How would raiding change if addons were restricted during World First?

Addons in World of Warcraft have been a hot-button topic for a long time. Many WoW players are addon purists, either because they want to experience the game exactly as it was created, or they simply don’t want the hassle of managing settings and keeping them up-to-date. On the opposite side of the spectrum, many mythic and raiding teams require a certain set of base addons just to participate.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how we got to this point (one video in particular comes to mind), and the arms race which seems to exist between addon developers and raid designers in every new expansion. It’s no wonder people complain that casual players can’t clear a raid at all anymore, not even when it’s two expansions out of date.

It almost makes you wonder if it’s sustainable at all. Wouldn’t banning addons altogether force Blizzard to rein in some of the more unmanageable mechanics and make raids accessible again?

Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Completely aside from the hundreds of quality-of-life addons that players have developed to make tedious tasks simpler, World of Warcraft has some very spotty coverage when it comes to accessibility, especially for blind users. (Have you ever tried to activate the native text-to-speech features? You can’t even turn them all on without sighted help!)

Blind accessibility addons like SKU and BlindSlash rely heavily upon some of the features Blizzard has recently tried to restrict in an attempt to curb bot activity, such as target distance and longer macro functionality. They’ve backed off each time, aware that breaking these addons without providing native support would put them on shaky legal ground.

Clearly, banning addons altogether is never going to happen, but could there be a compromise? What if we could curb this arms race by restricting addon use for all World First participants instead? Would it solve the problem, or just provide a novel mousetrap for the mouse to outsmart?