Just how important are achievements to the Retail community?
It may not seem like big deal, but I wondered about it today because I was thinking about the "arms race" that Blizz found itself engaged with addons such as Deadly Boss Mods. According to far too many videos and blog posts I've come across over the past couple of years, the complexity of raids has amped up by Blizz in an attempt to counter DBM --and other third party addons-- providing a counter to the already existing boss mechanics. DBM provides alerts on certain mechanics, so Blizz makes them more complex, so DBM adjusts to compensate for the complex mechanics, and so on and so forth.
But I wondered about achievements for a pretty simple reason: Blizz has the ability to sense third party addons and if it detects them Blizz has the ability to encode a change to WoW to block Achievements based on the presence of said third party addons.
Think of it this way: you push hard for a World First kill, and you finally GET IT, but Blizz denies you the Achievement because you were using addons.
Or certain types of addons that wait for certain flags and act on those flags.
Such as DBM.
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I'd presume that the WoW Community would be a wee bit upset about that, but just how upset is something I have no insight on.
If WoW wanted to kill off addons, that's one way of achieving that goal without resorting to an official ban on addons, that's for sure. Of course, Blizz would have to dial back the boss mechanics if they wanted to give raids a fighting chance against them, but still...
Yeah, I think the "popping of the DBM bubble" like the Fed raising interest rates is probably an extreme solution to the problem, but I have no idea just how raids would function in a "no addons allowed" WoW environment. It obviously works in other MMOs, such as FF XIV and SWTOR, but WoW is an MMO built upon third party addons like DBM and ElvUI.
Discuss.
EtA: Changed some grammar.
This is like CurseForge all over again. In that case, if they didn't want people using their REST API they shouldn't have based their entire site off of it. In the case of WoW, if they didn't want people using the Lua interface, they shouldn't have published it (which they do, quite loudly, as in "here I am, use me, use me!"
ReplyDeleteThe thing is that addons cover a lot more ground than the things that BigWigs and DBM do. Remove that and they'd have to spend a lot of time on improving the UI, which I feel like they lack the chops for. Which is fine. They stick to game engine design, the UI experts focus on making the UI better. Everybody stays in their lane.
Seriously, though, they can't ban DBM et al at this point without de-escalating raid mechanics. They've made it so complex and rediculous that you can't actually run one without addons. I mean, sure, I guess 24 other people could carry you. Better bring gold to pay them (oh, you might need an AH addon for that).
Now, the Lua interface is built on events. You listen for events, you react to them when they fire. It would be a simple matter to suppress those events in the UI code but again, gonna have to de-escalate the wars first.
Addons in WoW have, for the most part, been to make up for shortcomings in the core game engine. Go all the way back to things like HealBot and you see addons that really did need to be blocked (and they were), but aside from the kind of addon that plays the game for you (like HealBot), informational addons like DBM are relatively benign. All they do is gather up all the common wisdom for a specific raid and dispense it in chat or whatever. "Sargeras scratches his balls" - oh hell, brace for impact! That sort of thing. It's all kind of artificial to me ... if a message in chat breaks the game, the raid mechanics are fundamentally flawed. I think THAT is what Blizz is mostly concerned about - that this flaw be brought to light. This is fine. They can block that on the official forums but "you can't stop the signal."
Okay, "Sargeras scratches his balls" made me spew my drink. Huzzah, Sir!
DeleteBasically you gave me the answer in a nutshell: you simply can't raid without addons such as DBM or WeakAuras.
And yes, I'd be perfectly in favor of de-escalating the boss mechanic wars. I know that modern boss mechanics are potentially out of my physical abilities these days --well at least Heroic and Mythic likely are-- but I did wonder if part of the appeal of Classic is a return to an era where boss mechanics weren't so overwhelmingly complex.
Well, maybe you CAN raid without addons in WoW, but a giant reset of some sort is required to get there. Sorry if I buried that.
DeleteI don't know if boss mechanics are less complex in Classic - I mean, Heigen Dance, anyone? - but I do know they're flailing a bit to come up with what appears to be fresh. Or so it appears. Whether that's on their mind or not, that I can't say.
The Heigen Dance is one of those things that you simply have to develop a feel for. Other than the alert that it's coming, the Dance itself is all based on flow and feel. Apparently my two left feet in real life translated very well into Naxx, because it took me about a month's worth of Dances before I finally stopped dying to the Dance.
DeleteOh, me too. I am in real life a klutz, and it translates well, though my friends in my Cata guild on Azuremyst were able to give me some practical pointers that actually helped a lot. Where were they when I was blowing the raid up in Kara (you know the boss)?
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