Addon Fun: TradeForwarder

I haven’t done one of these in a while. With so little happening in the game until September 25th, now seems as good a time as any to talk about another cool little addon.

One of the design goals for Mists of Pandaria is to get people away from major cities and back out into the world. Profession trainers are scattered around the continent, world bosses are back, the daily cap is gone and there are tons of new ones for us to do in addition to Pet Battles, farms, etc. However, the problem with being out in the world is that nagging feeling that you’re missing an Ulduar or Onyxia run that you’ve been waiting for. Since the Raid Finder doesn’t support old content (and no one uses the raid browser window), the only way to quickly connect with other players for these types of runs is through Trade chat which, in turn, leads to a lot of sitting around in Orgrimmar or Stormwind.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get Trade chat anywhere? Well, now you can!

What TradeForwarder does is simply, as it states, forward Trade chat from people who are in a major city to people who are not through the use of a hidden chat channel only accessible with the addon. It even works if you’re in the middle of a dungeon, raid or battleground. As long as someone with TFW installed is in a major city, it will forward to you. Smaller servers may not always have someone that fits those criteria, but most mid-high population servers should have at least one at any point.

Now, the first thing to come to mind for most people is the question of why anyone would want to have their chat box filled with “Anal”, “did sum1 say Thunderfury” or “at the gay bar” spam all the time in addition to the typical trolling and political/religious bashing that regularly goes on in Trade. Well, I suppose that the average sane person wouldn’t, which is why TFW can easily be toggled on or off with a simple “/tfw” command or, if you use a broker addon like Fubar, TitanPanel or Bazooka, just by clicking on the icon.

I generally prefer to be out in the world doing stuff instead of sitting in Dalaran, but every time I go out to work on my Archaeology or camp a rare spawn like Aeonaxx, I always end up thinking “Hey, I wonder if anyone is running Naxx right now” and hearthing back to Dalaran after 10 minutes. By having TradeForwarder enabled, I finally feel free to, you know . . . play the game.

Download TradeForwarder here:

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/tradeforwarder