World of Warcraft: Midnight will be doing something very dramatic—slowly, steadily, but dramatic nonetheless. After 20 years of working in complete concert, Blizzard will be removing most of its AddOn creator’s access to its combat API, meaning AddOns like WeakAuras will no longer function.
In place of that, it’ll be adding its own increasingly-comprehensive suite of tools, such as a cooldown manager, buff tracker, and a more customisable personal resource bar. But one lingering thought has been rattling around in the back of my head: is Blizzard just swapping out one arms race for another?
If we take Final Fantasy 14, for example, user interface AddOns are completely against the terms of service—and in common enough use that they routinely scupper World First races.
During a group interview in a recent summit for the expansion, I asked game director Ion Hazzikostas whether or not Blizzard was concerned about AddOn authors simply creating third-party tools that go against the terms of service anyway. After all, if you draw a line in the sand, there’s gonna be people who walk over it.
Hazzikostas was remarkably collected about the idea, though: “We’ve approached this in a couple of ways. Part of it is making sure that we are offering robust versions of the most desired functionalities that aren’t harmful.”
He uses damage meters as an example of the ground Blizzard wants to cover—and, indeed, Midnight will be getting an officially-sanctioned DPS gauge: “In certain other games where none of this is allowed, players still want a way to seek out how to display damage in real-time on their screen so they can track their own performance, compete with their friends. That’s just fun. We want to make sure we have that functionality in the base game, so there’s no need to look to circumvent our rules to do it.”
When it comes to cheaters, though? “We have rules for a reason. Frankly, this is far from the first time that we’ve restricted AddOn functionality. And going back 20 years, players used to be able to use AddOns like Decursive, where you could just hit a single button and it would intelligently target and dispel players in your raid based on various heuristics. We broke that functionality.”
From what I can find, Decursive did indeed have its functionality kneecapped back in 2.0, the patch for The Burning Crusade. In this summary I was able to find, based on a since-taken-down post to the WoW forums, a lot of major API changes were made so that certain mods—including the old one-click Decursive—were no longer supported.
As for pesky cheaters, “if players are using third-party tools or actually trying to modify the client to get around these rules, that will come with account action, and unfortunately, we’ll have to ban players who do that. We hope it doesn’t come to it, but our goal really is to make sure that we’re offering everything you need to have a great baseline experience in the default client.
“And yeah, for those who are looking to cheat for a competitive advantage, there will be consequences.”
I want to emphasise that Hazzikostas didn’t come off as antagonistic towards the UI community, here. Some AddOn developers will be invited to Midnight’s Alpha Tests to help make sure they’re in the clear on incoming changes, and are able to work with Blizzard on which functionalities will and won’t remain.
“We have been in ongoing communication with the add on author community over the last six months,” Hazzikostas explains. “It’s a very tight-knit relationship between the engineering team in particular, on our UI side over here, and our AddOn author community … They’re constantly going back and forth about how to best provide the support that we’re all looking to provide together for the player experience.”
Ultimately, it’s a collaboration that Blizzard wants to continue “in full swing going forward.” While I still have my residual doubts, it does seem like the developer’s heading is pointed in the right direction—though I do still fear it’s entering an arms race, it’s got no chance of winning for good.
Mind, this is an MMO. There’ll always be someone wanting to flaunt the rules—and if Blizzard can improve its core functionality, I reckon WoW might just be better off for it.
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