Why?!?! Why, Damnit, Why?! Argh! Blizzard SUCKS! They ALWAYS break my stuff! – First of all, it’s important to clearly state that Blizzard does not officially support any add-ons. By support, I mean Blizzard is in no way responsible for their proper functioning, and does not guarantee their in-game stability. Blizzard guarantees that their default UI (User Interface) functions at all times, and it does, even though a large part of modders do believe it to be somewhat lacking in versatility.

There are two ways of viewing this lack of versatility. The first one, the most popular one, believes that Blizzard left a job undone—that like a lot of things in World of Warcraft, the default UI is “lacking in content”. However, the other view, held by most of the modding communities (those who code the add-ons), sees the reasons for this “ineffective” UI as Blizzard’s will to let the modding community grow, and offer plethora of AddOns to users which will allow them to have their very own unique UI, entirely fitted to their tastes and to the way they play the game.

This belief has been strongly reinforced with the possibility, since in patch 1.8, to disable some parts of the default UI. The modding community views this as an encouragement from Blizzard, to change, replace, reuse, rework, hash, cut, and destroy their UI. We strongly believe that Blizzard’s UI, intentionally, lays down the foundations of a UI (a foundation which does offer more than basic functions and does not prevent you from playing the game properly) to offer us infinite possibilities to tinker and customize our UI. There is no way Blizzard can satisfy every player’s tastes with only one UI, and we believe they have done so by not imposing one type of UI.

This being said, why does every patch break my add-ons?

One very common reason for this is that if you downloaded an addon in version 2.0.1 and later game patch 2.0.2 comes out the addon is still believing that you have 2.0.1 and will not function. You should always first try checking the box on your character selection screen; “Load out of date addons” whereas this svolves the problem most of the times. However, the most popular addons usually receives an update itself, but might take some time to be fixed and uploaded on the Internet.

– Well technically speaking, not every patch breaks your add-ons, only the patches that apply changes to the API (in other words, the functions used by your add-ons) or the way add-ons work. The UI was very well compared to (by Cairenn or Iriel I believe) a black box, with plenty of little buttons and lights of different colors and in different places. Inside the box, is WoW, the lights tell you something about WoW, and the buttons allow you to do something in WoW.

For example, if the red light were to light up, it would mean that you would have been hit for X damage, and WoW let’s you know that (via the combat log). If you were to push the cute little pink button, you would do the /hug emote. So there you are, in front of your black box, playing WoW. Everything is great but you only have 10 fingers and there are thousands of buttons to press, and you only have two eyes and there are thousands of lights to watch out for, so what to do?

Well you’d hire Santa’s little helpers, in other words add-ons. Add-ons just watch the lights, decode what they mean and yell it to you. They even help you press those hard to reach buttons. But what happens when Blizzard moves a button to another place because they’ve added one nearby, and don’t want you mistaking one for the other? Well your great add-on is going to try press the designated button and hit the black box, oh noz! So it’s going to hit it, and then it’s going to tell you “ZOMG there’s no button, ERROR ERROR!†Same goes for the lights. What if the light an add-on is piously gazing at changes color, or doesn’t flash at the same frequency it used to so that players without add-ons (those who use the default UI) can see it more clearly? Well the add-on is going to tell you “Uh, what’s up with this light? I’m supposed to be seeing a thousand flashes a second, and I only see three flashes a second! ERROR ERROR!†So this is how patches break AddOns. They swap the lights around, move a button so that someone using the default UI can reach it easier, add lights that add-ons stare at saying “WTF is that?”, even sometimes remove buttons (remember the Auto Travel soap opera…). Most (by most I mean 99.99%) changes in the lights and buttons are either a good thing for the default user, or a good thing for the add-on user.

An example of the good changes for add-ons that break them: (it’s called Creative Destruction, it’s actually an economic theory By Schumpeter and the very base of Capitalism, you Americans should understand that ) Let us imagine there is a series of four lights at the faaaar back of that black box, those lights flash a different frequencies, are of different colors and say different things. The only problem, is that all look realllllly alike, and what they are trying to say isn’t always clear (for eample, they flash differently but are trying to say the same things…). Sooo Blizzard sees this, hears a few suggestions left and right and decides to change them. So they rip those four lights out, and put 8 lights all very different and easily differentiable from one another. So add-ons that were looking at those lights are going “WTF?” and are broken =(. But after authors change the add-ons code, well all is better! The add-ons clearly understand what the lights are saying, it’s easier for the coders, it’s easier for the add-on, it uses less memory and most importantly it’s easier for the user.

So Blizzard does care about AddOns. They seem to want customized UI to be as effective as possible, as versatile as possible, as stable as possible (test realms help a lot in pre-updating of AddOns) and they want AddOns to be out there in numbers. They don’t support AddOns, but they all they can to make them possible, they deserve a big thank you from all of us.