User contributed guide to QD dailies

[Dragonhawk]

Hey, do you have any interest in a user contributed Guide? I've written one for the Isle of Quel'Danas Dailies - a holdover from Burning Crusade that's still a tidy source of gold, rep and XP especially for levelling characters in the 70's. There's also a second part that handles three related Dailies in Outland.

It's my first attempt at a real Guide and I've tried to follow the rules and examples from Zygor, but if you see any bugs or have any suggestions, let me know.

The XML autoloader for ZG looks for additional Guides named Guide01 through Guide40.lua. I named this one Guide10.lua so it doesn't overwrite anyone's personal Guides that they have been working on. Of course if Zygor wanted to adopt it for a future patch they could name it how they liked.

I've attached it as a .zip file since .lua isn't an allowed extension on Forum posts. You would unzip this into [Your WOW directory]\Interface\Addons\ZygorGuidesViewer\Guides . Then reload WoW and you should see it in the guide selection tree.

Thanks again for a great addon and I hope you enjoy my little attempt!

[antacus]

Very cool. Thanks for the submission!

Which brings me back to the user contrib stuff. I have asked about these in the past and guess John & Co. need to think about some official ground rules for how these are handled.

- Totally self generated
- Mods of existing guides
- Conversions of PDF guides to in-game (think Silver few months ago)

What about a section for members where people can publish their guides? Put disclaimers that Zygor staff does not support them? Or how about an option to sell user contrib guides? Say $5 per guide and Zygor keeps 25% (site maintenance) passing user 75%.

[Dragonhawk]

Is there some place where others have already contributed guides? I looked around and I didn't see any.

For my part, I certainly don't want any $, it's just sharing with the community.

I do think that a User Contributed Guides forum section would be awesome, because it would encourage others.

It would also be great if the guide_format.html file were updated to reflect the latest Parser, for example the from tag. As it is, I keep a copy of Parser.lua open on the seond monitor as I stumble my way through authoring.

[silverhawk11]

Is there some place where others have already contributed guides? I looked around and I didn't see any.

For my part, I certainly don't want any $, it's just sharing with the community.

I do think that a User Contributed Guides forum section would be awesome, because it would encourage others.

It would also be great if the guide_format.html file were updated to reflect the latest Parser, for example the from tag. As it is, I keep a copy of Parser.lua open on the seond monitor as I stumble my way through authoring.

Not at the moment, although Antacus and I have been wanting it for a long time. We completely agree with you in the fact that it'd be cool to see more user contributed guides, no money needed to be attached. I've been tempted to write some guides, but I'm too afraid that I couldn't release it to the public.

The main problem with user contributed guides is the fact that, to view these forums you must have purchased at least one product from Zygor, but only one. If we wrote a guide that, for instance, did dailies in specific areas and did that for each area, then the users could just download that and not worry about getting the official product, which would cheat the team out of their work.

I'm hoping for a workaround about it, and I'm sure somewhere in the future the team will think of something, but for now, who knows what we'll do with it :P.

[Dragonhawk]

The main problem with user contributed guides is the fact that, to view these forums you must have purchased at least one product from Zygor, but only one. If we wrote a guide that, for instance, did dailies in specific areas and did that for each area, then the users could just download that and not worry about getting the official product, which would cheat the team out of their work.

Obviously one ground-rule for the User Contributed Guides section would be that you don't upload a guide that "competes" with the purchasable Zygor guides. So even if I hacked up something for my own convenience that did my "personal Northrend Daily run" my way, I wouldn't post it here, because as you say, people could use it instead of buying Zygor's dailies.

User contributed stuff should be "fun" and/or a little behind the cutting edge, like my Burning Crusade dailies run with Cataclysm already in beta. I also have one I'd love to do (if Zygor could change the way corpses are treated) to let any new character hearth to Shattrath or Dalaran - especially useful for bank alts.

[master]

i think this is a great idea. competition is always a good idea. i would say there should be no restrictions to what guides could be made. if you want a regularly updated more professional guide then you buy a zygor guide. but if you want a quick specific guide that may not be up to date you download user guides.

this is another pro for the subscription plan. part of your monthly subscription would get you access to "free" user created guides. that way zygor still gets paid and users can make what ever guide they want.