World of Warcraft is currently chipping away at the mammoth task of calling curtains on combat UI mods—called AddOns—to try and wrangle some control of the 21-year-old MMO back. After all, if you can automate just about everything, then you need to build classes, raids, and boss fights around a batch of third-party installs, which, er, isn't good.
The problem being, these combat mods are often used for things other than raw, sweaty, glorious DPS and efficiency. For example, cleaning up visual noise and making the game more accessible. Or, in some cases, just customising superficial elements of the UI to your liking—whether to combat colour blindness or for the aesthetic.
And given how public Blizzard tends to be with WoW's betas, there's been a lot of hand-wringing. See, Blizzard's taken a sort of 'wipe the slate clean, then pare it back' approach. It's easier for UI designers to come down hard, then slowly make exceptions based on feedback.
But given the enormity of this change, some players are getting a touch skittish. Cue game director Ion Hazzikostas diving into Reddit once more to soothe their fears, after some kerfuffles with enemy nameplates which, as one player puts it, seem "hastily put together with minimum effort":
"Earlier today, we pushed a client hotfix to beta to change the way nameplate stacking/overlapping works," Hazzikostas explains, "as we know it's been way off the mark. We'll make further changes as needed based on playtesting/feedback in the coming beta updates."
Keen to establish that beta testing is, in fact, beta testing, Hazzikostas adds: "When it comes to UI features, players on beta will see more things go live in a more work-in-progress state than we'd usually target for, say, a questline or a raid boss, because we want to get feedback as quickly as possible even while we know we still have work to do on our end.
"There's a lot of discussion in this thread about people trying to go into Midnight (or 'preparing' in live TWW) with zero addons after using a bunch of different ones for years, and feeling frustrated. But our goal has never been to get people who enjoy the customisation that addons offer to stop using them entirely."
He goes on to state that these UI apocalypse preppers are jumping the gun just a tad: "The focus has always been on limiting combat performance advantages, and anything else that has been affected was collateral damage that we are working on repairing."
Such as UI customisations. Hazzikostas states that the team is currently "working with addon developers to provide new functions and other support to help re-enable a wide range of cosmetic addons that touch unit frames, action bars, and more, so that they can still work in Midnight.
"If you think the default UI is ugly, or you prefer your secondary resources displayed in a certain way, that's entirely your prerogative, and we want there to be as many possible AddOn options to allow you to change the size, shape, color, texture, and location of every element (as long as those changes aren't driven by real-time combat logic) in Midnight and beyond."
In other words, it's probably fine not to set your expectations of what the final product will be based on, well, a testing phase—especially given Blizzard's really rolling its proverbial sleeves up and getting stuck on in there. You can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs. Besides, there are other things to fret about—like fashion, which is actually looking a smidge dire.
