Some metacontext for those who don't know: Curse was the de facto WoW addon manager. Then Twitch acquired Curse and absorbed the addon manager functionality into their client.
Now Twitch sold off the Curse/addon functionality to a party with a much less-polished addon system.
Thus, there is now a new market for addon managers, since there is a new major expansion coming out, and playing modern WoW without mods is not great.
My personal opinion, as soon as they forced the merge into the Twitch client, the quality went down greatly. The old Curse client was much simpler, easier to understand, and didn't have all of Twitch crammed into it all. It really didn't make sense to have an "all-in-one" application since both parts seemed very different in terms of audience.
Seemed like typical business ideas, the curse launcher had an audience, they'd get that audience and synergise it into somehow making people use Twitch more as it's in the twitch launcher.
It didn't work, people used the curse launcher to load mods, not to socialise or work live streams. But some of these acquisitions can be that clueless.
I remember writing LUA scripts to alert people of certain encounter mechanics between boss attempts when my guild was among the US top 20 or so. The "boss mod" addons eventually caught up, but when you were among the first to get there, you could do a lot of additions/modifications yourself to make them better.
Great game, good times. Not anymore though from what I hear
Yeah, when I was in one of the top guilds during vanilla, there was an addon that top guilds had that allowed for adding timers/modifications via LUA. I can't remember the name anymore, but it wasn't publicly available, just circulated amongst upper echelon guilds.
We would wipe dozens, if not hundreds of times, just to get all the timings down and scripted. It also helped that four of the people in our guild worked in QA for Blizzard (not so well-kept secret of many top guilds back then).
Like someone else mentioned, now WeakAuras more of less does that in a much more user friendly way. Still the same process of wiping hundreds of times to build the WeakAuras though.
The boss mod addons are still king, but over the past couple expansions a tool called WeakAuras has been getting really popular. It lets you make little displays that pop up or disappear based on in-game conditions. There is a whole ecosystem of these, you can share them via in-game chat, and they are pretty fun to put together between wipes.
I like it a lot. But by saying that, don't get confused by the overall state Rust GUI applications are in: immature[0]. I have a background in native iOS and macOS development and this is another game. However I have not regretted choosing Rust for this project. I wanted to natively support both Windows, Linux and macOS and at the same time learn the language. This was my first proper Rust application and I've learned so much.
The limitation Iced has have actually done something good for the simplicity of Ajour. People are liking this simple look because the application is just a tool. There is no need for fancy animations.
After looking it up and finding iced I'm curious too. There are so many GUI frameworks for Rust but I never have heard about iced before - looks promising though.
Didn't GitHub spin off from Tekkub's hub back in the Burning Crusade days? Fun to see GitHub still being used to enable writing WoW addons a decade later.
As far as I can tell tekkub was an early hire and had a cgit instance for wow mods around the same time, but nothing suggesting they were a founder or GitHub was a spin-off of that site
It has changed a lot and is about to change again. There is a level squish coming soon to prepare for changes that will make it much easier for new and returning players to level up and enjoy the game. The current system is a little overwhelming to some. The new changes should be live within a month or so. The release date slipped a little.
You should check out modern WoW for a day just to see the mechanics they've been able to add.
Before the WoW Classic release last year, I was in your shoes and decided to try modern WoW for a few days as a goblin. It had some pretty crazy quests/events/locations compared to just spawning in Goldshire and getting some "Kill N of X" quests.
Yeah, quest variety has increased a ton. Lots of other kind of stuff than just fetch/kill. I don't think there's really any "Collect 30 bear asses and also only 3% of bears have asses" quests left either. Maybe in like the Burning Crusade zones?
I think they've changed the quest drop mechanics that if you don't get a bear ass from a bear, it starts incrementing the drop rate of bear asses for future kills. Previously you were just rolling for that 3% chance all over again.
The more recently added and revamped quests have higher drop rates. There are still a handful of quests that have a low drop-rate, but I find the ratio of these quests to be bearable.
That's when they're doing the prepatch for the new expansion. One of the things they're doing is making it so you can level from 1 to 50 in a single expansion's content.
Also, they're squishing levels back to the original 1-60 from the current 1-120.
Why? Blizzard seems to have taken a game that many people grew up with and made it easier for casual players (some of those same people who grew up with it who now have jobs/kids/fuller life) to still be involved. I find it great that I can just click a button to find a raid group for the few hours I have a night to play. I can still experience the end game content without the time consuming grind to get the right gear and people to do it. Even if I still want to do that, I can with the heroic/mythic difficulties. Convenience has made the game way more accessible to way more people.
You can still have social encounters and camaraderie. That wasn't taken away. Before, you were forced into social interactions which isn't always everybody's cup of tea.
>Difficulty made it so that people felt pride in what they had achieved.
There are still plenty of difficult tasks still in the game mixed with achievements/mounts that can give you the same level of pride and satisfaction.
it's a completely different game to even how it was in Cataclysm/Pandaria
it's now a single player game for nearly everyone (unless you're a higher level raider)
the vast majority of players will push a button, the game then automatically forms a group, teleports you to the dungeon/raid, which is then completed without anyone saying a word (and it is almost impossible to lose)
the other players might as well be bots
loot is now dished out individually and automatically by the game: no interaction with other players is needed
higher level raiders experience the same content, just at a higher difficulty (which does require an organised group)
Blizzard has optimised out the massively multiplayer part of the MMO, and with new "features" like PvP/mob scaling they've obsoleted the RPG elements too (leveled up? your character is now weaker!)
sadly: what's left is a skinner box collection game with many infinite grinds to force you to play by exploiting the fear of falling behind your peers
> the vast majority of players will push a button, the game then automatically forms a group, teleports you to the dungeon/raid, which is then completed without anyone saying a word (and it is almost impossible to lose)
To be fair, this is not really new. It already was this way 10+ years ago at the end of WotLK when I started playing it for a bit.
> Blizzard has optimised out the massively multiplayer part of the MMO, and with new "features" like PvP/mob scaling they've obsoleted the RPG elements too (leveled up? your character is now weaker!)
Argh, that is ugly. Does this mean I can't farm old Dungeons/Raids and Low-Lvl-Areas on my own anymore? This was quite nice to chill from time to time.
> Does this mean I can't farm old Dungeons/Raids and Low-Lvl-Areas on my own anymore? This was quite nice to chill from time to time.
Most zones have ranges, e.g. level 1-60. So coming back to that zone at lvl 120, you can easily defeat even the most scaled up monsters. Old dungeons/raids are easily soloable at max level.
The zone scaling has made leveling a much better experience, since you can skip the more this-was-made-15-years-ago content without being stuck without quests/content to do.
I personally really like the pvp scaling as well since it results in a much higher volume of interesting fights. Its also sort of a necessary evil that comes with the zone scaling, since people do zones out of order. E.g., a level 30-60 zone will have level 30s and level 60s questing in it, and pvp with a level gap like that is boring for both parties
the dungeon finder was maybe OK, but in WoD they added the automatic raid finder too
no need to have a guild
you can do old areas (via the "magic" of scaling down), however as you leveled up through legion and bfa the mobs health and damage scales with your level AND your gear!
so once you level up from 115 to 116 you become noticeably weaker
additionally you lose abilities from the previous expansion as you level up, so the classes feel like something out of a facebook game (awful to play)
so 5-10 years ago they ruined the MMO part of the game, and now they've ruined the RPG part too
You forgot to mention the time-gating, which is maybe the main thing that has me on the fence about the upcoming expansion. Most of the progression mechanics force you to wait a certain amount of time before you can keep going. This is incredibly frustrating to me, because I tend to play in bursts. I don't feel like logging on for 15 minutes to do a daily every day, and then when I do feel like getting a long session in, my progress is arbitrarily and artificially capped. Haven't looked into whether this will be better in the next xpac, but it's been a frustrating experience for the last 2-3.
previously the game was designed by people wanting to make a MMO that they wanted to play (everquest refugees), with some elements to keep you subscribed over the long term, but it all had an end
these days most of the grinds are infinite, and everything is cynically designed with the express intent of increasing engagement metrics:
- farmville like mission table
- infinite gear treadmill (corruption/titanforging, azerite traits, etc)
- infinite azerite power grind
- infinite reputation grinds
- removal of player agency (badge removal, master loot removal, gear completely random via caches, etc)
unless the KPIs they're targeting have changed: it's all still going to be in the next expansion, if disguised slightly differently
it's really sad, because it was one of the greatest video games of all time
There's been a surge of activity in the last year or so due to the re-release of WoW Classic, also known as Vanilla. There are rumours that Burning Crusade will also be re-released soon. I suspect the potential revenue is too good for Blizzard to resist.
I actually have a question here, why would they re-release BC? Isn't the point of Classic to keep it in a certain period of time? When many people started the game and thought it was at its "peak"?
On a side-note: would it be interesting to have a second branch of the game, maybe not called Classic, that would follow the main-line of the game, but would be a large chunk of expansions behind? That way people could relive those old expansions as if they were the latest one released. Personally, I think I would be much more on board with that since the game would actually change over time.
Thank you! I don't plan to support other games than World of Warcraft for now. But the code base is split into a core and gui part so it should be easy to fork and modify to your needs!
Ehh it doesn't seem to be a problem. Understanding the function doesn't require thinking about those 900 lines at once since the code for handling each message type doesn't interact with any other code in the function.
Awesome! I have lots of fond memories from the days of writing World of Warcraft addons (CTMod, CT_RaidAssist, ...). Great to see the community is still going.
Now Twitch sold off the Curse/addon functionality to a party with a much less-polished addon system.
Thus, there is now a new market for addon managers, since there is a new major expansion coming out, and playing modern WoW without mods is not great.