With the hundreds of new developments we’re all swamped with concerning the patch it’s a little tough to know where to start.

Inscription is a bit of a mess on about half the servers.  Fortunately there is always a way to make a good profit and you just go where the money is.  On Fenris the competition is just silly (50 pages of glyphs as I write this), but we just went back to selling herbs to all the alchemists and scribes and are making a killing there.  Cornered the market for minor glyphs and that works well.  Watching prices rise today now for majors as the herbs dry up, so it’s just a matter of staying on top of things as the market moves.

The servers were an even bigger mess.  So much for leveling inscription in an hour (or doing anything else really).  Still getting “World Server Down” messages today.  The PTR stress test didn’t turn out all that hot I suppose.

But perhaps the one thing driving most of us the nuttiest is the fact that mods are just dead.  Almost none of the legacy things we’ve used will ever work again.  There were so many changes to the UI that I eventually had to turn everything but AADV (the version that is supposed to work with 3.0) off just to get to where I could live with all the error messages from one mod.  And it just gets worse from there.

ACE is gone.  The updater and all the mods hosted there have been taken down never to return.  So much for automatic updates from maybe the best and most trustworthy source.  So we’ve had lots of comments from everyone struggling to know what to do about mods.

The good news is that mods are being updated as you read this.  The bad news is that there is not a system that even comes close to replacing ACE.  So you really have two choices at this time – go with the few you can’t live without or try out the Curse system.  Neither one is exciting me in any way.

If you’ve always downloaded your mods one at a time then Curse will work for you.  If you only run a few mods then it’s not that bad to go over to Curse or Wowinterface and just grab what you want.   The only problem is that a TON of mods will just never be updated again.  Many mod programmers have just thrown up their hands at having to completely reprogram everything with every single patch and finally called last straw.

So now you’re stuck with trying to find mods that work to replace what you had that do similar things.  What a zoo.  One bag (one of my favorites) is non-existent.  The replacement I got is awful.  It does weird stuff and I don’t feel like spending the hours it will take to figure it out.

For the second option that will auto update your mods the only game left in town is the curse downloader.  It does an AWESOME job of updating mods, but finding them is terrible.  Plus, you will have to eventually pay for the downloading service.  I’m not averse to paying for good service, but this one is so inferior to ACE I’m not sure I will be able to justify the expense.

So here’s what I’ve done.  I pared down to a list of just 10-12 things I can’t do without for now and will be a little patient with the rest of it.  None of the bar mods work right now and that is the one that’s killing me the most.  The five Blizz bars just don’t cut it for a shaman with all those totems to manage.  I can’t imagine how rough it is for druids.  Basically this means I have to relearn how to do a lot of things and that’s going to set me back a bit.

When you go to curse or Wowinterface looking for mods, pretty much anything updated on the 15th will work fairly well.  So perhaps the best thing to do is just update the few things that you love and toss the rest for a while.  There are so many cool new things to play with in the game that I didn’t want to spend 50 hours clanking around with mods, so to heck with most of them.

And, there is not really anyone to complain to.  Blizz isn’t responsible for messing everything up while trying to make their game the best it can be.  Sometimes that means changing things.  You can’t scream at the mod guys, they are all doing it for free.  But frankly after this I wish there were a few of them that would just go commercial and let me throw some money at them to keep things up to date and smooth.  But that’s not going to happen in the age of the freetard programmer.

You see, the more we demand free programming that represents hundreds of hours worth of work, the more we have to live with complete fiascoes like this.  There’s an old story that always comes to my mind in these situations.

A guy goes into a repair shop and sees a sign that reads: Fast, Cheap, Good – pick any two!  You can have it fast and cheap, but it won’t be very good.  You can have it Cheap and good, but it won’t be fast.  You can have it good and fast, but it won’t be cheap.

So, since it’s going to be cheap, and you need it to be good, you better believe the mod problems are NOT going to fixed very fast.  You’re talking about thousands of normal people out there with normal lives who have to earn a living somehow and they will get around to it when they get around to it.

In the meantime, drop the things you use that you can do without, update with the things that are available from the two remaining sources, and then sit back and wait for the rest.  That’s just the way it is.  We’re all going to have to let skill alone work for a while.  But cheer up, everyone else is in the same boat you’re in.  So keep bailing, and let your superior knowledge of the game continue to keep you Dominating!