Combat Philosophy and Addon Disarmament in Midnight

As we move into the beta phase of Midnight testing and invite a much larger wave of players in to experience the expansion and provide feedback, I wanted to take time to recap the planned changes to addon capabilities, and the accompanying broader changes to combat and encounters. This will be a long post, but stick with me, there's a lot to cover.

Over the course of the past year we have been talking about addon changes, but that communication has been spread across multiple videos, posts, interviews, and ongoing conversations with addon authors. This fragmentation has contributed to confusion and concern across the community. The main goal of this article is to dispel as much of this confusion as possible and, hopefully, provide reassurance around these planned changes.

To be clear, it is entirely natural for players who have spent countless hours experiencing Azeroth through the lens of their favorite addons to feel nervous about big changes to that ecosystem. While some players who use few or no addons may be shrugging their shoulders, for many others, this may be the single largest change an expansion has ever made to World of Warcraft. We take none of this lightly.

Addon Disarmament: Why?

So, if we know this is a risky change, why are we making it?

For over twenty years now, the customizability of the World of Warcraft User Interface (UI) has been a pillar of the game, allowing players to use addons to tailor the look and feel of the game to suit their preferences. Numerous improvements to the base UI over the years have been inspired and informed by these community efforts. But the power we give to addon authors has always come with the risk of tools that can distort moment-to-moment gameplay, which has led the development team to restrict addons' capabilities several times over the years.

In past incidents, we typically were able to address issues by limiting addons' access to some specific functionality (e.g. addons automatically selecting abilities and targets in the game's early days, or using player positions and clever math to build "radar" overlays a decade later). This time around, however, the cause for concern is subtler and more pervasive. Over the past few expansions, the community has increasingly shifted from a focus on addons that display information in a particular way, to addons that process that information to drive combat decisions and recommendations. As an RPG with cast times and cooldowns governing most actions, a huge portion of "skill" in WoW has always rested in moment-to-moment decision-making. By its nature, a computer with access to complete information about the current combat state in WoW (allies' and enemies' buffs and debuffs, active casts, cooldown state, health, and more) will be able to make the correct decision far faster than any human, and can do so with unerring accuracy.

Such addons move beyond the realm of personal preference, offering an objective advantage in moment-to-moment combat. As a result, players often will be told to download specific addons to improve their class performance, or to defeat a specific encounter. Guilds-or even pickup groups-commonly require the use of specific addons for mid-combat coordination. While we have never designed FOR addons, in the sense of making a specific encounter or class mechanic with the intent that players would write addons to solve a given puzzle, we have inevitably had to design AROUND them for the past several expansions. We have to accept that even in non-cutting-edge content, a majority of players will turn to any available tools to make things easier.

For example, when we design a boss in a Normal or Heroic difficulty raid, we have a tuning target in mind. While we risk causing frustration if we overshoot the mark, when we release an encounter that puts up very little resistance, we often get feedback that the boss was unsatisfying. In a similar vein, when we're designing a class mechanic, we're trying to express class fantasy while also offering engaging moment-to-moment gameplay. But with addons instantly solving a raid coordination challenge or collapsing a nuanced combat decision into a simple binary, we would get feedback, supported by data, that our design felt flat. And so we would add an extra layer of complexity to a class mechanic, or tighten an encounter's tuning to give players less time to react, in order to deliver the level of challenge and engagement that players are expecting. But that shift has left people who prefer not to use these addons at a clear disadvantage, making WoW less approachable in the process.

And so we are looking to level the playing field. The guiding philosophy for our approach is straightforward: Addons should no longer offer a competitive advantage in WoW combat. They should remain as robust tools for aesthetic customization and personalized presentation of information, but they should not be able to make a player more likely to succeed in combat against an encounter or another player. I've seen discussion around the word "competitive," with some understandably noting that they aren't playing in the MDI or trying to get onto the raid Hall of Fame or arena leaderboards, and wondering why a design shift about "competitive advantage" should apply to them. But the consequences of addons' impact creep into all facets of the game, and this uneven playing field is experienced by all players, whether someone is trying to defeat Dimensius on Normal difficulty with their friends-and-family guild, trying to get a foothold in Mythic+, or trying to be the best of the best.

Addon Disarmament: What's Changing?

In pursuing these philosophical goals, we have tried to take a surgical approach that limits addons' ability to process information, with the least possible impact on their ability to display it. Our engineering team has been regularly sharing updates to the API (short for Application Programming Interface-essentially the functions that addon authors can use to access and manipulate WoW UI data) with addon authors, but a simplified explanation of what we're changing is as follows: Information about the current combat state is designated as a "secret value" that can be displayed by addons, but not "known" by them. In essence, combat events are in a black box; addons can change the size or shape of the box, and they can paint it a different color, but what they can't do is look inside the box. So in Midnight, addons can still change the location of your buffs or debuffs, and the size and shape of the associated frames; they can change the size and shape and texture of enemy nameplates and cast bars; and many similar UI elements. But they can't "know" with certainty whether you or your target have a specific debuff currently active, or what the cooldown of a given ability is.

We debuted our alpha test with the strictest version of this ruleset, wanting to avoid a frustrating cat-and-mouse situation with addon authors pointing out loopholes in our logic and us needing to keep tightening things down to preserve a level playing field. Whereas we have historically disabled all addons in early weeks of expansion alpha testing, this time we invited numerous addon developers to the first wave of our test. We wanted to give them a head start on updating their addons and to hear early feedback on pain points. That input has been invaluable so far and led us to loosen restrictions in numerous areas that were causing needless collateral damage.

Even with this more focused approach, we knew that limiting addons' ability to parse combat events in real time would have a significant impact on a wide range of popular and benign addons, such as damage meters that offer immediate insight into performance, boss ability timers that have been part of raiding since the very earliest days of WoW, and tools that make the game accessible to players with a range of disabilities. So alongside the "secret values" project, our team has also been working on building up native solutions in many of these areas, as well as creating new API hooks to allow addon authors to access protected information in ways that don't risk competitive integrity.

We have been rolling out base UI features over the course of the year, and that will continue during Midnight beta:

• The Legacy of Arathor content update (11.1.7) introduced the Assisted Highlight and One-Button Rotation tools to help players learn new specializations and improve overall accessibility.
• We implemented an early working version of a Cooldown Manager in the11.1.5 content update, knowing that it needed a lot of iteration but wanting to ensure that we were getting all the needed feedback in a live environment; Midnight will feature a much-refined version.
• Midnight includes a new Boss Warnings system which allows players to see which boss mechanics are upcoming, while leaving the choice of how to handle them in players' hands.
• We are in the process of adding a range of native accessibility improvements, such as a built-in Combat Audio Alerts system that allows players to use Text to Speech and other audio cues for everything from player health to common combat events.
• Over the course of beta, we will be releasing improvements to our raid frames for healers, a built-in Damage Meters tool with server-side validation, and more.

While we work on limiting the ability of addons to give a high-end performance advantage, we want to ensure that the baseline WoW experience is as approachable and accessible as ever.

We know that if we are limiting addons' functionality, we need to give all players the information they need to succeed, and we need to tune our game accordingly. Along with much clearer visual and audio telegraphs, that may also mean having an extra second or two to react to a mechanic, or fewer things occurring simultaneously to keep cognitive load manageable. Our end goal is for any given piece of content in Midnight (a Mythic 10 dungeon, a Normal difficulty raid boss, a Tier 8 Delve, etc.) to be roughly as challenging as it was in prior expansions, but for that challenge to be more fairly distributed across the playerbase.

Why Are Some Cosmetic Addons Breaking?

I'd like to take a moment to address a technical nuance here: Many players have expressed confusion at seeing reports of some popular cosmetic addons no longer functioning as expected in Midnight. If we are only focusing on combat calculations, why are we seemingly breaking an addon that only changes the appearance of player and target frames? That is never our intent, but there are a few reasons why that might be the case currently in Midnight test builds.

The myriad authors who have created addons for WoW over the years have each chosen from among countless different approaches to structuring their code. As a result, two addons that provide nearly identical player-facing functionality might be quite dissimilar under the hood, and thus be affected very differently by the changes coming in Midnight. Some addons can and will work just fine in Midnight, but they have yet to be updated by their author; the work that they need to do may be very straightforward or may take a more significant amount of time. Every expansion in WoW's history has required tweaks to all but the simplest of addons (thus the "out of date addons" popup with each new major patch). Other addons, however, rely on implementations that don't merely re-skin pieces of the WoW UI, but rather rebuild them from scratch using raw data about the current combat state. Unfortunately, that particular approach (while by no means inherently wrong) has limitations under our new "secret values" system. While there are some areas where we cannot bypass these limitations without opening the door to computational logic, we are trying to do everything possible to minimize collateral damage. For example, recognizing that many players enjoy abstract and custom ways of representing their current count of Runes on a Death Knight, or Holy Power on a Paladin, we recently made all class secondary resources fully non-secret.

We are committed to continuing to work with addon developers and with the community at large to provide support for robust customization within this new framework.

Addon Disarmament: Why Now?

Another common question I've heard is: Why do this now? Why not wait until all our built-in functionality is fully polished and has had multiple rounds of feedback?

When I first started talking about our concerns with the impact of addons on the modern game nearly a year ago, we were still evaluating the feasibility of a solution, as well as the right timeframe. But we also wanted to gauge community sentiment around the general issue. WoW's history is littered with examples of the dev team trying to solve perceived "problems" that most players weren't particularly concerned about, and we wanted to reassure ourselves that we weren't headed down that same path here. We were happy to see a lot of positive reactions to the discussion. I'm not going to pretend that there was unanimous support, but the average take was something along the lines of, "It would be great if addons weren't required, but I'm not sure I trust Blizzard to pull it off." And that's very fair-this is a huge and challenging project, and I don't expect blind faith in the absence of results.

Convinced that we were on the right track with the aims of the project, we shifted to building a roadmap of what it would take to pull off this transformation. The team found that progress on the UI engineering front was moving faster than expected, both in terms of the "secret values" system, and in terms of implementing some of the replacements we knew we'd need. That made readiness for the launch of Midnight a real possibility.

These changes pretty much have to be made on an expansion boundary, allowing us to build a full slate of content and systems that are meant for a post-addon-disarmament world. Trying to ask players to relearn content mid-expansion without the tools they were using the day before would be a sure recipe for unhappiness. And no matter how much we improve our native UI, we can't build mechanics that are trivially solvable by addons and expect that players won't use those tools so long as they still function.

In the end, we were faced with the decision of either signing up for a couple more years of designing our content around powerful addons in ways that make it impossible for us to serve our whole community, or moving forward now and finding solutions within this new paradigm. And so addon disarmament is coming with Midnight, and the team is fully committed to giving the community all the support required, tweaking the logic around what is restricted, and making new access points available to addon developers, in order to make this transition successful.

Addon Disarmament: What's Next?

As we kick off beta, we're excited to see a ton of new players get access to Midnight content, but we're especially eager to see structured testing of the endgame. The changes to addons don't come in a vacuum; they are complemented by a new approach to building raid encounters, dungeon pulls, combat mechanics, and more. So we are looking forward to seeing players have that holistic experience, and we are looking for feedback not just on our UI or evolving addon capabilities, but on aspects of endgame combat that might feel unclear or unfair without some of the tools you are accustomed to using.

We're going to be watching closely and listening to feedback throughout the beta. To us, the "Beta" designation means that we have the entirety of the game's content ready for testing, but it is far from an endpoint to Midnight development. We will be agile and adaptive in close partnership with our community as we roll out regular updates in the weeks and months ahead, improving our base UI experience, adjusting tuning or presentation of mechanics, and adding new functionality for addon developers.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this. I understand that this amount of change can be scary, and that it's natural to worry that the long-term benefits aren't worth the short-term disruption. We're going to do everything possible to ensure that your experience with Midnight is a great one, that customization and self-expression remain hallmarks of WoW's UI, and that the game is more approachable than ever.

Ion Hazzikostas
Game Director

Read through our previous article How Midnight's Upcoming Game Changes Will Impact Combat Addons for additional insights.