When World of Warcraft announced that it would be taking steps to phase out several addons that Blizzard felt became mandatory for raid progression, it brought some mixed reaction, though our own Eliot celebrated the idea. Clearly it’s a hot button topic, and so it’s brought forth director Ion Hazzikostas to elaborate on these goals further in an interview.
Hazzikostas makes a variety of things clear about Blizzard’s plan – namely, that addons like quest helpers, gathering aids, and RP-specific mods aren’t the target, and that this will be a gradual process where things like combat log or aura hooks aren’t being removed in 11.1.7 or even 11.2. It’s more about starting a “philosophical kickoff” and opening a dialogue with the community, particularly since addon use has been A Thing in the MMORPG for years.
“This is not us setting out to smash a bunch of add-ons. The way we’re approaching it is, ‘What’s the least collateral damage that we can cause while addressing this issue?’ The goal is to build up the native functionality of our UI to increasingly narrow the gap between players who are using add-ons that assist with competitive functions and those who are not.”
Most of what’s discussed is focused on working in tandem with addon developers, tuning its UI features even if they’re not quite as good as some addons, and improving the readability of raid mechanics such that addons will be unnecessary. As for what addon functionality will be targeted, that will include those that track group cooldowns, incoming heals, diminishing returns on stuns, and specialized buffs or debuffs; again Hazzikostas admits that many of these features should be part of the UI by default.
Ultimately this is about a tightrope walk between mechanical conveyance and maintaining encounter challenge, all while ensuring player clear rates for harder content remains the same. “Part of the goal of mechanics is to create a problem that needs to be solved and a bit of challenge that feels satisfying once you overcome it,” Hazzikostas explains. “The goal is [to make] a world where the problems are, once again, in players’ own flesh-and-blood hands to solve, not an algorithm that they’ve downloaded.”
