Even though people react extremely brashly to the idea… I have always thought Addons have done way more damage to WoW’s community, design and accessibility than people are willing to accept/admit.
I don’t play with addons anymore and mostly PvP though I avoid arena formats because they require addons or you are a deficit to your team. I still do very well for the most part in BG PvP and open world without addons and its fun… I don’t have to constantly glance off at the slot machine interface glowing and whistling at me…
The community is just always ahead of the game. Many of the in-game features we have now used to be addons…and here we are 20 years later and they still can’t keep with the community. Go figure.
I probably wouldn’t ban all Addons, but would take a hard look at not allowing Weakauras in PvP.
Shouldn’t need a PHD to be competitive in ranked settings, putting yourself in a casuals shoes, it’s a lot to learn and master a spec each season you want to hop back in and play. Nevermind learning weak auras. Potentially a win win for both high rated players, casuals and newcomers.
Most of the time you have to mess around deleting re-loading weakauras it’s just annoying… upgrade visuals effects of major cds, bursting windows, CC… clear out the clutter of everything else.
Everybody knows add ons are cheats. But the people who need them to play far outweigh the people who dont need them. Blizzard only cares about $ and not about an actual competitive environment. Therefore the add ons are here to stay. Funny because back in the day real MMOs suspended and banned players for things like add ons and even macros. I remember a plethora of people getting banned over my 6 years playing Dark Age of Camelot for running combat macros and the game was far better off because of it.
Sadly this is the social/gaming environment we find ourselves in now. Humans will just be humans. And that is sad.
Yes, improving at the game should be rewarded. But knowing how to set up community made addons, which are not part of the base game, should not be a barrier or rewarded.
I should have specified you shouldn’t need a PHD in a 3rd party addon on how to create weakauras as well as maintain them with every single patch or update. Most of the time they are continuously breaking/bugging out.
Without weakauras you can argue the skill cap goes up due to having to actually watch characters cast abilities and not just listening to a fog horn.
knowledge is power, and its not zero sum, meaning you can gain the same knowledge.
weakauras aren’t difficult to learn how to make, most players will put thousands of hours into wow, take 3 and learn how to use WA so you can setup your own custom UI.
and when it comes to addon stability, yes, many are unstable, but most of that isn’t the addon’s fault but blizzard’s, they are messing with UI variables and whatnot which broke many addons which were stable for over a decade. you know what didn’t break? weakauras.
in terms of skill caps, it really depends. transforming the information flow still puts the the decisions of what to press on the player, if the addon is flat out telling you what button to press, then that is different and definitely changing the skill cap. however, veteran players catch on to stuff like this as well as scripting and then are able to use it against you.
The addon is telling you what to press… Air horns start blasting, which tells the player “Hey, I know you can’t see that someone used a cooldown because you rely fully on addons and have no awareness, but here is this urgent audio cue to press one of your defensive abilities.” What else would the air horn be telling you? Just stand there and die? It is clearly communicating something. And even if you press the “wrong” defensives it doesn’t even matter. You’re now better than an equally skilled player who doesn’t have addons. Good job.
As addons have become more and more powerful, the skill floor has been raised substantially. There are so many times you will see players, even at higher rating, who are doing nothing more than reacting to an air horn. Yes, a better player can take advantage of this, but the skill gap has decreased dramatically. The skill of understanding the enemy class and seeing/hearing cues to make decisions is gone. Addons will just force feed you all of the information and you don’t actually have to be aware of anything.
Which is just made worse by Blizzard being too incompetent or lazy to design the game. So instead they just design around addons, since the community will always pick up their slack.
Not directly. But if the air horn goes off because an enemy just used their Swifty one shot macro and your options are do nothing and die, or press a defensive and have a higher chance at living… I think it might be telling you something.
yeah, its telling you to do something or you are gonna die, but its not telling you what to do.
and answering a go with a defensive is part of pvp, it doesn’t really matter if its an in game effect or a UI element, something is going to alert the player.