Posts with tag interface

New loot frames! No more having to stare at your chat frames and scroll up and down to see which player won what item. Loot rolls are now condensed into a loot roll frame that appears in your screen. It lists the results of all the items that went up for grabs in the instance and who won them.

If you look at the screenshot above, you can see the roll numbers next to each player and what roll types were used. The player who won the item is listed at the top. You can expand or collapse the menu to see the list of players who rolled and what roll type they used, such as need or greed.

The only downside to this new feature is that I couldn't find a way to move the frame around. But hey, I'll take these new loot roll frames any day. What about you?

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The default interface for the auction house could use some loving. It's an essential part of players' gaming experience, and whether they use it or not, its design has an effect on them. We've seen many examples of Blizzard designing parts of their UI to include features provided by addons that had become so prevalent that everyone had to run them. For example, threat didn't always show up on the default frames -- back in my day, we had to run Omen to avoid pulling aggro from the tank.

It's important to recognize that not every valuable interface tweak belongs in the basic WoW UI, though. If it's a feature that's only used by a small segment of players or is unnecessarily complex, it's probably best off in an addon. You won't see me advocating that the base AH UI keep historic pricing numbers, for example. It is, though, a travesty that you have to page through hundreds of pages of single auctions to get to the lower priced stacks.

This is not a discussion of the good (yay, crossrealm chat!) and the bad (boo, privacy fail) of Real ID. This is a guide for how to truly opt out of this feature and how to adjust the settings if you do participate in game.

To be clear, everyone who does not have a parentally controlled account has in fact opted into Real ID, due to a security flaw. Addons have access to the name on your account right now. So you need to be very careful about what addons you download -- make sure they are reputable. In order to actually opt out, you need to set up parental controls on your account. This is not an easy task. Previous to the Battle.net merge, you could just go to a page and set them up. Done. Now, you must set up an account as one that is under parental control. Once your account is that of a child's (a several-step process), your settings default to Real ID-disabled. Any Real ID friends you have will no longer be friends. In order to enable it, you need to check the Enable Real ID box.

Setting up parental controls:

1. Go to the appropriate battle.net site for your region. (That link should take you there.)
2. Push the Create or Manage a Battle.net Account button.
3. Log in as normal.
4. Click on Parental Controls, which is an option listed under Manage My Games. (And, if you're like me, you'll be sad that you are still not in the beta.)
5. Choose the No - Setup Parental Controls button.
6. Fill in your info as both the child's account and your own. (Why they make this distinction, I don't know. Parental controls always used to be an option for adults to manage their own game time.)
7. You will receive an email. You need to save this email, because the link in there is the only way to get to the parental controls. Otherwise, you have to make Blizzard resend it. Click the link to get into the controls.
8. Save Settings and then be told it will take up to 30 minutes to go into effect.

That is how to opt out. How to optimize opting in is after the break.

It's no secret that some addons, like GearScore, generate a numerical value for the gear of a player or players by inspecting their gear. Other addons also do inspect requests for other reasons. However, as of patch 3.3.5 it appears that the functionality of addons that automate inspect requests will be limited via server-side implementation during rolling restarts.

Nethaera

Quote:

According to WoWAce, Blizz is going to start throttling inspection requests, thus limiting addons like Gearscore's ability to generate on-the-fly GS of a player's equipment.

It's important to understand that the throttling that is being done isn't intended to break any functionality of add-ons, but merely to control the amount of queries that are being sent to the server at any given time. (Thus throttling the queries.) The queries will still occur, it just won't happen as quickly as they currently seem to. You can read the statements that WoW Ace and WoW Interface have up for a bit more information on these changes. We wanted to give mod authors a heads-up prior to making the change so that they could make any adjustments they needed to on their mods.

http://wowinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33432
http://www.wowace.com/announcements/blizzard-to-start-throttling-inspect-requests/

source

Basically, the idea as presented is not to prevent addons from inspecting players but rather to prevent them from doing so as often as they currently do, reducing server lag by reducing the amount of inspect requests addons can flood them with. It's important to note that this is being implemented via rolling restarts; as a result addons that you have that currently make use of automated inspect requests might not function properly. Since this isn't aimed at crippling addons that use the inspect feature, it's likely most or all of them will be able to weather the change.

Patch 3.3.3 is going to the PTR soon, and there's a bunch of stuff that will affect those of us who play the auction house. I'm going to list them in the order I see them, and then we'll go into some analysis:

Professions

Runed Orbs: Recipes which require this item have had their material requirements significantly reduced.
Frozo the Renowned has moved into the Dalaran Magus Commerce Exchange and will be trading your Frozen Orbs for various other trade goods.

Update: Omega points out in the comments that Zarhym posted a list on the forums of what we'll be able to buy :

Crusader Orb (6)
Runed Orb (4)
Eternal Fire
Eternal Earth
Eternal Water
Eternal Air
Eternal Life
Eternal Shadow
Frost Lotus
Pattern: Frosty Flying Carpet [Tailors Only] (6)

Inscription

• Most recipes that required 2 inks now only require 1.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide.

There's nothing quite like your first time through Azeroth. Capture those memories by snapping screenshots (pictures of what's on your screen) in game as you explore, level, discover, plummet, laugh, triumph, fail ... All the moments that make life within the World of Warcraft so utterly bewitching.

Screenshot basics

• Take a screenshot by hitting the Print Screen button on your PC or Command+Shift+3 on your Mac. You can set a more convenient key binding in game in your Game Menu; hit Key Bindings and scroll down to Miscellaneous Functions.
• Screenshots get stored in the World of Warcraft folder on your computer. Look for the folder called Screenshots. Screenshots used to be saved as big, unwieldy TGAs, but now you'll find them in convenient .jpg format.

I really like this post over at Mend Pet -- after five years in a game's life, no part of the WoW interface should be remiss from getting the occasional update, and they mention possibly the only part of the game (even the login screen's been updated quite a few times) that's been the same since day one, the character selection screen. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, as you can choose your character and get into the game. But everything can be better, no?

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

If you're a regular reader of this column, you know that my biggest pet peeve with WoW is how little support guilds have received from Blizzard over the years. As I've said before, guilds are the backbone of any MMO. They facilitate all the group content that developers spend millions to produce -- the content that keeps people interested in the game and separates an MMO from your average single-player experience.

Without officers who sacrifice time and energy to organize and lead their guilds, no MMO can succeed. I am, of course, biased, but I believe that officers deserve more support than they typically get from MMO developers, especially in WoW. Finally, Blizzard has unveiled plans to deliver not just an improved guild interface, but an entire leveling and achievement system for guilds, complete with talents.

In Cataclysm, the face of Azeroth is not the only thing that will be reshaped. Guilds will be completely different entities compared to what they are now, with much greater depth and interactivity. To fully understand how monumental these changes are for officers everywhere, let's first look at the history of WoW's guild improvements.

Here's a great video from Arawn of CrusaderAura.com that offers up a first look at the new Shaman totem interface coming in patch 3.2. As expected, you'll soon be able to drop four totems all at the same time, as well as eventually (you'll need to be in the higher levels somewhere) have a few different sets of totems to drop whenever you want. As you can see, you have four slots, one for each type of totem, and then you can switch each of those on each of your Call of Air, Water, and Fire settings. Finally, the last button on the right is Call of Earth, which used to be called Totemic Recall, and will let you call all of the totems back, getting a little mana back for each.

It looks like it works great (save for, of course, the small bug with no cooldown on the elemental totems, but we're sure Shamans won't have a problem with that, right?). The bottom line is that Shamans will only need one button and one cooldown to smack their totems down wherever they want -- you can still light up totems on their own by pressing their buttons, but if you just hit the Call button, then you'll get them all, in the same cooldown with the usual mana cost. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of UI hooks are in this thing as well, and how it might work with addons. But that's for the future -- for now, it looks like Blizzard has done a great thing for Shamans here.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

Reader UI of the Week is back! Each week WoW.com will bring you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you're using, to readerui@gmail.com.

Let it never be said that I don't listen. After last week's sparse screenshot, many of you said you wanted to see a UI in real action, and especially a healer UI. I got a number of good submissions, but Twigleaf's (of Unity on Velen) stood out from the pack by being both very functional and very pretty. Everything has a place, the screen is information-packed, and nothing is ugly.

If this was my UI, I would move the center scrolling combat text up a bit, since I like to keep the very center of my screen clear to watch for things. But hey, it's not my UI. Let's see what Twigleaf has to say about it.

Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

A reader wrote in a few days ago with the question "What add ons would you consider helpful/essential for a new raid leader?", and as a raid leader myself, I thought it was such a good question that I'm devoting this Addon Spotlight to it.

Deadly Boss Mods

Boss mods are very helpful for all raiders, of course, but particularly crucial for raid leaders, who need to call out when raiders need to do things. If you're not familiar with boss mods, they basically aim to tell you any information about boss abilities that you might need to know during a fight. For instance, on XT-002, boss mods will tell you if anyone has a bomb debuff, when XT is about to throw a Tantrum, how long the heart has left, and so on.

Reader UI of the Week is back! Each week WoW.com will bring you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you're using, to readerui@gmail.com.

After a bit of a break, Reader UI returns with a nice set-up from Kraayliis, a Death Knight on Azuremyst-US (view large). Here's what he had to say:

I've just been working on setting up a clean UI that still retains the look and feel of a full UI while still minimizing the amount of clutter on-screen. I'm currently running WoW @ 1920x1080 resolution. This is my first shot at designing a UI so I just wanted to toss this out there to see what people would think.

I started using Btex for the background a few weeks ago and couldn't find what I wanted so I decided to draw my own.

Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

We covered another Ackis mod, Ackis Recipe List, just last Sunday. This one is (in my opinion) even cooler, and will be of interest to a wider audience than recipe completists. I Have Macro Lol!, or IHML for short, generates a dynamic macro (like Mounted) for you to use in various situations, like dailies and boss fights. You can use just one slot on your action bar, and the macro will adapt itself to whatever situation you happen to be in.

From the configuration interface (/ihml), you can set up what macro you want to use in any given boss encounter or zone. The macro is generated upon entering a zone or loading BigWigs boss modules for a boss fight (no support for Deadly Boss Mods, as far as I know). You can also set up default macros for parties, raids, PvP, etc.

The real value here is dailies. There are several different daily zones in Wrath, all of which have different items that need to be used. Back in BC, I could get by with just my Isle of Quel'Danas macro; nowadays, if I was still bothering with dailies, I would need about six different macros to swap out if it wasn't for something like IHML. The boss functionality is just icing. Thanks again, Ackis, for another solid mod to fill a gap.

Download I Have Macro Lol! at WoWInterface or Curse

Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

Just a short one today, but an addon that I know will please a small number of very passionate folks out there. It's easy to see what recipes you know: just look at your tradeskill window. But what if you want to see a list of recipes you don't know? Ackis Recipe List. Completists rejoice.

This mod is dedicated to listing all recipes in your tradeskills that you have not yet learned. But it doesn't stop there. It also tells you where to find them, even putting waypoints on your world map and minimap for vendors if you want it to. ARL also supports sophisticated filtering of recipes, so if I want to see all the Death Knight glyphs of skill level less than 400 that drop from mobs (although I don't think there are any), I can do that.

The interface is also pretty nice, given the amount of complexity it contains. There's a button to scan your tradeskills on your tradeskill window, which also allows access to the ARL frame once you've scanned. /arl will bring up more, including in-game documentation, which I especially appreciate - I haven't seen that in many mods before.

Overall, this mod does a great job at what it sets out to do. Highly recommended if you want to see what recipes you don't have. Thanks, Ackis!

Download Ackis Recipe List at WoWInterface

We saw a preview of it a little while ago, and now it's here in beta form: MMOUI Minion, the addon updater from the people behind WoWInterface. It's written in Java, and runs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, provided you have an up-to-date Java runtime installed. For Mac OS X users, the web site might warn you about your Java version, but if you've been keeping up with software updates, you should be fine.

As this is a beta, I won't be too hard on it, but I wouldn't recommend using it in its current state. It does show promise, especially with its extensibility (other sites can write plugins to allow Minion to download content from them). I ran into all kinds of problems, from the installer making it difficult to specify a path to the updater maxing out my CPU while idle to it detecting almost all my addons as out-of-date, even ones that aren't, but again, it's beta. The whole reason for a beta phase is to get the software out into the wild for wider debugging, so bugs are to be expected.

Overall, I'd say this could develop into something nice, but isn't quite ready yet. The icon, on the other hand, is totally adorable. If you do want to try it out, you would do well to follow their suggestion of backing up your Interface and WTF folders. I am excited to see what it will look like with more polish.