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.