Free Candy For Everyone

Just because they give a 1.57% discount if you consistently use their search engine, I tend to pop on by Amazon’s A9 search engine about once a week or so. I know, it amounts to just about no money, but it only takes about 2 minutes a week, so why not? Anyway, today I stopped by and noticed a link to A9 maps. “Who needs another map website?!?” I asked. But I clicked on through just to check it out, maybe it’ll be different, who knows?

Well, that link takes you to a page with the typical address box at the top, and a block asking if you’re looking for BlockView Images, which are only available for a few cities. Boston is one of them, so I selected Boston and whoa. Here, I’ll show you a screenshot.

See that eyeglass in the middle? That’s the intersection you’re looking at. And on the right are actual pictures of the intersection. I moved it around to a bunch of locations and they had pictures for many of them. As you can see the maps themselves are just MapQuest maps. But the BlockView thing is, I believe, what A9 is adding. I don’t know if we really need pictures of the intersections, but it’s a pretty cool trick. Of course, if they’re accomplishing this by handing some poor intern a camera and a map, I feel sorry for the kid. But if they can incorporate the pictures into directions, it’d be awesome. Like, “Turn left at intersection X” with a giant pic and you see the gas station or other landmark you should take note of. That’d be cool.

There’s a Crazy Cat Lady in World of Warcraft. You know what she does? She sells cats. Yes. It’s awesome.

Grouped with a couple of folks in Westfall today who had cats following them everywhere and had to go find out how to get my own. Lots of guides to noncombat pets out here, here’s one if you’re really serious about being thorough. I wish I hadn’t missed Orphan’s week. The pigs are super cute.

I had one of the strangest experiences yet while playing World of Warcraft this weekend. I recently started a human priest to play with my Sunday night group. Our Crazy Cattle are about up to level 60 and we decided we’d switch off weekends, one week playing our high level Horde, one week playing newbie Alliance characters. So I’ve been leveling up a priest so we can run Deadmines.

I was running around Westfall when this level 60 Dwarf Rogue apparently took a shine to me. She started out small. First she just gave me some linen for no reason. Then she started attacking anything that aggro’d on me. She followed me everywhere, would wait until I got a few hits on a target and then kill it in one hit. Which sure helped me on quest kills but did eat away at my experience gain (instead of about 200 xp per kill I was getting maybe 50). Then she followed me to town and waited while I did some shopping. Oh. And then she challenged me to a duel.

Here’s the “duel” underway.

It basically involved me casting a few useless spells that bounced off her, then dancing until time ran out and she therefore automatically lost. Yup. I “beat” a level 60 in a duel. Come on, the game says so, it must be true!

She continued to follow me for a while. Finally I figured I should ask her what was up.

She didn’t respond. Eventually, she challenged some silly level 13 Paladin to a duel. While they were at it, I ditched her. When she realized I was gone she invited me to a group, I guess so she could kill all my foes some more, but I wanted to get some XP darn it, and I turned her down!

I thought that was the end of it, but the next time I logged on my mailbox was full of random items from her. Total cost of goods when sold on the auction house? Over 30 gold. Yes, my friendly stalker sent me over 30 gold worth of items just because. So thanks Airishah. You made me a very wealthy little priest. Keep up the good work and good will towards n00bs.

Some of my college friends recently started playing World of Warcraft and I keep mentioning that I use all these really awesome UI mods that make the game experience better. Well they really wanted me to stop taunting them with non-information and just tell them which darn mods they are already! If you just want to poke around at random mods, go to WorldofWar.net, that’s the place. Anyway, I thought other people might be curious about what I use, so here goes.

I am actually pretty ridiculous about my mod management. I think the easiest thing for most people to do is just download one of the big packages out there and use it. I like to pick and choose a bit more than that. But here’s where to start.

Cosmos
Cosmos is a pretty comprehensive package. It comes in a couple of flavors. You’ll probably want the Release version. For detailed info on Cosmos, there’s a wowwiki page here. There’s a list of all the included addons in Cosmos on another wiki page here.

If you want to go piecemeal, here are the most important pieces (IMO) out of the Cosmos package:

• AllInOneInventory - This one makes it so you get one giant UI for all your bags. No more searching for which bag you put that one particular thing in, it just don’t matter no more!
• EquipCompare - Get comparison to your gear whenever you mouse over something anywhere, not just at a vendor
• QuestLogLevelPatch - You want this one! It adds the quest level number to the quest log. Doesn’t seem that this is available as an independent download, but there are other quest enhancement addons you can find if you don’t want all of Cosmos.
• ScrollingCombatText - Gives you much better info about combat hits, misses, parries, reputation gains, etc floating above your targets head in combat.

I have several other Cosmos mods turned on, but those are the really essential ones.

CTMod
There’s another decent package, a bit smaller but contains some good bits, called CTMod. This also has mods to simplify bag management, to see quest levels, and very importantly, to see coordinates on the overland map. This is really useful because tips on sites like thottbot frequently refer to the coordinates of a target. Here’s how you see them. Just check things out at their website, I use:

• CTMasterMod - needed for the rest to work
• CTPartyBuffs - Let’s you see buff/debuff icons next to your parties icons on the left so you can see when they need a cure poison or another Mark of the Wild, for example
• CTUnitFrames - Let’s you put percents on or next to health/mana bars. When I’m healing this is great, I have it put the % next to all party members’ health bars so I can say “When they get below 70% I’ll heal” instead of trying to go by bar color or something

Titan Panel
Adds a little title bar to the top (and/or bottom) of your screen with easy access to lots of great stats like number of available bag slots, amount of money (mouse over to see how much gold you’ve earned/spent this session), experience info (estimated time to level!), etc. This is also a package - Titan Panel itself is a framework for mods to report data. It comes with all those I’ve mentioned but you can also download other Titan Panel mods to plugin if you want. Oh, and it has a clock in the upper right so you can see the time at a glance. That’s kinda important! And you can set the offset from server time, useful if your server isn’t in your current timezone.

Auctioneer
So good. Super good. Let’s you scan all the items at the auction house and logs their prices. Do it enough times and you can build up a good database of market prices. When you go to sell it suggests a prices for you that’s probably actually in line with what the price should be. Invaluable in making money (see my guide if you want more tips on making money). I’d go with the “complete” download which includes some tooltip enhancements which are useful. It also has Enchantrix, which is great if you are an enchanter, otherwise totally worthless. So feel free to delete that one if you are not an enchanter - it tells you what something will disenchant into and gives the value of the disenchanted items using the auctioneer data. Very cool.

AutoProfit
Can’t live without it! Adds a button to the upper right of all vendors that let’s you sell ALL gray items. One click to get rid of all that vendor trash. You can also configure it to sell/not-sell particular items. I didn’t bother, it’s really useful as-is.

There are other addons that help you figure out how much your goods actually cost to craft so you can see if you should just auction off the components (probably should most of the time! ReagentCost, which needs Auctioneer or something like it), addons that are even beyond me that let you totally change the look of the UI (DiscordUnitFrames is crazy), and so many I haven’t even tried. I advise getting the standalone mods I mentioned and trying one of the packages for a start. Let me know if anyone has any feedback or other suggestions!

Hit a new personal record for time to level 10 today, just under 3 hours! Every new character I do, I seem to manage it a little bit faster. It’s like a new mini-game for me. Here she is, Myrael the Undead Warlock.

My main character is soo close to 60, she’s one little bar away from 58. If I stopped messing around with all the alts, I’d hit 60 in no time. But I really just love the start of the game so much. I can’t wait for the expansion pack and two entirely new starting zones to play in. That will really be cool to me.

Hey, here’s a question. All these currently-end-game-raids, what’s going to happen to them once the expansion comes out? Level 70s will be able to destroy those measly level 60+ critters? I’m sure I’m not the first to ask, it just honestly didn’t occur to me until right this second.