oQueue how-to for Flex raiding on demand

So you want to do Flex raiding instead of LFR? Or as well as LFR, you crazy cats? But you don't have a guild or any friends or the time to sit in trade chat forlornly spamming "520 afflock LF Flex /w" for hours on end? You want to be out in the world doing Timeless Isle things rather than stuck in cities? If only there was another way to PuG Flex raids. Well fear not, my friends, oQueue is here to save your bacon. Or any other pork product.

Before I get into the oQueue how-to, I am just going to dedicate a moment to openraid. If you're organised enough to be able to say "Yes! I can raid on Monday at 7pm!" then openraid.us or openraid.eu depending on your region should be your weapon of choice. This allows you to sign up for pre-arranged raids, or indeed to set up your own. But if you want to log in, and immediately hop into a queue for a flex raid, without the need for organization or flexibility, oQueue's the way to go. So let's get started.

It's using my battle tag!

oQueue can be a little daunting to the uninitiated, particularly as it appears to be making you battletag

friends with everyone under the sun, and spamming your chat like it's going out of fashion. When you first start up oQueue you'll see the screen to the right. First up, don't freak out. While oQueue does make your battletag public to other users, it's your battletag. If your battletag is your real name, your phone number or your full address, you might want to head over to battle.net and change it, because that's not really what it should be. Do be aware, though, that you can only change it once, so choose wisely! You can also refuse to auto-accept any battletag requests, and delete all pending and friended people when you go dark. In however long I've been using oQueue, I've never had any battletag-related problems. What's more, any cross-realm anything will need your battletag to work. It's the nature of the beast!

How do I get rid of this stuff on my screen?!

Most of oQueue's battletag functionality runs in the background, so you will rarely see evidence of it,

but what you will see is the chat and a mysterious scoreboard for alliance and horde. My first question was "how do I turn these off?!" So, in order to remove the scoreboard thing, rightclick the oQ minimap icon, and select "toggle marquee". To remove the chat advertizing, type "/oq toggle ads" into the chat pane. Hurrah! They're gone! As an aside, I'd love to have the ads in a separate oQueue-only window of my chat, but haven't worked out just how to do this yet.

OK, I've calmed down now, how do I actually find a group?

Right, this is the easy bit. Open up the main UI by typing /oq into chat or clicking the minimap icon, and, if you're not there already, go to the Find Premade tab. Hit Submit B-Tag, if it isn't greyed out, and hit Find Mesh. You may not need to do this every time, but it's not going to be a hindrance if you do.

You should see the list starting to fill up, and you'll notice that there seems to be rather a lot of premades available for different things. This may mean you want to filter your premades, and this can be done in a couple of ways. Firstly there's a drop-down menu at the bottom that's set by default to "all premades". Hit this menu, and you can choose what kind you want. Raids, for example, will get you most of the Flex groups. It's possible that, if people haven't set the group up correctly, you'll miss one or two. No big deal, though.

It's also possible to check a box that filters by your eligibility, if this doesn't show everything you think you should be eligible for, you'll probably want to open up your character screen and such to "show" the addon your stuff, but it seems to work just fine most of the time without this step.

Once you've got all the ones you're eligible for on the screen, have a quick scan for things like chat clients. Many groups will have things like "TS req" which means that they'll want you to have TeamSpeak, or similarly vent, mumble, skype etc. As a seasoned oQueue user for RBGs, I have all the chat clients set up already. Most of the time, people won't expect you to talk, just to listen, so don't worry. That being said, there will be no voice groups. Far fewer, but some!

There are likely to be other requirements, like roles, so melee, ranged, healers, tanks, and often languages, particularly if you're EU-side. There may be some flexibility within the role requirements, though, so don't necessarily let them stop you. It may be the case that that group gets a tank, then they lose a ranged DPS.

Hit "waitlist" by the groups you like the sound of. If the button doesn't change to "pending" there's probably a reason why, and often you'll get popups explaining those reasons. If no popup appears, then you should just persevere, or move on.

I waitlisted and I'm still... well... waiting!

Yeah, that'll happen, it's called a waitlist for a reason. It's a good idea to just waitlist for every group you're eligible for. If you waitlisted for something you don't want to do, like if you accidentally waitlisted for an RBG instead of a raid, just left-click the X to the right of the waitlist button. Right-clicking it adds the group leader to your blacklist, so only do that if you never want to see premades from That Guy ever again.

You'll know when your group "pops" as you'll find yourself invited to a raid team. Accept the invitation, and hopefully you should be stabbing things in the face in no time. It is customary, in the EU at least, to say hi when you join, then chat about where you're all from while the group forms.

Sometimes, just like any PuG, people will afk and not join the group, leaving those who did stuck waiting around while the leaders find a replacement. It happens. Then you carry on your merry way, kill some bosses, flex some epeens, hopefully win some loot! Flex is great for this last thing, as you're also protected from master looter ninjas thanks to the personal loot system.

I deactivated it and now I'm getting spammed! This is the worst!

This is one of oQueue's little quirks. What you need to do is, rather than deactivating it via the addon list or via something like AddonControlPanel or LoadIT, deactivate it from within oQueue itself.

Enable the addon again. Head over to the Setup section of the menu, the second tab from the right. On the setup tab click the [remove b-tag] button, then click the [remove now] button, then click the [go dark] button. You can then disable the addon just like you would any other addon.

Who are all these people on my friends list?!

Well, they're your oQueue friends. We mentioned above how it works based on battletags, right? Well it adds people to your friends list. But fear not, there are things you can do. Head over to that setup tab, and hit the "remove now" button. This will remove all those potentially nasty people. It won't check whether they were nice or not, though, so if you have some you'd like to keep, remove them manually. On the same panel, you can uncheck the "Auto-accept b-tag mesh requests" box on the bottom of the right-hand list, meaning that all friends will have to be manually confirmed.

Honestly, it's not that scary. Like I said, in all the time I've been using this, I've never had a problem. And if you have a problem, firstly let us know in the comments and we'll try to help, and secondly, report, blacklist, ignore. There's also a whole set of forums dedicated to oQueue help. Good luck!

Addons are what we do on Addon Spotlight. If you're new to mods, Addons 101 will walk you through the basics; see what other players are doing at Reader UI of the Week. If there's a mod you think Addon Spotlight should take a look at, email mat@wowinsider.com.