Addon Addiction
I remember when I loaded my first addon. I had played with the default interface for probably 5 or 6 months. I was having trouble finding a quest item and when I asked in /c 1 [General], the response came back with coordinates…Well, coordinates aren’t on the map by default. It requires an addon. So I asked how to get coordinates and someone told me to download Cosmos.
Cosmos, if you don’t know, is an addon suite. It’s a whole collection of addons with some internal libraries that support some suite functionality. And I used Cosmos for quite a while. But eventually, I got tired of Cosmos. It did some things that irritated me. So I went searching and found the Insomniax recompilation. And for what I was using addons for, Insomniax was wonderful. I loved Insomniax. But, eventually, it wasn’t getting updated (are at least, it wasn’t getting updated quick enough) so I started looking at individual addons.
I just started downloading addons that looked interesting or might tell me something I needed to know. An addon here, an addon there, soon an addon everywhere. I believe at one point, I had over 300 addons installed!
I’m not that bad anymore. Not that I have sworn off addons…if you count all the fubar plugins I use, I have 186 addons installed right now. But, it is seriously down from where I used to be. For the most part, I now use addons primarily to do one of three things: 1) change the way something is displaye, 2) give me information that isn’t displayed in the default interface, or 3) hide something in the interface.
Most often, for me, addons make it easier to use the interface by changing how it is displayed. The one addon I think makes the biggest difference for me is Bongos. I hate the size, location, and number of default bars. Bongos allows me to correct that and make better use of the bars for my play style.
Fubar also has a big impact for me, as it allows a compact space to display a lot of little information: equipment durability, total bonuses, location (coordinates) rep, quests, etc. While this isn’t necessarily critical info for my game play, it makes things faster and easier as I don’t have to open tons of windows to get what I’m looking for.
As with most bloggers, I have my favorite addons. I will at some point blog about the ones I find most useful or most fun as the case may be.
