A little about myself

Let me tell you a little about myself.

I've been playing WoW since before it's release. I got in to the beta during the final stress testing phases of the game, and have been playing ever since.

I am the creator of a few "Addons" for the game, namely Buffbot, Swiftshift, and my most important - Mouselook. All of which were specifically intended to improve the user interface as I played the game.

Before WoW, I played Dark age of Camelot, which is another Mmorpg. In that game, I played an Albion Highlander Minstrel known as Jjoe Nitro, and I became famous for charming high level mobs and running around with them in Emain Macha killin' Hibbies. :) Doing that required deep knowledge of how the keyboard worked with the game, and a deep knowledge of how the spells of the Minstrel actually worked.

When I started playing WoW, I found the controls to be strikingly similar, but subtly different enough to cause a problem. I still remember the very first day AFTER the very first night I played the beta of WoW - my right arm practically fell off my body. zOMG it ached sooo badly, I wished I could have ripped it off my body.

Why did it hurt so badly? Simple. In WoW, to look around using the mouse, you simply hold down the right mouse button. The problem is that I was holding down that button for 4 hours straight. You see, In DAoC, I played using the mouselook feature turned on full time, and used a "mouselook toggle" button to play. That means normally my mouse cursor was NOT on the screen, and I had to hold down a button when I wanted to click things with the cursor. This worked well for me since I executed every command using hotkeys - that is commands bound to the keyboard. When I tried to play the same way in WoW by holding down the mouse button, after several hours, my whole arm from my middle finger up to my shoulder ached.

It didn't take me long to discover that the user interface in WoW was fully customizable, and that a mod called LookLock already existed to do what I needed. It was part of the Cosmos suite, a UI addon compilation that has been available to the game since before even I started playing it. Once I downloaded LookLock, I realized it was close to what I wanted, but not quite...

So, I modified it. I took the code from LookLock and threw away most of it and kept just the part that engaged the mouselook mode, and dynamically assigned the left and right mouse buttons to move backward and move foward respectively - Just like how it works in DAoC. Over time, Mouselook has evolved into what it is today. I still use it, and frankly if I didn't have it, I wouldn't play the game. period.

When Blizzard prepared to release the expansion, The Burning Crusade, they released a massive update to the way UI mods work that threatened to kill Mouselook completely. They made it so that Mouselook would not be able to dynamically remap the mouse buttons while combat was happening! Talk about gimping you at the worst possible moment! I was ready to cancel my account and not look back. Anyway, I worked with one of the greatest Blizzard guys - Slouken - and we came up with a way to keep Mouselook working without it being considered an exploit. Thank you Blizzard!

Today I still play a Druid, although it's the 5th druid I've started. I play with some personal friends of mine on the Illidan server, on the Horde side. I've also played on Thunderlord, Arthas, Skullcrusher, Warsong, Dark Iron, and a few other servers.

That's enough for now, I want to go play :P