My Take on Microtransactions

There's been a lot of buzz about microtransactions recently, as a lot of 'free2play' games are basing their revenue models around the concept, much to the dismay of a bunch of users. I tried to cop out of this article, and mail the general gist of my take on the topic to Tobold, hoping he'd pick up on my general vibe and run with it. He already has a bunch of stuff on the topic under his belt, but he told me to knuckle down and do it myself, so here goes my long winded exploration of the subject.

For those in the audience with ADD: People basically hate microtransactions, and any implementation of them is doomed to fail. What people don't hate (and actually love) are playable demos. I think what we have here is mostly a war of words and preconceptions.

My first memory of microtransactions ever coming up was when Penny Arcade was talking about some guy named Scott McCloud, and how he had this idea about how to make money from his webcomics. He doesn't make funny-ha-ha webcomics like Gabe and Tycho, but big 'serious' webcomics. They're only in the same category as Penny Arcade and Chainsawsuit because they're published on the internet. He basically was exploring the medium of web based delivery, and was fiddling with the idea that a webpage basically has no border. An image can go on forever, and he called this concept the 'infinite canvas'. Needless to say, there was a lot of images on his site. He was an early proponent of microtransactions, and I can only guess that it had to do with the fact that bandwidth (and hosting) wasn't free. He obviously wanted to be compensated for his comics, and recop some of the cost of just 'throwing them out there for the masses'. Penny Arcade doesn't charge to view their own creations, but they run ads on the site. Tycho picked apart the microtransaction model on a few separate occasions, but I think it's summed up pretty well from an article I found from December of 2000 by a man named Clay Shirky, which I'll lean on pretty liberally from here, as all of the points still apply.

The article itself is worth a read, because it clearly illustrates many of the problems facing micropayment acceptance, and was written almost 10 years ago. One of the main problems is that there's a level of anxiety associated with ANY purchase, no matter how small, and micropayments try to make each purchase so small as to be associated with the 'it's basically free' section of our brains, but then another section speaks up saying 'well if it's basically free, why isn't it totally free?'. People are much more comfortable and accustomed to buying a pack of gum on Monday instead of 5 single sticks from Monday to Friday. The newspaper analogy is used as well... I personally find sports completely boring, and find reading box scores to be as exciting as watching paint dry. I'll read world news, and maybe the entertainment section. That's just my style. But the newspaper doesn't sell each section for 5 cents, they sell the whole thing for 50. If you do the crossword, great... it not, whatever. You buy the whole thing, and whether or not you get your 50 cents worth is totally in your hands at that point. Selling each paragraph for a penny, and hoping you read 50 paragraphs is sloppy. It would be a huge headache for the newspaper and the consumer. Simple is better. Chris Rock might argue otherwise.

People prefer to have regular billing cycles, or make flat purchases. There are certain situations where micropayments apply, but you probably don't even think of them in that manner. The electric company. Buying a stamp to mail a single letter. These are all industries which control their markets, though, and the system is so ingrained that we aren't even aware we're conducting a microtransaction when the gas bill arrives. Our gaming habits, on the other hand, have primarily been 'buy the nintendo cart, and play it till the wheels fall off', or 'subscribe to the MMO, and play it till we die in a Korean net cafe'. Getting your peanut butter in our chocolate isn't delicious, it's annoying.

Again, the basic gist is this:

The Short Answer for Why Micropayments Fail: Users hate them.

The Long Answer for Why Micropayments Fail: Why does it matter that users hate micropayments? Because users are the ones with the money, and micropayments do not take user preferences into account.

This is perhaps the most elegant summing up I could find. Who cares why we hate them, we just do. This is the same for in game advertising. When EA expects us to pay for Rainbow Six: Oklahoma, then ALSO expects us to not be pissed when the barns there have full size Dorito ads on the sides of them, they're just burying their heads in the sand and pretending they don't hear us. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, and as long as we buy the game, they're getting away with it. This isn't about in game advertising though, so let's not get side tracked...

I think one of the main things 'wrong' with microtransactions is that many people have the same negative reaction to them. They feel like the developer is double dipping our funds, because we already bought (or subscribed to) the game. It isn't fair for them to charge us again for new shoulderpads or a fancy flaming sword. The problem with this, though, is when the game in question is supposedly "Free2Play". This is where the war of words comes in, and this is the main point of the article.

Let's take a step back, and think about it again. Look at the following words, and see which one you 'like' better.

1) Free2Play

2) Playable Demo

It's pretty simple right? A demo is free, and allows you to try out a game with no obligation to buy it. Free2Play, however, has a negative connotation... these guys are eventually going to start asking me for money, those scheming bastards.

Right?

But that's exactly what a Playable Demo is, too. The company is hoping you'll like the demo, and go buy the full copy. A game like FreeRealms requires no money, no credit card, nothing to set up and get rolling. If you just honestly hate the game, there's nothing forcing you to buy anything in it. But some people still refuse to even try to out because it has the words Free2Play attached to it. I think Free2Play just has a shitty stimga attached to the name. I personally think the "2" is just insulting. Let's take another look at a similar producte category: Shareware.

id software's Doom was essentially Free2Play. You could download the first ten levels for ZOMGFREE, and play the hell out of that content. People loved the game so much they rushed to the computer store to get the full copy. There was no big hooha attached to the 'demo', it was pretty obviously a hook to get you interested, but people loved them for it. When did the perception shift? When did we get pissed at people trying to show us their game for free, and then charge us for the full version later? Tobold's main issue with Freerealms was that the bought items made the game trivially easy. There was no point in trying to earn anything when you could plunk down $2.50 and get a Cuisinart Flamey Royale that would utterly destroy foes. I think that's more of a balance issue, unless they're really trying to ruin the challenge for those that have money. This borders dangerously close on RMT and buying gold. I've said it a few times before, but I really don't give two squats who buys gold. So what they can buy BOE epics off the AH. Big Deal. It's not endangering my enjoyment of the game in any way, but then again I don't stand around inspecting people and crying about what I discover in Trade.

Again, side tangent.

The fact is that at some point, everyone got pissy about developers wanting to be paid for their work. I like MMOs, but I'm pretty stupid. My mind is tiny, and can only focus on so many things at once, so I only subscribe to one game at a time. Right now it's WoW. That's my 15 bucks a month. I was interested in FreeRealms, though, and bought ten bucks worth or Station Whatevers. Using that same currency, I 'bought' one month of (the full, unlocked) game time, a booster pack for the TCG, and a pirate hat. In my own mind, I would see no issue with putting 15 bucks a month into my wallet in FR, and buying the month of play (only 5$), and 10$ worth of 'toys' each month assuming the game entertained me as much as WoW does. It doesn't really, though. I kinda like the mining minigame the best, and that's pretty much it. I also think the mining outfit is horrendously cute, and prefer to run around wearing that anyway. What can I say, I play a pretty girl online. As far as I'm concerned, I could park myself at a tin vein, let my subscription run out, and just fire up FR anytime I wanted to play the mining game. That would never cost me another dime, and I didn't need to steal any software to get it.

I mean, that's a pretty good deal... right?

[continue...]

World of Warcraft VR Missions

Hatch has a post up, that points to a post by Spinks, which expounds on a shelf life for MMOs (well, games in general, I suppose). He laments "...a big factor might be that it seems like the game's best days are behind it, and there isn't that much to look forward to... It feels like we are riding out the next 6-10 months so we can be around for the climax, then many more will abandon ship."


There's basically nothing new, which is... well, nothing new.



Stabs chimes in with:

I imagine their plan is something like:

Oct Patch 3.2
Mar Patch 3.3
Oct New Expansion

If they release 3.2 & 3.3 early without being able to move the Expansion forward it just creates a very long dry zone next year.

...which seems to tie in pretty well with the whole system Blizzard has going, with 'Major Content Patches' (think: An'Qiraj, Zul'Aman). Stuff that isn't an expansion, but is something to chew on until the next one rolls around.

Some people like this system (although they're getting harder to find recently), as it's basically extra 'free' content that you get for just subscribing, and don't need to buy an extra expansion for. But think about it... Wrath has introduced what? A new, tiny continent (compared to vanilla WoW, let's not lie) with the accompanying 5 mans, a reissue of a dungeon that was already built, and now finally Ulduar. And that jousting thing. Content takes so LONG to create, and is so quick to burn through, that this may be one of the major cockblocks WoW is creating for itself. Their art department is too good, and holds itself to too high of a standard.

I know I PERSONALLY look around at the architecture of a dungeon, panning my camera to look up at the arching ceilings above Saphiron, and trying to figure out if the INTERIOR of Karazhan actually works compared to what you see from the outside, or if you just zone in the front door, and then they just make shit up as they go. I'm pretty sure it's the latter, but could be wrong. Think about Naxx for a sec, why is the thing you zone into so tiny? Is there not enough room in the fucking sky to have Naxx floating there, in real size? I think about crap like this, but I imagine that a majority of the playerbase probably doesn't. They're focused on the fight itself, and everything else could take place in an untextured cube for all they care. They're there for the fight, the challenge of the encounter, not animated slime waterfalls or spooky doodad crates placed hither and thither.

Which reminds me of something I never really understood, until perhaps just today when I thought about it.

Metal Gear Solid had a version that came with an entire disk full of 'VR Training Missions' that I thought was such a complete cop out at the time, and entertained me for perhaps 30 minutes (of controller clutching madness) before I just wrote them off as half assed bullshit thrown on the 2nd disc to punish people with OCD.

For the 8 in the audience that have no idea what I'm talking about, let me give an example.

Here's a screenshot of Solid Snake, sneaking around in some base, searching for Weapons of Mass Whatever:

And now here's a screenshot from a 'VR Mission':


I think these are actually from different versions of Metal Gear, I really have no idea, but you get the idea. The VR missions were Virtual Reality 'encounters' that you needed to 'solve'. Given a narrow hallway, with a small box to hide behind at location Z, and guards patrolling routes X and Y, how do you get from point A to point B? Some missions you're given a weapon with limited ammo, but for the most part, stealth tactics are all that are required to reach the 'goal'.

Then, when you think about the entire Metal Gear series, how is the first screenshot above really that different from the second one? You can see fancier textures on the walls, and propane tanks that are completely un-interactive, but the idea is the exact same... make it from this hallway to the next. After that, there will be a room with various cover to hide behind, and various enemies with various cones of vision that can alert other packs of mobs, etc etc etc, and you suddenly realize there's really no difference at all between the VR missions and the regular game.

Yes, the regular game has lore woven into each encounter, and various NPCs and quest givers from time to time will --oops! Am I talking about WoW here? Basically any game fits this mold, but Metal Gear was just ahead of its time, and was willing to strip any semblance of story or textures away from the core model of what Metal Gear was/is: Getting from point A to point B with various obstacles in your way.

The VR missions are just the Metal Gear version of the X-Men's Danger Room. A training facility to practice certain maneuvers, so that when you get out in the (lore filled, fully textured) real world, you know how to handle situation X.

Now let's switch to WoW. Let's think of say... the Slave Pens? There were three pulls before the 'Lobster Boss' that had Nether Rays that feared, Champions that couldn't be CCed and hit like trucks, and you had patrolling mobs that would link the three pulls if you caught a bad fear without a tremor totem or Fear Ward in place. Is that really so different from a room full of baddies in MGS? The parallel is there, so where am I going with this?

Earlier I said that WoW is kind of shooting itself in the foot by having such high standards. When you think about it, WoW isn't the most cutting edge game on the market, it's just the best executed (and yes, people will argue, blah blah blah). When I think of the garbage that passed for a dungeon in Warhammer (not that game's focus, blah blah blah), and any combat scenario in Free Realms... even situations I found myself in in LotRO (I never actually 'ran an instance' in LotRO), or gated areas in Age of Conan... it was all pretty lackluster compared to something like the Scarlet Cathedral. Even SM isn't the pinnacle of dungeon design, but it beats the pants off any other competitor. We only scoff at it at all in contrast to something like Karazhan. Wailing Caverns sucks compared to Upper Blackrock Spire, but we're talking about the same game, just different areas.

So where do we go? Downwards, apparently.

WoW has it's playerbase. Most of the people playing WoW have been playing for over a year, many since the game released back in the Dark Ages. They know what they want, and what they want is MORE. More variety, and more choices of what to run. Everything is fun the first time through, and stays fun for at least a few runs (excluding Occulus, which sucked without remorse from the starting gun). But after a while it gets tired. You want something new. I still stand behind my original assertion from last October that the best way to spruce up combat would be to give bosses a random pool of abilities to choose from, and you wouldn't know what a boss will do until you pull it.

Barring that, though, why not just have a few select instances that change subtly each week. Move some hallways around, and switch up patrol patterns. Swap out mob packs number 6, 8, and 12 with type Z caster packs instead of melee grunts. Go for simple, but abundant, variations on concepts. This bosses main attack is his whirlwind cleave (hmm... Skadi in UP, Herod in SM Armory, High King Maulgaur, need I go on?), but each week just switch ONE mechanic; now it's random voidzones, next week it's fearing adds... You don't need to turn it into straight VR missions where we're fighting Untextured Cube Boss 75476.v, but recycle the dungeon art and switch a few chairs around, and change the drapes from time to time... would that be enough?

I'm starting to ramble here, and losing a bit of the coherence I had in mind when I started this post... but let me pose a few basic questions:

Would you rather wait for 6 months running ULDUAR OMFG, or would you rather a much simpler (in terms of art) dungeon be released every month? What if it was one dungeon every two months, but the boss mechanics were tweaked slightly every two weeks? What if it WAS just straight VR missions? No new art assets at all, just very simple 'Dire Maul' textured corridors, and don't try and wow us with your leet quest writing skillz. Just give the designers free reign to just test out encounter mechanics and play with mob behaviors? Would that be appealing? I know this one guy with a whole raid dungeon fleshed out with over a dozen unseen fight mechanics. String a few hallways together and let's run that shit! Don't bother wasting 8 weeks on making ceramic pots and crap that don't even break line of sight when hidden behind.

For me, I still enjoy looking around, but a texture can only be 'so fucking awesome' and still just be wallpaper. A doodad in the corner can only be 'so fucking rad' and still just be something that serves no real purpose. I'd prefer to find myself fighting my way thru different SITUATIONS than different flavors of carpeting and throw pillows. I honestly enjoy the combat mechanic and group dynamic more than reading about some night elf I'm supposed to be blah blah blah-ing over.

I think I finally get the VR missions, but I was never horribly good at Metal Gear in the first place, and plus... I was running around alone. Given a DVD full of VR missions I could play Co-op online with 5 buddies with, I'd have a blast.

Yeah?

[continue...]

Naked Man in the Tree

Naked Man in the Tree is a blog that has nothing to do with World of Warcraft. It's also one of my favorite blogs to read, as it doesn't contain 30 second blurbs about what he fed the cat this week, but contains LONG, usually very insightful posts about a full range of topics. So if you're looking for an optimal DPS rotation today, sorry to disappoint. If you're looking for something online to sink your teeth into, then by all means, let's take a closer look.

Following that glorious introduction, I'm sad to announce that his most recent post doesn't sit very well with me. His posts are usually chock full of well researched information, but his most recent post kinda fell apart in the middle, and he got kind of worked up and emotional about the subject matter. Hell, I went off on a full tirade recently for a post called 'Preachy Douchebag is Preachy', so it's not like I'm above it, but I don't pretend to be any sort of intellectual. I only mention this because if you go off and read that one post, it may leave a sour taste in your mouth. I've read a good chunk of his archive since discovering him, and am willing to take it in stride. I'm kind of coming off as an asshole here, but it's because I respect him, and hold him to a higher standard. He's passionate about what he writes, and that's a good thing. I'm going to rattle off a few links in this post, but again... this isn't something you just go check the link to and then come back to finish my next sentence. All of his posts are worthy of printing out, and taking to bed with you to read before going to sleep. I loaded a few up on my mp3 player as plain text files and read two or three on the bullet train to Tokyo for my wife's visa a week back.

His early posts tended to be 'the big things'. One word topics like 'Religion' or 'Population'. Others put a few of the big words together: 'Racism and Dehumanization'. All of them are written from his own personal standpoint, so many aren't trying to be unbiased views on the subject. This, to me, is what blogging is. This is the big picture, the new media everyone is crapping their pants over. Here's one guy (a twenty something teacher in New York) posting his views in an intelligent manner, and I had never heard of him until just recently. This isn't Oprah. He doesn't have a late night talk show. He has TheNakedManintheTree.wordpress.com, and he makes me feel like an idiot for wasting my time blogging about warlock SL/Felguard specs.

Then again, that's who I am. Regarding politics, or religion, or huge issues facing the world, I really just don't get it. I feel like the religious of the world are living out in their own little universe out on the fringe, arguing for Intelligent Design in classrooms, and it just makes me roll my eyes. Politicians will do whatever the hell they want to do, and I really honestly feel like there's no point in getting worked up about it. That is my honest to god belief ...and yet I don't actually believe in god... so how silly is that? His most recent entry is one about the oceans, and it's an important subject. Bottom trawling of the oceans is totally fucking up the coral reefs, wiping out entire species of fish, and we're basically just fucking ourselves, and will feel the effects in our own lifetimes, but none of that shit can honestly be stopped. He gets upset in the middle of the post, and goes into CAPSLOCK to drive home certain points, and while I get it, I feel that nothing short of strapping an H bomb to my ass and blowing shit up is the only thing I could do as an individual. And no (for all the feds that just got alerted to my blog), I'm not gonna do that. What's left? Write an angry letter? Who the fuck in any position of power will care?

He mentions Blue Fin Tuna. That in three years, the Blue Fin Tuna reserves will be all but tapped. We'll be out of tuna fish sandwiches. That shit is real, and yet... at elementary schools in Japan they eat fucking whale. Like, it's on the school menu. Kyuushoku is the Japanese word for school lunch, and one day some fishy meat was on the plate, smothered in miso. When I asked a kid what we were eating, they were like Kujira. Whale. Yeah.

I stopped eating school lunch in Japan, but I won't lie and say it was some personal protest against eating whale, I just got sick of seeing all the kids picking their noses, then handling my rice. Then when you take a bigger look at the political system in Japan, you know shit like that is never going to stop. No Japanese politician is ever going to vote to cancel whale on school lunch menus. One guy tried, and he got laughed all the way out of office. They claim they hunt whale for research, but then it ends up on third grade lunch trays. I'm just saying... we have bigger fish to fry... the war and Iraq and oh my god I'm making myself sleepy even typing this up. It's all so fucked, and it's not going to stop. The fact that that last link even says "Faced with a reported 3000 tonne inventory of unsold meat from last year's cull, the ICR contacted the Yokohama City Education committee, suggesting the department include research meat in their school lunches" just goes to show how stupid the entire planet is. Research meat? 3000 EXTRA tons? Of research meat. Yeah.

Ugh. I don't really know where to go with this. This post started out as 'hey check out this one guy's blog, I like his articles', and is ending with 'jesus fuck, we're all doomed'. I like NMitT, because it gives glimpses of the bigger picture, but then at the end of the day, you just realize all the morons are in charge, and it's a never ending cycle of moronity, and it just makes me want to go crawl in a cave and die peacefully surrounded by empty cans of cheap beer.

Fuck, I hate everything.

[continue...]

Your Sandcastles Are Lame

Yeah. Nice try, buddy. No really, we're all VERY impressed with your masterpiece. Way to go, I'm sure the crabs are all very excited. It's a big step up from 'fill the bucket with sand and turn it upside down'. You're on your way to sandcastle stardom. Hooray for you.

Just don't quit your day job.

Oh, what's that? You've studied hard, and are ready to try again? Ok, I'll be waiting patiently. Oh, is that it there? Wow, you certainly have improved! No, really! I think I have a lollipop in the car for you, under my seat. Yeah, I was eating it and it fell down there, but you can have it. You've earned it with your masterpiece. What? You think I'm not being sincere? Am I showering you with false praise? Well, look buddy... I gotta come clean. That thing you've made there?

That isn't a sand castle, okay?


















*ahem*

THIS is a sand castle!

Hot damn! This is another non-WoW post that you guys can all flame me for and call me a faggot or whatever you're going to do in my comments, but I went and saw some sand castles this last week up in Tottori, and holy moley prince of darkness riding to church in a hot rod, these things were incredible.

Tottori is a 3 hour drive from where I'm living (god! you're so lame! what a waste of time! you should have been studying Cisco configuration manuals! I know, I know... hush) and is famous for this sand castle festival thing they do in the area every year.

Um, that's made of sand. yeah. ALL images are clickable for bigger versions! Tell a friend!

Tottori is on the northern edge of Japan, and instead of a boring old beach they have an actual sand dune up there. Just, like, chillin next to the umi. I guess this is rare in Japan, or something?


Whatever. They take a bunch of sand across the street, and artists from all over the world come and build wicked awesome sculptures out of the sand, and it's up for a few weeks. Some are actual castles, but pretty much anything goes.


You can walk all the way around each one, and view it from every angle; so people don't just slack and build it into some wall, every side has something different happening. This picture above shows a face in one of the three sides of the 'THIS is a sand castle' from above.

This is another side, and we're still on the first one here. : / It blows my mind to see this in front of your face, just out in some park, and not locked up in a museum. Then you realize, this is never going to BE in a museum. Once the festival is over, bulldozers will come and chuck all this sand back in a truck to be dumped back on the beach until next year.

Humans are fucking nuts! I just don't get it sometimes...

Another thing you might not realize at first glance is the SIZE of these things... here's a zoomed out shot from the edge of the park:


The level of detail is incredible, considering they're working with SAND. Click any image for a larger version, but I still scaled them down a bit, to like 800px wide... my camera takes like 15MB photos when shooting RAW, it's a little bit silly. I'll come back to this one below in a sec, it was my favorite.


These next three are all the 'same one', too. Starting in front and strafing left.


The boat one here (below) won first place, apparently. I think it's cool, but ... man, like how do you even say 'this was was cool, but not as cool as the others' when they were all so bad ass?



It had some fairly intricate writing on the side, but I think my favorite part about this one was the ocean waves... they really look like waves. It was also very 'smooth', not a lot of rough edges, which the judges maybe liked, too?

On the back of the wave is what I imagine to be the Old Man Sea? His face is actually part of the wave, and all fractured. Like the spirit of the ocean, fighting against the ship, trying to sink it...?


There was another 'boat' one too, but I liked this one better... it was two guys in a canoe, fighting off a sea serpent...

... they're losing the battle, as the serpent has snapped their oar in two...

Another one I liked made me think of Ulduar and the Titans. OMGIXOYOUTHINKABOUTWOWTOOMUCHDUDE, yeah yeah, but LOOK:

How awesome is this dude?!

Is he cradling someone in his arms, holding them to his chest?

More importantly WHAT EPIX DOES HE DROP AND WUTS HIS HARD MODE, YO?

A few didn't seem to have so much of a theme going, but were just cool, period.





There were a few others, but I've already got a ton up here.

The last one was my favorite, and it actually wouldn't all fit in one picture. It was a huge panorama, depicting the story of Gulliver's Travels. The book on the far edge (which I didn't take a picture of head on) has "Once Upon a Time..." written on the first page. I had to take three photos and stitch them together in Photoshop. Bonus points if you can find my seams.

Click the above image for the 2000px wide version; but even then, it doesn't do it justice. So! Here's the three individual images, but blogger won't let me just dump the full rez images up there. I could host them on notaddicted, but meh, it's getting a bit late and I still got two episodes of Lost waiting for me :)



Anyway, yeah.

Next time you go to build a sand castle at the beach, just... look... don't bother, okay?




Heading into Tokyo again tomorrow for my wife's final interrogat--- err, interview. After that it's rainbows and lollipops as far as the eye can see, AMIRITE?

<3

[continue...]

Satrina Buff Frames: Learn It, Use It, Love It

This is going to be a quick and dirty introduction to Satrina Buff Frames (SBF). An Addon I absolutely love to DEATH, and have used in its various releases since... well, a long time ago. I'm a UI whore, and while I could easily do away with 90% of the crap I use, SBF, Xperl, and Bongos (now called Dominos) are The Big Three for my main layout. Other things like Clique, Grid, and SmartBuff/SmartDebuff are nice, but don't get used by every toon, regardless of class like The Big Three. Dominos and Xperl are pretty straightforward (they replace your action bars and unit frames) but SBF had a tiny learning curve. Tiny because there are like 3 or 4 things to 'get', and then once you get it, you can go nuts.

SBF is a replacement for your buff and debuff icons. The biggest, and most simple feature is that those frames become draggable and scalable. That's all I used it for for about 3 versions way back when. I'd put my buffs in the upper left hand corner (unattached from my unit frame), and my debuffs made a bit bigger on the right hand side of my screen. This was actually for PvP, because I was a garbage rogue that would blow vanish while I had like 8 bleeds ticking. This was my way of being like YOU'RE BLEEDING, MORON to myself.

Look, the most basic setup, this is what you're looking at after installing it (all of these screenshots can be clicked for the full version):

Two sets, SBF1 and SBF2 ("/sbf options" brings up the UI, alt-drag the window to move it). SBF1 is your Buffs, and SBF2 your debuffs. We want to arrange these a bit better, so I moved them around and scaled SBF2's size. You can select the buff frame with the dropdown menu, or just (more simply) shift click its little handle to activate that frame. So like, to make our debuffs BIGGER, we shift click SBF2's handle (to make it active) and go to Layout, and scale it bigger.


Looking at the other options in the Layout tab, you can see I also made the frame 4 columns wide, and have them grow from the top right ("grow down, anchor point right"). This is going to sound complicated as I try and type it out, but just move some sliders and it's pretty basic. I also made made my buffs frame 32 buffs deep in the Layout tab (for SBF1!). I usually have more than 16 buffs going in a raid, but rarely do I have more than 16 debuffs at any one time, right?

You can color the buff/debuff timers, and choose whether it displays them in seconds, or minutes and seconds, or whatever font and font size it's shown in, and even where you want the timer shown (on top of the icon, over to the left, whatever). The Layout and Timer tabs both have a little Dpad looking thing over to the right side where you can nudge the icons closer together, further apart, or move the timer up, down or whatever. Again, just click a few buttons, it's not rocket surgery.

ONE IMPORTANT NOTE (that I'm not sure why it isn't default), is to make SBF1 and SBF2 be Blacklist in the general tab (and make sure SBF1 is showing buffs, and SBF2 showing debuffs). Whitelist will only show what spells you explicitly specify, and I learned this the hard way after a quick upgrade of Satrina before Naxx; when I ran into Thaddeus, and couldn't tell if I was positive or negative. Play around with this addon and get comfy on a free day, not 10 minutes before progression in Ulduar. I'll cover white and blacklisting a bit more in a few paragraphs.

It's easy to check if everything is showing up where it should by just buffing yourself, or using a bandage for the 'can't bandage for 60 more seconds' debuff.

Okay, that's set.

Now, one of the biggest features I use SBF for these days is the ability to create an extra frame, and specify a specific Buff or Debuff to show up in that frame so I know when something procs or I've been given Power Infusion or some crap. Let's make a new frame, and assign a specific buff to it.

Click the New Frame button, and you'll see a new group of buffs jump up on the screen. Shift click its handle to make it active, and then go to Layout and make it only 1 buff deep (not 16 or 32). There it is in the upper section of my screen, SBF3.

Let's get a little fancy and move the timer so it's directly on top of the icon, instead of underneath it.

Now we need to make a filter to say 'when buff X shows up, put it here'.

Now, there's one tricky option they added in the last version with the filtering system. All the frames used to be tied to one big filter tab and you'd make filters in a way like "In Frame 3, if the buff's name is Blood Fury, then blah blah blah" but now each frame has its own set of filters. You just make the frame in question, and go to its very own filter tab. This doesn't concern you, except to know that you want your specific frame to ONLY show what you tell it to show (otherwise every buff will overwrite that frame, and as you get one buff it'll show there until you get a second buff which will then show there). Since this frame is only one buff deep, that'd be pretty useless. We have a specific buff we want to show here (the orc racial Blood Fury), so we set Frame 3 to be Whitelisted on the General tab (only show what we explicity say to show). An example of a Blacklisted frame would be when we want our Auras to be in frame 7, and then make a filter saying to NOT show them in frame 1 or whatever. That's for later, for now just make Frame 3 a Whitelist frame, showing "Buffs", and let's make our filter.

Make sure the desired frame is active, and then go to the filters tab. In the little box, type n=Blood Fury and click Add Filter. This is the name filter, and the "=" means it's explicitly called Blood Fury. If you do a filter like n~fury then it would pick up any buff with 'fury' in its name (Fury of the Five Flights, whatever). Full documentation of the filter parameters is HERE, but for now, let's just keep it simple.


Then let's make that frame stupidly large and dead center, so we know when we have that buff.


Let's also make that frame immune to right clicks, since we're fucking spazzes, and don't want to accidentally dismiss that buff while we move our camera around. Put a checkmark in the Clickthrough box.


Lastly (and maybe this should have been firstly?), let's name our frame something useful instead of SBF3. Change its name to Blood Fury, so when you have 8 frames all over your screen, you know what's what. This is totally optional, and I actually don't do it, but the option is there. You can also specify WHO this frame affects. Normally this will be you, PLAYER (the default setting), but if you're trying to make a set of stunlock timers (totally doable) you could set these to Target, or Focus (and "debuff", "whitelist", and "n=Kidney Shot", etc).

Woo hoo, let's fire it up!

You'll notice that it's showing up in our normal buff frame too (SBF1), up top, which is fine, since I don't care if it's in both places. You could create a filter for your SBF1 if you DON'T want it to show up there, but I really don't care. This is the main reason I like this addon, because it allows shit to show up there AND where I want it, instead of having to dig around up there in the middle of a fight looking for some 5 second buff.

Let's say you hate icons, and prefer bars. That's easy. Make our frame active, and go to the bars tab and check the first box there.

Wow, that's pretty ugly, because our icon was scaled so big, let's trim it back down, and fiddle with the height and width.

Better, but I want the name to show up!

Enable the Name (in the name tab), and move the name to a good position on the bar.

Hooray. You can get as deep into this as you want. I'm just digging for features to show you at this point.

Using these basic principles, though, you can have a pretty intricate setup. Here's my warrior's layout:

It has seven frames total.

SBF1 - Buffs
SBF2 - Debuffs
SBF3 - Up along the top of the screen, 6 buffs deep, shows things like Shield Wall, Retaliation, Recklessness, and Trinkets
SBF4 - Next to my IceHUD rage bar, my shouts. Battle and/or Commanding. Two buffs deep.
SBF5 - Next to my IceHUD HP bar, shows my Shield Block or Glyph of Blocking. Two buffs deep.
SBF6 - Right below my character, 6 buffs in a little clump. Revenge Glyph (next Heroic Strike is free, Taste for Blood (overpower procs based on bleeds), Enrage, free shield slam procs from Sword and Board
SBF7 - Right below my execute button, shows when Sudden Death procs (execute anytime, regardless of HP of foe).

ALL of these are basic whitelist frames with n=Sword and Board, or n=Taste for Blood, or n=Sudden Death filters, etc. On my warlock, I have a similar little clump next to my player that uses the filter d>20, showing any duration which is a buff less than 20 seconds (molten core, backlash, glyph of lifetap, t7 4 piece bonus). If you need the name of a specific buff that a Trinket gives, look up the trinket on wowhead, and click the little green text in the trinket tooltip. The part that says 'Infuses the player with the power of the doggie goddess', clicking that text brings you tot he actual name of the buff (doggie fever!), and then you add that to n=whatever. Sundial of the exiled uses a buff called The Time is Now, etc.

Again, more filter crap at the SBF filter page.

I think that about wraps it up. Let me know if you have any questions for specific filters, and don't be shy about digging around on the Satrina site at Evil Empire. Let me know if you come up with any interesting filters of your own, too, since my usage of the addon is pretty limited, but for what I use it for, I couldn't do without. :)

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Wonky Warlock Spec is Wonky

Okay. This isn't going to be some new habit I get into with my article naming convention here, because I normally hate that "X Y is X" crap. But I really don't know what else to say, except I found some UGLY spec on Elitist Jerks a while back, dual specced my warlock into it as the 'garbage looking spec that EJ says is good, so huh, whatever' fully expecting to keep my normal deep destro spec, but since actually USING it once or twice, I'm pretty well convinced it's going to stay my main.

Golly, Elitist Jerks know what they're talking about. Whooda thot, rite?

I also tend to shy away from 'here's a pwnzor spec, and a step by step guide on how to squeeze every drop of threat/dps/healing out of it' posts because 1) I'm a horrible player that is mostly out to just enjoy myself, whether or not I top charts, and 2) I'm sloppy. Even with the spec I'm about to show you, I'm still not doing it right, so there's still a whole lot of room for improvement.

The basic spec revolves around getting one key talent out of Demonology, and then dumping the rest of the points elsewhere, because Demonology is generally pretty bad. YES, TIMMY. I know your Demo deeps are leet. Just shh. The adults are talking. This post is hard to type, so lemme just bang it out.

The key talent in question is Decimation. Once a boss dips below 35%, each time you hit him with an Incinerate, you get a free, ridiculously hasted Soul Fire. What's a Soul Fire? It's basically a warlock's Pyroblast, but costs a soul shard to use, and takes three and a half days to cast. With Decimation procs, though, they cast in 1.6 sec and cost no shard. This is a big deal.

Another part of new warlock DPS (for any spec) is the Glyph of Lifetap, which you'll notice has a certain nice synergy with the 4 piece Tier 7 bonus (which I offer). Basically, whenever I lifetap, I get a huge boost in damage. When I lifetap, and Dying Curse stacks with my Sundial, I'm basically sitting at around 4500+ spelldamage for the next few casts. Maybe I hit 5k, I dunno. I've seen like 4495 or something, but I stopped trying to open my character sheet and touch myself during raids when all the planents lined up. It got distracting. But this basically means there's a use for a downranked spell again in WoW! Rank one Lifetap only hits you for like 45 HP or something silly, but gives the full benefit of the glyph and t7 bonus, so rather than bang yourself in the face to start a fight and piss off a healer, you cast rank one, and begin your rotations. Then you want to lifetap every 20 seconds to keep the Lifetap glyph going (the first ten seconds of each tap are also augmented by the T7 bonus, but it'd be silly to Lifetap every ten seconds).

The starting rotation looking something like this:

Rank 1 Lifetap
Curse of Doom (this is ALWAYS your first spell, you want it done and up again asap)
Corruption
Immolate
Conflag
Incinerate spam

At that point you just conflag whenever you can while spamming incinerates, and refresh dots. But a magical thing happens at 35%, when you suddenly realize you have free Soul Fires coming. At this point EJ pulls a typical EJ move and actually gets out a protractor and starts talking about whether your Incinerates are hitting the bosses HEAD or BODY. If the hitbox is centered on its HEAD then you have that much extra range. You basically triangulate the hypotenuse's rhombus and solve for the cosin. A2 + B2 = more deeps or something. I just spam shit. I'm sloppy. I mentioned this, I believe.

In theory, if you're standing at the absolute max range from your target, your 35% and under rotation starts weaving like

Cast Incinerate 1
Incinerate 1 finishes casting
Cast Incinerate 2
Incinerate 1 hits, proccing Soul Fire
Incinerate 2 finishes casting
Cast Soul Fire 1
Incinerate 2 hits, proccing Soul Fire 2
Bake some cookies
Go AFK for beer

Whatever. Under 35% I'd basically cast those two first Incinerates (because casting one and standing around waiting for it to land is silly), then chuck a Soul Fire, then just see if the timing lined up. If I was ever casting an 8 day Soul Fire on accident, I'd interrupt the cast and start again. Then I'd realize I hadn't Lifetapped in 20 seconds, and Corruption was running low. One good thing that keeps me on my toes is refreshing dots, I always Tap before refreshing them for maximum punch, but when they're just ticking away I focus on Conflag's timer and just avoiding raid damage etc, and forget to do it.

I even put a big silly icon dead in the center of my screen when it starts proccing, so I don't miss when the boss is dropping below 35%. My other buffs below are any buff I have that's under 20 seconds in length (usually item procs). I'm showing 15s left on Lifetap Glyph, 1s left on my Dying Curse, 6s on Decimate (again, I put it up above after I wasn't seeing it there, that little area is always pretty 'busy'), 5s left on T7 4-piece, and I'll be peeing for 4 more seconds with a horrible sexually transmitted disease, and that shit makes me scream, yo. You can also see my conflag button greyed out up above the buffs, so I see when to pop that shit. My warlock UI is horrifically ugly, I really need to trim it down, but I got wrapped up in my priest (and then warrior), and stopped playing it for a long stretch of time.

Whatever.

SO. Like I said, there's a lot of room for improvement, but last night's naxx 25 I was topping charts pretty easily. I felt all badass, then I read Jong's DPS paladin blog for the first time today, saw he pulls like 6660+, and felt all inadequate again : /

Anyway. The reason I said the sepc is ugly is just beacause I feel like you're diving all the way down this tree for what feels like a 'side talent'. Like, Chaos Bolt and Decimate should swap places, and this should be the 51 point destruction talent. After having used it, it certainly feels more like a 51 point talent than some thing 36 points deep and off in the gutter. Then you have like 1 point in Backlash, 1 in Destructive Reach, none in Supression, and two random ass points just chillin in Demonic Tactics. I guess I'm just anal, because I like putting 5 points into talents with 5 point slots. I hate having 12% chance for something to happen, when it should be 15%.

But yeah. It friggin works. If you're a lock, give it a go.


Woo.

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