World of Warcraft: Cataclysm MMO Gaming Mouse SteelSeries Review and Tips

I recently acquired a WoW: Cataclysm Mouse, the 14 button monster of a human interface device. My impressions of it have been hugely positive for World of Warcraft, and it's a must have for end-game type playing (which requires the use of upwards of 30 abilities to play effectively).


Not Booting Up

I had an initial issue with the mouse out of the box, where Windows 7 was not recognizing the mouse on boot (although a subsequent cycle of the USB would fix this issue). This was due to the fact that the mouse was operating on an older firmware. There is no option later within the driver settings to install new firmware. When you install the drivers you have to make sure that the mouse is plugged in at that point, otherwise it won't detect and update the firmware. Once I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers and the firmware was updated, the mouse was recognised on bootup without any issues after that.

There are 10 profiles to store on the mouse, but I think it's best to use the WoW in-game native configuration.

Best Method Of Mousebinding

There are a lot of options for mousebinding with the mouse. Personally, I do not recommend using SteelSeries' driver software to do your mousebindings. Working within the WoW interface is much faster for setting up and testing bindings.

5 Reasons Why Casuals Should Return To World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

World of Warcraft is a mess. Blizzard themselves admitted that 70% of players never even get past level 10. How many people quit the game upon reaching level 40 quit because they didn't have 100g for the mount riding skill? And how about raiding? How can sane people get anything done at maximum level without spending 6 straight hours in some raid dungeon hoping that a piece of loot drops from a boss that you don't have to fight 4 other people in the same class for? It's easy to get burned out from World of Warcraft because it can seem to require a huge commitment of time an energy to make any progress within the game.

It's not so bad anymore. Blizzard have listened to the player feedback and have improved everything for the better, and the game is now much more casual player friendly. With the coming release of Cataclysm in December 7th 2010, there has never been a better time for the casual player to be drawn back into the game, and here are the 5 reasons why:

Make World of Warcraft Load Faster Using Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives are in their infancy in terms of mainstream adoption in the PC market. Barring the cheap SSDs found in notebooks, finding an SSD that offers good performance can be very expensive. The price to storage ratio is of an SSD very poor when compared with traditional hard drives. For example, a 128gb SSD will cost around £213.99 whilst a 7200rpm 250gb HDD will cost around £28.71.

With huge cost and tiny storage spaces, SSDs are not really meant to be used for replacing your 500gb of storage of movies or even for your games collection. However, in a game like World of Warcraft, SSDs make a huge difference in terms of speed increase in loading times. Any loading speed boost has a multiplicative effect on the entire game experience. This is because logging into a character, taking a ship between continents, dying in a dungeon and entering an instance or a battleground will take a long time if you are running from a slow hard drive, whilst a SSD will make your loading speed up to 60% faster.

Auto Sync And Backup World of Warcraft Interface Settings To Cloud Storage For Free

This particular article will focus on making World of Warcraft interface settings sync across multiple computers. This guide is also related to another one of my articles called How To: Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free. You can look there to see how to auto sync savegame and folder for other games.


World of Warcraft Interface Folders Introduction
All of your World of Warcraft interface settings are stored in a number of places:

X:\[World of Warcraft]\Interface\
This folder contains all of your downloaded AddOns.

X:\[World of Warcraft]\WTF\[ACCOUNTNAME]\
This folder contains all of your other AddOn settings such as the position of chat windows, the settings on Recount, etc.

X:\[World of Warcraft]\WTF\
Within your WTF folder is a file called 'Config.wtf'. This file contains details specific to your computer such as resolution and detail. We will avoid syncing this folder and the 'Config.wtf' folder because it may cause problems with the display of your AddOns unless your target computer has the same aspect ratio.

You may not want to sync the 'Config.wtf' file to another computer unless it has identical performance and resolution.

The rest of the settings such as spells on action bar placement (unless using an AddOn bar like Bartender) and friends lists etc. are stored on Blizzard's own cloud and do not need to be backed up.

Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free

Or How To Integrate Steam Cloud Features Into Any Game

Updated 19th January 2011: changed name of Windows Live Sync Beta to Windows Live Mesh 2011 to reflect name change of the service. At present, the program, service and UI are identical to Live Sync Beta.

A World of Warcraft Interface folder being synced.

The Steam Cloud is a service that allows the synchronizing of savegames and settings from one computer to another. This means that one could play a Steam game on one computer, and then when logging into Steam on another computer their savegames and preferences would automagically be transferred. This is a feature on many Steam games such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Torchlight, Trine, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Plants vs Zombies etc. However, although Steam Cloud is not available for all games it is still possible to sync savegames over the cloud using a program called Windows Live Mesh 2011. This free utility offers 2gb of storage (soon to be upgraded to 5gb) as well as automatically cloud syncing and peer to peer syncing.

Windows Live Mesh 2011 is far superior for the purposes of PC gamers to other popular syncing cloud services such as Dropbox. This is because Dropbox only allows a single designated Dropbox folder to be automatically synchronized. If you wanted to have automatic backup and syncing of say, your Mass Effect save game, you would have to either 1) manually copy the files or 2) create a fiddly symbolic link. Windows Live Mesh 2011 allows you to specify individual folders. This makes it possible to be extremely flexible in exactly what you want to synchronize. Windows Live Mesh 2011 also gives the option of direct peer to peer transfer bypassing the cloud, which gives a very good performance boost to certain syncs between computers and networks. Anyone who has used Dropbox or older versions of Mesh will know that it takes a long time to sync large files only through the cloud, so the peer to peer option is welcome.


Guide To Syncing Any Savegames Using Windows Live Mesh 2011

Step 1) Download the latest version of Windows Live Mesh 2011 using this link: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Windows Live Sync Beta is only available as part of the Windows Live Essentials Beta package. Make sure you only install what you need to (make sure to install Live Sync).

Play Any Game In Borderless Windowed Fullscreen (aka Maximized Window)

World of Warcraft and StarCraft II fullscreen side by side, as God intended.

Update 20 March 2012: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game.

Games like StarCraft II and World of Warcraft provide the option to run their game in "Windowed Fullscreen" (aka Maximized Window). Also modern Valve Source games such as Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm and Half-Life 2 natively support this mode, calling it "Windowed (No Border)". This is basically a normal windowed game where the window has been stretched to fit the screen in such a way that it looks maximized (by hiding borders of the window and the title bar).

This has several advantages to running a game in traditional fullscreen mode:

1) Ability to alt-tab quickly at any moment, even during loading screens.
2) Does not disturb multi-monitor set ups during loading.
3) Generally more stable experience.