World of Warcraft Midnight's addon confusion strikes again, as game director breaks two-year Reddit silence to address countdown concerns

Midnight's WoW addon apocalypse has dominated my social media feed lately. Whether it's another popular mod biting the dust, or Blizzard attempting to reclarify what's going on with the newest expansion, it's the most fervent discussion I've seen around the MMO in quite some time. After a new video from Adam 'MysticalOS' Williams was posted on the game's official subreddit, in which he reflects on a conversation he had with World of Warcraft's game director Ion Hazzikostas and lead software engineer Andy Churchill, players were left confused about Blizzard's stance on countdown addons. Now, Hazzikostas has broken a two-year Reddit silence to clarify some of his comments and reaffirm Blizzard's reasoning for the changes.

One of the main discussion points from the video was the idea of audible countdowns. After speaking to the two developers, MysticalOS relays that Blizzard's concern is players "going on autopilot" during raids, and not focusing on the boss' actual abilities because a timer is effectively doing the work for them.

While he does highlight that there are "a lot of big wins" for players, he states that Hazzikostas "doesn't want to see addons that exceed the potential of the base UI, or start solving things for you in competitional ways. To him, competition isn't just WeakAuras in the middle of a fight, it's also removing thinking from the process. Renaming a spell, in [Blizzard's] vision of World of Warcraft, is solving things for you, because it [means you don't] need to be knowledgeable about that spell."

Hazzikostas has since responded to the video, reiterating Blizzard's core philosophy on why addons are changing. It's not dissimilar to MysticalOS' latter comments, but expands upon the team's reasoning.

"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," he begins. "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."

Addressing the debate over audible countdowns specifically, he states that "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)," he concludes. "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."

MysticalOS has responded to Hazzikostas' post, noting that "I probably could have worded it better too in video. I hope overall you found [the] video fine though otherwise. You and I have always both [been] on same page that the best way to add something is to add it to stock UI first and foremost, and then open it up to addons to do what they do best: customize something that already exists." Hazzikostas' post is also pinned in the comments section of the video.

Addons will likely continue to be a hot topic until we see what they actually look like in Midnight. With the changes to healing stirring the pot even further, and experienced modders like WeakAuras' 'Stanzilla' confirming that their addons won't be updated for the new expansion, Midnight is going to be a very different look for World of Warcraft; for better, or for worse.

If all of these changes put you off, we have a list of the best free MMOs if you're looking for something equally as massive. Alternatively, if you love WoW's aesthetic but can't get behind the grind, we have a rundown of all the best fantasy games, too.