a white item to see if it's a quest item or tradeskill ingredient or spell reagent helps save on bag space and seeing which quest reward will sell for the most gold if none of them are usable or upgrades helps a poor noob like myself scrape together a little bit more cash.  I probably haven't spent enough time tinkering with the auction help, but so far I've learned to be cautious when looking at its recommended sell prices.  Even with regular scanning, I still check most items manually and adjust my pricing accordingly.  So like with QH, it's the mouseover info that's far more valuable to me.

Recount:  I installed this one recently just to see how I'm doing with my DPS.  A purely informational mod.

And that's it.  I might try tanking some 5 man stuff with my DK at some point, but I never intend to tank raids with any of my characters so threat mods seem superfluous.  Cheating in PvP in anathema to me so I'm glad to see Carbonite getting nuked (tell me that PvP 'functionality' doesn't smack of old DAoC radar hacking).  I might try out one of the Druid cat mods as my DPS skill use gets more complex, but so far I seem to be doing ok without one.  I'm managing fine so far with the default Blizzard action bars even with the eleventy billion Druid skills, though I might need to break down and get one as I level up my Shaman alt with the order of magnitude more totems and crap.  But otherwise I can't think of anything else I'd need a mod for.  Oh, maybe Gatherer.  We'll see.

I run recount lately as pure information/raid teasing, since nothing's quite as useless bullshit as posting trash dps numbers off an unholy dk <3

A bar mod (bartender right now, I loved xperl for TBC), healbot/libheal (libheal is the crucial one, even if you don't run a raid healing mod personally), bigwigs (raiding with boss mods makes life so much less dramatic), and a closed Omen window out of old habit.

The only thing I may wind up installing from there is a totem mod (totem timers I just can't get to work any way I like), and a rune cooldown mod to change the horribly information starved rune window.

You are simply amazing.  You are right, I'm going to go home tonight and get rid of it right away!  I'm also going to start playing like you do, because at the moment, I'm completely different.

What dailies are you doing that aren't just circuits?  After the 20th time of doing a set of dailies, they're pretty much mental auto pilot. It's like driving to work, you might need directions to your new job, but after working there for a month you should probably know the route without turning on the GPS every morning.

It's different on actual leveling quests, either you have a good memory for that useless crap or you don't. But daily quest management? Even the random cooking ones are a small enough pool that it's easy to remember what drops where.

Setting aside that your druid *will* be doing some offtanking at least  :grin:, threat mods are actually more important for DPS than they are for tanks - they're for seeing where you are relative to the tank so you can back off if necessary when DPSing.

I don't consider off tanking the same as main tanking.  One of the reasons I love playing a Druid is because I can shift and fill whatever role is needed in an emergency on the fly, including tanking when the main tank goes down or getting adds in a boss fight that requires it.  Though in the latter case, my Frost DK might actually work out better since on paper the test version of glyphed Howling Blast + Blood Boil might be better snap aggro than the more cumbersome Icy Touch + Pestilence + Howling Blast + Blood Boil we have to work with right now.  Discounting Death and Decay, but using a ground target aggro field has its own issues, though that could be because I just suck at tanking.

In any event, as far as threat mods go if my DPS feral is pulling aggro off the tank, then the tank has failed!  :why_so_serious:

The druid will always be better than a DK at *emergency* OTing, because the druid can be crit immune in dps gear and the DK can't, and crit immunity is the #1 overriding need, above all else, for tanking. So you might be able to pop into frost presence and grab aggro if the MT goes down, but you won't have any staying power.

Well yeah, the DK would be used when there's a specific need for an off tank that's known ahead of time.  I'll be sticking with a Frost tanking spec even after the patch.

Oh by the way, 360° bear Swipe is going to be HILARIOUS!  :drillf:

I'm really surprised that they let Carbonite operate as long as it did. It was flat out cheating. I'm also really surprised that more people aren't upset with that information I posted so long ago, outlining exactly how it was cheating, since apparently not many people know about it. Oh yeah, Carbonite is used to do quests. Yeah that's it. It was/IS 100% cheating when used on a PVP server. 99% of my overworld kills were directly contributed to Carbonite information.

Does nobody really give a shit about the cheating aspect of it? Is it because PVP death in WoW is so meaningless that nobody even cares if people are outright cheating in order to beat them or catch them off guard? The reactions, or lack of reactions so far, are pretty interesting to me. I'm not sure what to make of it.

They need to put in a bear spin graphic for the 360 swipe.

Whirlwind + bear = WHIRLBEAR

Most of us probably play on PVE servers and thus don't give a crap is my guess.

For me it is 4 parts that and 1 part "that's nowhere near as bad as the cheating in DAOC was."

Even though I don't PvP much in WoW, I care.  And I mentioned it in one of my previous posts.  I'm with you 100%.

Edit: @Ingmar: How is it not as bad as the cheating in DAoC?  It looks like it does pretty much the same thing the old radar hacks did.  The only real difference I see is in DAoC PvP was SERIOUS BUSINESS while in WoW is just meh.  The hack itself seems to provide the same advantage.

Really depends how it got the information. If it's showing other carbonite users, it's just iffy. If it's exploiting the client for information it shouldn't display, it's radar hax.

Here's what my normal WoW gaming session turned into after I got bored.

I'd fly to Grizzly Hills and park at the town and then task switch to do something else for about 5 minutes. I'd tab back and bring up the map, which by now would have, no shit, about 30-40 red dots on it. Then I'd mouse over the hotspots and each time I'd hover over a red dot it would give me their level, class, health, and the how long ago they were reported to be in this exactly location. (by other people using carbonite) If the dot was a person who was also using the free version of carbonite, and they were in a group, it returned the entire group information.

Then with that data now known to me, I'd pick out some targets and go grief them. I'd kill one and move on to the next, never ever staying in the same place very long. If it was close to server prime time, I'd fly up a zone to the north and see if anyone was doing the wotlk ring of blood quest, and grief that one too. All thanks to Carbonite. It kept me playing WoW about a month longer than I would have otherwise.

It was also outright cheating.

No it would take the data that other carbonite users gathered and present it not only to them, but to the registered carbonite users in the same zone. Essentially every single person using the free version was data harvesting for me and I'm sure countless others.

If an enemy got cached by you as you flew over them, ie, they became available to target (even if you couldn't see them! which was often, of course) they'd show up in a list of clickable names. You'd click them and they'd become your target. Then you'd swoop down and kill 'em.

It was so easy and seamless I actually felt bad about it. It's an incredible application, in my opinion. It was just used for evil purposes.

I agree that it's cheating, and I do play on a PVP server. However, dying in world PVP is very meh. There are other mods that do this in Arena (at least, I think; my healer in 3s has a mod that announces name/class of our opponents) which seem similar. Are those also getting the banhammer? I heard this was getting banned because of ads, not because of sploitz.

In Battlegrounds it didn't give me a huge advantage. I can see it being huge in open-world PvP.

Oh, btw - my addon loadout and why (I am a huge addon junkie):

Raiding:
  -- CT RA (more out of habit, Blizzard's raid frames are fine)
  -- Omen (Bilzzard's threatmeter UI isn't good enough)
  -- Deadly Boss Mods (since WoW raiding these days is "stay out of the glowy crap" may be getting superfluous - we'll see come Ulduar)
  -- Atlas (OMG WHERE DO I GO)
  -- AtlasLoot (OMG WHAT DO I LOOT)
  -- AtlasQuest (OMG WHAT DO I TURN IN)
  
Socializing:
  -- Prat (various nice-to-have chat frame improvements in one mod)
  -- Cellular (spawns new windows when you get a /tell so you can wipe the raid because you can't see the screen when omgdrama occurs)
  -- AuldLangSyne (gives you a fancy display for guild/friend lists which integrates very well into FuBar. Displays notes in the list so you can easily tag people's alts.)
  -- Elephant (chat logging - which for whatever reason isn't in the base client)
  -- ImmersionRP (I play on an RP server and by god I want to see everyone's hysterically bad RP descriptions)

Prettiness:
  -- agUnitFrames (I prefer this to XPerl, it's totally an aesthetic call at this point)
  -- FuBar (I like menubars. Necessary addons include DurabilityFu to autorepair and GarbageFu to autosell)
  
Questiness:
  -- QuestHelper (switched to this from Carbonite)
  -- TourGuide (GO HERE YOU FOOL, invaluable when trying to powerlevel your way through content)
  -- Jame's TourGuides (far better than the included ones with the base addon. Note: the Icecrown one sucks ass.)
  -- LightHeaded (in-game browser of Wowhead quest comments, a distressing number of which are "I solo'd this with my huntard")
  -- QuestGuru (quest history, better minion, etc.)
  -- Cartographer (basic map improvements)

Killingness:
  -- Quartz (if you are a caster, uh, get this. Casting bars for you and your enemies, DoT timers, GCD tracking, swing timers, etc etc etc)

Theorycrafting 101:
  -- DrDamage (in-game theorycrafting which gives you estimated damage and DPS for all your buttonz)
  -- Pawn (like DrDamage for gear. You can hit up elitistjerks for the point values for your spec and see at a glance which pair of pants you should wear)
  -- RatingsBuster (gives you the math on how much stats will affect various things, in case you don't want to just rely on Pawn to think for you)

Usability/Convienence:
  -- Autobar (I hate playing without autobar. Autopopulating hotbar for things like potions and quest items.)
  -- CTCore, CTBuff, CTMail
  -- EquipCompare (always shows what you have equipped when you have an item tooltip up)
  -- Sellfish (always show the vendor price for an item)
  -- VendorBait (always highlights at a glance what's the most renumerative quest reward)

Fuck sake Lum.  Do you not have at least a couple of hours downtime every patch ?

I can see it legally reporting what comes into your view (even if you aren't looking at it, your client knows about it and it's in draw distance)

I can see it using a hidden chat channel like so many other mods and reporting zone wide between other carbonite users. Still legal/not cheating, even if it's cheap.

If it detects players based on another form of communication that uses data from opposite realm carbonite users, it's crossed a line.

I misunderstood how it worked - from Nija's original post I got the impression it only tracked other people using Carbonite.

EDIT: BTW Lum, kick Dr. Damage to the curb. It used to be pretty cool, but if you are basing decisions on it now it is probably misleading you, it is wrong about a bunch of stuff right now (it misreports several of my abilities as a warrior at least) and hasn't been updated since December as far as my updater can tell at least.

Yeah, I'm terrible at explaining things. Carbonite touches naughty places.

I run almost as many addons and have found they actually don't break much.  As long as you have it set to allow out of date addons, most of your stuff will still work.  You'll have maybe a half-dozen addons screaming like Blizzard touched them in their bathing suit area, but the rest will be chillin'.  You'll want to update them all sooner or later but you can mostly ignore the problem for now.

I loaded my entire UI onto the PTR and the only thing that's not playing nice is my bar mod, Dominos.  It doesn't handle the new quest item system.  Now when you have a quest in your tracker and you need to use some item, you can click a little button right by the quest instead of fishing through your inventory.

The amount of people that don't know about this always surprises me.

Once I started using an auto updater (Ace until they got rid of it, now I use the Curse one) all my problems went away. I do have FuBar plugins disappear for a while at times while they're in a non-updated state but I can deal.

I don't play on a PvP server and I don't really PvP in WoW anymore because it's shitty, so. I agree it's totally cheating, but I, personally, had nothing to add to it beyond "Yeah that sounds like cheating."

Yup, I know this, but the amount of trial and error you can encounter when just ONE of your shitty things does something odd is annoying.  Doing that on Lums list would sent me fucking Belfry.

So no thanks.

Usually the error message gives some tip about the mod that's broken.

You have more Addons for WoW than I have PC games on this boss-ass computer.

You know, if you want the game to play itself, you can just download ProgressQuest.

Is it better than FlagRSP?

(http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8480/51858594.jpg)

 :drill:

By the way I think this screenshot I took crystallizes WoW. Blocked the goldseller address for extra irony and to not promote the shitheels.

 :ye_gods:

What, no eye patch?

I used to have a belf bank alt.  It lived in silvermoon.  Then I logged onto it after a raid to belfs having gay sex in the inn above the bank.  Two weeks in a row.  I am not kidding.  I moved the bank alt to TB.

It's not called Cybermoon for nothing.

That guy could have saved himself some typing by just writing in: Hi, I'm really a dude and I'm playing with one hand.

What the HELL, image.  :ye_gods:

I about choked down the laughter at "smoothe cunny", then I vomited a bit after continuing on to the end.

"smoothe cunny" - is that how they manage to keep it RPy?  Like Ye Olde Cottage and stuff like that?

"Prithee yon slave.  May I rapest thou smoothe cunny?"

Gold spam just elevates the humour another level.

Hey, it doesn't have to be a guy.   It could also be a very overweight teenage girl with low self-esteem.  That's the two archetypal players of that sort of profile I remember from my RPing days.

Gods.  I'm glad I ditched FlagRSP when I quit two years ago.  What passes for RP on my old server was all in that vein.  As someone who enjoys good RP, it made me hate people.

A few weeks ago I was playing my newbie Hordeling and someone was jokingly sending people to Kirin Tor for 'good' RP.  I made a sarcastic comment about Goldshire and we started commiserating about the state of our home server.  Apparently it hasn't gotten better in two years.

That desc is awesome.     

My single shot is better than that entire article. :colbert:

Ha! Good one.

Outside of some of the mods Lum listed under "Questiness", none of those mods really do anything except gather and/or display information differently than the default client.  (AutoBar is a bit different, although like most pure-convenience mods, its features slowly get added into the base interface.)  Most of them just save an alt-tab to either Wowhead (for drop tables, quest information, maps) or your favorite spreadsheet / simulator.

As to the question of patch-day hilarity: I run a pretty similar set of mods to Lum's (although the exact mod used is different in a few cases) and I haven't had any sort of interface cataclysm since the launch of TBC.

No, really.  All it takes is someone who can stay in character and understands they're an average Jane in whatever fantastic world they're playing in.  Unfortunately, the five of us are spread out amongst games and servers, and tend to go into hiding around people who claim to be RPers.

It's probably not too difficult to hide with the sea of monster flesh orbs that populate the online 'RP' servers.

This is one of the reasons why tabletop RP is infinitely better than MMO 'RP'.  Imagine some clown trying to pull off something like that when they'd have to look everyone else in the eye.

As I said, I do not play like you do.   I do not go do the quests as soon as I accept them.  I hate dailies.  I avoid them whenever possible, but I likes the dough.  So, when I see a quest giver, I grab the quest and go on my way.  I'll have my quest book full of dailies before I get the notion to actually do them.  Or, I'll simply do them as I'm flying over an area that is lit up by Carbonite and then keep moving on my way.  I'll turn it in later as I feel the need/want.

In my playstyle, the add-on is simply organizing and displaying these things to me so I can choose whether I want to do the activities now, or just wait until another time when I'm in the area.  I view Carbonite as an executive assistant.  It doesn't do the work for me, but organizes it and presents it to me so I can fit it into my schedule.  Simple as that.

I play this way across 5 characters right now, which will grow to an eventual 9 (2 lvl 70's waiting their turn.)  I got my druid to 80 last night (5th one.)  So, I'll have 5 characters with up to 10-15 dailies on their logs at any given time from any given area.  If I feel like logging into my Warlock, for example, I don't have to read through my quest book to see what I should be doing today.  I just take off and watch the map as I'm looking for herbs (gatherer) or travelling to an instance.  Hey, there's an area or a "?" I need to look into.  I either collect my cash or do the quest then move on.

By the way, I lvl'ed that druid to 80 last night (about 20 mins.)  He started at 76 on Friday.  Last 4 levels with about 10 hours played using Carbonite (and elite flying mount...that's important.)  Gear suck?  Yep, but that's what instances are for and now I'm ready to do what I enjoy with my guildmates (if a feral druid is needed.)

Which makes me laugh, as my guildmates give me crap about making 80 in Grizzly Hills with quest greens from around 74-75 range.  Done it several times so far and they say "your gear sucks!" to which I reply "instance time!"

You DO get it in tabletop RP, however you have a Gm to smack them down and say "No, that's not happening" or "ok, roll for it assmunch."    The worst sin of online RP-types is their need to dictate to other people how they react and what their character's reactions should be.  In a tabletop you can face-to-face or demand something in the rules, but since online is all emote-based it turns into a big game of 5 year olds playing cops and robbers.  

You remember that, right?
"pew pew, got you!"
"No you didn't!"
"Yah huh"
"I had a force field!"

:oh_i_see:
Might as well ask for a few leprechauns.

RP+MMO=Cybering.

Uh, no. (Hint: stay far, far away from Goldshire/Silvermoon)

Uh, yes. You run ImmersionRP. You know that the vast majority has descriptions that say that their characters are avatars of Aphrodite.

Also, Stormwind, Dalaran sewers, Undercity Sewers, Darnassus, Deeprun Tram, Uther's Tomb.

Disagreeing itt. There's no such thing as good RP.

This is why more games need the ability for guilds to selectively enable PVP with one another. All the RP guilds can enable PVP amongst themselves, allowing the potential for spontaneous combat to keep people in check. (Oh, you're supposed to be a ten foot tall demon lord? I guess that guild of "town guards" should probably attack you when you come walking into the tavern then, yeah?) Meanwhile that guild that just wants to "roleplay" a pack of mute serial killers can be excluded.

I really thought the guild warfare portion of UO had this right.  We certainly had a lot of fun with this "back in the day."  Rival or even friendly guilds would declare war on each other and be able to gank each other with no penalties.  Everyone else couldn't play in their reindeer games.  It was, dare I say it, FUN!

While I think you're 99.99% right on this one, there's that seriously minority .01% chance that's the bio of a sub in a D/s relationship who game together.
I've met at least 2 D/s playing couples in City of Heroes (where admittedly playing a character running around practically naked is A: not entirely out of place in the world of superheroes and B: gear being a foreign concept in that game, not dangerous to your health) and while the bio is definitely 'O GAWD' territory it's possible it's a humiliation thing to have that for all and sundry to see.

But in all likelihood it's Randy McHormonalteen, age 15, with deluded aspirations of majoring in Romantic Fiction and 'doing it with a lady'.

They've been doing that for years.

From what I've read, I don't think they really give two fucks either way about the QH guy. It's more the Carbonite guys.

Guy in my guild had I believe 200 addons. He described patch day as "a personal holocaust".


But yes, a threatmeter is pretty much essential. I think my guildies use either Omen or Diamond. Shamans (all two of them) had a totem manager as well.

I have yet to see a totem manager that's worth two hoots in hell. Some are conveniant enough (most aren't), but lack flexibility. Needless to say, I don't use one.

Instead, I have a truly mind-numbing array of hotkeys and conditional macros to control about every totem a shaman can have. It works and works well, but I've played my shaman for well over two years now. I'm not sure I'd recomend it to a new shaman, however.

Just to update:

Carbonite has gone freeware. You can now download the full version for free, supposedly the obfuscated code will be removed next version.

Interestingly, one of the developers posted on their website that Blizzard were the ones who initially suggested going ad-ware (http://www.carboniteaddon.com/cs/forums/p/3105/11896.aspx#11896).

I can't remember which totem add on I used, but as a healer, I really needed something that showed the status of earth shield and the totem thingie did.

On the entire adware thing, that is totally screwed up. I can only guess the devs thought it was a good idea, but their legal dept or something didn't.

That's...extremely confusing.

That's actually moustache-twirling evil.

I call shenanigans.

Blizzard: "Hey addon-guys! We've got a client base of, like, the world. Why don't you stick revenue generating ads in your addon so you can get some of that hot action."  Am I the only one who thinks that sounds unlikely?

I just tried out Carbonite since I figured what the hell.

Holy shit what a mess of an addon. How is this more intuitive than Questhelper?

The little scalable map window that continually updates.

It can replace your minimap, and merges the overland map (with its quest tracking data) into it.

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/43920/carbonite-quest.png)

The circular area is what you would normally see with your minimap, icons such as gathering nodes and quest icons appear there as they do normally. The map scales depending on how far you are from your objective similar to other map mods such as Mapster.

There's about 50,000 other features but I have most of them turned off.

Lum is the one guy keeping CT_mod in business, isn't he?

YOU KIDS TODAY WITH YOUR FANCY RAID FRAMES
GET OFFA MY YARD

Hmm, when i added carbonite it just created another minimap, was there a setting to remove the original or did you need another mod for that (and if so how do you get to all the crap that's on it?)

It's a setting. "Replace minimap with Carbonite map".

Rubberlad and Rubberhubby would be one of those D/s couples, right?