World of Warcraft's add-on changes aren't over: 'There will doubtless be some loopholes players find'

This week marks perhaps the largest change to World of Warcraft's core game since the MMO's original release.

Dubbed the "addonpocalype" by some players, Tuesday's pre-patch for the new Midnight expansion (which launches March 2) brought with it:

• Dramatic changes to what information add-ons and mods could read about events in player combat
• Streamlining and simplification to virtually every character class and specialization
• New functions within the game's core UI to make up a bit of the difference

Those changes aren't over. A mini patch, 12.0.1, will arrive in the next month and will continue to improve core WoW features, senior game director Ion Hazzikostas told us in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview. And other tweaks will happen as players figure out how to evade the limitations Blizzard has placed on their favorite combat add-ons, particularly those that simplify raid combat.

'We probably should have done it sooner'

Hazzikostas chatted for nearly an hour in a broad interview covering the history and role of player-developed add-ons from Warcraft's beginning in 2004 until today.

"Add-ons have been part of the game since literally day one, since beta," he says. "What we started to see 10 years later in Warlords of Draenor was increasingly bespoke add-on solutions that were designed to simplify and solve specific mechanics."

Hazzikostas says that the race for world first in the Hellfire Citadel raid in that expansion was determined by one guild having sophisticated add-on authors and the other not. One had a system that drew precise lines on the screen for a boss tactic, while the other didn't. It made all the difference.

"That was just the beginning," he says. "But it wasn't one specific function we could clamp down on, and add-ons had been such a ubiquitous part of the WoW ecosystem for so long, that we just said, 'Okay, I guess this is how it's going to work now.' But we've seen this become more and more pervasive as this trickles down… to tools that pickup groups are expected to use and configure."

The final straw was a slow but steady drumbeat of player complaints about having to set up increasingly complex third-party tools to succeed in Warcraft's raids. Blizzard developers considered whether this was how they wanted the game to be played, and decided it was worth the complexity of making a major course correction, he says.

"We've probably let this go farther than we should have," Hazzkostas says. "But we really just boiled down to the question of, do we want this to be what WoW is forever? We probably should have done something sooner, and it would have been a less-jarring transition for the community."

But there is no time like the present, he says.

"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today."

The first lockdown has unexpected results

Stripping away some of those computational add-on functions meant that changes would ripple throughout the game. Most character specializations were almost impossible to play perfectly without external tools, so they needed to be streamlined and redesigned to make more intuitive sense. Raid encounters, which had gradually gotten faster and more complex in an arms race with add-ons that trivialized them, needed to be slowed down and telegraph more information to players.

The work started about 18 months ago, and the WoW development team threw open the doors to Midnight's alpha test this fall, Hazzikostas says.

"This is probably one of the largest alphas we're ever going to have," he says. "We knew that we really needed to get a very broad cohort of players who are using all these different add-ons."

At first, the team cut off virtually all information about real-time combat from add-on developers. Their goal was to make it impossible to create tools that would solve boss mechanics and player coordination tests, while still preserving those add-ons and mods that merely changed how the game's information looked for players.

It didn't go well.

'That was nothing we ever intended to break'

"One of the big things we heard, both from players and add-on developers, was an unexpected breath of add-ons that no longer seemed to be able to function," he says. "I was surprised, and I learned a lot about exactly how many of our add-ons are written in the first few weeks of alpha."

Tools that reskinned players' UI or made it easier to use controllers or mobile devices were dead. Popular non-combat mods like ElvUI and Bartender broke. Accessibility tools were suffering.

"That was nothing we ever intended to break," he says. "We realized pretty quickly that a ton of these add-ons were written in ways that relied on many of the functions that we had now restricted."

Making a player or enemy's UI frame look different might just involve reskinning default Blizzard frames—or building an entirely new one from scratch out of combat information, depending on the developer involved, he says.

So Blizzard's UI engineering team fanned out to the developer Discord server and to speak with popular mod and library authors directly. Some of that work was collecting input and feedback; some of it was education, helping authors to (ironically) figure out how to work around the constraints.

Easing off on restrictions

As a result, Blizzard also made big changes, both to the core UI tools developers were building into the game and the access that add-ons could have. They also limited the most-severe restrictions to competitive, instanced combat—dungeons, raids and PvP instances—and attempted to lighten constraints in the open world whenever they could.

"The balance of inconvenience and collateral damage relative to competitive integrity is very, very different," Hazzikostas says. Allowing add-ons to listen in on chat channels and send background messages means a competitive advantage in raids, but is also crucial to allowing some open-world roleplaying add-ons to function, he notes.

The team is happy where that balance stands now, but they're keeping a sharp eye on what players and developers are doing with that freedom, he says.

He used the example of a recent workaround that was scheduled to be broken, an add-on that took the puzzle of which enemy players should interrupt in a raid fight and literally posted numbers above their heads with the correct sequence. In that case, the solution may be to randomize which enemy will need interrupting next, making it more difficult for add-ons to predict, he says.

"I see discussion in the community to the effect of, 'Blizzard's backtracking on this. Blizzard's walking back their plans.' This was always the intent: to swing the pendulum to the other end and then creep it back in a measured way," Hazzikostas says. "Our goal was never to stamp out the add-on ecosystem. It was to move away from it being something that feels like a required competitive aspect of the game."

Future changes to come…

He's expecting to see more-rapid and more-unexpected changes to encounters as a result, along the lines of the example given above. While fights should still take the same amount of time and be the same difficulty from group to group and attempt to attempt, they should be more dynamic, with variable timing and targeting, he says.

Developers are working with the goal to keep that variance controlled, so that groups aren't randomly wiping to bad combinations due to RNG, "frustrating or unfair outcomes," he says. Tuning knobs they can turn for difficulty include how many players are asked to participate in a mechanic, how many mobs spawn, how much time you have to complete a task or tactic, how punitive it is when you fail, and where things show up in the room.

A happy side effect might be early mythic raid bosses that are more approachable for mid-range guilds, he says, though the end bosses on mythic difficulty should still be a very healthy challenge for everyone.

The team will make more changes, he warns.

"Players are numerous and creative, and there will doubtless be some loopholes, some workarounds, some clever solutions. We'll make adjustments to both encounters and to the add-on API as needed in close to real time to keep things fair and to keep things fun."

The yardstick will be the impact on players. If a tool circumvents the designer's intent in a raid or dungeon fight when those begin in earnest come March, but doesn't feel too frustrating to use, Blizzard will likely just note it and adjust accordingly for the next tier of competitive content, he says. If the player workaround feels both required and frustrating, "we're going to take action quickly."

…but also more features

On the flip side, the team is also continuing to improve the built-in tools that replace some core combat add-on functions, including more-customizable player and enemy frames, damage meters and cooldown management, he says.

The Cooldown Manager will allow visual alerts, sound alerts when an ability comes off cooldown or gains a use charge. Add-ons will be further able to customize the visual display or suppress the display of particular mechanics. The damage meter will include more categories and sorting options.

Many tweaks were in this week's patch 12.0, while others will be part of mini-patch 12.0.1 in the next month. Some, including the ability to mark right in the game's dungeon journal whether you want to be notified about a particular mechanic, will come with future updates.

"We recognize that there are areas where more customization would be appreciated, and those are the things that are on our roadmap for the year ahead," Hazzikostas says.

"We don't view this as a one-and-done. We have gotten to a baseline experience that we feel good about, but there's always room for improvement."