I’ve been seeing a lot of screeching about addons and how they should be banned lately, often from people who don’t indulge in level 15+ mythic keystone or raids above Normal mode, if even that. Many of these posters are low level troll toons.
While not using addons is valid way to play, it’s important to recognize that not everyone has the same needs in game or the same experiences, so someone without mid or high end experience may not be in a position to demand changes that affect mid or high end players like what we’ve seen plaguing the forums.
From what I can tell anti-addon activists are a combination of people who just aren’t willing to install addons and superfans of certain streamers who have chosen addons ad the outrage du jour. Maybe they don’t install addons because couldn’t be bothered. Maybe they have the technical skills of a potato, maybe they play on a potato that can barely handle wow itself let alone addons. Maybe their moms won’t let them download things on the family computer. Nobody except the postet knows for sure.
What we know is that rather than just choosing not to use addons, and letting others have the freedom to use addons, anti-addon activists believe because they don’t want to or cannot use addons that no one should be able to use addons either. I don’t understand this need to force the anti-addon agenda on everyone else, it seems like big demanding to speak to the manager energy to me.
As someone who is studying software engineering, I believe that when people sit down to code something they are working at solving a problem of some sort.
Here are a non-exhaustive list of problems and how addons have solved them:
Problem: People spam political trolling in public chat channels.
Solution: An addon that swapped out the names of poloticians with funny and memey nicknames to at least make the trolling actually funny.
Problem: Prior to communities, an established RP networking channel in game was being hijacked by trolls who were posting slurs, telling people to end their lives, and banning people who asked them to stop or didn’t respond to them when spoken to (punishment for using ignore).
Solution: An addon was developed to remove the trolls upon entry to the channel and share control with all the regular members to yeet any troll not on the list. Was never released to the public for obvious reasons.
Problem: Too much spam in trade. Blizzard can reactively block things but spam is ever-evolving and the spammers would find a workaround.
Solution: An addon lets the user enter words onto a no show list and then the addon silently supresses these posts.
Problem: There’s too much spell effect clutter on the ground, it’s hard to tell when to get out of the bad.
Problem: Player had a visual impairment, perceptual processing impairment, or attention impairment that causes them to stand in the bad without realizing it for an extended period of time because they can’t see it or don’t realize it due to circumstances beyond their control.
Solution: An addon that plays an audio cue to warn people that they’re standing in bad.
Problem: A raid fight that requires quick accurate communication between multiple people exists.
Problem: Not everyone is comfortable speaking on voice, especially with pugs.
Problem: Some people don’t have a mic or can’t speak because they don’t want to wake their early sleeping spouse, child, or infant.
Problem: Language barrier exists.
Solution: An addon that makes it possible to wordlessly comminicate. Addon has localization so everyone can understand it.
Problem: Deaf player or player with an auditory processing issue can’t hear audio cues from bosses, either because they can’t hear or all the noise in combat becomes a jumble of just noise.
Solution: An addon that represents audio cues with visual cues.
Problem: ADHD player whose Adderall has worn off because it’s evening now misses a combat cue because they hyperfocused on some other part of the fight. Maybe an ADHD tank misses a taunt and the other tank is feeling like they have to wear the brown pants because their cooldowns have cooldowns.
Solution: An addon that reminds people the timing of a critical things. Things like a taunt in a taunt swap so if they zone out or miss a cue they can recover and their disabilities don’t cause a wipe.
Problem: The guild cap is 1000 characters and a very large popular guild has had to make several guilds to hold all the members and alts. This group would still like guild chat.
Solution: An addon that uses channels to bridge guild chat of several consenting guilds.
Problem: Too much spam in LFM.
Solution: Author of a popular world quest add-on includes a spam filter that blocks out most spam in LFG.
Problem: The filtering on LFG is really bad.
Solution: An addon author makes a better filtering system so you can choose to only see groups who have, say, an open DPS slot.
Problem: Someone is dealing with ongoing harassment, which Blizzard is notoriously bad at handling. Ignore doesn’t transfer across characters.
Problem: Harasser has his friends suddenly whisperers to the Target too and they need to be ignored. Oops, there goes 70% of the target’s ignore list. There’s a cap of 50 toons on ignore list.
Problem: The blocking of all toons in an account had bugs yet again for the 15th time. Ongoing harasser is whispering from alts again so the target needs to block all the harasser’s alts. Oops ignore list is full.
Problem: Harasser is managing to get off ignored lists due to a glitch I’m not going to detail for obvious reasons. Harasser has to be manually ignored again.
Solution: An addon that extends ignore, copies it across characters, and even reignores people who are able to glitch their way off of ignore upon the target’s next log in.
Problem: Player can’t read small text and/or prefers a serif font to a sans serif font. Maybe they need a more dyslexia friendly font.
Solution: An addon that lets you customize how text appears, including size and face.
Problem: A roleplayer is looking for other roleplayers. A roleplayer is looking for someone who would be a good person to play with long term. Etc.
Solution: Addon that lets people have profiles where people can enter information and be found by like-minded individuals.
Problem: The raid is doing prog and it’s a long run. People keep releasing and adding time between pulls.
Solution: Someone codes words that say “don’t release” and float around the screen upon death to remind people.
As you can see, addons have a variety of uses and this list isn’t exhaustive. Addons improve quality of life, increase customization, save time, improve communication, and even help players with disabilities be able to play on an even playing field.
Some may argue that they give an unfair advantage. In order for this to be true it would need to be unavailable to some people, but a majority of these tools are available to everyone.
This assumes that all players are on an even footing to begin with. This is not true.
In some cases, addons are the great equalizer for people with disabilities.
I’ve seen a number of arguments brought up against addons wherein the tool is not the problem but that people being tools are a problem.
There are often other simple solutions that can solve those problems instead of taking away helpful tools from everyone and basically excluding people with various conditions beyond their control like visual or hearing impairment or processing disorders, people with ADHD, autism, etc. from being able to play. People with disabilities shouldn’t be excluded when reasonable accommodations can be made just because other people are acting like jerks.
Instead of wanting to take choices away from everyone, these simple alternative solutions are more than sufficient.
Problem: I don’t want to use addons therefore no one should. Ban them.
Solution: Then don’t use addons.
Problem: I keep getting declined from M+ groups. Ban Raider IO!
Solution: Make your own group.
Problem: I get shamed or kicked for bad DPS, ban meters.
Solution: Stop pugging. Especially stop pugging with imbeciles that think the meters are everything. Make your own group or join a guild. Also maybe consider examining your rotation and such.
Problem: I got kicked from a pug raid for not having x addon, ban x addon.
Solution: Stop pugging with imbeciles. Make your own groups or join a guild.
Problem: People are toxic, it’s because of addons, ban addons.
Solution: Some people are toxic. They will be toxic with or without addons. Stop pugging with toxic people, put in the effort to make your own group or join a guild that doesn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense.
Problem: All the guilds require addons.
Solution: Make your own. If my socially awkward autistic self can make a successful guild, anyone can.
Lay out your values, your vision, your rules. Recruit like-minded people. Promote even tempered responsible players who are willing to officers. Work hard. I’d suggest starting by forming a guild mythic plus team with intent to raid and go from there.
You will have to work your way up and you might hit snags on the way but just keep swimming.
Problem: There aren’t enough people who don’t use addons to make a guild.
Discussion: Surely with as many fans as streamers are whipping up you can find ten people. If not, maybe your movement is not as popular as you think it is.
Problem: I can’t join a guild. I’m sick and my health problems interfere sometimes. I can’t join a guild, my work schedule is sporadic.
Solution: Do it anyways.
Seriously, there are groups that say things like come as you are, when you can, and stay as long as you’re able. With flexible raid sizes for normal and heroic, a raid team can be from 10-30 people. If you can’t make it every raid day? Play a dps and come when you can. Lots of inclusive guilds are flexible with this kind of thing.
Problem: But I want to raid mythic and that has attendance requirements.
Answer: This is unfortunately a Blizzard design problem. You might be able to join up with people that want to do smaller mythic raids and push for Blizzard to make mythic raiding flexible. (Lack of roster flexibility is why my guild doesn’t raid mythic.)
Problem: Raiding is too hard now because Blizzard is making things with addons in mind.
Discussion: Ion allegedly said that they made things with addons in mind. But what does that even mean? That doesn’t really give much insight. Maybe that means the devs realize that people won’t die to crap on the ground.
At this point, if I didn’t have disabilities that addons help me compensate for, I’m pretty sure I could do everything but Lords of Dread in normal and heroic without addons.
Lords of Dread not having a built in voting extra action button was a design failure on the part of the devs. I think they expected people to use voice chat to do the thing, not realizing that not everyone can talk in voice and pugs don’t like using voice (for good reason). With my group of up to thirty people, talking at once is not viable.
Problem: New players quit because addons are a barrier to entry. Addons make the community toxic therefore addons drive away new players.
Discussion: Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
There are lots of reasons why new players don’t stick around, and we don’t get that many new players anyhow. The game is old and if all young people are like the young people I know at university, this game is considered an old game that people don’t want to try, or that people do and are scared to.
I believe the problems with new player retention have very little to do with things like addons. It has to do with community toxicity to some degree, but I think majority of why people are not continuing to play is due to a lack of connection to other players but also how the community treats people.
I can’t prescribe how to fix the bad attitudes of players in general. Maybe Blizzard is barking up the right tree by making behavior suggestions (first part of the contract) and reminding people of the EULA/TOS (second part) with the social contract. But that remains to be seen.
The raging and the gogogo attitude in leveling dungeons, normal and heroic dungeons ehete people learn is also a problem. Needing logs and progression to get into guilds are barriers for new players to break into the endgame as is the whole leveling process as a whole.
Blizzard implemented a mentorship program last expansion but it was not particularly successful. It basically shoves new players and mentor players into a chat channel. In the chat channel new players can ask questions and mentors can answer it but who was in that channel changes every day and people from several servers are shoved into the same channel. Not all mentors are helpful in the channels or give unbiased feedback.
With the mentor program, chances are you’ll never see someone who answers your question again. There is no forming a long-term bond with a mentor. There’s no guidance on how to find a place that fits you.
There needs to be a better way. If you think addons are causing people to leave, well, that ain’t it champ.
At the bare minimum, mentors and mentees should be linked up on a server by server basis if they want to keep the channel thing. This at least means people will see the same people. Mentors can help people find places that suit them, and if they’re especially generous even hook people up with bags and starter gold.
I would love to see mentors have the ability to create profiles and each new player have the ability to pick a mentor. Maybe with some sort of matching algorithm that sorts potential mentors in similarly to the user preferences.
Something similar to how the raider.io recruiting thing is set up but better.
Basically people would be able to select multiple criteria to filter mentors by, not only times available and progression but also other things about them and their preferences. This way matches don’t only focus on gameplay but values and interests too.
Improving the guild search function could also serve to connect people with proper homes in very much the same way. Different guilds have different cultures. For example, some guilds are full of rage and use gamer words. Other guilds have strict no rage policies and inclusive atmospheres. Some guilds have super serious communities, young membership, others have older players, or joke around, or even make dad jokes or jokes about anatomy.
In fact, having a branch of the mentorship program where if x number of members of a single guild become mentors there guild can choose to becomes flagged as a guild that does mentorship and accepts new players and new players who reasonably match 75% of at least three of the mentor profiles of members of that guild can outright join it and get mentorship from that whole group.
Giving both mentor and mentee RAF style perks like the XP thing (I think they got rid of that) and teleports when grouped together, and whatnot would also help get new players into the endgame faster, as would letting new players enter chromie time to do dungeons other than bfa so long as they are grouped with at least one mentor.
By connecting people to those that could actually become friends and community I think we’ll have better retention. But that’s just me, I’ve only run successful communities online and offline for the past two decades, what do I know?
Some people like to talk about banning weakauras in particular, stating that the addon is too powerful.
They are mad at having to download the addon for the sake of being able to do the Among Us mechanic on Lords of Dread without having to get into voice chat in a pug.
The voting weak aura basically impliments something the devs should have if they weren’t so out of touch.
In reality, if Blizzard banned weak auras specifically by refusing to let an addon with its ID call or whatever, addon developers would simply sit down and integrate the parts of the WA base code that their auras use into the lua code of the auras and create hundreds of new individual addons that people would have to manually download. If they’re smart they’ll code it in a way where your leader can check to see if you’re using it.
A post WA world is one where when you pug you will have to download many addons and exit and restart your client each time. This is much less convenient then just clicking a link in chat and pressing import.
This doesn’t sound ideal at all.
There is an argument that if Blizzard makes their UI better and accessibility features better that addons can be banned and no one will get hurt.
- Blizzard is known for doing the corrupt a wish maneuver with plsyer suggestiond and there’s no guarantee that if they do integrate an addon it will be done to the level of robustness that addons provide.
Example: The default raid frames don’t even hold a candle to things like vuhdoo or grid2 or any other raid frames/healing oriented addon. I’m sorry, but no. This is why so many healers don’t use the default raid frames. Some do, and that’s fine, but many more like the control offered by addons.
Personally, I do not trust Blizzard to do a good job given their track record.
- Blizzard doesn’t do a good job of accessibility. A multi-million dollar company that can’t manage after almost eighteen years to make a font size larger than 18 available and with a ui scale the chat entry window doesn’t scale leaving a tiny unreadable text entry box. Worse, their ui won’t even let us change fonts. Blizzard is not doing a great job of making an accessable UI, at all.
The chance that they will manage to get the ui customization and combat addons integrated to the level that it will suit the needs of every blind person, deaf person, autistic person, ocd person, adhd person, impaired executive function person, photophobic person, person who a perceptual processing disorder, auditory processing disorder, traumatic brain injury, anything I missed, or physical issue affecting gameplay is extremely low.
We know what we each need as individuals. Let us take care of ourselves
It would be neat if they reached out to people with challenges and actually learn what we are doing and what helps us but it’s much better for players with accessibility issues to have the flexibility to build a custom ui. But that would take effort. Blizzard doesn’t even listen to their beta testers, what makes you think they will listen to players with disabilities?
- The ability to code an addon if one doesn’t exist to help with an accessibility problem is also important. It could take Blizzard months or even years to fill a gap in an unmet need where a hobby programmer might be able to do so in a week.
In general, addon authors can be more responsive and faster than Blizzard. They can make a fix asap where it might take Blizzard weeks or months or even years…
Again, look at the chat font issue. It’s been like 18 years with a set font face and max 18 point font. They even recoded the way the text works to fit with unicode at the end of Legion/start of BFA where they could have made that change but didn’t.
- There’s no guarantee that Blizzard would actually fix the telegraphing problems or anything else previously solved by addons.
What would actually happen if Blizzard banned addons?
Some people would find the new UI usable. Others won’t and will quit. Probably loudly. Disabled people who needed accessibility tools will quit, too, because their needs were cast aside for streamers and their spammy fans. Some disabled people might call up their advocate (lawyer) and file a suit against Blizzard.
Blizzard may or may not make fights easier. They may or may not fix telegraphing. Chances are they will not do any of it adequately because corrupt a wish.
Without wordless communication via addons, pugging will be less common and/or pugs will demand voice chat and possibly that everyone speak.
Everyone will have to join Discord every time and actually communicate.
Players with no mics, or who can’t or won’t talk for whatever reason will also be excluded from gameplay and wind up leaving.
People dealing with language barriers will probably have an even harder time if they continue playing at all.
RPers will be angry at losing the profiles they worked so hard on. They’ll have to find other ways to make connections. Hopefully they have some developers who are willing to make some web based things to help compensate, which will cost money for hosting that will likely be pushed on players. Or RPers will just leave. RPers are the customers who often make their own fun during droughts.
This could cause a mass exodus from a whole lot of people in a game that is already dying.
In closing, banning addons for everyone because a small minority doesn’t like them is really akin to being that person at the HoA meeting trying to control what flags your neighbors fly or signs they display because you find them degenerate. Just because some people don’t like addons doesn’t mean they aren’t beneficial to others. Addons are most certainly aren’t the cause of toxicity, people are just toxic.
The problem isn’t the tools, it’s people being tools.
Banning addons takes away choices and freedom from other players.
Banning addons harms players with disabilities and may make it so they cannot play the game like they could before. This is especially sucky for players who have been playing since the beginning and have invested a lot of time and money in the game and haven’t done anything wrong to deserve to be punished but will lose access to the game because of a ban on addons taking away their accessibility tools. This is especially unjust since many of these people didn’t choose to have what impairs them and is often beyond their control.
People who have disabilities and play the game should be able to continue to do so at the same level they did before.
Blizzard is especially bad at accessibility and will likely not fulfill the needs of everyone if they try to improve accessibility.
Hobby developers can quickly and responsively make quality of life changes and make accessibility software that may take Blizzard weeks, months, or years, to fix if they do at all.
There’s no guarantee that if Blizzard does integrate ui modifications that users use that they will be as good, as flexible, or even integrated right.
Blizzard should absolutely try to improve the base UI and integrate popular addons and features.
However, there should always be a way for players to choose if they want addons or not.
After all, user creation is where innovation happens.
Finally, different people have different needs. Just because one person, or one streamer, doesn’t like addons doesn’t mean the same thing is universal.
PS: I write too much.
