Blizzard's philosophy on the addon purge has been confusing to some players as the number of addons that will be prevented from functioning in Midnight currently doesn't match the previously stated vision. In response to Mystical's video on a recent meeting, Ion Hazzikostas responded on Reddit, noting that that main philosophical goal of this change is essentially the following:
"The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight is to level the playing field and do what we can to make it so that while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren't giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI. it's not that we view a spoken countdown as a form of automation or as inherently problematic; rather, we feel that it would be inappropriate to allow only addon users to have that functionality."
In other words, you should be able to change and customize how information is presented to you in the base UI, but Blizzard does not want you to add additional things to help you with encounters or content via addons. Addons that exceed the potential of the base UI will not be allowed.
Blizzard
A lot of this sounds positive. The only thing I heard that made me recoil a bit was hearing Ion's take on audible countdowns to enemy spells.
So, we're aloud to have a visual timer for the ability, but hearing a countdown instead of seeing it is me being a fuckin noob according to him. Fair enough I guess, but I'd also like to see him heal some of these bosses at an 18 and time his ramp down to the second, consistently, every time the ability is coming up.
Granted, I don't wanna argue in bad faith, ramping will likely be a little less important with so many healing amps being removed (a direction I support), I guess I just don't see how there's anything wrong with hearing a countdown as opposed to seeing it, and I kinda resent the sentiment that hearing a countdown is "automating" my gameplay. Timing things down to the second can be the difference between failure or success in this game, and I've got plenty to look at and react to in game as it is.
Perhaps they're sincere in that gameplay across the board will change to support their vision for addon restriction, but frankly, what I'm hearing is blizzard taking on a large responsibility to design their gameplay to support this hardline direction and honestly, I doubt they have the time or staff to devote to that season after season. I hope I'm wrong about that.
Despite everything, I'm excited to play midnight and I'm glad we're making big changes. I'd rather stumble on big changes than continue down the road we were on.
Hi, I just wanted to clarify my comments on this point.
We for sure could have been clearer on our philosophical goals here, which have been spread across multiple interviews and videos over the past year. We're working on a blog that can be a single source of truth there. The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight is to level the playing field and do what we can to make it so that while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren't giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI. In pursuit of that goal, we've made changes to the addon API, to our base UI, and to how we design our combat and encounters.
So in this context, it's not that we view a spoken countdown as a form of automation or as inherently problematic; rather, we feel that it would be inappropriate to allow only addon users to have that functionality. We also have concerns that giving addons access to exactly how many seconds remain before a specific spell is going to fire could open the door to creative problem-solving solutions.
Our focus is on designing our Midnight encounters to have both clear telegraphs ahead of time, and sufficient time to react (more time than we would have provided in a world where we knew the majority of players doing organized content were using addons to ensure they were ready for every major ability). If it turns out that we're unable to hit that mark, we're definitely open to adding an audio countdown solution to help, but we'd want it to be available in the base UI rather than requiring an addon.
