Friends list improved

The built-in friends list has its limitations, but luckily the WoW interface is very extendable by addons. And there are several that try to address the issues mentioned above. Unfortunately all of them are outdated and buggy.

I've played around with addons like Karma or NoteIt, but none of them was what I was looking for. And every single one of them was ancient and apparently unmaintained.

A real social interface would allow me to add private notes about any character I encounter. I do a PuG with someone - I add a note to that character. Someone says "thank you" when I do a drive-by buffing and even buffs me back - another note. Beggar in Orgrimmar - note it. Stealing my resource node from right under me while I fight a mob - note. Horrible tank that thinks two-handers and Deathwish are the way to go - note!

The notes have to be shared between all characters on the same account and server. An idiot I met on my main stays an idiot when I log on one of my alts. The note should be displayed on mouseover and when shift-clicking the player in a chat window.

And in times of server transfers and name changes a pure matching by name isn't enough. The race and class of the character should be recorded automatically, so I notice if I meet a completely different idiot just with the same name than the idiot I met a year ago. And the guild of the characters should be stored. While I don't judge a player by their guild tag, it does give a hint about the quality of the recruitment.

Since none of the existing addons fit my requirements I've started to tweak the simplest one, NoteIt, to my needs. NoteIt provides a simple notepad ability where you can assign notes to a player or item and have it displayed on mouseover.

So far I have extended it with an "info-stamp" that adds some extra info whenever I save a note, like the current time, the name of my logged on character, and the race, class, and guild of my current target.

So when I target someone and type /ni or /noteit then an edit window pops up that allows me to set a note, for example "repeatedly jumped into my fishing bopper". When saving it some data about my character and the targeted player get added like this:

-- Kirana - 2008-03-17 - Thunder Bluff:
-- male level 17 orc warrior
repeatedly jumped into my fishing bopper

Not perfect, but works well enough to be useful to me.

The next steps will be integration into the chat window so that the note appears when I shift-click a name in chat as well as handling /who queries when adding notes for players that I don't have targeted at the moment.

Friends list limitations

Why oh why can I only have 50 friends on my friends list? Is Blizzard trying to tell me something? Maybe something in the line of "These are not the friends you are looking for"?

In my opinion the social interface in WoW is too limited for an MMORPG. Limitations like 50 friends or 500 members in a guild? Are you kidding me? You call that Massive Multiplayer? There is no sharing of friends lists between your alts on the same server. And the default interface doesn't even allow you to add notes to your friends or ignored people. In short - the social interface of WoW stinks. These artificial limitations are plain and simple a disgrace for such a great game.

For me the friends list in the default interface is almost completely useless. With the amount of alts my friends have I can barely squeeze in more than a handful of "real people". And even then I have a hard time to remember which real player is linked to which alt.

Luckily the WoW interface is very extendable by addons, but more about that in my next post.