Brian Koponen

Programming and Tech Tips

World of Warcraft

My history with World of Warcraft goes back to its original Stress Test back in 2004. It was the first MMO I had ever played and I was blown away. Life would get very busy and I never ended up playing the expansions, but I never forgot the magic of the game.

That's why it is no surprise that there has been continued interest in this version of the game with private servers over the years. With the official release of World of Warcraft: Classic, I'm hoping a whole new generation will discover that same magic.

Over time, I have been putting together the tips and tricks I have learned over the years to help others get started and have the best time possible in World of Warcraft.


Guides

The Addon system is different between the original game and Classic. In many cases, there is no way to port old addons over as the functionality has simply been entirely removed. So I have created a guide for each version with all the addons that I have found useful. I have also written a couple of guides with some of the other tips and tricks I've learned.


Single Player Project

Even though World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer game, there are many reasons to want to be able to play it on a single player, local server. It makes it much easier to try out different classes and explore content that you just don't have time to get to on a live realm.

There are bots that populate the world, and they are surprisingly effective at making the world feel alive. Most interestingly, you can directly control them when they are in your party, which morphs the game into a party-based RPG, which is really interesting to play with.

It's amazing the work people have done to make this even possible, but it can be a little confusing to get started. To help out, I have written some guides with all the things I learned from running and playing on a single player server.


Macros

As a programmer, one of my favorite parts of WoW was playing with the macro system. In the original game, macros were incredibly powerful. You could create elaborate macros that would choose an ability to use based on nearly any data the game client had access to. For many classes, you could greatly simplify combat with these macros. Blizzard was unhappy with this, so they changed the macro system starting in The Burning Crusade to greatly limit how powerful the macros could be.

World of Warcraft: Classic uses the modern macro system, so all the old macros need to be updated and, unfortunately, a large number of them aren't even possible to recreate. With that in mind, I decided to create separate pages of macros for the two versions of the game.

Vanilla:
Classic:


Addon Reference Guides

There were a lot of addons created during the initial World of Warcraft release that have long since been abandoned. Since this makes it very hard to find any documentation for them, I have created these reference guides for many of the addons that I use. I didn't create any of these addons, just this documentation.