Programs for Seeing if your Friends/Guild members are online

[kidstechno]

Back during the EQ days, they had EQIM, which was where you could log in and see who was on before even starting up the game. Is there something similar out there for WoW?

[Kaelten]

no because that data is not available until your character actually loads.

[Beladona]

would require blizzard to set up some form of active monitoring similar to their Server Status page, but for players. Would be a large endeavor, especially considering the amount of players there are playing WoW. Personally I would rather them focus on making the servers completely network friendly and stable before adding more queries for the servers...

Then again, the chat channels are IRC based, so perhaps we would see them open their irc servers up to special Blizzard approved client programs before anything else.

[greycap]

it would be possible, but would require an additional application running, checking a certain file in your WoW directory, and updating a central site. this is against the ToS, however.

realistically, it would only be able to monitor those running the add-on. it would probably be able to monitor those who were in the online player's friends/guild without too much difficulty and redundancy.

[Kaelten]

true, but again as you said its against the TOS, the best solution would be for blizzard to setup an irc client or a im program of their own. I thought this would be neat as well. But thats all on their end.