Filed under: Games, Windows, Open Source
Max out your World of Warcraft character with a free, open-source application called Rawr
by Sebastian Anthony Nov 9th 2009 at 11:00AM
This tool is very popular amongst the serious World of Warcraft players but chances are, if you're a little more casual, you've probably never used it, let alone heard of it.
I'm about to tell you how all of those weak, made-of-paper mages do so much more damage than you and your rusty, rogue swords. You've probably wondered how -- try as you might -- one particular player always does more damage or heals more. "They must be cheating, damnit!" Well... almost! They're actually using an application called Rawr.
Rawr lets you experiment with different weapons and armor, upgrades, sidegrades -- you name it, Rawr lets you do it. We WoW players call it 'theorycrafting': it's like... Warcraft only... in theory. You don't have to actually be playing WoW to theorycraft. In fact, many people theorycraft in a loud and excited manner, often in public, on the back of napkins (it can be very embarrassing). The term itself predates World of Warcraft incidentally, originally coming from the Starcraft days of yore.
If I haven't sold it to you yet and you need further proof as to why Rawr is awesome, just watch the video after the break.
Did you stop and start it a few times just to hear the cute girl say 'Rawr'...? I did.
Anyway, a new version was released today, which is what brought it to my attention. The fact that it's a free, open-source download that's easy to use and the most popular project on Codeplex also has something to do with it. And alas, it only runs on Windows!
Every serious WoW player -- or even the epics-oriented casuals! -- should download and use this program.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
edward said 11:30AM on 11-09-2009
Seb, you need to start playing EVE Online.
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Sebastian Anthony said 11:34AM on 11-09-2009
Hah.
I played it for about a month. It was OK.
I'm actually more a fan of single-player games like Baldur's Gate (or Dragon Age: Origins, wheeeeee!)
But I play MMOs for the social/world-dominating thing. EVE is just a little too number-crunchery for me -- and obviously, as I'd be joining about 5 years too late, I'd probably be a bit behind on the skill and social curve.
Oskiee said 11:42AM on 11-09-2009
EVE online is for a special breed of people. As much as I love and admire the game, I personally cant play it.
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feffrey said 11:47AM on 11-09-2009
For Eve programs there are:
EFT for fitting ships
EVE Mon for skills to train for your char
Wthingy for wormholes
My POS for fitting out POS's
and all in one aps that do most of above like EveHQ
Not to mention the dozens of spreedsheets for calculation ore / refine costs etc, Eve central for market stuff, Out of eve for finding stuff / general info about your stuff, dotlan for searching through maps of eve and other related map data (like what system has had major battles recently) and the dozens of other web and standalone aps that do other things. (like flying eve with your joystick.)
And this is just a small sample of stuff for Eve.
No other game as anywhere near the amount of extra aps and stuff that Eve has. Not to mention that the game supports people have copies of the eve database, and being able to get real time data from the Eve servers with the Eve API
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Sebastian Anthony said 11:54AM on 11-09-2009
I didn't know it was a competition...
If there was ever two MMOs that don't have to compete over market share, it's WoW and EVE...!
Phil said 3:30PM on 11-09-2009
A web-based version is currently in beta test. It uses Silverlight, but it still rocks.
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Sebastian Anthony said 5:00PM on 11-09-2009
I hope it does some clever caching/download-on-demand, as it's quite a big bit of code/graphics. Neat though!
Dave B. said 9:10AM on 11-10-2009
I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard you can run it on a Mac via Mono (http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html).
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Sebastian Anthony said 5:00PM on 11-09-2009
Very cool :) Thanks for sharing.