Join Game Director Ion Hazzikostas as he recaps and explains the planned changes to addon capabilities, and the accompanying broader changes to combat and encounters.
fire the ion cannon at those star destroyers
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We are committed to continuing to work with addon developers and with the community at large to provide support for robust customization within this new framework.
So what your saying is we don’t care about your UI customization.
Thanks i will not be picking up midnight, i appreciate you saving me money. i’ll spend it on a game that deserves my money.
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Addons wouldn’t have needed to exist if information was presented clearly by the game.
But it wasn’t, so players adapted and made their own solutions.
Now, Blizzard shuts that all down and has to play twenty years of catch-up with addon/UI functionality, all at once, within one expansion lol.
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Boooooooo
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The addon restrictions as currently implemented are breaking the stated goal of allowing UI customization. Core UI elements and addons that allow us to customize unitframes are most impacted; man I don’t even LIKE ElvUI but I know it’s one of the most popular addons in the game, and it dies because of this.
This entire post boils down to corporate speak looking to shift blame from “bad development execution of a good development idea” to “players are the problem”.
This is freaking Shadowlands covenants all over again.
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this always happens every 2 expansions they revert back to their weirdo stances after seemingly being pro everything
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seemingly being the key word.
I got a good chuckle out of his hedging in the reddit post too. Quite comical.
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Addons should no longer offer a competitive advantage in WoW combat. They should remain as robust tools for aesthetic customization and personalized presentation of information, but they should not be able to make a player more likely to succeed in combat against an encounter or another player.
I think this represents a fundamentally contradictory philosophy.
An aesthetic customization can and often is a competitive advantage. If I make something look easier on the eyes, or larger, or have a more distinct sound, I am creating an advantage, even relative to someone who has not. An addon that improves accessibility is making a player more likely to succeed in combat, full stop.
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I hope that Maelstrom Weapon for Enhacement Shaman is counted along that “Secondary Class Resoruce” such as Holy Power and Runes for Death Knights. Maelstrom Weapon is such an intregral part of Enhancement Shaman but doesn’t not currently on Live have its own display after 5 (as a spell alert) and doesn’t have its own widget frame such as Holy Power or Runes or Arcane Charges etc.
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There are a number of problems with this and the least of them is the fact that you lied to people right off the bat with your initial statements pre-midnight reveal and your actions and statements post-midnight reveal.
If I could trust you or anyone on that team then I would probably be okay with a lot of this. But the reality is you have given me no reason to trust you. You’ve in fact done the opposite. You have proven time and time again that you are incapable of the most basic things.
- The replacements for many of these things do not exist on the beta. The state sponsored DPS meter we will be required to use literally does not work without console commands on beta. the nameplates require an ADDON in order to fix the problems they have. The boss mods are non functional and half the time their timers are wrong and that’s just on dungeons on normal mode. God almighty what the raid ones will look like on MYTHIC.
- “We don’t want to hand wave people or shoulder shrug their concerns” and yet that is exactly what has happened in this entire process and you have done absolutely nothing to stop it or slow it down.
- “we take none of this lightly” except you’ve done it in the worst way possible and left authors and creators in the dark for 90% of it until recently when you started having epiphanies that there was a bit of a problem with these ambitions: you are not capable of doing it in this short time frame and you need their help. Many of them took the stance of “we didn’t make this mess so we’re not helping you clean it up” and you are now in panic mode trying to fix it.
- You say you remain committed to working with addon devs and authors to help customization yet at the same time you have repeatedly shot down what people have said they desire customization for to the point that ON THE BETA RIGHT NOW WE HAVE TO DOWNLOAD AN ADDON TO FIX THE NAMEPLATE DISASTER
- You say you’re looking to even the playing field and i need you to understand that the difference between an addon user and a non addon user is no where near the difference between someone skilled enough for mythic raiding/high end keys and someone not. Getting rid of addons and WAs and the OPTION to have them is just going to make that skill gap worse and make the barrier to entry even larger as people will be vetted more heavily for group content and the gatekeeping will just get worse. You are NEVER going to win this battle and even this playing field and your refusal to accept that is going to cost you immeasurable resources and time and energy.
- I continue to say, and have seen nothing to tell me differently, you do not have the resources to manage all of this long term. You are playing 21 years of catchup in 3 months to implement things and THEN you are going to be required to maintain hotfixes and solutions to problems as they come up. Addon authors and devs have been fixing bugs and issues within hours or a day at the most. You take literal weeks if not months to fix problems. What happens when my in-game boss mods break or have a major bug with them? Am I just not raiding until you decide to fix it? How about when the nameplates feature has a bug - do we just not participate in content again until you fix it?
- “We are committed to working with addon authors to help ease the problems of their addons” well that’s news to many of them who you have left in the dark and ignored for a large part of this. You expect them to spend hours on hours updating and rewriting their code to be exactly the way you want it and to do it for free to bend the knee to these changes that, by your admission, are changing daily because you STILL do not fully know what you want? The plot is completely lost.
- “Addons should only have cosmetic changes and not competitive advantages” well apparently we have very different ideas of what this means because you somehow went from “we’re only breaking combat addons” to “we have made API changes so robust and so apocalyptic that 90% of current addons and weak auras literally cannot function anymore because in order to stop the errors from happening literally everything in the addon has to be disabled” - burning the house down to remodel 2 rooms is certainly a choice you made and it is not one that very many people support you for.
- This entire post reads like “You will bend the knee to our demands and you will like it or you can quit” which is hilarious because the stance used to be “we want player feedback from people to help guide our hand” now it seems the stance is “we’re doing it our way. We know best. Bend the knee or be cleaved” - if you want player support on this to increase and the bad optics and bad PR to stop, a good starting point for that is to start proving and showing that you are listening to concerns which has failed to happen the entirety of alpha. We are now in beta. Release is in February with pre-patch January and the holiday season in between. Tick tock goes the clock.
I’ve been told by people to be optimistic and I have tried very hard to look at this and find positivity but I really can’t. You have had 21 years to get these things under control. You failed in every way. And I am supposed to believe that THIS TIME FOR SURE PINKY SWEAR you’re gonna do it and do it right. Except this time if you get it wrong, instead of me having to ignore something that’s broken, I will have to deal with a disaster of a UI and foundational issues impacting gameplay that are impossible to ignore. All because you woke up one day and decided to burn down the house in order to remodel a few rooms for a group of players that have never and will never bother staying in this house because they do not care.
You are obliterating player choice and customization to appease people that do not even interact with the game. Look at the profiles of the people that are super positive on all of these changes. These people are barely doing world quests and delves. Addons and WAs and the “gap” there does not impact them and yet they are being allowed to dictate what my UI can look like. Why do I even pay a sub if I’m not allowed the most basic of decision making freedom?
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More like WoD at this point.
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tldr: you’ll be at the mercy of our terrible visual and nonexistent audio cues from now on.
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Addon Disarmament: Why Now?
In the end, we were faced with the decision of either signing up for a couple more years of designing our content around powerful addons in ways that make it impossible for us to serve our whole community, or moving forward now and finding solutions within this new paradigm. And so addon disarmament is coming with Midnight, and the team is fully committed to giving the community all the support required, tweaking the logic around what is restricted, and making new access points available to addon developers, in order to make this transition successful.
So…. You essentially didn’t want to take the time to stay true to your original statement of “we don’t want to just rip off the bandaid without replacements in place”? Is that what I’m getting out of this?
There’s an awful lot of writing/talking in this article that doesn’t really go anywhere.
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we have tried to take a surgical approach
I think you needed to try harder; unless you meant the 17th century surgical approach.
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This article uses a lot of words to say absolutely nothing new. Just vague assurances and some platitudes.
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“We are tired of the addon arms race we created by making encounters convoluted in higher difficulties, so we decided to remove the addons wholesale and then make nebulous statements about encounters in Midnight”
I may actually unsub. Nothing in this article is tangible or a positive for the player base. The “us vs them” statements are entirely out of touch and the “leveling of the playing field” they claim to be working towards will not happen.
”Numerous improvements to the base UI over the years have been inspired and informed by these community efforts”
you mean the base UI that didn’t appreciably change until shadowlands? That UI? The one that still has heavy limits or just flat does not do things players need it to? or are you really patting yourself on the back for adding in additional action bars way back in the day?
”We are committed to continuing to work with addon developers and with the community at large to provide support for robust customization within this new framework.”
No, no you aren’t.
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This is the core of Ion being a liar.
The game is only “designed around” the addons because Blizz can’t get over their obsession with metrics and curating the experience and etc.
The addons exist in response to how Blizz designs fights, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Designing the game “around addons” was always BLIZZ’S choice, no one else’s, and was never driven by a desire to make the game better, or to keep the game “challenging”… it was always and only a matter of their pride and need for control.
Only Blizz is to blame, from the start, every choice was theirs.
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No one is better than Ion at saying something that sounds good but means nothing. Think it’s part of the legal profession skill set of telling people what they want to hear while not actually saying anything binding.
But I guess it’s nice they’re letting him out of his cage now. Think he’s been there since the fruit bowl era when he put out the public memo talking about micro aggressions.
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They are explaining that they thought they had to do that, then their developers showed work that indicated that they could be ready for Midnight, and the developers had to make a choice of “Either we do it completely… or we don’t do it at all for yet another expansion and need to continue to develop the game with addons in mind.”
They explained this when they originally stated their change of mind and explained why, and this is them restating it again but offering more context to the decision making behind the scenes.
Haven’t read the article in full yet, I just hit up the big bullet points and quickly read through those. I will read the rest of it in greater detail later, but from what I have seen so far … none of this is particular unsurprising.
Of course. That’s the entire point in them wanting to try to put an official statement of “This is what we are doing, here’s why we are doing it, and this is a summary of all the stuff that we have said in numerous interviews for the past 4-5 years.” Depends a bit on when you start counting but… it isn’t supposed to be anything new but just in one single location.
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