Pathfinder, Azerite, Covenants, Running out of time for classes in DF.
They also fail their design goals with healing like every expac.
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I usually wait until the dust clears for expansions. I think this will be a broken mess. Th eelitist players will realize they arenât as good as they thought once the addons are gone LOL. The dungeons design are way too much now with all the mechanics, you need addons to keep up and I am betting the dsign team has not toned things down enough.
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I already addressed this stuff.
Blizzard canât honestly communicate. They communicate their intent today, change it tomorrow, maybe reverse it in a month.
(Their stance towards addons.)
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To which they have explained why, including why the change of heart. Honest communication includes also being able to communicate why someone changes their mind on something.
in modern cases courts have ruled that video games and online services are subject to the ADA, and âtoo costly to implementâ has never been a valid excuse for not installing a wheelchair ramp or elevator. and if a building canât argue against having to remodel, a video game maker canât use that defense considering it is a live game still in development and supported.
i think the legal validity of an ADA challenge to addon removal is exactly why Ion and blizz invited members of Undaunted to alpha to give feedback on their needs.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-director-admits-its-too-hard-without-combat-mods-and-explains-how-bosses-will-change-in-midnight-were-not-looking-to-turn-all-our-raid-encounters-into-giant-puzzles-for-people-to-solve/
basically, they donât have a choice, if they remove addons and donât have a sufficient replacement in place fully ready to go, at launch, then every single player who has been using weakauras to overcome their tism, dyslexia, adhd, vision problems, or whatever disability they overcome with weakauras is going to have a real valid legal case to sue blizzard.
the more exotic and âout thereâ possibility is that people sue blizzard before the expac launches to get an injunction which pauses all development on Midnight until blizzard shows their new code meets all plaintiffâs ADA needs.
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Yâall do know that there are lots of people that play without those addons, right?
Allow me to customize how I see and hear my player information.
Each person has a different way that they might process information the best. I know for me that my UI would cripple any other player because of how unique and unintuitive it would be for anyone else.
Presenting my cooldowns/buffs/procs and having audio queue for that information does not affect fight design. It doesnât âsolveâ mechanics. It doesnât give me insight to the information of other players. Let me display UI the way I want to. THAT is what Iâm providing feedback on.
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ADA would generally not be applicable in a video game setting. Most lawsuits that involved ADA were lawsuits that had to do with inability to work with screen readers and other items. Anything else for the internals of a video game would involve the Communications and Video Accessibility Act which requires video games to offer appropriate user interface and chat for people with disabilites, which is already done (seperating audio, low light levels, voice chat, etc.). No where does it state to what degree that needs to be or if it needs to be done for specific aspects of said game. Just because an addon is being removed/restricted for a specific aspect does not mean a company can immediately be sued.
From what i have read, as far as weakauras they can continue but with the removal of reading the combat log they just refuse for Midnight, and beyond, to alter their software to adhere to the new rules. If there was a lawsuit brought against blizzard for that it would probably be dismissed simply because the maker of the addon is refusing to continue production of their addon. This isnât a situation where weakauras couldnât continue, they just donât want to alter their code to do it.
Any one person could probably bring a lawsuit if they want or even a group but i doubt it would gain any traction or merit to not be dismissed immedietly, and that is even assuming it makes it anywhere thanks to the probable nunerous lawyers that Microsoft employees.
im not a lawyer, but quick google searches seem to indicate recent legal rulings determined the ADA does apply to online services.
- NAD v. Netflix (2012): The National Association of the Deaf sued Netflix under the ADA for lack of subtitles. The court found that an online-only service can still be covered by the ADA.
- Robles v. Dominoâs Pizza (2019): A blind user sued Dominoâs for an inaccessible website/app. The court ruled the ADA applied because the app was integral to the companyâs services.
the in game options do not cover everything disabled people were doing with weakauras, not even close. if the in game options were sufficient, disabled people woudnât have had to resort to weakauras.
additionally, the in game options donât help neurodivergent people while weakauras did.
nobody had a problem with the way the UI fails to accommodate every possible disability because they had weakauras to make it as custom for their needs as possible. the removal of weakauras means everyone with a disability besides colorblindness now is being hindered by the UI unfairly.
this isnât a matter of addon dev laziness, blizzard changed the code so that practically no addon works in midnight, not just weakauras. idk what blizzardâs idea of skinning is, but currently on alpha if you want to display player HP, you can only call the raw number, you canât even make a health bar.
thats not addon authors having a tantrum, they literally canât continue with addons when literally nothing works because of changes blizzard made. the addon authors certainly want to continue, but canât because of blizzard, meaning the entire situation is blizzardâs fault. and remember that weakauras is only the most popular addon, people use plenty of others to help them read the UI.
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Did they need to resort to it or did it make the game easier? Thereâs a very large difference.
And those people, 100%, should be able to choose to play without addons, if thatâs what they want to do. However, every person has different needs and preferences for how they assimilate and process information. People for whom the default Blizzard UI is inadequate should likewise, 100%, be able to choose to use addons to modify the UI to suit their individual needs and preferences. The fact that this choice has been available to players for almost 21 years is part of why WoW has been successful for all that time.
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Donât let the small group of no-addons zealots bother you, OP. You can go to r/wow and see a much larger population who overwhelmingly think killing addons is a horrible move.
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Well the two cases you cited were due to an inability to use the services provided due to a disability. The same cannot be said here. WoW offers a plethora of in-game options for disabled people but are no where near required by law to provide a personalized solution for every disability that would play this game.
The problem you seen to be having is confusing accessability with ease-of-use. While, yes, companies are required to provide tools for specific disabilites (color blindness, blindness, deaf) they generally are not required to do it for all disabilities. You used neurodivergent as an example but that is such a broad term for several specific disabilities that WoW would most likely not be required to provide tools for every aspect of neurodivergent nor should they be expected/required to.
As far as weakauras goes, i will say that i watched bits and pieces of it and not the whole thing, but from my understanding they refused to develop further because the loss of access to the combat log would hinder most of the items with it and give accurate information because it can no longer access real time data. They could rework it as an addon with functionalites outside the current scope but they refused to alter the coding to do that. Again i am going off of the bits and pieces i watched/read so i may be off bade with that.
I mean no matter how you cut it the chances of them getting sued becaue of this is a long shot. Could someone do it? Absolutely! Chances if it actually progressing is probably slim.
They arenât refusing, they are literally blocked from developing the addon. Blizzard has stopped them cold.
Iâd wager that the people who made the decision to kill addons donât even play the game.
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i know for me i had to use it to set UI elements to dedicated places like a gauge cluster. having my buffs and runes and resources move all over the place gives me eyestrain and headaches trying to track it.
i didnât necessarily need weakauras to do this, i was able to accomplish it with addons in the past, but play long enough and you start to see when your addons bug out, and my old rune hud started to die around legion or bfa, and in particular i had it crash on me in the middle of pvp combat, not the idea time to be doing a /reload. but i noticed that weakauras never seemed to crash, so i decided to rebuild my entire UI in weakauras and place everything, my resources, procs, timers, etc in ways that i can easily read it without eyestrain. and it worked. in almost 10,000 games, ive only ever had my weakaura hud die on me once.
so i would say i had to resort to weakauras. idk how changing the UI information makes the game easier other than it removes the barrier of the UI being trash. i could give you my UI, or teach you how to make your own, its not suddenly going to make you play DK like i do.
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the ADA standard is reasonable accessibility, not basic minimal options, if blizz removes functionality the people with disabilities relied on for access, and offers no replacement for a year, that could be seen as withholding reasonable accommodation.
and while neurodivergent isnât specific and covers a lot of categories, when a single design change excludes an entire category of players who previously had access, that raises a dispute impact issue under the ADA, even if the company didnât intend to discriminate, courts often look at impact, not intent.
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Microsoft/Blizzard essentially hold monopoly-level control over the client environment. Once they lock out third-party accessibility tools, they inherit the responsibility to replace them with equivalent access.
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I donât see what the big deal is.
RP addons are not being hurt only ones that requite combat data.
If your guild really needs DBM to down bosses then it seems like a skills issue on your end. in fact this may be a good thing slowing down progression and giving people other than the usual suspects a fighting chance to get things like World Firsts.