Did you get sent here by someone in-game? Or did you stumble upon us and want to know what all the excitement is about? Well here is your guide for just how to join the F2P community in-game! I wrote this after verbally explaining the instructions to several people I had met in-game who I wanted to bring into the community, and realized that a step-by-step guide for newcomers would be useful.
This guide is written specifically from the point of view of the burgeoning, guild-like free-to-play community on Aerie Peak, but these instructions can be followed to create such a community on any server, as long as everyone follows these steps.
Step 1: Join the /f2ptwink custom chat channel.
The command to join a custom chat channel is
/join <channelname> so in this case, type in
/join f2ptwink. If you are a free-to-play account, you won't be able to communicate yet on this channel, but do make a note of what channel number it assigns you. (For most people, this will be channel 5.) This channel number is how you will communicate on the channel later: if it's 5, you would type
/5 Hello.
Step 2: Preserve your current friend list.
The chat addons you will be installing will automatically update your friends list with the names of all the people in the f2ptwink channel, so that you can communicate with them. It will also remove people from your friends list who -aren't- in that channel, in order to keep your friends list from overflowing, and for that reason, any friends whose names you want to keep permanently on your friends list need to have some sort of Note set on them. Right click their names in your friends list, and Add Note. Doesn't matter anymore what you put, but I still put a "@" symbol because that's how the addon used to work.
Step 3: Log out, download and install the chat addons.
The heart and soul of our community effort is due to the coding efforts of Yasueh, who maintains his addons in -
this forum post-. Download all the addons in the first post of that thread, unzip them, and drop the resultant folders into your World of Warcraft Addons (World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns). All you have to do is put the folders in the AddOns folder, and restart your game. When you log in to your character, you should see a notification about the addons' version, as well as seeing a lot of activity in your friends list.
Step 4: Communicate with the community!
You can now check your friends list in your Social pane, or the Chat tab of the social pane, to see all the people in the f2ptwink channel. You will now be able to not only send all of them tells, but also communicate with them in a guildchat-like fashion through the /f2ptwink channel!
Notes:
1) This works equally well for f2p and p2p (pay to play) accounts, so if you have a p2p character on this server, you can still join the community. This will not interfere with any regular guild chat if you're in a guild. Myself, I made a death knight on this server so that I can help facilitate f2p players in grouping up for pvp premades and other groups. Help from p2p accounts is always appreciated!
2) You can change the color of the /f2ptwink channel to make it stand out from General, Trade, and LocalDefense. I changed mine to a color very close to guild chat. You can change the color by right-clicking on the General chat window and choosing Settings, then clicking on Global Channels and clicking on the colored box next to f2ptwink. Set the Color Picker to your preference.
3) The addon will make the change to ANY character you log in, as long as the addon is enabled, so be sure to preserve your friends list or disable the addons if you are logging into a character whose friends list you haven't preserved yet! At the character login screen, there is an AddOns button on the lower left, that you can use to disable the addons so you can log into a character and preserve your friends list.
4) None of this would be possible at all without the generosity and hard work of Yasueh who created these tools so that we could have a real community while still living under Blizzard's anti-spam measures for trial accounts. Please thank him for his efforts in whatever means seems appropriate to you! And also, check back to his thread regularly for updates to the addons!
5) Since you had to register on the TwinkInfo forums to download the addons, please consider becoming part of our community here on the forums as well! We discuss lots of topics regarding F2P accounts, not only in regards to PvP but in getting the MOST out of your trial account in all ways!
Thanks so much for lending me your ears, and I welcome each of you to our growing community!
Addendum: Where to find us on the Aerie Peak Server!
Due to popular request, I am adding a section here to let people know where on the server they can go to encounter other F2P players!
Cross-faction meetups for Arenas and other shenanigans tend to happen on the landing at Gurubashi Arena!
:Alliance: Often, Alliance can be found duelling in Goldshire in front of the Lion's Pride Inn (those who don't do so at Gurubashi, that is).
:Horde: (I will edit this to indicate where the Horde hang out and duel when they tell me!)
