Introduction

Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most successful massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) of all time. With over 4 million subscribers worldwide, the game continues to sell almost a year after its initial release.

New to Warcraft? Check out how to get started and some of the terminology, with Why Guilds Make World of Warcraft More Fun For Beginners .

It's a quality product to be sure, but even the best of games can benefit from some aftermarket modifications. World of Warcraft mods can do things as small as moving the loot window under your mouse, or as big as cataloging all the items and prices from the auction house. Some players look at mods as cheating or exploiting, but really they are just collecting data, displaying information, or moving the user-interface around a bit. And using them isn't against the rules.

Installing all of these mods is very easy. You just download the file, unzip it, and copy the folder into the Interface\AddOns folder in your World of Warcraft install directory.

On the character select screen after you log in, you'll see an Addons button in the lower left.

Clicking that will take you to the Addon list window where you can easily see all the addons you have installed. The list will tell you which ones are out of date, and let you enable or disable them.

The more addons you run, the more memory you will need to have allocated for them, so you can increase the memory setting here as well.

As patches come out for the game, the addons will start to go out of date. Most of the time, they will still work without being updated, but it is still a good idea to check the site where you got the addons after a patch to see if they have been updated. Obviously there will be some delay before addons are revised, but updates can usually be found a week or two after the major game patches.

Here is a list of some of the more useful modifications that can be found for World of Warcraft. I've left out all the class-specific mods - and there are many - just to focus on the ones that could benefit all players. If you're still reading this I'm going to assume that you are familiar with the game, so I'm not going to waste your time defining all the WoW terms used.