counterpoint: the best features in TurboHUD and other 3rd party addons are UX/UI improvements that only give an “unfair advantage” because they reconfigure what are otherwise dark design patterns disguised as “player agency.”
For example, would you rather do the math and squint at the lines on 100 yellow items, manually entering some of the DPS ones into a website calculator to see which is more DPS…
…or would you prefer an addon to do those things for you if you wanted them to? Perhaps an “overall roll quality = X%” score.
It’s insane to me that a calculator is even needed, and that people were surprised about how OP crit + vuln were because it isn’t clear how the “dps bucket equation” works. The solution? Show the DPS buckets and what your damage numbers are.
But I mean, can you even trust that when it says I have 105% of the challenges completed? Third party software have revealed official bugs before…
Would you prefer an in game damage meter…
…or somehow parse damage by eyeballing it and accept the illegible combat text with VULNERABLE text everywhere that can’t be removed?
Would you like the ability to move the interface around so that buffs / frames / cooldowns are in the middle of the screen so you’re not looking all over the place (ridiculous UI options for widescreen, for example).
In theory it is honorable to try to level the playing field with the UI, so that there is 0 metagame of “how good your addons are = inseparable from how well you perform” (see wow arenas for how ridiculous it can be)… but in practice the information as it is shown on the screen is not ideal.
In reality, they’ll make tweaks as they realize one of the major pieces of friction to enjoying D4 is the UX/UI, and how it greatly overshadows the immersion.
D3 had botting and “map reveal” as an obviously untouched exploit background, but the stigma of addons is silly: WoW does it, and does it the best out of any game. But blaming these QOL enhancements that only automate information is misplaced, especially when people in D3 ladders apparently played 24 hours a day for entire seasons and didn’t get banned.
Want to level the playing field and get player support about 3rd party usage bans? Make the interface not require them as much via better customization options and more information.
It’s ironic, because players could confirm obvious bugs with some of the addons… I have no idea what tools are actually used on Blizzard’s end, but some of the effect bugs would be extremely obvious if displayed differently.