The last couple of days I’ve spent a bunch of time fiddling around with Add-ons to World of Warcraft.

Specifically, I installed Cosmos UI (user interface), Census+ and something to make the upload process for the census results easier, a program called UniUploader.

I installed them just before the 1.9 patch came out, so I had the lovely experience of immediately having to upgrade/re-install the software since there were oddities or outright problems.

Actually, the only REAL problem I’ve had is that I cannot get UniUploader to work for me. Or, if the uploading is going on, it’s not crediting to my account on WarcraftRealms and since I’m uploading Census data not only to be nice but also to perhaps see my name on the top contributor’s list, that’s not cool.

CosmosUI

At any rate, CosmosUI has a whole bunch of helpful little things all bundled into one package, like a bitty script that automatically closes your loot window if there’s nothing in it, and prints a message to your chat screen about how there was no loot to get. Plus, when you’re looting and there ARE things to pick up, there’s another script that makes the loot window come up right under your mouse, and if there are three objects in the window all you have to do is click three times and the script will move the window so the objects are under your mouse for each click. How cool is that??!

Census+

Census+ is pretty self-explanatory if you take a peek at the website I’ve referenced. It’s statistical information about the population of characters on World of Warcraft, broken down in almost every way imaginable. The data those graphs are based on is data that has been gathered by players like you and I by using the Census+ mod as we play, letting it do a bunch of ‘who’ queries to gather data about the players online at the time. If you shut off its verbose printing feature (which is off by default) you’ll hardly even know it’s running, except for the fact that you have to upload the Census data file every once in a while.

UniUploader

That’s where UniUploader was supposed to come in and make things easier… but I can’t seem to get the uploader to work for whatever reason - at least it doesn’t credit me the same way I get credited when I do my own uploads. So… I canned UniUploader and I guess I’ll just do my uploads manually every few days.

It’s too bad, tho, because I had done a lot of world-hopping to gather my data and I think UniUploader thought it was doing its job just fine and therefore it deleted the data that had “already” been submitted, each time a new submission “went out”.

Ah well, I guess now that I have it “figured out” I’ll be okay.

[Jan 10/06 note: After reviewing some forum discussions on the “no file found” topic, I removed version 2.3 of UniUploader and went to v 2.1.2 and the auto-upload function now works just fine]

Zul’jin was the first Realm I was assigned to when I logged into World of Warcraft the very first time, and that’s where my highest level character is.

I haven’t decided if she’s my PRIMARY character or not, even though she is my first and highest level character. I may find another character I like more, and then that one becomes my primary, no matter what level I am.

But I’m the kind of girl who’s got lots of love for her different characters anyway, and those labels of “primary” and “secondary” can be so hurtful already… I’ll just talk about each of my characters as though they are important to me, because in an internety kind of way, each of them are.

At any rate, I’ve already posted a picture of that avatar, but I’ll have to post an updated one at some point.

Troll Hunter Valdesta in Zul’jin is currently level 18, and I’m in a guild called “Sight”. I don’t know anyone in my guild, really… I was just guildless and someone invited me to join their guild and I said yes. Since then the guild has grown by another 30-40 members, so there’s always some chatter going on there, and things I could get involved with if only I knew what they were talking about.

There are so many areas on World of Warcraft that a big long list of acronyms has been made so folks can say “ultra-extraneous statements” like UES instead, and save their and everyone else’s time when it comes to slow typers. I’ve seen the list but I haven’t saved it anywhere I can refer to it quickly. Perhaps I’ll post it to this blog at some point.

At any rate, that’s mainly what my problem is - folks are spewing these acronyms, asking if anyone wants to “go there” and I don’t have a clue if it’s good for my level or not, so I don’t tend to respond. One of these days I’ll start jumping into whatever is being offered, whether i get killed or not in trying. It’ll be fun and an adventure, and maybe I’ll get promoted past Initiate in my guild.

These days I’ve mainly been working on quests. I’m hanging out at The Crossroads in Horde territory, and just recently headed over to Ratchet to clear off a few quests sitting in my quest book from there as well.

I’ve found myself a friend and battle buddy over the past week, whose name I cannot remember right now (J…oll), but we’ve done a few quests together and done some fighting together over a few different days and it’s gone well, we seem to fight at about the same pace, neither one of us was really lagging behind most of the time, and certainly our chat patterns matched - bursts of chatter followed by quite a bit longer silences while we killed everything we came across. He was helping me find the supplies for the Crossroads, and we were killing off every Quillboar that we came across.

I find I’m enjoying the quests here on World of Warcraft, because they’re educational and varied in what needs to be done, and they’re a great way to encourage exploring. Simply slaying beasts is fun, but it’s more fun when there’s a goal at the end that everyone is working towards.

I’m generally a solo player, so finding someone to party with who doesn’t annoy me is a blessing. I hope to find a few more like that, maybe we can all go hunting together :)