Frankly, as the years go by, it’s harder and harder to justify paying for this game.
It’s not like this game is cheap; yet the quality of the software, the quality of the service is just bad. The quality of this pre-patch is just disrespectful; from the downtime, to the bugs, to the features provided.
Your new UI is just bad. You had a recipe you could follow. People have been slaving away on mods. You know why people use Weak Auras, Plater, etc… Yet, you barely address any of this with the new UI. Really, you have the same exact UI elements, they are just movable now. The main reason people use addons, is that your UI elements simply fail at doing UI things.
The information provided by the default UI is all over place and poorly accessible. A clear example are shaman healing procs: tidal wave, flash flood, etc… You put those in the buffs bar, which has a bazillion things already. In addition to having no clear structure; the icon for these procs can be any where in that bar. Why not have all procs and passive effect be draggable to an action bar? People can then decide where a proc effect is visible on the screen. There are many other examples of poor UI decision that can be remedied by simple solutions.
People use addons for aesthetics and to control the real estate of the UI. Why are you preventing people from hiding some of the UI elements? I use key bindings, I don’t need visible action bars to click things. Why can’t I hide the 1st action bar? Why do I need a unit frame for my character, if I am in a party? The list goes on…
You need to do better. It’s shameful that you rely on addons to provide a basic functional UI for any type of remotely competitive gameplay. Really, just basic functional stuff would be enough to eliminate the need for addons for most.
The fact that basic functionality such as resizing some windows, not being able to move Target of Target, and other extremely limited customizations or lack there of is just extremely mind boggling.
People make free addons that are more customizable than this “brand new feature” and selling point of a AAA game…
Subscription-based MMOs perform significantly better over time (for the players) than free-to-play MMOs which engineer inconvenience to sell convenience.
People spend significantly less money on WoW that they might’ve on competitor MMOs.
I guess it depends on the player. I have been really good at playing F2P games and never spending a dime. Then again, I am in my 50s and have patience, enjoying the ride while I can. I dont pay for instant gratification - I can wait a few weeks or longer.
Shoot, I paid for DF and a few months gametime just by doing WQ every day on a group of toons.
Now obviously there are not hundreds of millions of people playing WoW, and many if not most of those are duplicate downloads for reinstalls/updates etc… but it would not be out of the realm of possibility to assume that there have been close to 1 million unique downloads on each of the top 3 most used addons.
So yes, a lot of people use addons. Whether the majority do or not will never be known, but it is safe to assume that a lot of people do.
It’s a game. If you’re not happy then take a break. It’s okay to do so. I’ve taken a ton of breaks from WoW. Most recently I came back after 18 months.
I’d love to resize the talking head pop up!! Pretty sure you can move target of target. I was able to from the standard UI.
Granted I did keep bartender so I could put my bars where I wanted and make them as small as I wanted. I was also able to move the xp bar. Kept SexyMaps so I could move and resize and change the shap of the mini map.
Really hope MoveAnything gets an update. The profession window is HUGE! Taking up over half of my screen. Cannot have the AH window and the crafting window open at the same time, very annoying! I want to be able to resize the crafting window and the talking head pop up!
