It is Time to Ban WoW Addons

Community General Discussion
1

Addons have been a big part of WoW since the beginning. But it is time for us to look into its negative impacts.

  1. For hardcores

The recent WF races are no longer just a competition of game skills, but also a competition of which guild can write best codes and addons. RWF is in game and irl gold sink. It is working a full time job instead of a playing a game.

It is not surprising at all that more and more hardcore raiding guilds stopped or disbanded. And this trend will continue.

  1. For casuals

I agree with some have said already: raiding is too hard. It is already hard to find people, form a group and organise a raid for casuals. Then the raids are significantly harder and harder over the years. It is just not fun for casual raiding.

One of the big reason is the addon. Ion said in previous interview, Blizzard has to make the encounters harder and harder, because combat addons are more and more intelligent. This is just a vicious circle.

  1. For Blizzard

Players shall not be dependant on third party addons to play a game. Basic addons like UI customization, damage meter, coord, should be integrated in the game itself.

Blizzard’s decision to add voice chat, UI, mouse over, M+ rating, item level, etc. is a good direction. But it is not enough. We need more basic functions included in default settings.

And the removal of combat addons like DBM will certainly make encounter design more creative.

  1. For everyone

Nobody loves to download, upgrade, set their addons all the time on every computer he plays WoW. It is just a hassel and it shold not be necessary.

The Overwolf and WoWup issue shows again how messy third parties are, from curse to twitch to wowup to overwolf to whatever in the future. Players don’t deserve this.

  1. For addon developers

It is great that you make a career and money from making useful addons. And thank you for your contribution to the community. But for the greater good of the game and players, this has to stop.

In sum, it is time to improve wow default settings and ban ALL addons.

200 Likes
4

If all you’re doing is looking at addons, you’re not really playing the game. End of story. If the game drives the encounter for you, you’re not really playing the game. If someone has to tell you all the answers to the test, you’re not really taking the test. Simple.

64 Likes
5

Allowing addons is THE biggest problem of WoW.

It causes tons of other problems in the game, and does way more harm than good to WoW.

54 Likes
8

That is the sad truth of WoW today: a game of addons, 3rd party website and sims.

That is why Blizzard shall improve the default functions in game, instead of giving up and just addons doing its job.

32 Likes
11

You’re absolutely correct.

A good game will make whatever mechanics of an encounter obvious and meters just add gasoline to the blazing inferno of toxicity in the playerbase.

The game would be better off without addons.

31 Likes
12

Yes, they have been here since the start. And now they bring more negatives than positives to wow.

Why so many other games don’t need addon, but wow needs? What is so special about wow that makes it completely different from other games, that wow can only be played with addon? Nothing, it is just a game, same as others.

All those 3rd party customize addons are not 100% needed. It is just that wow players are used to them. With simple improvement to basic functions, wow is totally playable without addon. And that is what Blizzard should do, instead of letting 3rd parties do its own job.

14 Likes
13

I do find it funny how many addons people need to play this game

38 Likes
14

You’re not entirely wrong, but there is an order of operations that must be followed for what you want to happen, and it will probably never happen.

The game has to be designed to be played without addons.

1 - Currently, boss fights and even some dungeon trash are designed with complex mechanics and garbage visuals or ques that something is about to happen specifically because blizzard knows everyone has DBM/BigWigs. Fixing this would require Blizzard to fix nearly every dungeon and bossfight in this entire expansion. In no other MMO is the last boss of UR dropping a black-red frontal on a nearly pitch black floor. In no other MMO are there 1sec cast brown avalanches on dirt that must be dodged the way there is in NL. Imagine doing the Nathrezim boss from last expack without weak auras or any final raid boss with zero boss timers. Blizzard doesn’t do a good enough job making bosses approachable without addons, it would require a complete overhaul.

2 - Rotations have to be designed to be done without addons. Blizzard currently relies on players using weak auras to give us the most complex rotations in the industry and fixing this to work without weak auras would require rebuilding nearly every spec in the game. And I’m not talking about arcane mage’s modern rotation which should have never even made it off the piece of paper it was written on. Lets take something super easy and braindead like BM hunter.

A BM hunter has 1 easy to track cooldown, a builder, a spender, and barbed shot. Lets suppose the BM hunter is in a dungeon and has 3 stacks of barbed shot (and thus, 3 stacks of frenzy) up on a mob. That mob dies. In the vanilla UI, the hunter has no real way to track frenzy on their pet at all, they are just relying on seeing the debuff active. What if the mob didn’t die but instead they swap targets? Again, no really good answer here. Maybe name plates, but trying to track how many stacks AND the time remaining on a debuff in a sea of name plates is absurdly bad UI/UX design.

And thats one of the easiest specs in the entire game. don’t get me started on “how would a feral know not to overwrite his bleeds based on TF or stealth empowerment when there is zero, absolutely zero in-game artifact showing the existing bleed is stronger than what they might be about to cast” or “do you really expect players to look off into the upper right or wherever they moved their buffs too to find out they have a proc / trinket / PI / cd still active in an ocean of otherwise static, not-important-to-know-about-right-now buffs”?

Yes, the ideal WoW experience should not require addons and addons should not provide competitive advantage.

But we have a game where developers designed with the direct assumption that players would be using addons, so until all those designs are undone, they can’t go backwards on addons.

48 Likes
15

Yes please.

68 Likes
16

It is Time to Ban WoW Addons

no

34 Likes
17

I thought we were in the age of adding choices, not removing them? :stuck_out_tongue:

34 Likes
19

We’re closing in on 20 years straight with addons in this game. I don’t think it’s going to change.

37 Likes
20

op there are add ons that will tell me how much gold in total i have and what toon has what item. they have instead of hoping on 10 toons to find the items i need or want to move over.

dbm is funny it player say it plays the game for you no it dont.
you can set it up to give you 30 secs head up when the next attack it about to begin and get rdy

the cords i dont trust blizz that enough to get one made some how it might be broken and takes weeks to fix.

the bag one same as the first one player like the bags that give info and sort them into the slots

11 Likes
21

No one has to do this.

You leave my addons alone. My UI doesn’t affect raiding.

They don’t. It’s a past time. They might make enough in a week to buy a McDonald’s burger combo.

It isn’t.

False.

It’s not a race.

That won’t change with addons gone.

Doesn’t exist. Watch the masked language.

46 Likes
22

It is very true. That is one way of thinking.

And the other way is that, BECAUSE of addons, Blizzard has to artificially increase its difficulties.

As long as addons are allowed, devs have to artificially increase the difficulty to compensate the addon functions.

It is an endless arms race. And the only way to break it, is to ban addons.

8 Likes
24

Genuine question - if addons allow blizzard to create more complicated boss fight mechanics….

Isn’t that a good thing? Otherwise game would get stale if you were limited to boss design without addons.

10 Likes
25

This is false. They’ve already stopped addons from doing certain things so that this isn’t an issue.

You done spreading misinformation yet?

35 Likes
26

I think when they added the hud effects they could have just as simply created a library of customs and made it an ingame process, and then banned outside capability. Same with dbm. A lot of the “possibly gamebreaking” addons if you work at it to make scripts etc. could easily be toned down if blizz first made it in house. Banning all addon capability is dumb though

2 Likes
27

Again - isn’t this good?

Without addons - they couldn’t increase boss difficulty narrowing design scope.

2 Likes
28

I agree completely.

7 Likes