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Exactly, Blizzard derives increased value from users taking the time to level a second character due to QuestHelper. Many users use Auctioneer. While those are free with exceptional support there are also many that are not free such as Zygors' Guides ($50), Carbonite ($2.50/mo), Brian Kopp's Guide/Addon ($59.99), Joanas' Levelling Guide ($77), and QuestUp ($47).

You'll note that the paid addons are for quest assistance.

You'll note that Brian Kopp (previously featured on slashdot) is now making cash by selling an ingame version of his guide, me thinks this is retribution.

Also, as an addon author myself I can only say "Go ahead, turn off all your API's, see how that works out. I can farm other games".

Some people already do this. The Auctioneer addons pack for World of Warcraft has alpha, beta and gamma versions released before the official release.

Absolutely: The Lua interpreter source code is very clean and well written, and wonderfully portable and platform agnostic.

Here's the source code that you can view online -- there isn't much to it! Four global header files, 19 core C files, 19 core header files, 10 library C files, 1 interpreter C file, and 2 compiler C files. Here is the main loop of the virtual machine -- notice that there are only 38 opcodes!

A great example of some interesting code written in Lua is the Auctioneer add-on for World of Warcraft (screenshots, manual). Here's the index of the Lua sources, and an interesing Lua file that calculates statistics on auction items. This code depends on features provided by the WOW client (implemented in C++ or whatever), as well as other Lua scripts loaded into the client.

One important reason to learn and consider using Lua, is that it's by far one of the fastest and smallest of all the interpreted scripting languages, on the Programming Language Shootout. It totally smokes most other scripting languages.

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SPEED (the number is how many times slower it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by wasting time):
Lua: 6.4; Python: 7.4; Pike: 8.3; Tcl: 8.7; Perl: 9.0; Scheme MzScheme: 11; PHP: 13; Icon: 14; Smalltalk GST: 15; Ruby: 16; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 32;

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SIZE (the number is how many times bigger it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by selling memory):
Lua: 2.5; Haskell GHC: 2.8; SML MLton: 3.4; Python: 4.1; Perl: 4.3; Tcl: 5.1; Icon: 5.4; Ruby: 6.0; C# Mono: 6.3; Pike: 6.8; PHP: 7.1; Oberon-2 OO2C: 7.9; Erlang HiPE: 7.9; Java JDK -server: 9.1; Scheme MzScheme: 9.2; Mozart/Oz: 9.8; Scala: 10; Lisp SBCL: 10; Smalltalk GST: 13; Smalltalk VisualWorks: 15; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 30;

Lua is even better than several compiled languages (like Java) when it comes to its size! Like Java, Lua also has a "just in time" compiler, but that was not used in these benchmarks (although I presume Java's was, because Java did very well with speed but not memory usage).

I think it's laughable that someone would put their time into learning a faddishly popular language like Ruby, but would then not consider learning a technically superior language like Lua, since Ruby scores so badly on these benchmarks compared to Lua, Lua has been around a lot longer than Ruby, and it had already proven itself in many commercial products (like WOW).

Lua really is far ahead of the pack of other languages in many ways, BECAUSE it's so clean and well designed. Plus its licensing terms are excellent, it's extremely portable, easy to embed and integrate with applications, and SWIG supports it well. So it's definitely well worth learning.

-Don

Absolutely: The Lua interpreter source code is very clean and well written, and wonderfully portable and platform agnostic.

Here's the source code that you can view online -- there isn't much to it! Four global header files, 19 core C files, 19 core header files, 10 library C files, 1 interpreter C file, and 2 compiler C files. Here is the main loop of the virtual machine -- notice that there are only 38 opcodes!

A great example of some interesting code written in Lua is the Auctioneer add-on for World of Warcraft (screenshots, manual). Here's the index of the Lua sources, and an interesing Lua file that calculates statistics on auction items. This code depends on features provided by the WOW client (implemented in C++ or whatever), as well as other Lua scripts loaded into the client.

One important reason to learn and consider using Lua, is that it's by far one of the fastest and smallest of all the interpreted scripting languages, on the Programming Language Shootout. It totally smokes most other scripting languages.

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SPEED (the number is how many times slower it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by wasting time):
Lua: 6.4; Python: 7.4; Pike: 8.3; Tcl: 8.7; Perl: 9.0; Scheme MzScheme: 11; PHP: 13; Icon: 14; Smalltalk GST: 15; Ruby: 16; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 32;

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SIZE (the number is how many times bigger it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by selling memory):
Lua: 2.5; Haskell GHC: 2.8; SML MLton: 3.4; Python: 4.1; Perl: 4.3; Tcl: 5.1; Icon: 5.4; Ruby: 6.0; C# Mono: 6.3; Pike: 6.8; PHP: 7.1; Oberon-2 OO2C: 7.9; Erlang HiPE: 7.9; Java JDK -server: 9.1; Scheme MzScheme: 9.2; Mozart/Oz: 9.8; Scala: 10; Lisp SBCL: 10; Smalltalk GST: 13; Smalltalk VisualWorks: 15; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 30;

Lua is even better than several compiled languages (like Java) when it comes to its size! Like Java, Lua also has a "just in time" compiler, but that was not used in these benchmarks (although I presume Java's was, because Java did very well with speed but not memory usage).

I think it's laughable that someone would put their time into learning a faddishly popular language like Ruby, but would then not consider learning a technically superior language like Lua, since Ruby scores so badly on these benchmarks compared to Lua, Lua has been around a lot longer than Ruby, and it had already proven itself in many commercial products (like WOW).

Lua really is far ahead of the pack of other languages in many ways, BECAUSE it's so clean and well designed. Plus its licensing terms are excellent, it's extremely portable, easy to embed and integrate with applications, and SWIG supports it well. So it's definitely well worth learning.

-Don

Absolutely: The Lua interpreter source code is very clean and well written, and wonderfully portable and platform agnostic.

Here's the source code that you can view online -- there isn't much to it! Four global header files, 19 core C files, 19 core header files, 10 library C files, 1 interpreter C file, and 2 compiler C files. Here is the main loop of the virtual machine -- notice that there are only 38 opcodes!

A great example of some interesting code written in Lua is the Auctioneer add-on for World of Warcraft (screenshots, manual). Here's the index of the Lua sources, and an interesing Lua file that calculates statistics on auction items. This code depends on features provided by the WOW client (implemented in C++ or whatever), as well as other Lua scripts loaded into the client.

One important reason to learn and consider using Lua, is that it's by far one of the fastest and smallest of all the interpreted scripting languages, on the Programming Language Shootout. It totally smokes most other scripting languages.

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SPEED (the number is how many times slower it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by wasting time):
Lua: 6.4; Python: 7.4; Pike: 8.3; Tcl: 8.7; Perl: 9.0; Scheme MzScheme: 11; PHP: 13; Icon: 14; Smalltalk GST: 15; Ruby: 16; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 32;

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SIZE (the number is how many times bigger it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by selling memory):
Lua: 2.5; Haskell GHC: 2.8; SML MLton: 3.4; Python: 4.1; Perl: 4.3; Tcl: 5.1; Icon: 5.4; Ruby: 6.0; C# Mono: 6.3; Pike: 6.8; PHP: 7.1; Oberon-2 OO2C: 7.9; Erlang HiPE: 7.9; Java JDK -server: 9.1; Scheme MzScheme: 9.2; Mozart/Oz: 9.8; Scala: 10; Lisp SBCL: 10; Smalltalk GST: 13; Smalltalk VisualWorks: 15; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 30;

Lua is even better than several compiled languages (like Java) when it comes to its size! Like Java, Lua also has a "just in time" compiler, but that was not used in these benchmarks (although I presume Java's was, because Java did very well with speed but not memory usage).

I think it's laughable that someone would put their time into learning a faddishly popular language like Ruby, but would then not consider learning a technically superior language like Lua, since Ruby scores so badly on these benchmarks compared to Lua, Lua has been around a lot longer than Ruby, and it had already proven itself in many commercial products (like WOW).

Lua really is far ahead of the pack of other languages in many ways, BECAUSE it's so clean and well designed. Plus its licensing terms are excellent, it's extremely portable, easy to embed and integrate with applications, and SWIG supports it well. So it's definitely well worth learning.

-Don

Absolutely: The Lua interpreter source code is very clean and well written, and wonderfully portable and platform agnostic.

Here's the source code that you can view online -- there isn't much to it! Four global header files, 19 core C files, 19 core header files, 10 library C files, 1 interpreter C file, and 2 compiler C files. Here is the main loop of the virtual machine -- notice that there are only 38 opcodes!

A great example of some interesting code written in Lua is the Auctioneer add-on for World of Warcraft (screenshots, manual). Here's the index of the Lua sources, and an interesing Lua file that calculates statistics on auction items. This code depends on features provided by the WOW client (implemented in C++ or whatever), as well as other Lua scripts loaded into the client.

One important reason to learn and consider using Lua, is that it's by far one of the fastest and smallest of all the interpreted scripting languages, on the Programming Language Shootout. It totally smokes most other scripting languages.

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SPEED (the number is how many times slower it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by wasting time):
Lua: 6.4; Python: 7.4; Pike: 8.3; Tcl: 8.7; Perl: 9.0; Scheme MzScheme: 11; PHP: 13; Icon: 14; Smalltalk GST: 15; Ruby: 16; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 32;

Here are the ratios of interpreted languages compared to compiled C code, in order of SIZE (the number is how many times bigger it is than C, smaller is better unless you make your living by selling memory):
Lua: 2.5; Haskell GHC: 2.8; SML MLton: 3.4; Python: 4.1; Perl: 4.3; Tcl: 5.1; Icon: 5.4; Ruby: 6.0; C# Mono: 6.3; Pike: 6.8; PHP: 7.1; Oberon-2 OO2C: 7.9; Erlang HiPE: 7.9; Java JDK -server: 9.1; Scheme MzScheme: 9.2; Mozart/Oz: 9.8; Scala: 10; Lisp SBCL: 10; Smalltalk GST: 13; Smalltalk VisualWorks: 15; JavaScript SpiderMonkey: 30;

Lua is even better than several compiled languages (like Java) when it comes to its size! Like Java, Lua also has a "just in time" compiler, but that was not used in these benchmarks (although I presume Java's was, because Java did very well with speed but not memory usage).

I think it's laughable that someone would put their time into learning a faddishly popular language like Ruby, but would then not consider learning a technically superior language like Lua, since Ruby scores so badly on these benchmarks compared to Lua, Lua has been around a lot longer than Ruby, and it had already proven itself in many commercial products (like WOW).

Lua really is far ahead of the pack of other languages in many ways, BECAUSE it's so clean and well designed. Plus its licensing terms are excellent, it's extremely portable, easy to embed and integrate with applications, and SWIG supports it well. So it's definitely well worth learning.

-Don

Yes, Auctioneer is very pretty code, and it does a lot of sophisticated stuff, too! Every time I log into WOW, I let auctioneer scan all the auctions and update its tables of market price statistics, and once it's done (about 7 minutes of downloading), it presents a list of the most profitable auctions that are expiring soon, and the expected profits. I've snatched up strange items like "Elemental Fire", and turned them around for huge profit. Every object you point at can pop up stats about its expected auction price. Some people use Auctioneer regularly (and game the auction house) to make real money (selling WOW gold for real cash).

The "cosmos" ui and "thottbot" service is an even more elaborate set of WOW extensions, all scripted in Lua. It gathers statistics on EVERYTHING you see in the game, and uploads the data to the central server, which hosts discussion boards for every location, object, non player character, quest and magic spell in the game. It's like a real time screen scraper that spys on WOW's data stream, which it can do efficiently because so much of the game is exposed to Lua, and all events are reported to the scripting language!

-Don

At first, I chose to use JavaScript to script my PocketPC application, because it was the most obvious "consumer oriented" scripting language, with a free implementation in C (SpiderMonkey, the original JavaScript engine, built into Firefox and many other applications).

It worked, but it was big and slow. And it was a pain in the ass to interface with C and C++, because SWIG doesn't support it, and it has a really nasty extension API. But I didn't realize how truly horrible it was, until I saw how bad SpiderMonkey JavaScript ranked in the Computer Language Shootout. It's not just the worst, it's MORE THAN TWICE AS BAD as the second worst!

What amazes me about SpiderMonkey JavaScript, is that it manages to be magnificently slow AND waste huge amounts of memory, without actually getting any benefits from all the trade-offs and compromises it made!

It's not just at the bottom of the list of the computer language shootout ranking, it's waaaaay below the next worst language: more than twice as bad, in fact!

Last place SpiderMonkey's ratio to C is 26, while next to last place Smalltalk GST's ratio is 12, so SpiderMonkey's 2.25 times worse than the slowest Smalltalk! (That's with a 1 multiplier for full cpu time and memory use, to consider both.)

In contrast, Lua is the fastest scripting language in the shootout. In a head-to-head comparison with JavaScript, Lua totally smokes JavaScript and leaves it in the dust, with some benchmarks scoring as high as 71, 77, 80 times better than JavaScript.

Lua's an extremely well designed and implemented language, very clean and simple, few compromises and blemishes, excellent licensing terms, very easy to integrate with C and C++ with SWIG and other tools, has few dependencies, runs everywhere, and it's even easy to learn, read and write.

Lua already existed (in an early form) by the time Netscape started kludging together LiveScript then renaming it JavaScript. It would be a better world if Netscape had decided to use Lua instead of inventing their own half-assed language, and getting distracted by the Java Juggernaut.

But in spite of that dot-com-bubble diversion, Lua has finally proven itself, and is extremely popular in the game industry, widely used in games like World of Warcraft. A great way to see how powerful it is, and learn practical Lua programming, is to check out and look at the source code of a sophisticated WOW extension like Auctioneer.

-Don

I used t play WoW. I am quite bored with it now but I played for about a year. I played through to lv 60 twice and enjoyed everything but the buying and selling. Epic items cost way too much for me (a hardcore gamer to my wife but actually a casual gamer to the Slashdot crowd no doubt) to get many.

In the last two months of playing I made a discovery that just about blew my mind. For those not in the 'know', Blizzard allows a certain amount of mods to be used in game. These do various things such as map enhancements, custom button grouping etc. Now one of these is called auctioneer. What it does is make you money. Not just a little bit but a whole CRAP PILE of money. This mod will NOT get you banned from WoW that I know of either.

How does it work, you ask? Glad you asked. Its very simple. If you have ever heard the phrase "Buy low. Sell High" well no truer words have ever been spoken about this addon. It scans the auction house for items that are being sold under the mean asking price. So if the average price of a stack of gold bars is 2g (for instance) and there are 5 auctions with bids below it will flag them and allow you to bid on them. You can say show me items with a bid

I struggled with the morale of using such a tool, but as my subscription was running out I wanted to see how much gold I could make in my last 30 days. I tried to do this on paper for a few weeks early in my WoW career but it is a tiresome process. I had about 6G in the bank. I would run this once a day and by the second to last day I had over 1000g in the bank! Broken or what? It was then I realised I would never play again. What is the point? If its that easy and I can buy whatever I want then there certainly is little use in playing.

Oh well. y other $0.02 is that I don't think I can support Blizzard too much any more. I loved Diablo2 and WoW for a time but I can't stand it when companies treat their customers like criminals. Close the loops you idiots! Don't blame the guys that spent possibly $100(s) on your @$%^ games. Its THEIR (read: Blizzard's) fault.

End rant.