No, you’ll need an addon to reskin it - but this is gonna be the kinds of addons that will continue to work.
The majority that plays the game, if it is not broken don’t fix it, what they should be doing is making it easier to update addons and have their own workshop like the steam workshop for example but on battle.net client.
Addons do not automate play and that is against the eula anyway, they at most help raiders collectors and so on we also do not need to track all buffs we only need to track a few as a tank having weak auras is very helpful as there to many things happening all the time, i do not mind of they tone that down the things happening not the addons.
I have also used elvui for years and tukui even longer before that.
lel you mean gut their addon to a point it’s not recognisable anymore, btw hows your turbo boost thing going? managed to do a normal run for once?
Youre in for a rude awakening after you will no longer be able to blame people of cheating. If there are still any players for you to play with that is.
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Wait until he realizes that Blizzard develops their own version of DBM and Details.
Is he a filthy cheater too when midnight is live?
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Im gone be verry pissed if elvui goes away and my ui will be crap because blizz has no clue what they are doing.
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The shareholders don’t have any internal knowledge to demand more then ‘growth’ and ‘ai stuff’ and other things that trend on their social media feeds.
You have to understand, shareholders are the reason corpo speak exists. They’re a different breed of human.
They should absolutely get bullied out of the developers room tho
I think in this case Blizzard is actually being introspective, maybe because shareholders gave an ultimatum? possibly, but I don’t think the shareholders themselves said ‘purge the addons’, they probably don’t even know what an addon is.
I want to try and give a prespective from a software engineer with experience both using the Addon API and the WebAPI on what is actually happening.
I cannot speak to how ElvUI or other similar addons are built, i’ve not checked or seen their source code.
However, in general, the change blizzard is making is very typical industry change.
IOS and Android make similar changes to their SDKs, Store requirements and APIs every 5 or so years that require some significant re-writes to meet the new requirements.
The older an application or piece of software is, the likely the harder it will be to ‘upgrade’.
Especially if the addon started as a hobby project, there’s a good chance the foundation has been ‘patched’ over the years and thus a big API change like this can fundamentally affect how the add-on works and require significant rework.
Add in the fact that the API changes are in Alpha, subject to a lot of changes, you’re working against a moving target.
This can be frustrating - and ElvUI has only said it is on ‘pause’ until the API is more stable so they know what they’re working against.
But if ElvUI had a lot of functionality that was tied to reading in-combat information, yeah those whole aspects need to be written to be a ‘theme provider’ rather than a more generic component that reads and then displays the information.
The truth of the matter
What blizzard is doing is technically common practise and the goal to make sure addons cannot read combat state does mean significant rewrites.
However as add-ons like BigWigs has shown, which is already supporting Midnight, with a good solid code foundation it’s not a huge ton of work.
In the case of Weak-auras that was entirely combat log driven as the ‘core’ of it’s functionality, It’ll need to re-structure itself a lot.
Same with Damage Meters, they’ll need to go from ‘logic based’ to ‘presential based’ and that is a shift, and some might not want to do it anymore.
The feelings
This process can be frustrating, but building software ontop of another service, such as Facebook, Instagram, Game APIs, Game SDKs and even some game engines, means you’re tieing your work to the whims of the service and tools you consume.
Emotionally it’s frustrating at times, i’ve personally had this happened to me in a professional setting a few times.
But that is always the risk of this model and blizzard (in my opinion) is going in the right direction for it’s users.
Thanks for the perspective, I found that interesting! To me, it seems one key difference though is that in most cases tools are build on some API to deliver a product to earn money. In this case, it seems reasonable to put in the work to cope with a huge API change.
By contrast, add-on developers provide augmentations to WoW for free and have, in many cases, helped Blizz to get away with minimal effort. The motivation in this case to make the needed effort might understandably be quite different.
Do we know if X-perl (now Z-perl) are also gettng removed and gutted?
I think you all are severely underestimating how limited currently the API is. Dont take blizzard’s word for granted and listen to the addon devs, its not that they dont want, its that they cant. For example, remember all those addons who reskinned holy power or combo points? As of things stand right now you cant customize even that, because personal resources are secret.
“But blizzard will eventually expand their API” “Its just the alpha”, those are all just empty words. You cant code an addon based on promises.
In the own words from an oUF dev:
Auras on the unit frames are another thing. They’re completely cooked. People have been complaining about auras on the default/blizz target frames for ages now, that they’re hard to read, that there’s no filtering, etc. But atm we can’t even make anything that’s ON PAR with that atrocity. And due to the new limitations our version would perform SO MUCH worse despite having basically no features whatsoever.
The same applies to sooooo many other things like health, power, classpower, etc.
People keep bringing up “ion said this, ion said that”, “combat APIs this, combat APIs that”, “customisation will be possible!”. In reality to customise things you need to do some maths under the hood, but we can’t do any of that now because all the needed values are secrets, we can’t read them, we can’t alter them, we can’t react to them. The only thing we can do is to pass them around as a hot potato.
All in all, it’s not about the time and effort, we simply no longer have the tools to do the things we want to do
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Sadly this is not 2000s Blizzard… just look at how bad the Warband Bank API is. A new, core feature with basically no way to finetune the way you transfer items to and from it.
There are a ton of free apps in the IOS and Android store, which also do not sell ads, that also need to respect the changes of platforms they support.
Game Mod SDKs change and sometimes in breaking ways for modding communities etc.
I think the core issue(s) for some add-on developers is the emotional toll of this change, which i fully get.
- They either built something and spent a lot of time on it, but now need to re-write it (maybe partially their own fault, some parts not)
- The problem they solved is now being addressed by blizzard and removes the need of their add-on.
Quite a few modders had patreon supports, so this also affects their income in some way.
A slightly different story
around 8 or more years ago their web API changes drastically, to cover privacy concerns but also authentication and endpoint usage.
A ton of services like Guilds of WoW (but not including it) needed to re-structure their entire syncing mechanism.
These things just happen, usually for good reason, but unlike previous changes, this is more in-sight, but also more miss-understood by a % of the community.
So i hope my input and insight help in some way, but again, cannot speak on behalf of any addon developers currently affected.
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