95: The Burnt-out Crusade

[The Escapist Staff]

"Not all authors, however, escape without real harm. ? Two French users demanded that Gello localize WaterBoy, a mod that helped mages summon and distribute water for raids. He refused to spend so much time translating again and asked that they mod it themselves. 'Then the flame emails began,' Gello recounted. 'When I stood by my position (probably not in the nicest terms), they continued in earnest. I got an email with an attachment I thought was safe and apparently it wasn't.' The modern computer nightmare had come true for Gello. 'I basically abandoned the email address, formatted my pc, ditched the mod and didn't look back.'"
Greg Tito explores the dangers of modding for WoW.

The Burnt-out Crusade

 

[7thpixel [deprecated]]

I once spent hours trying to solve a casting bar problem with Discord. I posted a link on Lozareth's forums, and had a response in 6hrs: http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2987

I've never had the mindset where I toss issues over the wall to mod developers without trying to troubleshoot it myself first. It's a shame that kids feel empowered and demand things from these people who are helping the community in their spare time.

 

[Odseus]

I've played wow off and on since closed beta. I'm amazed at the amount of entitlement complex some of these people have. People don't have to use these MODS! jesus.

It makes me wonder if wow would be as popular as it is today without the customizeable ui. Or would blizzard have picked up the slack and actually fixed their UI so that it doesn't look and function like ass.

 

[incoherent]

It makes me wonder if wow would be as popular as it is today without the customizeable ui. Or would blizzard have picked up the slack and actually fixed their UI so that it doesn't look and function like ass.

The real trick is that everyone likes their UI a bit different. Ask a dozen World of Warcraft players and they'll probably all like something a bit different. Some people thrive on additional information: you'll see a screenshot of their UI and it'll be full of boxes, bars, numbers everywhere. Even within this group, the presentation and arrangement of that information changes. On the other hand, some people just want something lightweight so they can focus on actually seeing the boss instead of seeing a bunch of boxes.

So suppose you're Blizzard, and you're trying to make a UI that's all things to all people. The first group will want to have all of those boxes available to them somewhere, and will want to be able to make the boxes look and act different, but the second group really doesn't care, and in fact might react against the clutter. What you're looking at is a fairly horrendously large system, and a fairly horrendous configuration menu. (Incidentally, that's one of the knocks I remember hearing against Discord: too much configuration.) It's smarter to just build in a plugin architecture of some sort and let the modders go from there; that way, if you want something more complicated you go and find it, and if you don't you can use the basic UI.

I'd honestly be surprised if anyone built a major MMOG nowadays without some sort of UI plugin ability.

 

[Kemayo]

I've been writing addons [http://www.wowinterface.com/list.php?skinnerid=28542] for the last year, and I've managed to stay fairly free from burnout. I'm far more burnt out from playing WoW than I am from writing addons, anyway. I find myself improving my addons fairly regularly, but I haven't actually *played the game* in a few months.

I would note that the satisfaction from addon-writing is pretty much its own reward. It's fun to write useful things that some others use. If you go into it hoping for fame or financial rewards, you're going to be disappointed -- my most popular addon has been downloaded 74,000 times, and I'm up to $0 in donations so far.