If you’re working on that Loremaster achievement, WoWHead has added a new wrinkle to the WoWHead Profiler that absolutely rocks – namely, you can see any quests you have yet to complete, in any zone.

However, Admiral Akbarr says it’s a trap! And it is, to an extent, because it forces you to get a WoWHead account to install and run the WoWHead client, so they get all that nommy in-game data, and that makes WoWHead even MORE accurate! The bastards!

So, you make the call.  I’ve been running the client for quite some time now. It’s unobtrusive, and it’s nice to contribute to a database which I use so extensively.

Our GM spent weeks brute-forcing the achievement, and got it mere days ago.  I’m staying low for a while.

We’ve certainly been a busy little guild. When last I spoke of such things, we had completed the Arachnid Quarter, and were one boss short of the Military Quarter.

Saturday, we crash against the wall of the Four Horsemen, again and again. Part of the problem is that I was calling the switches, and I think I was off. Eventually our two tanks took ownership of the process and we downed our first one, then the second, and moved to the back, and Oh MAI GAWD we’re gonna … WE DID IT!  Despite one of the warlocks in the back insisting that we move on because we’d never be able to do it. ¹

Sunday, we find ourselves outside the entrance to the Plague Quarter. First up is Noth, and with decent DPS we brought him down before it got crazy.

Then came Heigan.

You have heard of the dance. I’ve read up on the dance and watched the videos. The one person in the raid that had done this extensively took 10 minutes to explain the fight, did a good job.

Of course, we were doomed. The first dance saw five out of nine (yes we were nine-manning at this point) fall victim to the dance. Left standing: the MT, myself, a healing Shammi, and a Survival Hunter² . We set about proving that Heigan could be taken down by such a crew … and we did.  A good 10 to 15 minutes later, we stood victorious. To commemorate this, the GM insisted that the four of us stand before the corpse while everyone else lie on the ground before us.  Clever idea.

All righty then, Loatheb! Nine-manned! Two-shot!  /flex   OK, is this a “healer fight” or a “DPS” fight? The two biggest obstacles to overcome here were (1) getting the healing timing down to fit into that 3-second window, and (2) remembering to toss some dots and use my wand during the downtime in between.

The GM is on fire now, so we’re charging hard into Construct Quarter, still nine-manning it. We decide that Patchwerk isn’t going to work on a nine-man configuration, so we get a former guildy to step in to the vacant slot³ .  No training vids now – the raid has outpaced my expectations⁴. We’re taking this one cold, with some instruction from our druid. After one wipe, he shifts to HoT assist mode and we are able to keep the tanks up.

Hey, look, it’s frogger!  OK, I expected a lot more pain here, to be honest. People have problems with this?  I can see lag playing a factor, but that aside, dying on this should be hard to live down.

Grobbulus! We two-shot this one as well but I really think we need to learn more about this boss to make it go smoother, such as how to dump one’s poison bomb, and so on.  In the end we were all dead, but so was he, and we were able to loot, so we’ll take it.

We ended the evening getting omgpwned by Gluth, with the realization that we needed to read up a bit on this one and Thaddeus.

But what a night … five guild-first kills in our Naxx progression. It’s nights like this that make all the drama bearable.

Oh, and this final screenshot serves two purposes.

1) Hey lookies, I haz epic rug now!

2) Fuubar was commenting on his ugly UI. I offer this as evidence that it could be a lot worse. As Grimm told him:

It is the TRUE reason that bin Laden is still in hiding.

It is what actually made Romney drop out of the presidential race.

Someone at Chrysler tried using it, and see what happened there.

McG used it on his WoW account.

Christian Bale saw it.

Seriously, my UI has been weaponized. Classified. Probably going to fight the Taliban.

To which I’ll add: and we totally took down Heigan with it.

Tonight: can we finish Construct? Will Sapph be Our Little Dragon? Will K’T get revenge for Bigglesworth’s untimely demise?

1. This is what we get for looking the other way while he pegs 25s – he starts thinking everything should be easy. /sigh. Can’t have a run without drama, can we?  At least nobody quit the guild, though our MT left the raid until the GM called him out and made him come back (good on her). [↩]
2. Our MT conjectures that we were probably the only ones to watch the vids as instructed. A good guess, I think. [↩]
3. we later found out that the DPS warrior he replaced had gone offline because the police raided a house on his block, and they killed power to the whole block [↩]
4. I’m in charge of finding and posting training materials on the guild site [↩]

The WoWHead Blog¹ links to an interview with Connie Mableson, a lawyer whose bona fides includes representing MDY against Blizzard in the Glider case recently. She has interesting views on the subject, and concludes that Blizzard is going to try to monetize addons somehow.

I disagree with Connie’s reasoning. Her suspicions seem to be flawed by her basic lack of understanding of the actual technical aspects of creating addons. Here are some points to consider.²

• Addons are written in a computer language called LUA. LUA is an interpreted language. The programs are simple text files that are fed to an interpreter.
• Addons as distributed, therefore, are plain text files that anyone can review, unless you are very tricksey like those Carbonite people, who manage to obscure code so that you can’t tamper with it.³
• WoW internals are written in a compiled language.  Compiled languages deliver executables that can be run directly without any extra interpreter steps. A popular language of choice for this is C or its more modern cohort C++.⁴
• The WoW executable has a LUA interpreter built in to it. This interpreter is gimped – it does not have full access to the full LUA language standard command set, for example, nor does it have access to the network or to WoW internal data structures. This is done for security, and is a good thing.
• Therefore, if Blizzard wanted to shut down addon developers, they could just disable the interpreter. No need for draconian revisions to policy or anything else of the sort.
• LUA programs (addons) have access to in-game data through a very narrowly defined interface. Want to find out the time? You can’t just look at the clock. You have to ask WoW to do it for you, and return the value.
• The WoW executable has access to data structures that are far richer than the data available to LUA programs. Potentially, the WoW client could find out the time by looking directly at the clock, no matter where that data lived.
• Therefore, attempting to take over the LUA addon marketplace would be one of the more rediculous things they could do, gimping themselves by disallowing the very data they owned. That would be very stupid.
• Interpreted languages like LUA run slower than thier compiled language counterparts. Why on earth would they go that route when it would gimp the performance of the addon? Again, that would be blazingly stupid.
• Addons are required to “persist” data (save it) through a narrowly defined, inefficient database engine. You can likely experience the inefficiency directly, or see the difference directly, is more accurate. Go in and nuke your Auctioneer database, and see how fast your next load is. I bet you gain five to ten seconds minimum. And that’s one program.
• The WoW client can access disk files directly, which is potentially near-instantaneous access to information. The WoW client’s LUA interpreter cannot. Not allowed. No disk access, no network access.
• Therefore, Blizzard would be foolish yet again to go this route, by frustrating the user, increasing load times, and degrading performance overall. More stupid!

So, besides the obvious technical flaws in Connie’s argument, everything else she says in this regard is guesswork – and based on flawed assumptions, at that.

She might still be very right. Blizz has pulled some classic blunders in the past, and this would fall right into that sort of bucket.

But I very much doubt it.

I have a possible alternate scenario, involving something like an Apple App Store on the Blizzard web site, requiring all addons to filter through that⁵ and cutting Blizz a piece of the pie of any revenues taken in by addon developers.

This would be great, except one thing. This is Blizzard. They can’t maintain a searchable forum, the main website goes kaput under the slightest traffic spike, huge chunks of webspace go south for no reason, etc. In short, they suck at internet other than how it directly pertains to the games they distribute – and that’s because the two are maintained by completely different groups. But point is, the odds of getting the ‘good’ geeks on this are probably less than even.

So: do not want.

1. Is there nothing they can’t do? [↩]
2. Full disclosure: This is an expanded version of the reply I left over on the WoWHead blog. [↩]
3. As of the recent update of the addon policies by Blizzard, obscuring the code in this manner is no longer allowed. [↩]
4. If you don’t program in C, you won’t “get” why there are two plusses. I will only say that it is not an Orwell reference. [↩]
5. And won’t Curse et al be thrilled at that! [↩]

Meta took an early day to get us started on the road to Northrend – got the next to last copy of Wrath from the local Target, and headed home to install. The wife was much amused at the twitter-off between me and our GM as we both tweeted our progress. Best moment: she tweets “Not enough space on my HD to install!”  Insert the Sound of Ultimate Suffering there. That probably gave me the edge I needed, though, as I managed to log in¹ before she did. For once, I win in the geek-off between me and her².

The choice of toon was not really that difficult to make. I did ask if there was a preference from the GM. She responded “Whatever is the most fun.”³ I responded that all 4 of my 70s roxxor, so I had no preference, to which crickets responded. Choice made by default – I am my own favorite.

Since I started so early, I was able to get a good amount of work done, but only on those quests that didn’t require access to very scarce resources, such as unique mobs and the like. The first days of Quel’danas come to mind, where every Blood Elf mana-head and confused sentry drone was pounced by multiple attackers every time one spawned. As one person put it, “Imagine Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving”.

My starting area of choice was the Borean Tundra, because it has Rhinos!⁴

Some of the quests just shine with stupidity, though. One of the “infiltrators” you have to kill is also a vendor, which means that when you go for this guy, you not only have to compete against others wanting to ninja him, but also you risk cheesing some poor huntard trying to buy meat for his pet.

Pets – All of mine are up to 70 now – Rigel the stompasaurus, Random the white kitty, and Coral the orange kitty. Now I have to decide which cat to keep. I went through an awfully long training cycle with Coral, but Random has been my faithful companion ever since I was 50-ish.  One of them has to go to make room for as-yet-unnamed-gorilladin. I’m thinking Random will be retired, given the task of guarding the Grimmtooth estate from pillagers⁵ And, finally, I have a new pal, Bellatrix the Rhino.  Yes, I can haz Rhino Bowling now.  Bel is just getting her feed under her, as it were, but I look forward with great anticipation as mobs fly through the air at her behest.

Quests – We gots ‘em. I dropped almost all of my quest log as no longer relvant, though I would sincerely like to finish off my Nightbane quest line. It’s just lame not being able to start that quest myself. That aside, at this point my quest log is almost full again. I’ve found most of the quest hubs in the Borean Tundra, an done or two have been cleaned out. The Murlock one is just priceless. If it weren’t for the fierce competition I’d've gotten some screen shots, but there was no time to dilly-dally around.  Rescuing Murloc tadpoles is just about the most fun you can have with a murloc – with or without armor – that is possible, is all I’m saying.

Trade Skills – Oh my, the cost of Grand Master training is a killer! Unfortunately, one of my favorite addons – Advanced Trade Skill Window – totally locks up the game now, so I’ve had to get rid of it for now.  I’ll be watching for updates.⁶

Instances – Late in the night, our GM pulled together a final run into The Nexus (this was her third), with one warlock on a PuG who was competent enough but unable to outshine our mighty DPS (our GM of course pwned my arse). We wiped twice, once on the 2nd and once on the final boss, but now we understand the fights and may be able to deal better in the future.

Gear – So far I’ve vendored everything I’ve gotten, except for one ring⁷. Anomalus does drop a nice pair of boots that I’d like a crack at, though.

At this point I am around 2/3 of the way to 71. Sure, I’m no power-leveller. But I’m enjoying the scenery, that’s for sure.

1. And out, and back in – as recommended by Blizzard [↩]
2. Not to worry, she has me on so many fronts this is at most a form of ceremonial parity [↩]
3. Ouch. I so deserved that. [↩]
4. More on that later. [↩]
5. Surprisibus! Surprisibus! – that so slayed me the first time I saw it (around 3:08 for the relevant gag). [↩]
6. Hmmm… on the link, the author explains the issue and recommends a workaround. OK, I’ll give it a shot. [↩]
7. Is this a homage to The Scout Report? That would be cool. [↩]

One of my addons was automatically updated last night and introduced a HUD to my display. The problem is that I don’t know which one!  At least with WUU I was able to read the release notes after the fact, but with WOWMatrix that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Anyone else?

Back in the Amiga days, there was a nifty program designed to get rid of Guru Meditation Errors (similar to the BSOD of Windows yore) called GOMF – “Get Outta My Face”. When WoW upgrades go bad, I really need something like that.

And it didn’t just go bad, but went bad in spectacular fashion, as FuBar took a beating and as a result, around 1/2 my plugins went nuts. I eventually traced it down to a bad install of Babble (a localization library) but it was pretty hairy for a while.

More specifically it was a borked install of the FuBar-Plugins library that *required* that Babble be installed seperately. It was confused as to whether to use the embedded version, or the base install version. I had fiddled with using non-embeds at one point, didn’t like the results, and had reverted … except this one small little bit, which I had never figured out how to unwind.

Let that be a lesson. Plugins are Serious Business. If you experiment, be sure to save a snapshot of what worked previously, just in case.

This of course curtailed my questing just a bit, but I was able to knock out the Bring Down The Warbringer! quest line, which climaxes with an enjoyable jaunt around an Infernal staging area with a Fel Reaver pet. I’m guessing that when 2.3 goes live, that this will become a mandatory quest for Huntards wishing to tame one for themselves. Although I hear rumblings that the new pet will be moved to 2.4 due to some game mechanic issues (namely, how to transport cartloads of Defias Bandits that the Reaver requires for food).

Speaking of 2.3, it is confirmed in the forums that 2.3 will go live next week unless something awful pops up in the meantime.