Lately with the recent Race for World First and especially in the wake of the Dragonsong’s Reprise Ultimate in FFXIV the debate surrounding addons and plugins has really picked up – today Mike talks about addons and their place in MMOs.
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As much as addons are an issue in combat in wow, spell animations hurt the game just as much. Trying to tank or play Mdps is like trying to pick up a contact lens in a mosh pit with and EDM light showing going on in it. Don't dare step in the vermillion swirly, but you better keep inside the magenta swirly, and hey don't these 19 other players spell animations look great?
I easily clear savage every week without a single add-on downloaded. I don't think they're necessary to complete harder content. But for the love of god just give us some damn chat bubbles.
this was a great video.
Absolutely not, Add-ons is the reason I play WoW. FFXIV doesn't want it that's their choice, don't force it on WoW.
My UI will be very different to yours, I'm a clicker, I need information laid out in a different way, if I was a key binder I would probably hide spell buttons and have weak auras for when they should be cast, giving me more screen space to be aware of my surroundings. As a clicker I can't click hidden buttons, I generally increase the size of the spell buttons so I can click them and be more aware of the rest of the screen. Wow has become quite dependant on up time of buffs and debuffs, managing them with weak auras is really helpful for me and on other games managing auras is a pain. It would be nice for dps meters etc to not be used as a weapon, but without them how can we know we're playing our class well, I'm all for a new idea. I think wow should be inviting top guilds to special servers for raiding e sports and so they can manage and encourage raiding e sports, they could have more regular events. I agree they need to design bosses so boss mods aren't required and on simpler raids (lfr normal) more guidance is given to train us to be better raiders.
Old school runescape has started promoting a 3rd party client on the website since it provides a boatload of QoL plugins(including an HD mode). And they're slowly but surely incorperating those plugins into their main client. There's been some bad blood between the client and the game devs, but its nice they're getting to the point where they're doing more than tolerating eachother
It sure would add some difficulty to WoW. No more dbm. You have to pay attention.
Funnily enough the problems of addons are not the addons themselves but the community. People are just afraid, and Yoshi-P is included in this, that addons will just make the community more toxic, ironic tho that this whole debacle over addons made the entire community more toxic since now, more than ever, we have 'witch hunts' over people using mods/addons.
Btw, playing devil's advocate, everyone says that addons like cactbot (equivalent of deadly boss mod) shouldn't be allowed but I know a lot of people that only started doing extremes and later savages because they had access to cactbot. Cactbot opened up more content and enjoyment to those people because they had this extra push and they never used these addons to harass other people in their parties or even mentioned they had been using these. So most than likely if you have done savage/extreme you had someone using cactbot on your party, and I'd like to reflect on this, did your enjoyment of the fight was less because someone MIGHT have been using it?
Still on the topic of addons that are controversial, AlexXIV is an addon that just fixes the game. It can be used as a cheating tool but without it more than 50% of the playerbase can't even properly play the game because the game coding is unbelievably bad. It might not affect you that live in the same country as the datacenter but a huge portion of the playerbase doesn't. In case you don't know AlexXIV fix the bad codding of the game and allows players with ping higher than 100+ to double weave. Imagine being in a place where your ping is 200+/300+ you are already having problems because your buffs/debuffs/procs come almost a second late, and you have to deal with your abilities being locked out because the game was badly coded. Some jobs are basically unplayable without this sort of fix and the ones that are somewhat playable can never compete with the people that have a lower ping.
Again I see a lot of people talking how addons are bad and all, but addons aren't exactly the problem. The problem is the fear of having a game where people become toxic by trying to enforce them on others. Yet we are becoming more toxic by witch hunting those that might need these addons to just enjoy the game on their most basic functions.
While i get the idea that ff14 telegraphs its moves with visual cues, I've found as fights get flashier and flashier its hard to even see them, so addons end up being useful just cos you can't tell what the boss is doing any more. Particularly the fight on the statue's hand in the recent 24man, the boss was smaller than usual so he was just a blur of flashing lights.
They are banned and always have been, they ruined WoW and they would ruin FF14 as well.
When he started talking about using just one single addon, I knew immediately which one it is, and it's honestly surprisingly common for people to get the entire idea of using addons because of the lack of chat bubbles. I use many more addons than just chat bubbles, but I might never have started using them if the game had chat bubbles for players natively.
I don't want to play a pve game without damage meter where some leeches can just suck and do zero damage. Anyone who wants to get red of damage meter is a complete degenerate in game.
Addons are fine for quiality of life. To deny addons as a blanket statment is to ignore technology and the ability and dedication of your fans. Addons become a problem when the encounter is a problem.
As a huge addon user and M+ player. I would fucking love to use "no addons"!!!
It is impossible tho. Like they are the only reason we can even do 25+ keys at all. There are so many mobs that need to be cc´d/kicked/kited and other things that you need to track or you just die in seconds. The whole game design needs to change in WoW to even make it possible to remove ANY of them.
A short list of my basics atm: Keystone tracker, Plater for nameplates, weak auras for EVERYTHING, DBM for EVERYTHING and 3-5 other addons for minor stuff like showing keystones from party member and so on.
This is just basic stuff. That is pretty much expected/needed to play. Without them you will be at a huge disadvantage and the game is 10x harder for you.
That is why i say keep them out of FF14!!! Once addons are in it´s too late and the designers will make shit insane just to counter addons.
And this is why people will return to WoW the moment an expansion is good , it is just more modernized and has more QoL like ADDONS for example .
"Several people have been banned" You mean the same 2 who are now unbanned because its been 10 days.
who waiting for the good version, the Asmon React version.
A significant point that's being overlooked in this debate is the fact a large portion of the playerbase is on console. If I recall correctly, the majority of Japanese players are on the PS4 and 5, PC gaming is not as big in Japan as it is in the West. They cannot install any addons at all and there is a serious concern for Yoshida about the kind of unfair advantage this would inevitably create, the worst case scenario being the rest of the playerbase excluding console players from content (there is a small precedent for this: back before the network improvements in ARR, console players were often being kicked from Titan HM parties because the lag on mechanics made it so avoiding them was much harder for console players.) At the end of the day Square Enix is a Japanese company, so for better or worse the feedback of Japanese players will always be the first they receive and take on board, and this has been apparent throughout the game's development (majority of liveletter questions have been from the JP community, for example.)
I personally have no issue with any non-combat addons, I use a number of them myself and would be saddened if they decided to pro-actively start banning all of them, but I understand their position. Here's hoping this spurs them to implement the UI mods like chat bubbles into the game proper like Yoshida said, even if I don't use them myself!
Weird that you need 17+ minutes to just say "Yep" 😉
Honestly, in FFXIV if they just disabled the mods in Instanced Content it'd probably be enough. In WoW it's a much bigger issue because the default UI and all the content isn't built for no mods, but I guess that's what you start in Dragon Flight I guess. WoW really should have nipped this in the bud back in Vanilla when they banned Decursive.
Im never gonna care what someone chooses to do client-side unless it directly impacts the way others play(ie pvp cheats, relying so much on cactbot at the expense of skill and becoming a hindrance when you suddenly can't use it or PFs acting like its necessary to use certain addons when all content is clearable without).
I feel like people are missing the forest for the trees where if lots of people have to rely on certain QoL plugins; it should have been an ingame feature in the first place. The devs from as early as ARR should've been looking at what popular addons are being installed, examine why they're widely used and make the improvements that would mitigate the need to use them. Its good that they're doing that now at least and I hope they do follow up on their promise to add all the highly requested QoL features.
As for DPS meters, fucking PVP shows everyones-including the enemy team's- total DPS at the end of every match and even lets you sort by highest. Consider that PVP has gotten way more popular too, way more than savage raiding probably. Some kind of ingame DPS meter for hard content would NOT be the most toxic feature this game has.
Addon creation is RnD every sport has RnD
100% yes , a game should not neglect its own UI and design systems around things someone else is producing for free. Hire these people or buy their software.
There's actually one thing that does concern me about the innocent addons like UI enhancements. If people are too happy to use addons to "fix" their various small gripes, then the demand for the devs to actually fix it officially drops. In FFXIV I have addons to control what debuffs I see, individually size up the ones I want to see more, I have additional gauges for some jobs to show more information more conveniently, and so on. I now don't have any will or energy to go to the official forums or elsewhere and in any way voice my wish for these things to be implemented…because I already have them.
We basically have to just trust that the devs are keeping their eye on what addons exist and take ideas from them, because I can't see addon usage translating to visible consumer feedback if the consumers are content to fix the problem externally.
The Skyrim comparison doesn't really apply, it's a single player game with no competitive element. Imagine FIFA, Fall Guys, PUBG, Valorant or any other multiplayer game with a competitive element that allowed you to use add ons that told you more information than your opponent, you'd just call that cheating. I know League of Legends has some add ons, like one that gives a timer overlay on the mini-map and to auto-buy stuff, which is a bit closer to the line but since it doesn't actually tell you where your enemies are for example, I don't think it crosses it. As for the timers, in theory you could just run a timer on you Phone, but even that feels a bit dodgy.
In the grand scheme of things, when it comes to multiplayer games, very, very few allow you to customize them with Addons, and there's generally a good reason why. It's way to easy to give one set of players a competitive advantage which can trivialize the content and the competition.
as far as people using addons as a weapon to target streamers, there will ALWAYS in EVERY ONLINE GAME be people who go out of their way to attack streamers in any way they can, dragging the addon policy of FFXIV into it is really just shifting the blame as to how these streamers are affected.
No add ons. If a game needs an add on to play the game, that is a design flaw of the game. Developers should integrate those things that make game play more enjoyable. No third party nonsense. It is all cheating. I refuse to play games that allow add ons. There was a time when WOW did not allow third party add ons because they thought it was cheating.
Addons in multplayer games are designed as cheats, dont compare mods for singleplayer games to that. That's a strawman.
before i watch i will say ban them all. as a wow player since 2004 up to a year or 2 ago. fuck em! only cause problems for devs and the players both.
If it wasn't for Elvui and other general quality of life enhancements, I would not have played wow for so long tbh.