Saturday, September 1, 2007

Role-Playing Mods, or "I Don't Role-Play, But I Still Want One"


The new, girl-written comic lauded on popular WoWInsider, Hammer of Grammar, used Role-Playing mods in a recent comic. (My favorite comic: Penis Envy.)

I had no idea Role-Playing mods existed. I mean, I don't really want to Role-Play. But I like giving my characters backgrounds and personalities, as evidenced by a previous post, and I think it would be really fun to download one of these.

The comic cites the following three addons:
I'm going to conduct an experiment where friends and I try these addons and rate them by the following criteria:

Attractiveness
Ease of Use
Shows Info of Other 2 Addons?

We will include screenshots.

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FlagRSP BC
tested by Dustfire and Shenoah

Broken, and not in the "this is so awesome, it's broken" way. In the "oops, I stepped on your glasses" way. Nothing shows up when you input info, error messages abound, and the friendslist panel that Shenoah acknowledges might have been cool does not actually allow you to enter friends into it. This is obviously the fault of not being up-to-date and may be corrected some day, but shows an obvious laziness on the part of the creator to keep up with major patches, so it would probably break again as soon as the newest update comes out.

Attractiveness: 7/10
Ease of Use: 5/10
Shows: (coming)

As for the write-a-background feature, which is what I wanted a RP addon for, it doesn't have one. It allows you to enter a last name and nickname and a physical description. There is even a tip pop-up that specifies "This physical description panel is not for background information" and gives examples on what that means. So I thought "okay, the background panel is elsewhere." No, it isn't. Even when I got excited by finding the almost-hidden "Turn Over" button at the top, thinking there were more forms to fill out, I only found "I am/am not roleplaying at the moment" checkboxes.

Honestly, people know what my character looks like. They can see her. She's pretty. Whatever. What they can't see is her backstory, and I wanted to write one. So I'm disappointed.


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MyRolePlay
tested by Nevari and Manasseh

Already, this addon seems infinitely easy to navigate. With unobtrusive toggling and simple text boxes, Nevari tells me that it's what I was looking for. In fact, she's going to keep it after the trial run, she likes it so much.

Manasseh, of course, called me a bother and will probably get rid of his asap.

Attractiveness: 9/10
Ease of Use: 9/10
Shows: (coming)

Nevari got screenshots of all of the features. ^_^ Click the images to see full size.


Looking at another's profile:

Mouse-over player:

Edit:
Manasseh kept it and changed his profile (what you see in pictures is just what he put in to test it), but I haven't been able to see that new profile, though he swears he changed it. That would be a bug with the system, I guess.

3 comments:

  1. Yays! I guess I did overdo the screenshots a bit, eh? I thought you wanted a very clear picture of what the mod did. I'm going to keep this one for sure (unless somehow the third one is even better). Maybe I'll create a char on a RP server just to see how many people have this mod and read their stuff. XD

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  2. Hey -- I'm the girl who does the comic, saw you on the referrer logs...

    Save you some time -- MyRolePlay is the only one that has a window for backstory. The third one is the one that I use and the one screenshotted in the comic.

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  3. ^_^ Thank you! I'll keep that one installed. I may test the third one just for screenshot purposes, then, but that will be all.

    Love your comic. Love love love.

    ReplyDelete

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