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The World of Warcraft UI Team has shared a message to addon devs in the WoWUIDev discord server, offering clarity on upcoming addon restrictions, the goals behind the changes, and what to expect in future UI updates.
Originally Posted by Warcraft UI Team
Hello to the members of the WoWUIDev Discord server from the WoW Team at Blizzard!First of all, thank you all for your feedback so far about the upcoming addon changes. We've been reading it all and discussing it internally, and we'll continue to do so. Also, a special thanks to the mods for setting up the addon-restrictions-feedback channel. Consolidating your most important feedback about this project in one place not only makes reading the feedback easier for us but also reduces the likelihood that the feedback will get lost amongst other chat.
Reading through your feedback so far it is clear that there's a lot of confusion about the timing, goals and nature of these changes. While our communication on these changes so far has been intended more for the press and general player base, we also understand that it would greatly benefit you as addon developers to have a little more clarity. We also hope this clarity better informs your feedback going forward. Please understand that this project is in heavy development right now, so we won't be able to give specific technical details just yet (exactly which things will be locked down, etc). We'll be releasing this more detailed information in the future though, well before this project goes live, so stay tuned for those details in the coming months.
Although we haven't finalized a target release date for these changes, what we can say is that we'll be giving many months of advance notice before we flip the switch. We want to allow addon devs as much time as possible to test the changes, report issues and provide feedback. We will be announcing the landing place for these changes well ahead of time and taking steps to maximize the amount of hands-on feedback from addon developers before the changes go live.
Addons provide a huge amount of value to our players, and we have no intention of banning them or anything like that. We are aiming to cause the least amount of collateral damage possible to addons when these changes go live. We know there will be some unintended fallout for addons that are not directly targeted by these changes, but we will be actively taking steps to minimize that damage as much as possible. Your feedback here is vital, since you obviously know best which APIs you currently use and for what purpose.
Likewise, we aim to minimize the impact on accessibility addons as much as possible. Functionality in this space which is no longer possible after these changes are things we will aim to incorporate into our base game.
We have seen speculation that we are primarily targeting RWF guilds with these changes. While it is true that Mythic raiding has become increasingly reliant on addons, that is not the primary goal of this project. We are embarking on this project with the aim of leveling the playing field and making the game more approachable for all players. Currently, addons are able to analyze and "solve" combat and coordination mechanics perfectly, and faster than would be possible for an unassisted human player. While many players will naturally seek out any advantage, this also means that players who don't use these addons are at a huge disadvantage. Many players end up feeling excluded from competitive content unless they install, set up, and maintain a number of addons. This is a significant barrier to entry, and we have heard growing feedback over the years from players who resent feeling like they need addons to play the game properly. This project is about doing everything we can to shrink that gap, by building up the baseline functionality of the default UI, while also reining in the "optimal problem-solving" capabilities of the addon API.
We will also be making substantial changes to how we design our combat and encounters to accompany these addon changes. Removing the ability for addons to "solve" most encounter mechanics means that we can also take a different approach to the design of our encounters going forward. The same goes for certain class mechanics. The goal is to make our class mechanics more approachable and easier to understand without addon solutions. If everything goes to plan, WoW will remain challenging, but the nature of that challenge will be less about managing subtleties of class mechanics and more about collaborating with allies and interacting with encounters.
There are a number of significant additions and updates to our UI that will go along with these changes. We have already announced that we will be adding a built-in damage meter and making improvements to our nameplates, but that is by no means the extent of our planned changes. The goal is for our base UI to provide players with a good portion of the most important combat information addons currently provide. Most of this functionality will ship at the same time as these addon restrictions, if not sooner. Furthermore, this is an ongoing process: we intend to keep this line of communication open after the restrictions are put in place, and we will continue to listen, iterate, and improve our offerings in subsequent patches.
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