Posts with tag blizzard-calendar

One of the big UI improvements in WoW 3.0 is the calendar. Next to player housing, a calendar is one of the longest-standing player requests that had not yet been fulfilled (or shot down by Blizzard). Like most gaps in the game's UI, this one has been filled by various add-ons over the years. One particularly popular and enduring one is GroupCalendar. In fact, GroupCalendar is so well-loved that even with the official calender now implemented, many guilds and players are still using it.

Why? Well, mostly it comes down to features. Both the Blizzard calendar and GroupCalendar support the basics -- raid lockouts, holidays, player-created events with attendance lists. But like most things Blizzard, their calendar is fairly simple, and more or less ends there. GroupCalendar goes a bit farther.

• Durations and level ranges can be specified
• Finer-grained control over invitations; for instance, you can specify a minimum and maximum quota for each class, with a standby list if you're full on (say) Hunters
• Automatic invites and queuing when it's time for the raid
• Edit: People can be allowed to sign up to an event even if they weren't explicitly invited (this is not the case on Blizzard's calendar, and theirs only allows you to invite up to 100 people)

Those are a few of the features that stand out at differentiating GroupCal from BlizzCal for me. And overall, there are more options on everything.

Don't think this is an advertisement for GroupCalendar, though. If you don't need the extra features, there's no reason to install it. Blizzard's calendar is more lightweight, already built-in, and much more polished (as you'd expect). There are no synch issues, and no bugs (that I've seen). In fact, the only thing missing from the built-in calendar that I really want is for it to show the daily dungeons and battleground. But if you do want the extra features that GroupCalendar offers, the developers have shown no sign of slowing down; you can get it wherever fine add-ons are hosted.