This one will have to be a bit shorter and lacking a diagram since I was away from my home computer most of the day. The good news is, there is no great need for a diagram as it is more of an addition to last week’s topic than an entirely new one. As promised, this week will be a bit about buffs and debuffs. More specifically, how they are displayed, seeing as how that’s what we are talking about in this series of Repairing Gears.
If you head on back to last week’s Repairing Gears you’ll be able to get a good picture in your mind from the diagram for what I am about to add to it. Right on the player’s circle (or target’s circle, for that matter) would be attached smaller circles that have a color/graphic on them representing a certain debuff type. For instance, there may be a circle on a person when they have a poison on them. Mousing over that circle would display the information about the poison (damage/time remaining). If they also had a di
I want to go over just a small portion of the information we want to display for this week’s topic. We’ll look only at the unit frames, the area that displays the health and “special” bars (mana, rage, endurance, energy, whatever) of you, party members, and your target. I promised diagrams, so I’ll go ahead and get right into them, and then wrap it up with a small tie-in of why they were designed this way.
Now, let’s take a moment and go over what’s there. The first large circle on the left side is the player information area. The outer ring is health, the second ring is whatever “special” bar should be showing and the innermost ring can be used for a couple different things. For instance, it could fill up as you gain experience in the game, or perhaps it could fill up as some sort of quest counter, for a specially designated quest in your log (as you kill “x” amount of people or collect “x” amount of i
Your regularly scheduled Repairing Gears topic for the week has been pushed back to Friday, March 16th. Due to this, the Weekly Roundup usually appearing on Friday, will be showing up on Saturday instead. On a further note, starting with next week, the Repairing Gears topic will be put on Wednesday, instead of Thursday, and the Highlight of the Week will be moved to Thursday. This revised schedule should allow an easier time of getting each article out on its proper day, rather than having to delay or move around weekly articles in the future.
Sorry for the delay this week.
repairing gears, weekly roundup, highlight of the week, delay
I’m changing things up this week and talking about a subject that is far more abstract than previous topics. It’s been said in interviews I’ve read (and linked to) and by the players that MMO interfaces are lacking in quality as a whole, and even more so when compared to non MMO games.
The obvious problem is so much more information is available and needs to be displayed in an MMO than in any single-player game. In the average single-player game you can push your start/menu button and pause the game, allowing you ample time to cycle through what you are looking for and do whatever you want. In an MMO there are plenty of times where this isn’t the case. The game is going to continue to go on around you even if you are scouring your inventory for that potion you need to use so the mob attacking you doesn’t kill you. Another big problem is that people play on monitors of various sizes. Those with larger monitors will probably be able to put up more in
Time for the fourth installment of the Repairing Gears on World of Warcraft’s guild system. I said this one would cover guild halls, and it will, but first a quick note that I thought I put in an earlier installment but must have missed.
Officer MOTD.
The current MOTD (Message of the Day) for the guild is nice, but I’ve always wanted to be able to set aside a second one where only officers (or those with proper permissions) can see the message.
Let’s head back to guild halls again though and recap while doing so.
In the second part of the article I talked about guild banks and what they should be, what they should have in them, this would be one feature of the guild hall, and in my mind, the most important. Two weeks ago (I missed last week’s installment) I brought out some highlights from a topic on guild halls, and I’ll use that as the jumping point to expand on a variety of things mentioned there.
The idea of a trophy case of some sort is one that i
Time for the third part of this the third Repairing Gears post. What I’m going to do for this part is go through some of the post I mentioned earlier and pick out some ideas from it with a short comment, which will be expanded on in the following installment where I take what I like, add in all that I had already planned, and enhance what other people have thought of.
I’ll go ahead and quote the posts (or the parts of interest) so people don’t have to guess at which one I’m talking about.
Gigantic heads of the bosses that have been vanquished by your’e army of crusaders.
This idea isn’t exactly what I would do, but I like the spirit of the idea, some sort of “trophy case” to display accomplishments is a cool idea.
A bank NPC where officers of the guild can store pots and other items would be useful.
Having talked about this last week I don’t think I need to go over the practicality of having such a system in place, but I’m
Last week I made some changes to basic guild management. This week I wanted to dive right into the first part of my fixes for guild banks. I will still be going back to other changes in the guild management part of things, but I am trying to keep things in order of how they interact with one another and this seems the next logical step for me (though the way ideas fly in and out of my mind that may have changed by the next part.
There have been many, many posts over on the WoW official forums about this and guild halls/housing and the entire topic of just guild banks can taken so many ways that I want to focus it again into two primary components for the first part of this guild banking system.
Items
Money
Items first, because I like starting at the top of the list. This is probably the simplest part of the banking system because it works essentially just as the individual character banks do, there is a bank space, followed by rooms to put bags (though charging the space for thes
