Every now and then, I want to play World of Warcraft. I renew my subscription stuff, I log into the game and then I remember why I can't play it without mods.
The same was true for me with Everquest also -- I had my own custom UI (which was a bunch of XML files) which was optimized for each different character -- my Druid had things set up a certain way, as did my Rogue and my Cleric, and all the rest of them. To play with the default Sony-provided UI was essentially playing with a handicap. Sony, after a couple of expansion packs opened the UI up to third party developers, but for the first two years, we suffered through playing with a horrifically designed user interface.
The World of Warcraft UI isn't nearly as bad as Sony's. This is partially because Blizzard is very good at designing UIs, but also because the Blizzard UI designers took a look at Everquest, shook their heads and designed something that actually works for their game. There are few things about the interface that bother me, and luckily for me, mods work to fix those small gripes.
One of the biggest annoyances has been the character-by-character printing of the quest dialogue text -- they did this to give the quest a more fairy-tale storybook feel, but to me it just reminds me of old modem terminals as you waited for more characters to be transmitted over the modem at 300 baud. For a person like me who reads relatively quickly, this is tremendously aggravating. It's like having the letters be read out loud by a first-grader one at a time. While I'm sure that some people have no problems with this, I couldn't stand it.
Thankfully, mods existed to print the quest text all-at-once which allowed me to keep some sanity as I ran through the newbie quests for the hundredth time. It transformed the time wasting process of click-on-an-npc, wait for them to finish their spiel, wait for accept quest to light up, click accept quest, to the two step process. The two step process became very simply, click on npc, click accept quest.
I'm way behind on all the UI plugins, and I haven't patched in ages -- the Blizzard downloader reports a gargantuan 200+ MB download before it'll even allow me to enter the game. Of course, for all my hours spent on the game, I still haven't yet managed to get a character up to 60 yet (some are really close, but the thought of grinding my way to 60, quite frankly, bores me) I'm looking forward to the expansion, because even though it's not the first newly content added since I left Blizzard, they finally have some pretty characters on Horde, which means that I can finally play with my old guild.
After I did all that, I log into some of my old characters and find that spam has even infiltrated the World of Warcraft:
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