As I've talked about before, I'm a sucker for passion. Recently through my efforts in trying to make WoW modding and specifically map making/world building more accessible, I've seen a lot of that. It's reaffirmed my beliefs of so many talented people being out there that simply haven't messed with it due to its lack of accessibility or it being so stuck in the past. It has also reinvigorated my spirit when it comes to the WoW modding community, as my previous experiences with it haven't been as positive as the ones I've been having recently.

The modern WoW modding Discord has been popping off a bit and is at almost 800 members, but with that it has also been bringing up some of my history with communities. This post with will largely be a rant about said history/sentiments with some minor plans/updates around WoW modding at the end and how I think it can be different compared to what came before it. Feel free to skip to the last 2 paragraphs for those plans/updates!

Late night contemplating and reflecting is how I operate. It's when the world and by extension my brain is the most calm and actually able to collect thoughts. I don't know if this is normal or if there's something wrong up there, but that's how it is and has been as long as I can remember.

Most if not all of my big project plans from the last decade stem from late night thinking sessions (often during sudoku or something else automatic). One thing that has always been hard and still is, is actually thinking about my life and my future. I don't think I really know how to do that. I can do it with projects and hobbies, just not life.

What if you could change anything about WoW and you didn't have to care about all the things Blizzard has to care about like dev resources, player reception, future content, backwards compatibility and all that. Just complete freedom with no consequences whatsoever.

It's a fun thought experiment that will yield very different results depending on who you ask. Hell, most of the things I list probably 99% of the playerbase won't care for, but in this context, we don't actually have to care! Many ideas here aren't necessarily mine either but stuff the community has talked about for ages. Either way, here goes.

There are many tools out there to support WoW modding, but as these posts will only be focusing on modern modding we'll focus on tools that can help with specifically that. First up: Noggit!

I love modding games. I love WoW. Following that logic, I've been dipping my toes in WoW modding for a bit now and wanted to do a bit of an intro post on it. Many people won't be familiar with it (for obvious reasons we'll get into), but I still think it is pretty neat and has the ability to be even neater in the future.

This is the first post in a series of posts I plan to make around datamining and what goes into various parts of it. Off we go!

Back in patch 8.2, Blizzard removed the primary way for us to verify guessed filenames for World of Warcraft's files. These days, only interface files ship with official filenames and everything else has to be guessed by the community, with no way to verify. Said guesses are then stored in a listfile.

One of the harder categories of files to automatically generate names for are the tens of thousands of WoW's voice-over audio files. This post goes into some of the work we've had to do in the community to be able to name these files so people can actually find them (for whatever reason).

There is 1 thing I will always make time for; passion. People talking about their passion, making something that comes from a place of passion or otherwise trying to follow whatever they're passionate about.

I (and I'm sure many others) do almost everything based on passion, to a fault. I've talked about this before and how this can get out of hand, but it's been the thing that got me where I am today. Times are changing, though. I want to use this blog to talk about my passions and why I think it's important that we keep sharing and talking about our passions as much as possible.

This is going to be a quite long-winded post as I just need to get this off my chest, but it sets up what I hope I to use this blog for.

This is an import of the Reflection (2023) post I made on Google Docs for archival purposes.

1 year ago in December 2022, after collecting input on Twitter I posted this to reflect on changes I had gone through up to that year around datamining as well as to some of the reasoning why I made the changes I did. It was very therapeutic to write at the time so why not write a sequel? A lot of this is as a continuation of what I wrote last year, so you might want to read through that to get an idea of where I was at the time.

This is an import of the Reflection (2022) post I made on Google Docs for archival purposes.

I wrote this document primarily for myself to reflect on the time I've spent working on WoW things by walking through them (or most of them) and my decision on throwing in the towel when it comes to public datamining and actively maintaining and supporting WoW.tools. I ran a Twitter poll to see if people cared to see this document/properly write it out and 89% of 128 people wanted to, so here it is. I might still add things/change/clarify stuff over time, but I wanted to get this out before the end of the year. If I do update things I'll be sure to mention what/where.