TankingTips.com

With the onset of Icecrown, there are a lot of things I could have talked about, but you’ll be able to find that kind of thing everywhere. So, instead I’m going to share something else with you. An interview.

Huh? How do you interview a trinket? Well, I hope that’s not what you’re thinking right now, but if you are, you’ll find this interview especially enlightening. I have the pleasure of presenting you my interview with Satrina of the Evil Empire Guides, Satrina Buff Frames and much more!

1. How did you get started with theorycrafting?

Back in 2004 I started to wonder about these “crushing blows” that I kept seeing in the combat log. The tooltip said that defense was supposed to reduce the chance of crushing blows happening, and I was curious as to how that worked. I went out and collected and bought a ton of gear with defense on it and then spent a great deal of time dying to Taelan Fordring. After collecting a few thousand data points, I posted a bug report showing my findings which absolutely showed that defense was not reducing the chance of crushing blows. The report was answered by the Blizzard employee Block who explained the basics of how defense and crushing blows interacted for us. With that knowledge in hand, I wrote my first two articles: defense and crushing blows. The rest is history!

2. Why did you write all of those articles, anyway?

Funnily enough, because I am lazy. I got tired of writing out the same response over and over again, and pasting a link is much easier. Having something in a permanent place makes it a lot easier to refine, reword, and update things so that people always have the most up to date information available when they visit, rather than having eleventy different versions floating around in various threads. Now that everything is at TankSpot, it’s viable to have discussion and let people put their questions in a relevant context as well.

3. Anything you regret writing?

Yep. In 2004: “It seems that there may always be a small chance that you’ll get a critical hit no matter how high your defense is”. I’ve regretted that line for years. At the time, we simply were not 100% sure how crit reduction from defense worked. Most theory people figured that some mobs just had a higher crit chance, but I didn’t want to come across as if I knew absolutely. We know better now, of course. With a little more thought before calling it done, I could have included the part where we infer that some mobs just have higher crit chance since if there was always a small chance to be crit regardless, we’d see many more critical hits every day across more than 100 servers, yadda, yadda. 20/20 hindsight and all that.

4. Can you recall the moment you first thought, “Hey, I’m E-Famous”?

There are really two points that come to mind. The first was around late 2005 when I first noticed that a lot of questions were being answered on the WoW forums simply by linking to my stuff at evilempireguild.org. About the same time, the Satrina email address started to pick up with people asking questions and looking for advice. The second was when I started getting more and more email about SBF, started to see people asking for SBF help on the WoW UI forum, and more and more people had SBF in their posts in the ever-present “show your UI” threads on various forums. The latter is much more recent, mostly in the past 12 months.

5. How does it feel to be “E-Famous”?

Equal parts flattered, ridiculous, and nerdy. It’s a funny thing.

6. How did that feeling compare to seeing your name on an item?

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grinning for a few days. And calling myself a dreadful nerd. This was a pretty awesome moment, too:

7. What do you think it was that caught Blizzard’s eye enough in order for you to be honored in such a way?

If I had to guess, I would imagine it’s because of the way that I have been active in the tanking community. Probably that and the fact that I’ve been mouthing off for just about five years now on that and other aspects of the game! Seriously, though, I think that part of the recognition comes from my attempts to only talk about things that are seemingly immediately relevant without (very much) hyberbole and exaggeration. Backing what I am trying to say with math or at least reasoned arguments. I’ve tried very hard to not let my natural sarcasm colour my writings, and to not flame people - I have been mostly successful with that, which I think helped too. Also, contrary to what my detractors might say, I have always given as much of an even hand towards the other tanking classes as my knowledge allows when I do bring things up. I’m not sure if what I’ve done in terms of addons was part of the mix or not.

8. What do you feel has been your most important contribution to the community?

I’d like to think that it’s the guides that I wrote and continue to maintain and keep up to date. My intent was to take subjects that can be pretty complex and try to break them down into explanations that anyone can understand. I haven’t always been successful at the first cut, but I do continually edit and refine to make things that much more clear and easy to read. Given the views they still get even more than four years later in some case, I think I have been successful overall. As they saying goes, as long as someone is getting benefit from it, it’s all worth it.

9. What do you get more feedback from, your articles or your addons?

At this point, addons hands down. I get a PM on TankSpot every once in a while, and maybe two or three email per week asking about game mechanics. I handle upwards of 25 email in a week about SBF in the normal course of things, and at least double that when SBF is in a beta phase. I have a pretty devoted following of people who I can count on to test SBF betas and provide awesome feedback and error reports (thanks gang!)

10. How did you get started in addons?

My very first addon project was to write new unit frames that had no status bars anywhere. I hate them because they give me no useful information. Eventually, people started asking what unit frames I was using in my screenshots and I packaged them up as Satrina Unit Frames. That’s probably my least popular addon, but I’m not the only one who hates status bars! The second one I wrote was a little addon to move the buff and debuff frames off to the side, arrange them in vertical columns, and make the icons smaller. People started asking about that one, too, so Satrina Buff Frames got packaged up and made available. For a long time, I told people that they were strictly “what you get is what you get”, but I finally gave in and started adding sliders and checkboxes in an options frame. Again, the rest is history!

11. What would you suggest aspiring addon creators do to get in the “game”?

Start small. If you don’t know XML, learn the basics. If you already are a programmer, Lua will be a snap to learn. If you aren’t, Lua is a very easy language to learn. Wowwiki is an excellent resource for learning what’s made available to your addons by the game client to let you figure out what is possible and what is not, so reading up on that is a very good idea. There is an excellent book out there (http://wowprogramming.com) written by three prominent members of the UI community that will give a great head start to any aspiring authors whether they are have programming experience or not. Most importantly, find a few little addons to study and see how they work, and how things interact with the game client. The best way to learn it is to play with it and break it.

12. Do you enjoy theorycrafting more than WoW itself? If so, was this immediately the case or was there a transition to it?

Yes. If it weren’t for theorycrafting and addons, I would have quit WoW completely a long time ago. In fact, I don’t actively raid anymore at this point and only do theorycrafting and addons. Well, only addons at the moment as SBF is going into development for the next release, and Digits 2 is due to be finished for release in the next few weeks. I am sure that Cataclysm, if not 3.3, will suck me back into testing and theorycrafting in a hurry!

13. Where do you see yourself going with addons and theorycrafting?

Well, not being active raider anymore gives me a lot more time during evenings through the week! I’ve now finalised the feature list for SBF version 3.2, and will be starting design and coding in the coming weeks. First up is to finish off the long-delayed Digits 2, though. I think tanks will be pretty happy with what that will bring. As for theorycrafting, there isn’t a great deal to do now, at least on the warrior side of the house. When 3.3 comes, I’ll re-test all of the threat values for warriors again to make sure everything is current. I keep meaning to rewrite the “Life after 490 Defense” article into a “Life after 540 Defense” article. Maybe I’ll get around to that, though with Cataclysm and the demise of defense on the horizon it isn’t perhaps as high on the list. When Cataclysm comes, I am sure there will be lots to do!

14. If Blizzard offered you a job, would you take it? If so, what role would you ideally play?

It’s quite literally the only thing that would entice me to move to the U.S. Would I take it? As a kid, I always wished I could be the guy who wrote Karateka or Ultima. Working at Blizzard would be the ultimate way to realise that dream. As for role, I’ve a very long history of tearing games apart and trying to make them better, so ideally I’d love to be on the systems team working on game mechanics. I could definitely see myself working on UI development as well - so long as nobody wanted me to do anything with Photoshop!

And that’s a wrap! Big thanks to Satrina for humouring me with an interview and even more so for all that he has contributed to our community over the past 5 years!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 11:30 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.