Add-Ons and Midnight

Community General Discussion
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I’ve heard… read some stuff about Midnight, watched videos talking about Add-Ons and want to voice my u requested, less than doesn’t matter, opinion.

Add-Ons have made life for top raiders and even some prog guilds very nice. Honestly, there might even exist guilds that only get ApTC because of Add-Ons. And, for transparency, I use DBM, Plater, Raiderio, and Details! While I have Astral Keys on my Curse Forge I don’t actually have it on any of my active toons as I’ve fallen out of enjoying M+. First and probably last season for me.

Now some of these are Base, if you want to be good at your chosen class(es) then Details! or some meter that gives information on spells cast, uptime, damage/healing, those kinds of things are minimum to learn the basics of your class, without it you have no way of determining if you are getting enough out of a spell to justify heavy use. The game gives no way of getting this information yourself.

DBM is Base. Unless you’re going to subject your guild to countless frustrating wipes to learn timing on mechanics yourself, or are a God gamer and identify all mechanics after seeing them once, then having base version of DBM to yell at you when your spaced out damaging the boss is required to accomplish the fight. Honestly, beyond whatever it does upon download I don’t know. I can’t remember messing with it or wanting to mess with it.

Now, everyone knows WeakAuras to the point of having heard about it from someone at some point. I phrase it like that because I’ve tried using it twice and it made my experience in game indescribably worse. It’s not for me, but I found other ways to keep track of important CD’s without it and that’s all I was trying to get out of it. I’ve heard it can help with your rotation, but imma be honest I couldn’t figure that out and Hekili gave me some of the worst rotation advice ever. But, both can be argued as required for high end play or learning a new class. I’m not going to say I’m a great DH, but I did Parse better in my Heroic Raid than I did on first kill of Normal Queen. So, I’ve gotten better without the help of WA or Hekili.

So, let’s consider everyone is capable of what I did, getting better without add-ons, all we “need” is DBM and Details! (Or some kind of detailed damage meter). And I’m left with a single thought, why can’t Blizz just add these features into their game. “It will take a while to develope.” No. Just buy the versions already used and hire the people who created it to keep it up to par. Or whatever, honestly they might not even need to legally compensate these software developers and they can at any time make them illegal to use altogether as they are technically outside software deciphering Blizzards code for us. Which in any other game is considered cheating. Let’s hope they don’t bully control of the software away, but it’s possible. So, just add the add-ons to the base game that you’re ok with being used and ban hammer the rest. Bring the game back to the game, especially since we don’t really “need” DBM (Nerub’Ar mechanics were honestly not that bad to learn) to have a challenging raid. Just make a raid where players have to actually understand what is on their screen. I don’t need my computer yelling at me when I see a swirly forming on the ground, I know it’s time to move. I’m actually taking DBM off my main this week for raid night because it’s utterly useless for me in raid. As a tank though, it’s invaluable as it can be tough to learn proper taunt rotation when it comes to multitanking.

TLDR, buy the add-ons you’re ok with and hire the creators. Add them to the game and ban all outside add-ons. Stop trying to balance your game around the ways players find to break your coding and just make the breaking illegal because you ALREADY OFFER enough to get the job done as long as you look at your screen.

As I started though, unasked for and less than unimportant, so I know imma get a lot of hateful comments because people don’t agree with my recommendation. Hopefully some decide to respond with an idea of their own. As always, thank you Friends

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But that’d cost money.

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I can’t think of a more hostile way to go about this.

It’d be a terrible business decision.

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Wowhead and other fansites along with addons, have been doing free heavy lifting for Blizzard for decades.

Bobby would fall off his yacht if he heard you talking about paying the creators now.

:laughing:

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Ill just say this. It’s sad that we need addons. Visuals are OK, but default nameplates are trash. I use them and they are terrible. Boss counters don’t have timers or description when he does something.

Blizzard needs to make their UI better, so you don’t need addons

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I would love for Blizzard to have better visual cues for procs and buff tracking. Needing to have an add-on like weakauras to track things because the base UI just has them in tiny little buff icons mixed in with a bunch of unimportant buff icons is just dumb.

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I am all for blizzard having better options within WoW.

But don’t take my customization away from me.

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This is why I felt the need to point out that legally speaking they may not have to pay. They might be able to take the software and ban the creators all in one stroke of a legal pen.

Which would be much more hostile than buying out the creators and maybe offering them a job. Because Blizzard has identified Add-ons as an issue for them when designing encounters and are talking about limiting add-ons in Midnight.

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I don’t see them kicking the creators in the veggies like that, but we’re in Microsoft territory now so there is no telling.

I also don’t see them offering anyone a job, just isn’t enough work to justify a paycheck, unless they get into the encounter design and then why hire an amateur addon writer when you can get an actual encounter designer?

Blizzard are notorious for overreacting and then back peddling when the pitchforks come out, that’ll be the scenario if they mess with peoples addons we’ve been allowed to use for 20 years.

Some authors do get paid, and sometimes there is a cry for help, as with the author of DBM, he was having major issues with his teeth, was taking fish antibiotics to deal with it as he had no money for a Dentist, so community did a fundraiser and the dude got his teeth taken care of and a bunch of cash in his pocket.

I’d pay a one time fee for sure, low dollar amount, but they’d feel the love when 1000’s start doing it too.

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If you have ever listened to Liquid or Echo players/leaders, they all pretty much universally dislike the weakaura/addon race that they have to play. They all state, they would love to go in and just figure the fight out, make a few timers and go. The problem is that the skill of the players is so high, that anything that isnt made or tuned to be just barely possible, will be cleared pretty easily for them. And truthfully most of the top guilds.

Here is the solution Blizzard have arrived at. The cutting edge, highest difficulty content, is going to require that level of commitment and skill, and need that level of organization. Normal>Heroic will not. M+ above portal keys? They will require some min/maxing and meta comp gameplay.

This is most likely the best way to do it. It gives the vast majority of players, access to content of a reasonable difficulty, that any class/spec can do. The issue with the system is that there is a trickle down effect. People look up at the best players, and assume that the way they play is the way it has to be played at all levels. The classes/specs/talents/comps/addons/weakauras that the best players are using, become necessary in all content to them.

Then you have this population, where a bunch of people at the mid range skill and content level, feel that the way to get better is to mimic what the best players are doing, and push that narrative to people who are just content to game at the low-mid levels.

Truth be told, you can take those Top 25 guild players, and stick them on any class/spec combos and they will out-perform more casual players. They just optimize because they have to.

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I’d very much rather this extreme never happened. When Blizz adds their version of addons to the game, they suck. And I end up having to get some addon anyway to deal with the suckage.

I would just love for them to stop using the same visual graphic for both soak mechanics and gtho mechanics.

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That’s a bunch of crap, though, Blizzard doesn’t have to design garbage fights like Ovinax for any reason.

Their “but addons made us do it!” is just an excuse.