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Officers' Quarters: From the mail bag
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.Hello, fellow officers! This week I'm going to try something a little bit different than usual. I tend to focus on one topic that requires a detailed analysis. However, I do receive many more questions that I never feature in the column because they have a more straightforward solution (or, at least, because I believe they have a straightforward solution). So I would write a private reply to the e-mail but never showcase the question here. I've decided to try an experiment this week and feature several of these e-mails with shorter answers. Even though they may not be the most complex situations, I think the answers will be helpful to other officers. Let me know what you think! Here's the first question. Too Many Cooks I was wondering if you could do an article on having too many cooks in the kitchen during raids. My guild is brand new, 3-4 weeks old, and we run Ulduar 10 and ToC 10 as well as Naxx 25 and Naxx 10 for the new 80s. As of right now, I am my guild's GM as well as raid leader. I have plans in the future to add an official "Raid Leader" to create events and lead some raids although I plan on still leading a few because I really enjoy it. Right now though, I have a few natural born leaders that attend my raids and it causes some problems.
Outfitter not discontinued after all
Once upon a time, Mundocani created Outfitter, and it was good, and lots of people used it, and there was general rejoicing. Then Blizzard released their new addon policy, prohibiting selling addons and asking for donations in-game, and many addon writers thought that was not so good. Mundocani pulled his addons from public distribution in protest, as did some other authors. This was sad, even if I did seize the moment to write about some other mods that did the job. Now it has been brought to my attention (thanks, nadewow) that Mundocani is both continuing development on Outfitter and returning it to public distribution (i.e. Curse and WoW Interface). His stated reasoning for this latest move is that "Blizzard isn't going to respond to the concerns raised by the community, which puts things at a stalemate," and he doesn't want to punish users for what he sees as Blizzard's mistakes. In short: Outfitter is coming back (this goes for GroupCalendar too, by the way). Yay! That news is especially welcome because we won't be seeing the Blizzard Equipment Manager in 3.1 as we had expected to. While we wait for them to be posted back to the addon sites, you can get a copy of either mod at the author's forums (registration required).
Blizzard Calendar vs Group Calendar
One of the big UI improvements in WoW 3.0 is the calendar. Next to player housing, a calendar is one of the longest-standing player requests that had not yet been fulfilled (or shot down by Blizzard). Like most gaps in the game's UI, this one has been filled by various add-ons over the years. One particularly popular and enduring one is GroupCalendar. In fact, GroupCalendar is so well-loved that even with the official calender now implemented, many guilds and players are still using it.Why? Well, mostly it comes down to features. Both the Blizzard calendar and GroupCalendar support the basics -- raid lockouts, holidays, player-created events with attendance lists. But like most things Blizzard, their calendar is fairly simple, and more or less ends there. GroupCalendar goes a bit farther. Durations and level ranges can be specified Finer-grained control over invitations; for instance, you can specify a minimum and maximum quota for each class, with a standby list if you're full on (say) Hunters Automatic invites and queuing when it's time for the raid Edit: People can be allowed to sign up to an event even if they weren't explicitly invited (this is not the case on Blizzard's calendar, and theirs only allows you to invite up to 100 people) Those are a few of the features that stand out at differentiating GroupCal from BlizzCal for me. And overall, there are more options on everything.Don't think this is an advertisement for GroupCalendar, though. If you don't need the extra features, there's no reason to install it. Blizzard's calendar is more lightweight, already built-in, and much more polished (as you'd expect). There are no synch issues, and no bugs (that I've seen). In fact, the only thing missing from the built-in calendar that I really want is for it to show the daily dungeons and battleground. But if you do want the extra features that GroupCalendar offers, the developers have shown no sign of slowing down; you can get it wherever fine add-ons are hosted.
