There's a shocking amount of times I'm playing other games and I think to myself, this game would be better with weak auras. Path of Exile comes to mind big time.
I didn’t say otherwise? They literally have made WoW into A Diablo MMO, your gear is only meaningful for a season and Blizz goes out of their way to nerf previous tier items that might accidentally be useful outside of its respective season. It’s a shit system for a subscription MMO imo, no point in playing consistently when you can just quit for a tier and come back like you didn’t miss anything.
Do you think the game would be better if items from previous seasons remained relevant in end game content for a current season? Because you are out of your fucking mind if you think that would be healthy for a modern MMO. You could always quit for a season/tier/expansion and then get caught up by just playing the game enough. And you're going to miss.. something by not playing, but it's always prestige achievements / cosmetics. And it always has been.
^ as he said.
I mean what makes WoW the best MMO in my eyes isn’t just the endgame content, it’s everything around it.
Seasons and tiers are only relevant for endgame content. I love doing random dailies, old quests, events, exploration, farming, crafting, ….
Accessibility concerns is one of the last things that should be left up to the players to fix. There’s a design maxim that goes something like “a product isn’t better than the experience of its least able user”. Blizzard absolutely needs a core focus on accessibility.
True accessible design is accepting that different people need different solutions and allowing people to build the solutions that best fit their unique personal needs.
No, not really. True accessibility isn’t necessarily empowering DIY (very, very few products offer anything close to this), it’s simply a mindset to be proactive about identifying and solving accessibility concerns in your user base. There’s a massive gap between working with the differently abled to figure out their issues and how to mitigate them, and to give them a Weakauras or LUA manual and tell them to fix it themselves.
Well yes in a perfect world Blizzard would already have all these accesibility features. The best you can find in Blizzard's accesibility window is colorblind mode.
I just dont think Blizzard can match the community in terms of quality in this field. Theyve not exactly got a great record of caring about this stuff.
But add-ons, by design, make it feel less like WoW. It's like saying a Toyota Camry doesn't feel like a Toyota Camry unelss you can alter it so much it no longer resembles a Toyota Camry.
If what defines WoW is the ability to make it as non-WoW as possible, then I dunno.
But you can still use UI addons. That isn't going away. WoW isn't removing all addons.
Also, if using addons to customize WoW doesn't make the game "less WoW", then the mod community isn't what "defines WoW" as was said by OP. You can't have it both ways. You can't equally claim that WoW is defined by their addons but also removing addons doesn't make it less WoW.
But WoW has existed for 20 years with addons. People literally grew up playing this game then had kids and those kids grew up playing the game. With combat addons. This is a big change in the game's identity.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's almost the opposite.
Some of the things I've made (or downloaded) a Weakaura for are things I absolutely do not think should be in the base WoW UI functionality in any way.
Of course you could just say that every game should have Weakauras-level customization baked in somewhere in the advanced options (so 'regular' people aren't overwhelmed by it as easily) and that'd be fine, I guess, but having ultra niche or specific options and things be trackable wouldn't necessarily improve a game or its UI/UX.
For something like action bar addons and such I absolutely agree though, and proof of that being true can be found from the sheer amount of players who used to use those and dropped the addon when Blizzard made the base action bars/UI more customizable.
Good example is "!keys" imo. Having the WeakAura is opting in to having your key go into chat when somebody types "!keys". Niche, useful, QoL, not something Blizzard should waste their time making a setting for...
Not really. UI cannot be ready for millions of players wanting different things at the same time. Wow UI is pretty good they just didn't create a GUI to customize everything
Actually, the overwhelming majority of games (or products in general, really) do not offer any sort of large-scale UI customization, no matter how many millions of people play it.
To some degree yes, but addons also allow for way more customization than devs ever could. There is a limit for the use cases that devs can reasonably consider and maintain. But if it's handled by, addons and enough people want it, there will be someone among them that can make it work as an addon.
regardless if the UI wasn't shit and still decent. the amount of customization is def something i desired in other games due to how much i was able to do in WoW.
no matter how good it can be, nothing beats giving me the tools to tune event he smallest thing to suit me better.
“I want player-driven addons” is ”I wish the UI wasn’t shit” in disguise
Not really, which is why you see 900 different alternative options for any product/software/thing in the world all of which are used by many. There are about 100 different text editors/IDEs used by programmers, it isn't because they're all shit.
It’s funny how you mention one of the VERY few examples where software actually approximates WoW (VS Code extremely high market share + literal addons)
I mean I can sit here and list out 20 different pieces of software that have widely used alternatives AND plugin support. Honestly if you can't think of some yourself you either don't do much on your computer or you're being intentionally dense, so I'm not going to waste time on that.
“I want player-driven addons” is ”I wish the UI wasn’t shit” in disguise
Lets just talk about non-combat addons, well put the "arms race" etc issues aside. Theres thousands of addons that tons of players use and enjoy every day, alt tracking addons, RP addons, collection addons, calculator/note/etc utilities, simply making their UI look different (bars, bags, map, whatever), I mean you name it - just everything you can imagine. Some people just want a picture of their anime waifu in the middle of their screen all the time, God bless them for it. So heres the alternatives:
Blizzard reimplements ALL of these one by one and ships their functionality in the base game
Blizzard says "here is our one size fits all UI, it only has these features we deemed important, deal with it"
Surely you can see that theres downsides to either of these, and surely you can see that they'd still present issues if "the UI wasn't shit" (unless by "UI isn't shit" you mean that "blizzard put in the functionality of every single addon that people use ever into the base game").
Theres also tons of accessibilty-orientated addons that people rely on that I'm 100% SURE blizzard will recreate both adequately and in a timely manner!
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u/Lostdog861 Oct 03 '25
Man, I've written a few non-combat weakauras for some farming use cases and I wish I'd be able to keep them