What the heck is happening with my WoW addons in Midnight?

Blizzard told us when the trilogy of expansions comprising The War Within, Midnight, and The Last Titan, that they would be over time replacing and blocking third party addons that perform computational actions as combat helpers. In their original announcement they told us the ability to skin the interface would remain intact and that they would move slowly and carefully — but that isn’t how things are now proceeding. The community response has been largely extremely negative.

Where did we come from, and how did we get here?

Addons have been around since the release of retail World of Warcraft. When I started playing at launch in 2004, the friends that introduced me to the game did so while also telling me to install several addons — which included Titan Panel, Quartz, OmniCC, and a damage meter. When we started raiding Molten Core we installed more addons, including boss mods and tools that contained the screen space that displayed gameplay because most of us were running computers that couldn’t process the spell effects that filled our screens, so sections behind chat windows and raid frames and damage meters were all blacked out to preserve processing power. Long term players would remember installing addons like Atlas because Warcraft didn’t originally ship with instance maps — these were only added in Wrath of the Lich King. Another early addon replacement was the scrolling combat text functionality.

The WoW developers have certainly been thinking about addon replacements for a long time, the better part of a decade or more. For many people the Cooldown Manager, intended to replace common WeakAura class rotation assistants was the first element they tackled, but in reality this is an acceleration of a journey they have been on for a very long time.

They have spoken for years about how raid encounter design has to take into account that some players — most those in hardcore cutting edge guilds, will be using highly optimized UIs to automate much of the on the fly assignment and positioning decision making. On the DBM discord we have a long standing text command for people asking us to add positioning information that reads out “Blizzard hates radars” after the ability to detect your location within an instance was blocked in 2016. Part of the justification for removing computational addons is it allows them to create a more diverse range of encounters and levels the playfield for new or casual players who may not know where to get or how to configure the suite of addons used today by high end raiders, Mythic+ pumpers or ranked PVP veterans.

After the recent announcement regarding the plans to make the future Xbox even more like computers, World of Warcraft has been mentioned as in the mix for the console in the future. The idea that had previously been treated as a joke looks like becoming a reality, and WoW may be getting streamlined with the intention of making it console ready.

Where are we with addons now?

The development team have learned from experiments with baked in scrolling battle text and the cooldown manager that many users will continue to use the third party tools if they are still available. The most effective way to find out how well your tool actually works is to perform a Scream Test: turn off the old system and see if anyone complains about missing functionality.  After trying to move away slowly, they have gone into alpha testing for Midnight swinging wildly in the other direction, turning off many functions that most of the well know addons rely on — the most significant of these is the use of ‘secret’ containers that will display parses of data sent from the Blizzard servers instead of it being processed from the combat log in addons on the client device. 

One of the key attributes of a scream test is that you have to be able to turn the function back on if someone does scream for a valid reason, but that assumes you control the service to be able to turn it back on. When you are dependent on volunteer third parties, this may not always be possible. This applies to both Blizzard and the addon ecosystem generally, and for the large addon authors themselves who rely on external libraries for their addons to function.

Libraries are small pieces of code that perform a specific function that are available for any addon author to use instead of needing to code that function themselves. Some of the popular libraries include Ace3, DataStore, LibSharedMedia, and Masque. These components sit there invisible to most players doing a lot of the heavy lifting for addon authors. They do much of the integration to the Blizzard APIs in a way that allows smaller developers to produce addons without needing to solve those interactions.

As someone who has been a moderator on the DBM discord for probably close on a decade now, I can tell you from experience that many users have a very incorrect and entitled view of addon authors. Under the Blizzard terms and conditions, you cannot charge to use an addon, so addon authors have to either write and maintain their addons in their spare time, or find other ways to fund it. For large well known suites like DBM, BigWigs, WeakAuras, ElvUI, etc., they have Patreons which supporters can donate to support the authors, for who this is effectively a full time job. For many of these larger, more complex tools, they have teams who are responsible for coding, shaping new feature requests, testing, UI design and management — they are entire development teams. And then they have moderators to manage their ‘customer support’ channels, because people can be awful sometimes. We routinely get aggressive and abusive messages about decisions Blizzard made that inconvenienced someone.

With a large chunk of their core functionality being blocked, a number of major addon authors have decided it’s not worth the grief to continue. If their addon is not going to provide value to users, they rightly assume fewer users will be downloading them, and even fewer will stay subscribed to the Patreon accounts. Without the income to pay their costs they need another revenue source, which means less time to spend on the addons they have been supporting. Some of the high profile addons who have announced they will be retiring, at least for retail, include WeakAuras and ElvUI. There will undoubtedly be others over the next several months.

Once these developers walk away, getting them back won’t be easy — or potentially possible at all. Because ultimately they know that even if Blizzard wanted them to come back and cover gaps now, their days are numbered.

What comes next with addons in Midnight?

Blizzard have said they know they yanked the leash hard on the alpha launch. They have said that as they get feedback they will reassess what functions they may allow through. Many people have been providing well thought out and constructive feedback around particularly accessibility issues created by these changes. The forum responses from Blizzard have been somewhat comforting so far — it suggests they are listening, but what will ship is yet to be seen.

The next few months of beta testing will give us a much better idea how radical these changes will be. Most people who are complaining are not doing so having tried the new simplified rotations or differences in the encounter design philosophy. Blizzard have made some initial changes based on feedback around the Rotation Assistant configuration, which is a move in the right direction — only time will tell if they will make enough changes to for people to be generally happy.

The screenshots previously provided are clear and show their design intent. They also show the option to choose different display skins that we have not yet seen. We also haven’t see how accommodating it will be to reskin using external addons — something they have committed to, within limits.

Change is necessary for WoW to survive, and addon authors need to choose for themselves what the best option for themselves will be. Some may chose to adapt for their current addons, like DBM and BigWigs are doing, others may chose to retire as addon author or build something entirely different. We will have to wait and see.