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Originally Posted by kriscorrie
I love the irony of a development like this, Blizzard employ hundreds of qualified designers top dollar wages, and provide a 2-3 year development period and with all that resource available to them they come up with the DEFAULT UI .
Meanwhile, some guy / girl and a few friends come up with something of this complexity in their spare time with limited to no financial backing.
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To be fair to Blizzard, what they did with the default WoW was brilliant. It's simple and easy to understand. There are no complex widgets or elements that are just overwhelming to someone starting out the game. Sure, it lacks a lot of functionality that many players want, and that's fine-in fact, it was probably a design goal by their team. They knew that by exposing the interface to alteration through LUA, they would be getting a lot of the more complex and specialized tools done for them. In short, I think their whole UI strategy is downright brilliant. They get the same advantage that FPS games do when they allow people to build their own maps-it's free, player designed content!
As far as the amount of work that went into the Mazzle UI, there's no doubt that what he's done is absolutely impressive in scope and achievement. However, this was not just one person and a few friends. It's more like one person and a few of their friends for each of the UIs in this collection. I'm sure Mazzle'd be the first to tell you that a lot of credit goes to the original developers of all these add ins.