Should they just break addons?

[Branflakes6000]

What the fuck? You want class Discords to be paywalled?

I've seen some dumb shit suggested in my day but... wow.

Not what I said. Class discords are way too big to not have leaks. What I imagined when he said "in-groups" was a much smaller group of the best theorycrafters, likely being paid to help with world first guilds. Theorycrafting is a skill that requires experience, other skills are known to be paid for in WoW, but sims and data aggregation nullifies that skill.

[Velerios]

Not what I said. Class discords are way too big to not have leaks. What I imagined when he said "in-groups" was a much smaller group of the best theorycrafters, likely being paid to help with world first guilds. Theorycrafting is a skill that requires experience, other skills are known to be paid for in WoW, but sims and data aggregation nullifies that skill.

And what exactly has this to do with addons: sims and data aggregation will exist with or without addons, that's for sure.

[Branflakes6000]

And what exactly has this to do with addons: sims and data aggregation will exist with or without addons, that's for sure.

Some wanted to engage me about what I said earlier, I'm just continuing that discussion.

[Velerios]

then just dont play with addons?

I think that's the concluding sentence of this thread. Just don't use addon's, it's as simple as that: i would personally not play without them. (when i start to play again, maybe next week if my mood is good again after the disaster of SL; but this has definitively NOTHING to do with addons)

[Relapses]

Not what I said. Class discords are way too big to not have leaks. What I imagined when he said "in-groups" was a much smaller group of the best theorycrafters, likely being paid to help with world first guilds. Theorycrafting is a skill that requires experience, other skills are known to be paid for in WoW, but sims and data aggregation nullifies that skill.

lmfao and where do you think that information will end up the millisecond somebody from the "in-group" leaks it? Get out of here man. Information is free. It's the internet in God's year two thousand twenty two.

[Biomega]

Cliques hoarding information, was that really a big problem before simming? You'd think the same people hoarding information would also keep sim updates or simming in general to themselves instead of making it open source. Let's say it is true, I think that would be cool. Imagine paying gold for information from one of these hoarders.

Ultimately it's a design choice that I'm not sure Blizzard consciously made. It shortens the lifespan of content, weakens the community, and discourages individuals from theorycrafting.

This is one of the weirdest, most poorly thought-out takes on this topic I've ever seen.

[Branflakes6000]

lmfao and where do you think that information will end up the millisecond somebody from the "in-group" leaks it? Get out of here man. Information is free. It's the internet in God's year two thousand twenty two.

Someone paying for information then immediately making it public is a nice robin hood fantasy, but that would be rare. In addition, every patch and every balance hotfix brings something new to theorycraft.

- - - Updated - - -

This is one of the weirdest, most poorly thought-out takes on this topic I've ever seen.

This is one of the weirdest, most poorly thought-out responses I've ever seen.

[LedZeppelin]

Id like 1 season where they break all non UI mods but i feel at this point players would just use something external. I get it, quake pros can track the timing of power ups in their head, etc etc. I think there is more room for this in the pvp arena but i think the people who are good at pvp now will also be good at pvp without the addons. they are good because of their choices and communication, not because they know hoj is off cd in 5 seconds. Only thing that would it make harder is DR tracking i think.

for pve it definitely wouldnt work because those encounters are tuned around players having addons.so it would have to be new content. Although nothing lasts forever. What if these dbm/bigwigs people retired or left? What would the game look like then?

[Biomega]

What if these dbm/bigwigs people retired or left?

Someone would take over, or making something similar. Nothing about it is proprietary or difficult to replicate in any way. The only way these addons would ever "disappear" is if Blizzard changes something to no longer make them work - which is unlikely to ever happen. WoW's addons are a positive selling point for many people, despite the misgivings of some parts of the community.

[Stormdash]

They don't need to break add-ons generally, but they need to be more proactive about just taking the ideas from them and building them into the game, like they did with OQueue which is the basis of our current party finder in retail. And once they occupy the field, as it were, for a certain type of add-on, then they can modify the API to close down the rest. So there is DBM, it's just integrated to the game. Would also be its own way to tune/adjust encounters, by restricting and enabling how in-game DBM can be used.

[pahbi]

I don't mind addons, but I feel like the entire game, including the most difficult content, should be playable without addons.

The cynical side of me wonders how much money blizz has saved over the years by basically farming out their UI development to the fan base.

[Celement]

Someone would take over, or making something similar. Nothing about it is proprietary or difficult to replicate in any way. The only way these addons would ever "disappear" is if Blizzard changes something to no longer make them work - which is unlikely to ever happen. WoW's addons are a positive selling point for many people, despite the misgivings of some parts of the community.

They kind of are disappearing in mythic. People prefer wa over traditional boss modes in mythic.

[Biomega]

They kind of are disappearing in mythic. People prefer wa over traditional boss modes in mythic.

That's a gross exaggeration. WAs are used extensively, but usually in conjunction with boss mods; not instead of. Both of the top mythic guilds make copious use of boss mods, too.

WAs are a long way from replacing boss mods, largely because they work in very similar ways. And I did say people would just make "something similar" - I doubt the specific addons DBM or BW are going to disappear anytime soon, but even if they did, that KIND of addon (under whatever name/brand) would never go away.

[minteK917]

Any add on that warn or solves boss.mechanics for the player should be removed period. If the fights are too hard without it, its a design flaw in the fight itself not giving proper warnings or not being intuitive enough to understand visually or by sound. Most of the add ones are simply a way to blizzard to be lazy with their own interface and game design. Aldo difficulty =/= quality.

[Bladesyphon]

Cliques hoarding information, was that really a big problem before simming? You'd think the same people hoarding information would also keep sim updates or simming in general to themselves instead of making it open source. Let's say it is true, I think that would be cool. Imagine paying gold for information from one of these hoarders.

Ultimately it's a design choice that I'm not sure Blizzard consciously made. It shortens the lifespan of content, weakens the community, and discourages individuals from theorycrafting.

I've lived those days in older MMOs that I played when I was younger, back when we had garbage sites like Allakhazam as our best use of information. They sucked then, and they would suck now. I'm glad to see that part of the MMO experience died along with losing XP. It wasn't fun, it lead to a small percentage of players essentially controlling an entire server's worth of players, and more importantly it lead to the majority of a server or game's population just getting irritated at the controlling population.

The shit never lasted anyways. Eventually whatever information they were hoarding - be it some great XP Camp site, a rare item drop from a specific monster, etc. would always leak out to the general public, and those cliques would either end up vanishing, or find new and creative ways to recreate their monopoly.

It's just poor game design.

[Biomega]

Any add on that warn or solves boss.mechanics for the player should be removed period. If the fights are too hard without it, its a design flaw in the fight itself not giving proper warnings or not being intuitive enough to understand visually or by sound. Most of the add ones are simply a way to blizzard to be lazy with their own interface and game design. Aldo difficulty =/= quality.

While I agree some things that addons do (WA especially) are borderline at this point, I do think that on the whole the existence of addons has IMPROVED fight quality rather than decreased it. Even with addons, some of the more complex mechanics are quite challenging - without addons, you probably couldn't have them.

But that's not even the worst of it. Where addons probably help the most, overall, isn't at the top tier of raiding. It's in the middle to low tiers. Having warnings pop up and timers tick down is of most significant help not to the people who are acutely aware of everything they're doing anyway, but to the people who AREN'T. Which means that if Johnny Casual wants any shot at raiding without a mod that tells them FIRE NOW FIRE BAD every time it happens, fights would need to be dumbed down considerably. The result would be a completely different raiding landscape, where top-end players would quit in droves because they're bored out of their minds.

I agree that WoW could probably improve its UI more, and is disincentivized to do so because addons can take care of that. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact it can be a very good thing, because custom UIs will always be a better fit to an individual experience than one-size-fits-all solutions, even ones that are much better than the current default.

[Stickiler]

I agree that WoW could probably improve its UI more, and is disincentivized to do so because addons can take care of that.

I think it's more than just "disincentivized", it's also that there are so many different variations on the UI. If they were to improve the UI by borrowing from current UI mods, which mods should they borrow from? ElvUI is a popular choice, but personally I can't stand it, I much prefer something like ShadowUnitFrames, but that's not to everyone's liking. I think they could make some small improvements, but I wouldn't want any broad improvements, especially because any kind of sweeping changes would inevitably break UI addons, and would make a lot of work for the developers to fix.

[Maruka]

It feels like a feed back loop at the moment. Addons have so much power to dictate fights that blizzard has to make the encounters super intricate which makes addons more important and more of the focus of the fight.

Id like to see them block a lot of addon functionality and then dial back the insane mechanics slightly to compensate.

[minteK917]

It feels like a feed back loop at the moment. Addons have so much power to dictate fights that blizzard has to make the encounters super intricate which makes addons more important and more of the focus of the fight.

Id like to see them block a lot of addon functionality and then dial back the insane mechanics slightly to compensate.

Its not really that the mechanics are insane, its that the game itself does not justify these mechanics often. This is especially true of mechanics on timer, those just shouldnt be a thing. Make mechanics queue an ingame thing, may it be animation, cast bars/time or hp. Something that is intuitive to gameplay. The only reason those mechanics exist is that we run a bunch of addons telling us when the timers are about to go lol.

They also end up stacking too many mechanics at once, warranting addons. Because you are human and sensory overload is a thing. You can pay attention to like 2-3 things happening at once, when it goes over that you need the addon to warn you. You cant think that many things at once.

Number of mechanic =/= difficulty. All those discussion are about quality of fights. The add ons that warn you about everything makes worse fights, they are fights made for the add ons in mind. Addons that solve for you the sensory overload that shouldnt be in the game. I could make you the hardest fight in all of wow with only 2-3 mechanics and no overload. By simply making them hard to execute and require coordination. Or i could make you an easier fight with 8 overlapping mechanics, and if you had no addon would feel harder. The latter is just a shit fight. The former you will probably feel like you are mastering something upon execution.

[Playintrafic]

Weakauras needs to be annihilated.[/B]

Nah, it just needs to be strongly curtailed.

It was fine when it was just being used to track Cooldowns and procs and stuff.