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• TG Daily: Do you think there is any truth to human game-playing become robot-like? I know that when I solo around.. it's basically charge, heroic strike X 5 or more, bloodthirst and finally execute. I also tend to go to the same areas and kill the same mobs. Mercury: Definitely, for the leveling part of the game. Every player has a set progression of moves and they only change gradually as you gain new skills, talents, and gear. Once you have your optimal set, you rarely deviate. I knew I had to do something to automate it after the nth Immolate/Corruption/Curse/Drain pull. TG Daily: Looking through the WoWglider forums, when GMs starting teleporting players you added teleport detection. In addition, it looks like you added GM whisper detection also. Regarding the cat and mouse game that is played by Blizzard and the GMs, how have your countermeasures evolved? Mercury: If it's a cat and mouse game, then the cat must be one of those new hunter pets with stealth, since we never see it coming. But one of the few advantages we have is our size. So when we learn of a change in the detection procedure that GM's follow or a change in the Warden code, we can react very quickly. Compared to the game, Glider is a tiny, tiny piece of code. I can apply a change, test it, document it, and deploy it in a matter of 20-30 minutes. Blizzard has to move much slower. TG Daily: Would you recommend this program to people who are just starting WoW? I can definitely see the use of this for people who already a level 60 and don't want to do everything over for an alternate character. Mercury: Your answer is the same as mine. In the FAQ on our site and when anyone asks, I always discourage new players from using Glider. All that 1-60 content is pretty fun, for both factions. And skipping it with Glider is just a shame. If anything, I'd say not to use Glider until you've leveled a character of both factions to 60. Those last few levels can get pretty grindy, though, once you've exhausted your quests, so maybe a bit of skip is in order. I really think if Blizzard had some way of allowing a veteran player to level new characters faster, they would have higher retention of subscriptions - and probably no Glider to contend with. Those players have already done all the basic stuff, they just need a new 60 for their guild's MC raid or to play around in BG's. A fresh level 60 character in all greens isn't really that valuable, but takes a lot of work to make.

• TG Daily interview: Chat with a World of Warcraft bot programmer

  Earlier this month, we ran a preview of an exclusive interview with Mercury, a developer of a World of Warcraft bot - a cheat program to accelerate the player's progress within the game. In this full interview, Mercury talks to TG Daily editor Humphrey Cheung about his motivation to create WoWglider, how it works and avoids detection, and his future plans for the bot. TG Daily: Were you an avid World of Warcraft player before writing the program - and what inspired you to write it? Mercury: Definitely. I'm one of the many lifelong Blizzard game owners out there. I started with Warcraft and have played all of their titles. When WoW was finally released, I got it immediately and I've been a fan since. The inspiration behind Glider was really what it's for now - to catch up to level 60 without spending so much real time. I'm in a small guild and my guildmates reached 60 while I was still in the mid-50's. I wanted to get to 60 as well to come along on the instance runs, but I had no time to grind it out between work and social life. When I did finally log in for a few hours on weekends, it was frustrating to see them orgranizing pickup groups for Scholomance and the Blackrock dungeons. I'd be off killing Shardtooth Bears and Crystal Rumblers solo. The original version was very unstable and simplistic, but it allowed me to get my warlock up to 60 pretty fast. My Canadian guildmates knew what I was up to and they encouraged me to turn it into a more well-rounded product so I could sell it. After I showed a few friends the rough version, they all collectively badgered me into marketing it. I promised my guildies that if I sold enough copies of Glider, I'd fly up to Toronto and buy them a round of beer, which I plan to do in January. TG Daily: Did any other programs give you inspiration or a template for developing Glider? Where did you learn the programming skills required to write the program and is Glider a full-time gig? Mercury: None in particular. I ran across a few tools that did some game automation, but nothing struck me as very professional. This was back in April, mind you, and things have changed a bit. But even then, our idea was to use my technology and my partner's marketing/design to position it as a very professional, clean app. So avoiding links to "hax0rs!!11" sites and keeping the design clean was the closest we had to a template. As for my own skills, I've been a full-time developer forever. I started with C, switched to C++ when it came out - that should date me - and just went from there. It doesn't take an enormous amount of talent to make something like this, but you do need to have a solid understanding of software development in general, like understanding business needs, prioritizing issues, source control, and so on. And, no, Glider's not a full-time gig. I've lowered my contracting hours to have more time for Glider, but it's still not making that kind of money. A big part of Glider is still the fun factor of working with the game and the users on our forums. TG Daily: How popular has Glider been? Do you have any estimates on how many times it has been downloaded? Mercury: It's been fairly popular, but not a huge, smashing success. In other words, I've never had to get more bandwidth or upgrade my small server. Without looking at the logs, and I don't want to reveal hard numbers, I'd swag it's been downloaded for evaluation around 3000 to 5000 times since the hard launch in late July 2005.

• While I love working with hardware for hardware's sake, there comes a point when the rubber meets the road and you have to use technology for something other than benchmarking to truly appreciate it. Don has done a great job here of digging into the nuts and bolts of what makes the Xeno Pro tick. But when I found out he'd be writing this piece, I was immediately curious about how the card would affect performance in a real-world app that, at one point, I was actually fairly hardcore into: World of Warcraft. I personally blame/thank James Yu, formerly of GameSpot, for introducing me to this one while it was still in beta. Healing In WoW The 12 million players involved in WoW probably know what I’m talking about here, but for the Tom’s Hardware readers who’ve never touched World of Warcraft before, the game is divided into the content experienced as you level up and the content you experience once you’ve hit the level cap. Some people level multiple characters and enjoy the questing, five/ten-person grouping, PvPing, etc. For me, WoW was all about end-game raiding. Now, as you’re leveling/grouping/questing, the game is fairly relaxed and everything gets done on your schedule. But in end-game, the encounters get more difficult, the atmosphere gets tenser, and most important, the loot gets better. Should you get to this point, the game becomes more competitive. Screw-ups are less tolerated by peers, and your latency does matter. I play a paladin healer on a reasonably-quick computer attached to a fast cable connection. Even still, in end-game content, fractions of a second make the difference between your tank living and getting smashed by some ridiculous combination of abilities. In order to perform as well as possible, healers have to be aware of their latency and start casts with that number in mind (even before the previous cast has registered as having landed). Damage casters have to do the same to maximize DPS. In the screenshot below, you can see my latency plugged in to an integrated Gigabit controller. Yes, I know you have to click three times to get to the full-size version. Feel free to make fun of my horrible UI if it helps ease the pain of that third click. The second shot shows my cast bar with a little red sliver at the end. If you start a cast right when the bar hits the sliver, you’ll start your cast immediately when Blizzard’s server registers the result of your last cast. If you instead wait that fraction of a second for your game client to show the cast completed, you’ll have little blips of downtime in between heals—the recipe for an eventual untimely tank death. If the Xeno Pro were able to cut down in-game latency and make that sliver as small as possible, there’d be greater positive correlation between when I see in-game and what Blizzard’s server registers—in other words, less compensation on my end for the disconnect between my computer and Blizzard’s. This would be a great thing for competitive raiders and easily make the card worth its premium. Now, when I’m playing the game, I’m not doing it with multiple torrents in the background and I’m not running a virus scan. It’s WoW on my desktop system with Ventrillo running in the background. When my wife and I were playing together, that’d be the extent of the network traffic. If your play style is different, your results will vary. And if you do like playing the game with all sorts of other downloads going on at the same time, hope that we don't raid together, because nothing annoys 24 other people than a wipe caused by the 25th lagging out. So, I loaded up Vent, loaded up the game, and headed out to Icecrown to do some healing tests. While latencies naturally varied during the course of testing, I generally saw pings between 20ms and 90ms, averaging just over 60ms. I didn’t see any improvement with the Xeno Pro installed, and the healing strategy I would use in a raid environment remained unchanged. With near-certainty, putting an extra $130 into your graphics subsystem is going to make more of an impact on gaming if your connectivity setup is similar to mine.