I welcome the addon nuke, but I assumed that Blizzard will pay popular addon and Weakaura developers for improvements to UI and other game enhancements. Are there some intellectual property rights issues or Blizzard developers are just too proud to implement what many great addon and Weakaura developers have done?
I’m sure they get feedback, and read it, but there are clearly limits to how much they can act on it.
For instance, if their managers don’t allow them the time to do a good job, test thoroughly before release, and monitor and rapidly fix bugs, no amount of feedback will change anything.
“Good enough, get it out the door on schedule” kills the value of feedback, but the current dev environment is “hit your release date no matter what.”
Well, I am sure large features are harder and longer to implement. However, there are extremely small ones. For example, why have per char as the default for keybinding, instead of the account-wide keybinding as the default? Or enable Cooldown Manager as default. What idiotic developers introduce major new features and disable it by default? And you have to go enable per alt…
Something is serious wrong with Blizzard’s developers. There is little concept of consistency or user friendliness.
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The “addons not required” goal would argue for what you suggest, but there was a second goal of greatly reducing the “arms race” between encounter design and addons.
They want to be able to design encounters where the mechanics must be handled by the players rather than having an addon or weakaura (or the default UI for that matter) tell them what to do.
I literally started with “I welcome the addon nuke”, so you didn’t even read my post. There are many improvements to the UI that addon developers did. For example, oilvl shows ilvl on the char panel without having to move your mouse to the slot to hover over. Something like this is a huge improvement to the default UI. Whenever Blizzard implements a feature, they tend to just turn it off or it’s based on per char instead of acct. Why develop and introduce features/improvements that players need to enable one char at a time (such as CDM)?
Of course I read your post.
I didn’t remark on the seemingly contradictory first line to avoid appearing rude.
What wasn’t clear to me was that you wanted Blizzard to add stuff that addons can still do perfectly well (like showing ilvl on the character panel).
But they have arguably done much more by providing and maintaining an API that allows this to be completely customized by any addon (e.g. size, color, position, font, etc). Having done all that (much more work than just slapping on a single option of their own taste), why devote even more resources to a solved problem when there are many others more in need?
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Because the only “need” that matters is the priorities the development team’s leadership has decided on. Too bad if players have other priorities. If they want their priorities to matter, they can just write their own games.
Just curious, why would you just automatically assume this?
Have you considered that perhaps more players are interested in having unavailable and/or disabled features restored (sensible aura/HoT white-/black-listing, for instance) than in having Blizzard provide another way to do something that’s already possible?
I certainly don’t share your priority in this regard.
I don’t have any priorities.
I’m pointing out that the developers have their own priorities, and “what the players want” is way down the list.
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The Blizzard core team produces the API and addon programmers consume the API. Blizzard doesn’t have a lot of experience consuming their own addon API and it shows.
You actually have to train a third party developer. Even if they look smarter, they’ve never developed on the internal codebase.
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Are you telling me that turn on of off some features are major work? As a developer myself, it only takes 5-10 mins to turn on and off features.
The code is old and quirky. Look how long it took to increase the base backpack size from 16 slots.
I don’t recall telling you that, and I would wager it depends on which unspecified “features” you’re referring to.
Adding something like display of item level to the character panel sounds simple (especially considering that they have provided and maintained an API to do it for a couple decades).
But no matter where they put the little number, or what font or color it is, somebody will want it to be in a different place, or a different font, or a different color. Which means they now get have people demanding to know why they don’t have a GUI for customizing this “simple” feature.
Every possible customization is already available through third party addons who use the API Blizzard provided, so it adds nothing in terms of value for Blizzard to redo the same work.
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Addons that do these been around for 10+ years. Most people use it because they are so convenient. You are telling me that Blizzard is so ignorant that they can’t even make improvements to the game’s UI for 10+ years?
They’re new at it, having left those UI enhancements to addon devs, and probably led by people who refuse to allow the devs to incorporate the best or most flexible features of pre-existing implementations. “Not invented here” is a real problem in development team politics.
No, I’m not telling you that.