The most remarkable and innovative part of the World of Warcraft experience wasn’t coded by someone at Blizzard – it’s Thottbot, as in “Dammit, which god damn tower does this quest say I’m looking for? I’m paging out to Thottbot.” Now, of course, quest info sites are nothing new, but the twist for Thottbot is that instead of being built by a dedicated staff of people with no lives, it’s built by anyone who happens to run a popular UI mod for the game (and yes, it’s optional) – the data is collected from that player’s play experience, and forwarded to the Thottbot service, which then compiles it for all to see.

The advantages are obvious, with accuracy of information being the most obvious. Hell, it’ll show you a map of where in the zone something drops. If Blizzard is like any other work environment I’ve been in, I’ll bet their designers, QA peeps and Forum Monkeys use Thottbot. Sure, they have design documents which are supposed to tell them all that stuff, but Thottbot tells you how it DOES work, not how it’s SUPPOSED to work, a distinction that’s critical when trying to operate a live service. And trust me, even though we SHOULD have tools built that tell us this stuff, building them and keeping them up-to-date start to fall in priority once the boat starts taking in water.


Some people have implied that Thottbot is somehow worse for the play experience than good ol’ Stratics was. I’ve had some imply that designers should be opposed to things like Thottbot on principle. The younger iteration of me would have agreed. Nowadays, as I try to juggle work, fiance time, real life responsibilities and a tragically burgeoning hobby, I recognize it’s value more. Hint: I’m the highest level member with the most hours logged of my 25+ person WoW guild, and even I don’t have the time to waste on some of these quests.

  • If I’ve killed 30 elite dragons and haven’t gotten a single drop in 30 tries, I’m going to look it up.
  • If I’ve been told to ‘look for something strange’ in the southern half of a continent, and an hour later, I’ve moused over every pixel in that zone, I’m going to look it up.
  • If you tell me to ‘go look for a guy in a city’ that happens to have 50 shops, 300 NPCs, and no prospects other than going door to door, I’m going to look it up.

Is this laziness? No. I only have an hour or two to play per night. Is it because having the sword is more fun than earning it? I don’t know if I agree with that either. I know the moment that I earn a great item definitely falls in the category of five seconds of great gameplay, but if the heroic thing I do to earn that is to mouse over pixels and try to find something that glows in a 3D space, I’ll reach for Thottbot every time. Hint: we’ve declared an entire genre of gaming obsolete with the epithet’pixel hunting’ — and now it’s being brought back, only complicated by larger spaces, 3D camera control, elite mobs and random player killers? Excuse me while I page out.

So despite the fact that the quests is what WoW got right, they sporadically have some content that sucks (and occasionally lame-ass quests are by no means a flaw limited to this fine Blizzard product). Which brings up the obvious conclusion. The fine folks at Thottbot has information that would be of high value to the design team of Blizzard — they have a ranked list of which quests in the game are the most searched for and, by implication, are viewed by the players as the most broken. There’s nothing like good data mining to humble a designer into fixing unparsably vague or stupid content.

The twist on all this, of course, is the possibility that Thottbot is owned by IGE, who are, depending on who you ask, evil incarnate or simply misunderstood. This has, of course, raised the question of whether or not you should support Thottbot, or instead, go to a smaller, hand-crafted site to help keep the man down. Which I find kind of humorous. Thottbot has provided a service for free — miniscule advertising, no popups, no login screen names, apparently out of the goodness of their heart.

Could the guy who engineered Thottbot have afforded it’s massive bandwidth bills unless SOMEONE with reasonably deep pockets bankrolling it?

Original Comments thread is here.