LFM: Mature and civilized discussion of addons

[Overlord Urahara]

I was thinking about what I said a few minutes ago and was thinking you'll probably be able to use a parser to find out the DPS like in rift

[Deleted]

Yeah, but I think it's very inconvenient (and it still requires the game to have a combat logging feature).

For example, I believe almost everyone just uses Recount instead of using a live WoL session in WoW, with the exception of (some) raid leaders.

[Samfroman]

I found myself in WoW with nearly 40 addons, and although they helped a lot with customization and possible theorycrafting assistance (recount), everytime a new major patch or expansion would come, a lot of my addons would become all cluttered and some even gone. I am fine without addons, but there are a few i would not mind such as some sort of DBM, threat meter, dot/hot/buff tracker, and of course some sort of healbot. I myself wont be a healer, but i believe healbot to be very helpful and would make healing a little more orginized and swift, which could save someones life. But i dont want so many addons where i feel like i need to get all of them, customize them, and then have the possibility of them getting screwed up and me having to start all over again.

[Serapplebum]

It would feel like a pretty significant loss to me to not have addons in an mmo. What I would miss would be the quality of life addons, I'm fine with the absence of combat addons. As well as the ui works and looks, it would be impossible for the devs to anticipate every annoyance & inconvenience that will pop up. By allowing players to offer quick and easy solutions to these issues which devs may never feel is worth the time to address could help players enjoy the game more, and continue to play longer than they would without. The endless amount of little tools players cook up for minor aspects of the game also also encourage others to participate and enjoy in parts of the game which they may have otherwise not shown much interest in or ignored altogether.

Overall, I feel the absence of addons deprives the devs of a great deal of valuable, free contributions from players which largely would only serve to enrich the gaming experience of thousands of other players. It's a resource that I would be very sad to see go untapped.

[Raeli]

This discussion generally revolves around a few basic ideas that most seem to be voiced most vocally - not necessarily all agree with these, but they're common to see:

1. I don't like addons because Addons that assist you in boss fights make the game easier.
2. I don't like addons because Damage Meters cause people to QQ at each other.
3. If the game is good, it doesn't need addons.

All of these ideas are flawed.


1:
Let's take WoW for example, as we should all be familiar with it. Look at the encounter complexity in Vanilla, most fights are very simple, dull almost, you might say. If I think of the most complex Vanilla encounters, there was little benefit to be gained by using addons. Heigan - it's just moving, the only gain is if there would be a timer for when he would teleport to the raised area. Four Horsemen, there just isn't anything, perhaps a timer for when they will next apply their debuff. Loatheb, that was quite hard in Vanilla, unless I remember incorrectly, but the healing reduction was a debuff, and the little spores were clearly visible, meaning there would be little benefit there either.

If you look at today's encounters, take Ragnaros for example, having a Boss Mod would be beneficial so that you don't explode a Magma Trap at the same time Ragnaros does something else that might result in someone dying. You'll want to know when the seeds are coming too - sure, the other abilities are not necessary for timers, things like meteors are obvious, however, knowing when the Seeds are coming is fairly important, certainly more so than I can think of any Vanilla encounter.

What I'm saying is, as Boss Mods have come around and gotten far better, encounters generally have become more complex and a lot of them are designed around the idea that boss mods exist - certain events are intentionally masked from the combat log so that boss mods cannot get a specific timer from them, or they can only make an estimate based upon other events that may happen around them.

This brings me onto one other thing - If there were no Boss Mods, would you be against addons? It's not hard to control what data comes through, they could easily mask all pertinent data to boss mods while still barely impacting the ability of other addons.



2:
People often claim they don't like addons because of Damage Meters. I don't understand such arguments. They claim that they lead to idiots that only care about DPS, standing in the fire DPSing to reach the top of the meters. They claim that it leads to idiots insulting others in groups because they don't do enough damage.

The problem is, they don't think about the social element itself. Is the problem the addon, or the person themselves? Just look at anywhere on the internet, there just are these people. Whether an addon exists or not, these people will still be here and they will still be idiots to other people. The best thing you can do is to avoid them. As an aside note, things like WoW's Dungeon Finder do not help this, it may only be a minor thing, but having to take the time to form a group with people instead of using a dungeon finder has benefits - sure it can take quite a lot longer, but it's worth it for enjoyment. You generally put more effort in when you've spent a while actually having to actively look for a group, than when it's just formed with no effort from your part. Not only this, but waiting in the Dungeon Finder, especially if you are just waiting makes people bored and restless, which also doesn't help the sort of people that typically are idiots in Dungeon Finders, but this is a different subject.

Anyhow, Damage Meters - the problem with them is generally a social one, the addons themselves aren't the problem, and if anything are very useful. They allow you to look over your DPS or Deaths or whatever it may be and get a statistical overview, they can help to see what are the best spells you have, they can show you how you are doing compared to others, they overall are beneficial, the only negative aspect to them is a social one. Should something be banned because some idiot might try and use it to insult someone else? I think not, those very same people would insult people regardless. If anything, those people should be shunned and removed from the community. Trolls are never good.


3:
This idea again is flawed. I get that people don't like using addons, they don't like configuring addons, they like to just get into the game and play. The problem with this is, unlike other games MMOs need a lot of interface space to convey data to the player. For instance, in an FPS all you really need is Ammo and Health, perhaps you have a minimap too, but that's about it. An MMO has a full set of abilities that (generally) need to be displayed, they have a minimap, health and "energy" of yourself and your target, of your party, a pet maybe too, maybe the target's target (for tanks), you'll need other panels that open up occasionally too, bags and so on.

Not everyone agrees on what each person needs in an MMO UI. Hell, just take this short list of issues:
1. It's Cyan - that's not going to help if you play the game for long stretches or in the dark, or when you are in a dark area, it's very bright.
2. There is no Target of Target.
3. The Player Health Bar does not show text, and so you have to "estimate" your health. The Raid Frame does, but unfortunately the others don't.
4. The location of elements. The Health Bars are too far to the bottom of the screen - this is good for some people, but personally, I never look at the bottom of my screen, I'm looking at the middle, infront of my character.
5. Unable to turn off the visibility of the primary action bar. I personally don't care for seeing them, I keybind everything, yet I have to have things I don't want cluttering my screen.

There are also other things that I'm sure will be missing, and there's other things that Addons will help with - not only will they help with the purely cosmetic, they allow users to get the information they need and want. Not everyone cares about a target of target, nameplates, debuffs on your raid etc.

No UI will ever make everyone happy, it just won't. Different people have different needs, and it simply is impossible to cater to all of them, so what you end up with is those that are happy to just get in and play are happy, but those that long for other information never will be, and given the popularity of addons in WoW, I would say that there are quite a few people who are not happy with the base UI. Even if, in wow, it's something as simple as getting only a bag replacement addon, or maybe an action bar replacement, or prat/chatter, or titan panel/fubar for fps/gold/memory/latency/time display etc, or many other simple little things that you forget about.


TLDR:
There is a huge array of things you can do with addons, and to say there shouldn't be them just because of a misconception that Boss Mods make the game easier, and that Damage Meters cause people to insult others, is just silly to be honest. Boss Mods, if anything, encourage the designers to go further and make more complex encounters (but as I said earlier, it's not hard to block data to certain abilities if you want to, so as to not make it easier), and Damage Meters - the only issues with them are social ones, and the people causing those issues would still be in the game regardless of the addon, they would still be idiots, so there won't be any change in the situation, so why overall make things worse for people that actually use them?

---------- Post added 2011-10-28 at 07:27 AM ----------

I've always had an uneasy relationship with addons. Do addons like DBM and Healbot add functionality, and enable a "higher level" of gameplay than is possible in the base experience? Unquestionably, and it's a good experience to have. The problem is in how that experience comes about. Addon-makers feel like they have to do whatever they can do give every advantage possible to their players. Developers in turn have to craft harder content to foil the addon-makers, and it turns into this never ending videogame arms race.

A HUGE amount of people have this misconception.

It is not hard to simply not show combat event data for certain abilities in WoW.

If Blizzard don't want to have the ability for something to be announced, they can easily disable it.

There are many spells in the game that also don't issue combat log events, I'm sure you all know about healing Absorbs for instance, addon makers had to do a whole lot to estimate how much an absorb was doing, this was up until blizzard actually started sending Absorb data to the combat log.

So ultimately it's this:
Boss Mods are only as useful as the game maker allows them to be. Blizzard have been extremely laid back on limiting them, although there have been some events that have been masked.

If Bioware are aware that people don't like the idea of addons, it will not be hard at all for them to limit their usefulness while barely impacting other addons.

[Deleted]

personally ive raided the entire firelands teir without a dbm style mod and quite frankly its not needed. This addon and bigwigs/deux vos is what basically made blizz have to change raiding from dps checks to dodge the fire mode more. Or at least thats my thinking.
This type of addon is actually what i hate the most even though i dont realy have a good reason,it should not be needed and it makes things so much easier even though it doers such small things.

On the issue of Ui customisation, i understand some people just like how they like stuff and anything different just sucks. Having played mmo's are some 5/6 years i can safely say ive gone through my fair share of different ui's but its managable without custom stuff. The biggest issue was always proc tracking which could well be an issue for swtor. At the same time the buff bar is with the button bars at the button so it could well be more obvious (thats assuming there are procs to track, havent realy looked into the dps tree's with alot of detail)
But this issue can be easily countered if the designers do it right and allow things to be moved around.

As for dps meter/threat meter.

dps meter - quite frankly i dont care whether its there or not, the only place it matters is raids/operations. If you cna parse and live log it, it doesnt matter thats how you can do it. personally i dont use recount because i lag so bad with it in 25man raids and just rely on the guilds logs as were corpse running/trash clearing etc to see how i did and what happened etc.

threat meter - I can understand why tanks want it, its nearly mandatory just for lulz. Personally while tanking i never realised how much i glimpsed at it then back to the screen until i stopped using it one time, it just felt so weird not knowing how much tps i was doing and how far i was ahead. Of what ive seen of videos though, i can see that it might not be so much needed. My reasoning for this is from what ive seen from dev walkthroughs that you can kinda see who you dont have aggro on because there blastering somone in the face, and well if you looking at driods/aliens shooting people rather than at some nice ui fonts in a square then they are getting you to actually look at the scenery and models theyve made for you to look at.

And last lastly mouseover macro's - healers dream if they can be allowed at the same time they could very easily allow for heals to be used on mouseover through some interface option which we havent heard of due to Nda (yes i hope ) Mouse over's are just amazing for healing its that simple. Its probs the only downside to the game if it doesnt go live without them for me. at teh same time i healed for 3 years without them and i still click and heal at times just to see peopls debuffs and stuff.

I think i covered the majority of reasons why people want addons just my 2 cents anyway

[noahjam326]

If the UI is on (at least) the customization level of Rift, then I don't see addons being as needed. If the game's UI is not that deep, then you should absolutely allow addons. Player choice is always the preferred path. It's a quality of life issue. I think UI should be customizable, no questions asked.

[Kyira]

I'm still on the fence when it comes to add ons, I do believe they had their place in Warcraft but they also became required and I can barely remember a time when I didn't have add ons. Looking at TOR's UI I can say I won't be needing a UI based addon like LUI which I used in WoW. Looking over my Curse Client I can only see 1 add on I'd want in to use in TOR and that's Power Aura's I loved this add on for personal buff / de-buff tracking / spell alerts etc, but TOR may have these things built in? I would like a damage meter for personal use but I'd like to see the chat spamming options removed, I find it useful when it's used to correctly gauge performance and not as an epeen extension but I have stated in the past that I hope TOR is more tactically based then number based when it comes to encounters anyway. Boss mod and Threat meter based add ons I'll wait till I've played before deciding if they would be helpful in Operations and Flash points.

Edit - I forgot to mention the implementation of macros would be very welcomed by me

[Raeli]

Looking over my Curse Client I can only see 1 add on I'd want in to use in TOR and that's Power Aura's I loved this add on for personal buff / de-buff tracking / spell alerts etc, but TOR may have these things built in?

No, not in the way of nice on-screen textures. You simply have the little (de)buff icons above your player portrait, above your action bars. They're not very visible in comparison. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to see what I'm talking about if you watch any video showing the game. They're about 20-25 pixels big, or if you look at advanced posting editor here on mmo champion, they're about as big as the bold or italics buttons etc. Other than spell effects, which not all buffs have, certainly not permanent ones - at least to my knowledge (again, view videos), this is the only way to see, and as such, yes, I can see a lot of people finding this very lacking.

Another pro-addons argument ftw!

[Kaninchen]

I need them, I want them and they should be implemented asap. There is always something missing in the UI for certain situations and you end up thinking "aww man, if I had x, y, z would make seeing x, y, z easier". Instead of then going to the SWTOR forums crying about why we can't do this to our UI or why they don't implement this and that, we can instead to go curse and download it.

Also, everytime I changed my UI to something different it felt like a breath of fresh air.

[smashzu]

I don't mind not having addons, but if they aren't going to give us third-party addons, they need to update the UI and add the things that people are asking for - and make them optional. I'm more worried about not having macros, I macro damn near everything with modifiers startattacks mouseovers etc, I don't know how long I can actually play at max level without them.

[Raeli]

I don't mind not having addons, but if they aren't going to give us third-party addons, they need to update the UI and add the things that people are asking for - and make them optional. I'm more worried about not having macros, I macro damn near everything with modifiers startattacks mouseovers etc, I don't know how long I can actually play at max level without them.

I will be honest, without addons and macros, my enjoyment of the game will be severely lowered - I've enjoyed making addons in wow, and love customising my UI, not only this, I am quite anal about my UI and I like to have everything specific, the current layout just kills me, and all that Cyan, god it's like having a heart attack.

[vian]

My main concern is that people will abandon the game if they don't implement support for Addons or macros within the first few months.
Alot of my friends gameplay is heavily based on macros and awareness addons.

I myself started my raiding raiding career in vanilla WoW w/o addons (did use CT Raid Assist in AQ40), I find it alot more lucrative, to me as a person, playing with the minimal amount of addons.

Edit: I'd like to add that Macros gives alot more depth to the gameplay, giving players more features to play around with.

[smashzu]

I will be honest, without addons and macros, my enjoyment of the game will be severely lowered - I've enjoyed making addons in wow, and love customising my UI, not only this, I am quite anal about my UI and I like to have everything specific, the current layout just kills me, and all that Cyan, god it's like having a heart attack.

I agree completely. Personally I don't mind the current layout, but I would like to see them take a page from RIFT and at least allow a fully customizable UI - even if there are no addons.

[Raeli]

I agree completely. Personally I don't mind the current layout, but I would like to see them take a page from RIFT and at least allow a fully customizable UI - even if there are no addons.

Without addons a fully placeable, customisable UI is required. This means moving any element, choosing additional elements such as a damage meter, size of health bars, action bars etc, and especially choice of UI colour as that Cyan just kills me.

[jvbastel]

Without addons a fully placeable, customisable UI is required. This means moving any element, choosing additional elements such as a damage meter, size of health bars, action bars etc, and especially choice of UI colour as that Cyan just kills me.

I wonder why they didn't consider UI customization a must-have feature for the game at release date. The current amount of options is just marginal and IMO it would be a big mistake from BW not to add more before release.

[Omians]

i do beleive when WoW was released addons were not supported to much.. infact i "think" you got in trouble for even trying to use addons.. im probly wrong but they just let them come through.. been so long i cant remember if there was always a addon button on the character pick screen

i can be totally wrong and not remembering correctly

[Zarasthura]

I am 100% for addon and the use of macros. Why? I loved customizing my UI to fit my tastes in WoW. The current UI in beta isn't exactly what I want to use as a healer, and hopefully Bioware can see this too. I love addons that improve my quality of gameplay.

What I don't understand--and nobody has been able to clearly explain this--is that the people who are against addons call it cheating. It's clearly not against the rules to use addons, and there is no reason why you shouldn't other than your personal beliefs. However, on the official forums there seems to be some kind of purist crusade against addons, with peopel spreading huge misconceptions about them.

The excuses for not wanting addons and macros in that I've see:
- They ruin the immersion of raiding (i.e. they claim that DBM ruins raiding)
- recount abuse (i.e. if you're doing terrible, people will call you out for it based on recount)
- Ban all addons because they want to game to be pure and free of handicaps that give other players the upper hand over you
- some of the more crazy zealots really believe that it's cheating, ignoring Blizzard's rules that they ARE allowed and are available at your convenience

[Hellfury]

UI customization is a big part of MMO's this days.

Blizzard had set the bar high, made some mistakes but ironed out pretty good, all in all addons are part of what makes WOW, All my friend and guildmates have addons of some kind, most have totaly new UI's, myself I have a self custom made UI to suit my playstyle and taste

Rift deveopers knew that they would had to make addons support and done so. Iam sure Bioware will do the same and tbh I hope they do.

Now do addons give an edge in PVE and PVP? Yes they do, but they arent anything obscure they are easy to reach to anyone.

Iam one of those ppl that love Damage Meters, I play DPS mostly so I wana know if Iam doing a good job or not, I wana know if the new gear I got made more powerful over 2weeks ago, I like that kinda of information

[Trollsbane]

There will be some sort of damage meter, even without the addition of addons. The game does have a combat log. Just like Aion, someone will just make a stand-alone mod that runs on your comp while you play, and reads the combat log.

Additionally, Bioware have said that they will have an out of game system (probably similar to WoL), where you can look things up. I haven't heard about that in quite some time though, so things may have changed.