Leveling Guide Pilot (with Multi-box notes)

Hey guys,

Don't know if this is the right place to post this but I feel it might be relevant to some people.

Just wanted to share a little project I'm working on with you guys and get your thoughts and opinions. While leveling my paladin and hunter (both 70 for a few months now) via dual-boxing I took a detailed notes and routes. I originally did this knowing that I would probably start a 4/5 box within a few months and wanted to to have a easy time leveling them in outlands. With that in mind, I tried to make my guide easy to follow and multi-boxer friendly. A few weeks after getting my characters to 70, I decided to try making this a leveling guide and as a side project worked on several versions later came up with this guide. The forum and website came much later. For now the site isn't meant to be anything but a highlight on my resume (I'm a web developer) showing some asp.net and php work. For the time being I wouldn't register or post on the site for another 2-3 weeks, since I'm constantly updating and purging old data.

So far the guide is complete in concept and functionality but only has Horde Hellfire and Zangermarsh guide. I want to get a general feel if this guide would be useful to anyone and if it would be worth my time to convert the rest of my zones and finish Outlands (Horde for now). Each zone takes about 10-15 hours of coding to convert from notes on MS word to what you see here. I'm still working on the general theme of the site since many friends have complained that the dark background and white / colored text makes it hard to read. There may also be some glitches with Internet Explorer (Firefox is stable). For now I'm focusing only on Outlands because its easier to cover 10 zones from 60 to 70 then it is to cover 20+ zones from 1 to 60.

Anyways the guide url is: http://www.worldofnoob.com and the guide menu is on the left. Let me know if this is something you'd like to see. Any ideas are welcomed.

Edit: Actually this link might be better, takes you to the "How to Use" and has a working demo. http://www.worldofnoob.com/index.php?page=32

After getting my first character to 70 and then another to 49 I turned to a leveling guide to try it. 3 level 70's and a level 61 later I still swear by them if you're looking to maximize your time in WoW efficiently to produce fast results.

I own both Alliance and Horde guides and what you're doing there is a good breakdown of steps. My only thought on it is make it easier for people to know where to locate the guide at the home page (I know it's all in development) but other than that... keep up the good work, I like it.

Also, will you make printable versions? That's always a key benefit to a guide. If you do, a suggestion would be to allow for two versions.. one including the screenshots and one without.

:) Great job! I'm envious of your webmaking ablities heh.

Haven't thought about printable versions, not sure how I'd implement them in my code right now but it's still early in development. The guide is data driven, all notes quest names and coordinates are taken from a sql database. I wanted a consistency for my guide so that all quest names, notes etc would be identical across however many pages I needed. So when I want to change any aspect of the quest or add new notes, I just change the database table. Orginally this was supposed to be a demo of some asp/php skills on my resume, so I think I went a bit overboard. ;)

When I was looking at the "how to" on your guide, I noticed the 2 quest examples you give have some text in bright pink. This is very difficult to read on the grey background of the tooltip. I strongly suggest changing that color. =)

Nice start though. I do agree that a printable version would be nice, but I can see that it may not be feasible with the way your site works. =/

lol, I don't know what I was thinking using pink (insert gay jokes here). I changed it, I think wanted a different color to distinguish regular notes from multi-boxer notes.
I made a little change also on the blue quests links (supposed to represent do quests), to show the quest notation. Doing this for now because I want to see if that would be more helpful to dual-boxers later I'll add a selection form. This may make things look a bit jumbled, just testing implementation.

Also thinking I might add a few dropdown options for each guide to show, hide (probably strikethrough) certain quest chains (for example non-friendly dual-boxing quests like collection). I doubt while dual-boxing, I would want to have to over over each quest to see if I should do that quest or skip it.

Checked out your guide, I like the tooltip popups. The MB notes and "grade" as you put it are a nice but I agree that not too dual-boxers will be able to mouse over each quest to see if it the grade or MB notes.

Just curious did you scrape wowhead for the tooltip info? The quest chain and xp is left in the chain are a nice touch but how accurate are they? Wowhead still has some issues with broken quest chains.

I modifed some code and the quest notation (which shows identifies the quest, part of chain, and multi-boxer difficulty) to appear on relevant quest links, this helps reduce the need to mouse over. I'm thinking of redoing the format of the guide to a more "text-book" format which doesn't require mouse overs to display notes and some of the more relevant data. It all depends on whether the wow community really needs yet another leveling guide and if I feel it is worth putting another 60-70 hours to complete Outlands. Regardless, the guide will be free with only a few ads to offset hosting costs. If I decide to scrap the Guide, I'll might make a condensed version for multi-boxers (maybe a list of quests that I feel should be skipped). I'm mostly looking for a project that will allow me to channel my WoW addiction to a more constructive use. :) When the time comes when I'm completely bored with WoW ... I still want something that I can use on my resume or something.

As for the tooltip info, I didn't scrape wowhead (wish I did would have saved time). Instead I entered all data manually by hand on wowhead and alakazham (has better quest chain info) as I looked them up from my notes. This ends up a very lengthy process but I want to be certain of the accuracy. I've been using the quest guide on an alt (shadow priest) since I entered outlands so far there have been very few corrections. So far I'm nearly finished with Zangermarsh and a little past 63. I entered outlands at 58 and so far 58-63 /played has been 1 day, 11 hours, 19 minutes. I think I would have had a much faster /played time if I were a hunter or warlock instead of a shadow priest.

Impressive! I admire the dedication it took to get this done. This is really a great start and I'm looking forward to its continued development.

I've been using your leveling guide for while leveling my alt just to try it out. So far its pretty efficent and easy to follow but the white on black color theme starts to hurt my eyes after a hour. Your site looks cool and all but white on black died with DOS. ;)

Otherwise I like it, I've found it a tad faster than Jame's Leveling Guide which I've used before. The chain and unlock info are great but I find it annoying to have to hover over the quest to read notes. Looking foward to the other zones, can't speak for the others but I'd use the guide if it were complete.

Thanks for trying out my guide and your suggestions are more than welcomed. I'm looking to change the color scheme of the guide / site with a more subtle gray or light beige background sometime soon. I'm thinking of ways to change the format of the guide to make it more convenient to use. I'm probably going to take out the notes from the tooltip and put them within the guide. My orginal mindset for the tooltip was to provide a reference to the quest whenever it's mentioned, so when you mouse over the quest you get all the relevant information even if it was mentioned on a different page.

I think I got lazy along the way and left most of the notes on the tool tips only.

I'm not famaliar with Jame's Leveling guide you mentioned do you mean Joana's Guide?