Losing Faith in Blizzard’s Direction with Addon Restrictions

Community General Discussion
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I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for years, and I’ve always believed that addons were part of what made the game feel like WoW. Player choice, creativity, and customization helped define our experience.

Now with the upcoming Midnight expansion and Blizzard’s plans to restrict or remove certain combat addons, I’m struggling to trust their ability to manage these systems themselves.

There are already countless bugs in current content. Dungeons and Delves like Ky’veza’s Dark Massacre still have long-standing issues where mechanics don’t behave as intended. Even when players report them, fixes seem to come much later or not at all. It’s hard to believe that a studio already struggling to maintain stable gameplay systems can successfully take on more responsibility by removing features that the addon community has handled for decades.

Blizzard says they want a level playing field, likely in preparation for the Xbox release, but playing with addons has always been a choice. If someone prefers the default UI, that’s fine, but removing access or limiting tools that many of us rely on for accessibility, performance tracking, or just basic functionality feels like a step backward, not forward.

I understand the desire to evolve the game and integrate modern systems, but I can’t help but question whether Blizzard has shown the consistency or responsiveness needed to manage these features effectively. When bugs go unresolved and priorities feel misaligned, how are we supposed to have confidence in even more of the game being locked behind Blizzard’s internal systems when bugs go days, weeks, even, months before getting fixed?

Maybe I’m missing something, but what do you all think?

Do you trust Blizzard to handle raid timers, cooldown tracking, and UI improvements better than the addon community has for years? Or do you think this move is more about control and platform parity than actual player experience?

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Things are fine. Scaling back the bloat is a good thing.

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No I do not trust them to do this well at all. I do think this is somewhat about control ( wc3 ums allowed dota and LoL to exist and blizz will never forget that), but more them putting themselves into a corner for ignoring the communities requests for additional to the base UI and customization for decades so much so that they have tripped themselves up on their own trap. (I also don’t think this thread is terribly unique enough to merit its reutterance again but thats my 2cents).

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This doesn’t make any sense since the rumor is the new Xbox can run natty Windows, at which point getting add-ons on it would be trivial.

But I do agree with the overall concern. We can track whichever buffs and resources Blizzard deems important. We have access to whatever information Blizzard deems important.

Considering they left Stormbringer without a proper Tempest tracker ALL of TWW, I have no reason to have faith in them here.

Removing a lot of things is hardly evoltion imo but I gues that’s semantics.

There’s only one platform: Windows. (do they still support Mac?)

My assumption is they probably planned to roll back the API access for add-ons slower but then realized they didn’t have time to do it with a more fine-tuned approach and just basically shut off everything in combat for simplicity. The sad state they’ve left a lot of specs in doesn’t suggest guided ‘pruning’ and simplification but panicked darts thrown at a board.

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You’re level 70 you have no bloat.

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Why don’t you wait until beta and watch what your favourite streamers are saying.

A lot of players are in your position. It is not about if we can trust them but how safely can they make this transition

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If this is the way of the future for all consoles eventually, plenty of people will not be using it for its PC capabilities, and will just use it as a normal console.

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Beta will be too late for meaningful change.

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And they presumably won’t be able to play WoW without using the natty Windows feature.

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Depending on how it’s integrated they may never know. A game is a game.

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From current reporting, you would need to exit out of the “console” part of the pc to be able to access bnet/steam/epic. So they would have to intentionally install wow

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Not at all.

This is the line crossed that’ll ruin them.

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The “bloat” appears to be the fact that there are too many healers still playing. These changes will fix that.

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I don’t really care about blizzard’s reasoning for the change, I approve of it… because I think addons are a net negative for the game. Too much reliance on addons instead of pushing blizzard to improve the UI for more QOL. I don’t really know if I’d call it “faith” but I believe by the time 12.2 swings around, we’ll start to see the UI in an increasingly positive light.

That’s the hope at least.

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My personal opinion..

Great concept, but am not looking forward to the execution. I’d love to eat my words though.

Literally nothing outside the quest helper has been good. Nothing even on par, just significantly worse.

All of the new stuff has resulted in me removing 0 add-ons so far.

Not a good trend.

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One thing the addon community has is passionate people who seem to love their addons and update/bug fix regularly. Blizz have never been like this for non gamebreaking issues.
I don’t buy for one second their “but we will change” type attitude to keep up the developer quality we have become so accustomed to with addons, especially UI addons (some of them look sooooo good), or improve and maintain the areas that have been lacking for so long that we use addons to cover them.
My Blizz UI still messes up even now and I find myself fixing it at least once per week on a different character each time. Any issues with my addons, even minor are fixed within a few days by their owners.
It will be the same buggy rollout, quick fixes early on, then leaving bugs to stick around for years afterwards, if they are ever fixed.
Even players asking for functionality is usually met with addon creators adding it in quickly while Blizz ignores most of what players want.

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And in some cases, they are doing this.

In some areas they’re going too far, and that’s a problem.

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Midnight isn’t even here, why are you losing all hope already?

Blizzard did say they’ll dial back a bit, to a certain extent.

You haven’t fully experienced Blizzards flushed out version of their own implementations of combat addons.

Their implementations are still in the early stages, give them a bit of time, experience the final product and then come to conclusions.

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When I read about people saying it took them years (sometimes decades) to craft their UI with addons I do wonder if they realize that is a red flag that something is wrong with the addon system. It shouldnt take years to get a UI that you like in any game. It just should not.

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Addons did not make WoW feel like WoW. M+ players and raiders really need to actually sit in the games world for more than 1 minute.