Countless people designing/developing/testing/improving thousands of addons for a plethora of uses
Blizzard:
Has a team of maybe a dozen people working on the UI improvements
Has a deadline of 6 months give or take until next expansion
Has no good channel to collect feedback and communicate effectively with the community
Has history of putting out mediocre features in their game, that over months/years are iterated and made better.
The timeframe is just not feasible to remove all addons and provide a good enough product that does not make the game worse for thousands of players. The projectâs scope is just too big for the way they want to go about it.
So there are 3 possible scenarios:
They backtrack completely and do not remove any functionality until they and the community is happy with the default features the game has (highly unlikely they go this way).
They go through with most of the changes that they put in the alpha (with effects worse than that of shadowlands, with many players just leaving the game due to it not offering the same things as before).
They go back on a plethora of things they removed in alpha, resulting in giving back much of the functionality we lost, but using the new technology they introduced in order to better control what addons can do and cannot do in the game.
I can somewhat understand (even tho I disagree) the removal of combat addons, but Iâll be sad if they also decide to purge UI addons that people have been using since 2007.
Majority of UI addons will be purged. No nameplates, no damage meters. So since no nameplates, no unit frames. No buff debuff tracking, use their garbage cd tracker.
The problem isnât them being removed per se, itâs the time frame. They say they want to replicate the functionality of these popular addons in the base UI, but all these addons are projects contributed to over decades by hundreds of people and they want to replicate all of it in <6 months by a UI team of maybe two dozen people? Itâs just not possible. It will be half baked and will feel awful. Just look at the cooldown manager, itâs still not an ok replacement for the base functionality of weakauras, and itâs been out for a year, tons of feedback about âAdd this, we want it to do Xâ and nothing has been added to the game.
And UI is something that does not need to be coded into the game? Or maybe an âaddon featureâ does not need to be designed, developed, and tested before going live, which all takes time?
A good example is the cooldown manager. The functionality was introduced in 11.1.5, they were aware of the feedback given that there was no customization and it was lackluster. An addon was available within 1 day that gave you the ability to customize it as much as the game let you. Now, 6 months later, they are adding the functionality to be able to customize the cooldown tracker.
So they put out 1 feature (cooldown tracker), and for its CUSTOMIZATION, they needed 6 months to give a good version, that an addon addressed in the first days.
So how much time will it take blizz to fix everything that they will break unintentionally?
It took them almost an entire year to add the functionality of choosing the buttons on the cooldown manager
Zero display options, zero visual cues, zero modifiers like outlines, flashing, zero sound alerts, zero splitting apart the buttons and moving them around as you please. One feature, of one UI element, took almost an entire year, after mountains of feedback.
Addons iterate fast because itâs a handful of devs that work independent of the big machine that is blizzard, broken features can get fixed and pushed the next day. This is evidently not the case for blizzard.
And as the cherry on top, they are not trying to replicate ONE FEATURE, they are trying to replicate the ENTIRETY of all UI addon functionality people rely on, that has been building up over decades, in <6 months.
Itâs just impossible, there are not enough hours in a day to make it happen.
The game will be more fun to play for 99% of the existing players and it will even attract new players.
Blizzard have stated multiple times that they will not remove addons completely and that they appreciate addons existing for things like RP, or addons that only make purely visual changes to the base UI.
That addon only made some very small improvements to the Cooldown Manager, such as allowing abilities to be reordered. The new updated Cooldown Managers that will come out in 11.2.5 next week adds a way more than just ability-reordering, and it will be robust and user-friendly.
True, but it also means the quality will be questionable and things will be more broken after every patch. When the UI is made by Blizzard, Blizzard will be responsible and they will test their UI. I know Blizzard QA gets a lot of lately, but I canât remember the last time the default Blizzard UI had bugs.
Not true. Blizzard is not trying to replicate all WeakAura, Details, Plater, and Hekili features. They are focusing on important features that most players need. Theyâre not going to replicate WeakAuras as a mini-addon development platform. Theyâre not going to include Detailsâ in-depth log analysis and comparison features or streamer UI features. Theyâre not going to give us Platerâs 1000 custom nameplate options and custom scripting. Theyâre not going to give us Hekiliâs ability to show the next N buttons, support for trinkets/interrupts/defensives, toggles for abilities you donât want to have suggested, or toggles for major/minor CDs so you donât waste them near the end of a trash mob pack.
I currently play with Northern Skyâs WeakAuras for raids and Tarithalâs for M+. And I also use Hekili. But Iâm using those WAs/addons not because I want to, but because the game is so hard and convoluted at the moment that itâs basically impossible for me to play a lot of specs competitively with the base UI. Iâm very happy that those âcybernetic enhancementsâ, as one of the WoW devs calls them, are being removed, and that theyâll simplify classes and encounters a bit to compensate the difficulty.
As it stands theyâre not even giving players 0.1% of any of these addons. Their nameplates have zero customization as to shape, size, colors, padding, transparency, or toggle options. Their cooldown manager is two FIXED unsplittable, uncustomizable, unchangeable blocks of buttons all of equal size, where your only option is to remove or add buttons to this block
If it is an attempt at recreating âtheirâ version of these addons, itâs a very half baked attempt, because it has not even one iota of the customization people love about UI addons that can make a UI suit their preference.
It would be more honest for them to just remove it all and go âWe donât want you to customize your UI at all, itâs supposed to look one way for everyone regardless of preferenceâ. That would be more honest.
Are you talking about 11.2.0? If so, well yeah, of course the current state isnât complete. The new Blizzard combat addon replacement features (Cooldown Manager, Boss Warnings, Damage Meters) are mostly scheduled for Midnight.
The 11.2.5 Cooldown Manager weâre getting next week has 4 panels: essential cooldowns, utility cooldowns, tracked buffs, and tracked bars. The buffs they show, their size, position, opacity, etc. is customizable.
That is something, but itâs not replacing what weakauras does, or any cooldown manager for that matter. Given you cannot still customize triggers, visibility, separate them one and one, add visual effects, rename, change the icons or names, or anything of the sort.
Yes, it is blocks of fixed buttons you can click add or remove to, that is again not a sufficient replacement for current tracking addons like omnibar or weakauras.
Disagree. Making a good UI is an art. Platerâs options UI is an absolute train wreck. Itâs powerful and gives you 1000 options, but thatâs not what most gamers want. Most gamers just want to play the freaking game. So âjust replicatingâ Plater is luckily not Blizzardâs goal.
The hard part of designing a good UI is understanding what most users need and making it easy for them to solve their problem. The current Blizzard nameplates are obviously crap, and Plater makes it possible to have some really great nameplates, but itâs much too complicated to set up because it exposes way too many options. So Blizzard is working on finding out whatâs actually important and focusing on that.
fascinating exhibit of someone with 0 self awareness
lately, but I canât remember the last time the default Blizzard UI had bugs.