 I tell ya, some people demand everything free and served to them by a throng of nude supermodels along with a complimentary foot, back, and e-peen massage. The public "outcry" on the Curse.com forums over their client going premium is simply ridiculous. If anyone bothered to pay attention, the Client was branded as a "Premium Preview" prior to it going live. Why didn't anyone attribute this to a beta service like I did? Well, I'd imagine a few people did. However, now the loudest are heard the most, and they're vicious. Up above you can see the deal. Premium, for the most part, retains it's automated features, high-speed downloads, gets rid of ads, and you get an orange border for your curse.com avatar. Pricing? I paid a solid 30$ for the next year, quarterly/monthly/weekly gets more expensive. It's not so much the service that I find useful, I do like the automation, but they're giving 20% to addon writers just for using Curse. Kudos to that! This makes me feel much better about having 60+ addons yet not donating for any of them. Seriously a wad of cash there. High speed downloads? None of these addons are incredibly large or anything. You're not going to wait 10 minutes for your latest version of Squared, or TokenMachine. I tried out the standard before I tossed money into it. Nothing changed THAT much to warrant a vicious public outcry. If you feel entitled to a fully featured free service you're in the wrong day and age. That was SOOO 2001. Bandwidth for 3 major MMO addons is expensive, net advertising has easily dropped 50%, and the Donate button was laughable. Money is required to keep websites alive.Woo.Free users can still use the client, albeit one add-on at a time, and it's no longer automatic. It DOES check to see which addons need to be updated, you manually need to click update on each one. You can still download using the Curse Client from the website, or download the raw addon to manually install them. This is not what the Premium client is for.I guess what I'm getting at, is I see value in the Premium Client. It supports Curse as a whole, and GOOD developers as a whole. The automation has always made my life easy, and it's interchangeable between AoC and WoW along with WAR. Not that I would touch either of those two games. WAR is my love.So if you use Curse, don't be a cheap bastard if you can help it. Save up 30$ and buy the premium. Support your addon creators and the host site.
I start to pray, every single time a new patch is released, that I do not have to go through all of my addons (Count is at 51 now), to disable, and enable, and update just to make my current UI usable. The next patch coming down the lines is certainly going to break more than a few, and hopefully, the good little developers are playing on PTS to figger out what updates need to be deployed on patch day. Right now, pretty much every single one of these Addons is working to full capacity, except nLootLink. I still haven't figured that one out. Addons are a huge part of any MMO. You can load the standard UI and play the game without any issues whatsoever. Or you can massively enhance the game and play to your own tune. What I've noticed with WAR over time, and other MMO's do this for sure, is the integration of utility addons into the default UI. Another thing that I pray for during every patch, is a few of these knocked off my list in support of a WAR version. Not that I have anything against these addon developers, but at least the War developers get paid for their work, hence, update without question...  I'll even give ye a slightly bigger picture to see all the addons I'm talking about.
I've been thinking about doing an entry all about UI and addons, what's good, what's great, and the disappointments of awesome addons that simple fell off a cliff due to some patch that broke it. Instead, or as some may expect following that process, I'll simple be linking to each addon, and giving a brief sentance on its functionality.
Obviously, I wouldn't be using them if they sucked, or were not working at this time. So here we go!
Auction Stats - Adds a bit more info for the AH-Elitists. Good to know how much something should be priced for if ya can't find it at the time. What sells for how much, etc.
AutoBand - Awesome if you're frequently heading a WB, keeps Tanks, Healers, DPS, all balanced across the groups, and autokicks logged off players every 60s
AutoDismount - Oldie, still works. Very nice.
BlackBox - UI mod for the respawn timer.
BuffBegoneUltra - I should probably trash this... Supposedly broke back in October
CareerText - Takes a while to build the DB, but eventually every time you see an enemy in combat, their Career will appear in their health bar.
CaVES - Goes next to your Equipped stuff. Lists changes, in case you need details on different sets of stuff.
Compact VPs - Adds % to domination to a couple things, like WarBoard
Curse Profiler - Meh, tried getting rid of it, keeps my profile updated somehow I guess.
Dammaz Kron - Best UI addon to date. Track your kills in a very sexy manner using the ToK.
Dye Preview - Look cool all by yourself, or check out differnt dye combos. No one else will see the changes but you.
EZCraft - adds context menus to Apoth/Tali, less drag n drop. Highly recommended for crafters
Fixer - Supposedly keeps things in place when they try to default. Still having trouble with my chat boxes though.
HealAll - TALK to healers? Bah, they know what I want. One right click removes my res sickness.
Horizontal Mechanic Bar - Numerical bar instead of whatever your mechanic is. Works great for Rage and Combustion.
ItemRack - Can be used for equipment sets/tactics. I mostly use it for quickly comparing different items. Pretty powerful lil guy.
Join Selected Scenarios - Since QQueuer broke (Its been fixed a bit), I started using JSS. Haven't seen the need to switch back just yet. I probably will though.
JunkDump - Sell all that junk with one button! Careful though, among the "White" items include Standards, Mounts, and Siege Weapons. Gotta add them to the Exceptions list.
Lib, Lib, Lib - Various required libs
MapMonster - Pin cool points to yer map, or set waypoints for running to.
Navigator - Adds a compass with said points an waypoints on it.
Minmap - Not really min, but bigger and square. Default map UI replaced. You lose buttons for various addons though.
Miracle Grow Remix - Awesome-uber-leet-sauce for Cultivating. DO NOT cultivate without it.
nLootLink - Right, still working with this one...
Numeric Influence - Der, numbers instead of a Bar, though I use both.
Phantom - removes default UI elements very well.
QuestTrackerHelper - Another Oldie, auto assigns quests depending on your zone to the map and quest list.
nRarity - Adds outlines in grey/white/green/blue/purple/gold to items.
RealmStatus - Easily track all the tiers
Reported! - Mail addon for those pesky gold-spams. Just click report at the top, then send off an auot generated report to the Banhammer crew.
ShiftWho - See a name in chat? shift-click to do an auto /who on them
SpamMeNot - blocks (not so much lately) tells from gold spammers and autoreports them (still works quite well) to the Banhammer crew.
Squared - ZOMG, required. I love Squared. I could live without all the rest if I only had this one.
TargetRing - buggers running behind rocks trying to hide? TR keeps a lock on them as long as they're in range. Handy for RDPS/Healers
Tome Titan - Yeah, well... I like my unlocks. This shows just about all of em.
TDPS Meter - For Warboard
Trakario - When an objective is picked up, this shows you who's got it Name and Career for both sides.
VerticalMorale - Yup. That means up and down.
Vertigo - I actually don't need this one anymore, but it allows you to have vertical action bars.
Warboard - UI replacer for a LOT of stuff. Minimalist design.
TDPS - Adds TDPS to the board
FPS - Adds FPS to the board
GameMenu - Awesome, adds the GameMenu to the board in itty bitty icons.
Warhammer Census - Finally this is working again. A complex /who algorithm tracks all the players in the game in your faction. Kinda cool for tracking who the big/active guilds on the server are.
WSCT - Lots of options for any kind of damage/event/heals coming in and out. Very neat, mess with it
WarWhisperer - /t replace, works more like an IM service. Keeps a history of everyone you talk to, and what was said.
XPStatus +G - UI element that has XP/RP/GP/Gold and time to level
zMailMod - an example of things that WAR has added into the default UI. zMail is still being worked on, with mass-add per profession its still a keeper.
There's a couple other ones out there that I'm looking into at the moment. Just for good measure, I leave you all with a current (mostly) shot of my UI.
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