Some very big addon news is coming out related to the addon apocalypse coming with WoW’s latest expansion. After the announcement of the complete restriction of combat log access for addons, WeakAuras has announced that they plan on ending support for WoW entirely with Midnight’s release.
Today’s blue post on some changes to the addon policy, aiming to avoid affecting non-combat addons, was made after this announcement. It’s unclear whether this would impact anything stated below, but seems unlikely.
A True Apocalypse
WeakAuras has been the biggest addon platform out there for a long time, as player could create many individual mini-addons using them. Today they announced their plans to basically close down shop. They explained their reasoning and possible ways they could reconsider in a lengthy post on their Patreon page.
Generally, based on the announced changes and especially Blizzard’s stated philosophy towards addons from Midnight forward, the WeakAuras team decided that it simply didn’t make sense to move forward with a version of their addon for Midnight.
“It’s important to note that these changes are not final and will evolve over the course of the alpha. However, given Blizzard’s stated philosophy, it seems highly unlikely that the core restrictions will be meaningfully reversed.
*As it stands, we do not expect to release a WeakAuras version for Midnight.*“
The Classic version of the addon will remain available.
The team also goes very in-depth, explaining exactly why this is a deal breaker for them. They also have personal notes from their team, talking about how this has affected them, as well as a Q&A section. You can check out the full post on their Patreon page.
A Possible Way Out
The team also covers what could change between now and Midnight’s launch that would make them reconsider. Between Blizzard just completely changing their attitude towards addons to very specific technical details, the WeakAuras team listed three possible ways they could continue support for Midnight.
What would make us reconsider?
There are a few things we can think of:
1. The ability to compute new secrets
– To go into the technical details a bit, combat state APIs no longer directly return information addons can use, but rather return “secret” values, which can be piped into other APIs that interpret those secrets to display combat state to the user without exposing it to the addon itself. You might have heard of private auras before, and secret values can be considered as an extension of that to the entire combat state.
– Blizzard maintains that addons don’t necessarily need to see all that information, and for WeakAuras we’d agree, if addons could compute new secret values. As an example, if it were possible to do things like combine the secret “is the ability Icy Veins on cooldown” and the secret “is the buff Icy Veins not active on the player” could be combined into the secret “is the buff Icy Veins not active on the player AND is the ability Icy Veins on cooldown”, then we could retain much of the utility of WeakAuras.
– Unfortunately, we did already ask about that, and it was indicated to us that it’s very likely policy that Blizzard doesn’t want exactly this kind of power in addons’ hands. Best as we can tell, this is a philosophical stance along the lines of players shouldn’t need addons to fill gaps in the information the game gives them, and Blizzard seems like they want to ensure that is the case by making it impossible for addons to fix those kinds of mistakes. Put that way, we almost love the change, but it does put WeakAuras in a weird spot, since “fixing gaps in information” was our bread and butter.
2. Revert this change for personal combat state only
– Before this week, we had assumed that personal combat state (so, your own buffs, cooldowns, resources, etc.) would still be available, and that WeakAuras would converge into something like a hyper-customizable Cooldown Manager. We think this is still just about plausible, and while it would be a severe reduction in our capacity compared to before Midnight, we would still be willing to maintain the addon in this scenario.
3. Revert this change entirely
– Yeah, we don’t think this is likely. “Addons gone” is all but a flagship feature of Midnight at this point; those are the breaks.
Head on over and read the full and extensive statement here.
So what do you think? Will WeakAuras actually stop existing for retail? Will the WA team and Blizzard come to some sort of compromise?
