after the patch within 2-5 hrs my add ons were rdy for an updates
Tome of Teleportation is borked.
Not working with the Teleport Cloaks rn.
Welcome of the world of mods and addons.
Meh… even with PTR betas, there will be broken addons on release. There always are. Active addon developers usually get their stuff updated in a day or two.
I (foolishly) had hoped that it would be easy because Blizzard would limit themselves to only doing changes necessary for the event, and would save the other random changes for 10.2.7 in like, a month. But of course I was basing that on a company with functional product management.
I give them kudos too, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was no reason to make them rush to get changes out to fix errors in the live game.
This is every single patch regardless if there is a test realm or not. Honestly i prefer them do more of this it actually puts a little mystery back in wow, i hate things being datamined 2 seconds after its added.
Also not trying to beat you up but if you are that reliant on add-ons maybe try playing without them every once in a while. You might realize you dont need so many 
That’s not true. 99% of the bugs that the most used addons have right now would’ve been fixed already.
Just going to leave this here.
While I sympathize with the addon author who is undergoing chemo, updating their code is largely trivial. For something like placing all functions inside of a table, resulting in such changes as SendChatMessage() becoming C_Chat.SendChatMessage(), this particular update was trivial.
If big change are inbound, such as when Blizzard changed how addons collected aura data, they had given heads-up along with a thorough explanation. (Such as the C_Timer functions.)
Blizzard’s engineers largely are pulling back on what they’re allowing (especially while in combat lockdown), or they’re optimizing functions, such as merging foo:SetX() and foo:SetY() into foo:SetSize(x,y)
While their API isn’t perfect, it’s extremely well-made and information is readily available through console commands. For example, did you know you can find all the Plunderstorm UI code under a folder named “WoWLabs”? Why is this relevant? This is to show that they also rely on their Lua code working as expected. Regression testing is a tricky thing when you’re working on a 20-year-old game. It’s not a big deal if your addons throw errors because, as I said, it’s trivial to fix. And because it’s trivial to fix, other AddOns may exist – some with those issues resolved; a temporary option at worst, a maintained option at best.
In short: If you can’t wait for an update, find an alternate solution.
PS: I’m lucky enough to be able to fix broken AddOns myself. I despise Details though, that AddOn is designed to break if you sneeze at it too loudly. I’ve shared some localized fixes for extremely popular AddOns, such as WeakAuras, when it starts spitting out errors on the PTR. When you lose something critical, like Import/Export, it can suck bigtime, but you can easily transfer over your existing WeakAuras if you simply copy/paste the ...Options.lua file into your PTR folder properly – and then you have all your WAs!
Doesn’t matter how trivial, it breaks without heads up while this is 100% unnecessary.
That’s not true. There are a few addon devs that happen to be close to a few Blizzard devs and that’s how they find out early. Everyone who isn’t part of that group, or doesn’t follow 1 of the few Discord servers where you can find that info, you’re out of luck. The most common sources did not have any information until after 10.2.6 was made available unencrypted on the CDN.
Even then I went through the diff (which was rather massive), it still introduced changes that were not covered by their deprecated 10.2.6 implementation, including subtle changes in existing calls.
This is irrelevant to the subject.
Not what this is about.
I manage a few addons, so besides of dealing with other broken addons, I have to ensure my own work, while I rather be playing the new content.
I’ve been running the alpha for a long time, that’s simply not true. Usually when I discover a bug and report it, it’s fixed in a next alpha version usually within the hour. The release versions are also very stable and if something comes though, is fixed rather fast.
Patches like 10.2.6 just put more pressure on addon devs than necessary. Instead of fixing the bugs over a longer period of time, they are rushed to fix everything on patch day, and this is not okay imo.
I’m using BasicChatMods. Have you tried that one?
Addons brick every patch even with a beta. This isn’t anything new.
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It is true, lol. Look, I’ve been playing this game for a long time. Every single patch, a add-on breaks. Every single patch elvui breaks, and more. Evlui breaks sometimes when there isn’t even a patch so it’s like you can’t blame lack of ptr on add-ons breaking.
And as an addon developer I tell you you’re wrong.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/g/blizzard-tracker/activity/posts?category_id=35
https://www.wowhead.com/blue-tracker/topic/sticky-6-0-ui-add-on-changes-13421662064#136783073307
(Blizzard tends to purge the forums, so this doesn’t go all the way back.)
With fewer and fewer CMs, we don’t get as much communication, but communication still exists.
Players largely don’t want to be spoiled by PTR.
Players like yourself want a PTR specifically for addon development purposes.
Who should they listen to?
I want to be clear that I’m not against you on this. AddOn development is a hobby, not a job – even if you’re a career software engineer. I simply don’t care for users of my work clamoring for updates for something I do at my own expense. (I used to maintain a WA package that was very popular for my spec, from WOD onwards. If it had errors or needed updates due to content, I’d fix them at my own pace and update the shared link on WAGO.) :: surely, it’s not as in-depth as your work, but creating that separation between hobby and duty changed my perspective.
I simply don’t believe fixing broken addons warrant a PTR. If Blizzard could provide addon developers with a resource to improve your workflow, I’d rather support that idea than a PTR outright.
ElvUI was bugged the first day of 10.2.6 but fixed the same day, and I was grinding out Plunderstorm so it didn’t bother me.
That’s from 10 years ago. They haven’t communicated more than a few very specific changes for ages.
- Nobody is forced to go onto PTR.
- Datamining can be limited by encrypted content.
- They can release a separate version with just the related UI and API changes if they insist on keeping it a secret.
It works just fine for every other patch.
Not going to solve the problem. I’m not sure you understand how complicated managing addons can be, especially for larger addons. If you can’t test the changes in all clients, you’re not going to have a working version regardless.
Era, Classic, and Retail all have a slightly different version of their Lua API. You have to constantly check which call for which function you have to do. Sometimes you have to add client specific versions because they deliberately did not expose everything available.
Even if they gave us the best documentation ever, it’s mostly useless until you can test it on all game clients.
Are you referring to 10.2.6? Because the addons I use seem to work just fine. Though I haven’t run into any of the new spells or reworks yet so that could change depending on the addon.
The authors will get there, though I agree with making sure a ptr happens is a must. Heck even a closed PTR with an NDA so add on devs can update their stuff if WoW wants a secret patch.
Yes 10.2.6, there were a few addons that had issues.
Would a Blizzard-supported extension for VSC help? Are there some modernized solutions you’d support that wouldn’t involve a PTR?
No. Need to be able to actually run code.