November Feature Pack

Here are some changes that have been worked into the premium UI recently. Reapp's ACT Statter and the DarqUI Stat Monitor, Quest Journal, Maintained window, Maintained Spell Monitor and DarqUI Help files have all been updated!

Challenging the "Stats" Quo

It's rare, but every now and then we have an opportunity to remove something from the UI, yet it gets better in the process. You'll recall back in the summer Darq Side member and ACT plugin creator Reapp published his Statter addon for ACT that included an option to integrate with the DarqUI Stat Monitor. His earlier version enabled players to log their own stat changes during encounters, and use the ACT platform to evaluate personal combat performance graphically.

In the meantime, Reapp has made substantial improvements to his already outstanding plugin, and now players can use the Statter package to not only log and graph their own performance relative to stat changes, but compare their own results with other players in a group or raid context.

The idea for overlapping multiple players' stats comes from the way players have always used ACT to compare encounter DPS and HPS -- we all know the typical bar chart that says "this player had x DPS, this other player had y DPS." So we know who had "the best DPS" but it doesn't tell us why.

A stat comparison over the duration of an encounter offers insight. If a player has a spike or drop in an important stat (from a buff or debuff, for example) that corresponds with a spike or drop in their performance, we can see how that affects their composite DPS or HPS number spread out over the duration of the encounter, alongside their allies. How cool is that?!

Among many scenarios where the new multi-player graphing capabilities will be useful, I can imagine for example a raid leader putting several raid members together into a common Statter channel and evaluating how well a certain single-target buff improves performance between the raiders. If Player A benefits more than Player B, then the raid leader can call for that buff to be used on Player A, with empirical results to account for the decision.

So what did we remove? Given the expanded graphing complexity, Reapp was not able to apply the various custom color choices we were specifying for each parsed stat. Juggling all those colors with several players being parsed, well, you can see how that's not going to work out. Instead, the plugin will now assign colors from a default pool.

You'll find that the unused color widgets are no longer in the way on the Stat Monitor setup page, and log lines no longer include the color tokens from before, which cleans those up as well.

I think you're going to love using the new and very cool ACT Statter version as much as I do. Thank you, Reapp!

Note Worthy

The game developers surprised us recently with a new convenience feature in the Quest Journal, in the form of an editable Notes page for each quest. Here is the official feature guide.

As  you might expect, I took the opportunity to give the new feature a hard workout, and in doing so found a couple of places that could use some polishing up. The first issue was that there is no way to know at a glance which quests have notes and which don't unless you click on the Notes tab. If you create some notes for a certain quest, you might forget they exist, since they are all quietly tucked in behind the Details tab.

So my concern is that the player will end up wasting time and frustration clicking back and forth on the Notes tab to remember which quests have notes available. To make things a little bit friendlier, the Notes tab will now turn green when you select a quest that contains some custom notes. It looks like this:

You'll also notice two other tweaks in this screenshot: I added a missing scrollbar for longer pages of quest notes, and cleaned up the Details/Notes tab layout which looks a bit strange in the default window.

Billions and Billions Served

Power Creep in an MMO is almost as dangerous as Feature Creep to a computer program. (That's right, I said it!) And we all see the evidence in EverQuest II. Hit points, power points, direct damage, threat, ward and heal amounts all spiral up into the stratosphere over time, especially as new expansions are launched and new levels of power are introduced.

Stat displays in the live game are already pinched for our highest-level players, and the Beta expansion is showing more of the same. Darq Side member Alakazzam pointed out the problems are not just cosmetic -- here is one case where timer data is being occluded by the overflowing values:

Two components where this issue is most keenly felt are the Maintained window and the Maintained Spell Monitor. It seems like only yesterday we made accommodations for values that had crept up into the millions, and this week we made another round of adjustments to get values in the billions and hundreds of billions under control. Now values over 999,999,999 will be represented on icons with "B" shorthand, similar to "M" for values in the millions.

Extra Help

If you've noticed various help files being replaced lately when you check for updates, we're actually putting the cart before the horse on purpose. Last month's Waypoints newsletter promised you several fairly large premium features to be released in November, plus the new DarqUI Utility on top of the expansion release.

All three features are nearing completion, and our helpful members have been working to coordinate their schedules so they can give the features proper testing. And so as an efficiency play we're publishing updated help files early. I'm optimistic that we can fit everything in during November. Rest assured everything is in great shape and we'll publish as soon as ratonga-ly possible.