Belghast has a blog post up about the creation of a Gaming Tools menu on his blog. The post shows some examples of this organisation and the list of websites that count as tools in this case. The games used as examples may be less familiar to me but the styles of sites included are the staples of the MMORPG games: news sites, forums, guides and wikis.
I often link to or mention such sites in my gaming posts, but I’ve not listed them anywhere for posterity. Rather than creating a new navigation for the site, I’ve opted to include them in this post for future me to refer back to.
World of Warcraft
The game I’ve been playing the most heavily these last few months used to have quite a variety of web tools, but things have consolidated rather heavily over the years on just a few sites (some of which I never use as I’m no hardcore raider).
WoWHead – no explanation needed for WoW players, but this is the most comprehensive database site in the modern era. Also note their WoWHead Classic sub-site.
I’ve been levelling Blacksmithing in Classic and have been referring both to the profession guides buried within WoWHead and looking at the excellent gathering ‘loop’ maps over at WoW Professions.
We used to pay a lot of attention to WoW gaming news, not so much thesedays as time is short, but we occasionally listen to the Blizzard Watch podcast.
Everquest 2
I rely heavily on wiki sites when playing Everquest 2 as there is so much I’ve never done before. The main wiki site that I frequently refer to is eq2.fandom.com and references to this site dominates my bookmarks and browser history. The EQ2 Zam website also still has some useful guides: I still refer to their gathering pages for example.
For EQ2 specific news, I usually check out the official EQ2 news webpage (via Twitter post links), and to the excellent Everquest show on YouTube.
Tool-wise, I use very few add-ons but I have been using EQ2Map for years now, available via the EQ2Interface website.
Dungeons & Dragons Online
The Dungeons & Dragons Online wiki website has a host of resources, including guides to specific quests. It’s my most frequently used DDO resource according to my browser history.
I’ve tended to use bookmarked official forum threads as a resource for DDO more than for other games, perhaps because the community in this game is particularly good at forensic analysis of the game’s complex rules.
The game is blessed with some strong community resources, like DDO Central’s coverage of DDO related blog posts. In such a complex game, having player-written guides can be a boon, such as this gearing by level guide I recently referred to over at CitiplaysDDO.
I also sometimes use the DDOCompendium site as a tool for ability and spell lookup.
Dungeons & Dragons (table-top)
To round out this work in progress listing, I’ll also add the Dungeons & Dragons table-top resources as well.
There are several quality wiki sites for rules referencing while playing. These days it is so easy to find the rules through a variety of means without stopping play to thumb through rulebooks. One officially endorsed site is the D&D Beyond site, Wizards of the Coast’s own digital offering. It has free to access details for spells and other rules. The D&D Beyond forums are also a useful resource when trying to find clarifications or rulings on specific aspects of gameplay.
The are a few wiki sites that I’ve used beyond Beyond, although such wiki sites need to be used with a slight note of caution. In the table-top genre there are a lot of homebrew (i.e. not playtested) content that makes it onto the wiki, and the designation of content as unofficial isn’t always obvious. That said DandDwiki has proved to be a comprehensive resource, especially for my 3.5 Eberron campaign. I’ve also used the ArkalSeif D&D Tools site for certain database lookups, notably for my Eberron campaigns. There’s also the Roll20 Compendium, another wiki site with extensive coverage of 5E rules – I do not use the Roll20 virtual tabletop software but the wiki site is free to access for all.
The other aspect of table-top that can really benefit from some Google-fu is world/setting detail lookup. For Eberron I use two primary resources. Firstly, the Eberron Fandom wiki has a great set of setting-specific resources. Secondly, the Eberron Unlimited wiki site has a trove of more detailed and niche information. It’s also possible to research a lot related to table-top gaming on various fora to learn from the experiences of others. Time permitting I always look up how other referees have run a given adventure (when using published modules), as it can be great to get extra details, warnings on balance issues or even ideas for handouts ahead of running the adventure.
GamingSF 
EQ2.eqtraders.com is far and away the best for everything to do with crafting. Their gathering tables, like all the other info, is up to date for Luclin whereas the Zam one is a couple of expansions behind, presumably because Zam stopped covering EQ2 a few years back. All the information they have is archive material.
I did a post a couple of years back on resourcs for EQ2 but sadly some of the best sites I mentioned have stopped updating. The one I found absolutely invaluable for making sense of progression was EQ2library.com. They stopped a couple of expansions back, which is very frustrating. About a year ago there was a post about a new version of the site but since then, silence.
I’ve found information about Blood of Luclin extremely difficult to find. There seem to be more people actually playing the game than there were two or three years ago but a lot fewer willing to write about it.
Bah! Cut and paste error in the first word! Obviously that should be EQ2traders.com.
Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
Thanks for the mention!