Responding to a comment from a Reddit user regarding nameplates and unit frames, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas wrote a lengthy comment about Blizzard’s vision for add-on customization in Midnight and beyond.
Ion’s comment talked about:
- The ongoing work that Blizzard is doing to polish their base UI and refining what’s being offered.
- Enhancing the base UI so add-ons don’t feel necessary.
- Reiterating the changes to add-ons are strictly about limiting combat performance advantages.
- How Blizzard’s UI can’t fully capture the thousands of various customization options add-ons can offer.
- Blizzard still welcoming add-ons that will customize your UIs as long as there’s no real-time combat logic.
Here’s the full comment below:
Ion’s Reply on Reddit
Earlier today we pushed a client hotfix to beta to change the way nameplate stacking/overlapping works, 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.
Nameplates, unitframes, and raid frames are all seeing ongoing polish (and in some cases we need to set up designer logic for better defaults on buff/debuff visibility). 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 customization that addons offer to stop using them entirely. We want to keep improving the base UI such that fewer people feel addons are necessary to enjoy the game, but there’s a reason last week’s blog was about “Addon Disarmament” and not “Addon Removal.” 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.
When it comes to aesthetic customization, we could put in years of extra development on the UI and still not fully capture the thousands of variations of personal preference that addons enable. And if we tried, the base UI interface settings and edit mode would become a mess of endless niche options.
While we have UX designers focused on refining the base UI offerings that are being tested now (and we know a lot of refinement is still needed), a major focus for our UI engineers, which isn’t captured in patch notes, is 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.
