It might not stun you to learn that when we found out that World of Warcraft is adding a new rotation assistance tool into the game, MOP’s Bree immediately said to me, “So the column for tomorrow is about this, right?” And I informed her immediately that no, it wasn’t, because my column for tomorrow (that is, today) would be about how the developers are also removing the functionality that empowers the general class of what I call Raid Garbage Addons. Actually, what I call them is less charitable than that, but it involves cussin’, so we’re going with that name.
This category of addon is something that the game has long not only permitted but been tacitly encouraged by the developers. The developers knew full well the whole time that players relied upon these modifications in order to take part in progression, and so rather than designing fights that didn’t need them, they designed fights that absolutely needed them. Which is a bad thing. And also, as now demonstrated, it was something that they could and now will fix.
Let me be clear about something: These addons are, and always have been, bad. Not in the sense that there is some moral component to using them or not, but in the sense that they break the fundamental balance state of how the game is supposed to be played. Instead of a scenario where you could have this additional guidance or not, the fights were designed assuming you had this additional guidance, thereby bypassing making the mechanics readable or enjoyable.
It hasn’t been so long since I wrote a whole article about a video that made me angry insisting that the developers don’t get to tell players what to do in this regard. Because, y’know, it’s an obvious lie. Developers have their hands on the scales. If Blizzard had wanted these mods to not exist, literally the only thing they ever had to do was make these mods no longer function – you know, the thing that is actually happening now. And this is a good thing.
Because the best time to turn these mods off was years ago, but the second best time is now.
I have used the same line about housing, and there’s a reason for it. The fact is that this shouldn’t be a discussion. It is not a good thing if someone creates a mod saying “don’t figure out the mechanics, just follow the bouncing ball to where you should stand,” and it is a worse thing if the designers decide that the Bouncing Ball Mod is sacrosanct so design around players using it. That shouldn’t have been all right as far back as Warlords of Draenor, but the fact is that even though we have that a decade in the rearview, you can still make the right call now.
“Ah, but they’re also going to be baking some of this functionality into the core UI!” you reply. “Aren’t you mad about that, then? Aren’t you mad that they’re adding a rotational assistant tool? Isn’t your objection that these addons reduce skill?”
To which the answer to all of the above is… no. Like, no, that’s not my objection in the first place, and no, I think the idea of adding in a rotational assistant feature is great. That is absolutely a thing that should happen.
Look, I have been playing this game for a very long time, and complaints about Blizzard wanting to redesign a spec every single expansion have been going on basically forever. (Accurately, for the record.) If you haven’t played a spec in a bit, it is a good thing to get a quick primer on how to play it to a certain extent. You turn on an assistant, you get guidance, you then can turn it back off once you feel at least moderately confident.
I have seen people very, very ridiculously claim that this is a problem with WoW’s specs being bloated and requiring too many buttons. This complaint made me laugh until I passed out for several minutes. The majority of WoW specs have a complexity level below that of several City of Heroes powersets. Calling that “bloated” and complaining that this is “dumbing things down” requires a number of cognitive conflicts that I don’t know how to even start disassembling. It’s perfectly fine if people can just get this guidance in the game, full stop, and when most of your specs require regularly hitting four buttons max, I just don’t see a problem with it.
But there’s also the fact that the problem here isn’t inherently just a buzzword like “complexity” because I can at least understand the brainworms that come in when you think that adding a guide to rotations is bad but removing progression raiding tools is also bad even though one makes it easier to unpack something and the other makes it harder to match mechanics. But both of them serve the same ultimate purpose of reducing a gap between players and making the game more approachable as a thing in and of itself.
As it stands right now, there is a marked difference between players who look up guides, install every progression addon and WeakAuras and so forth, and people who just want to log in and play the game. The fact is that those addons don’t actually make the raids any easier or harder because the raids are designed with their existence in mind to start with. But they do make actually playing that content less about playing the game in itself and more about doing what the add-on tells you to do.
It’s like playing a linear adventure game with a walkthrough printed out from the start. Sure, you can do that, but what’s the point? You’re not proving anything other than your ability to press a sequence of keys when you’re told to press that exact sequence of keys.
Making an interesting fight wherein the mechanics are readable on a player level without requiring an addon saying “HEY, THIS MECHANIC REQUIRES YOU TO DO THIS” means that you get to play the game. Having guidance for your rotation built-in means that you don’t have to just hope you get it right and then bristle when it turns out you were wrong once you look up further information. This reduces the gap between these things and places more emphasis on playing the game instead of looking up tools for the game.
And these are good things. Oh, sure, there are still scads of things that I can point to as being problems with the game’s current design, but in many ways it’s an extension of the same philosophy that has been at least theoretically guiding Delves. Sure, it’s not half as good a system as just proper deterministic gear, but it’s an acknowledgment that the game should be rewarding more than just one specific group of players who happen to indulge in the developers’ favorite personal pastime in the game.
So yeah, all of these changes are good. We should be happy about it. Sure, some of these are changes that should have happened a long time ago, but they are happening now, and that’s the time when things can actually change.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti for new installments of WoW Factor as they examine the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
