Those: Blizzard
March 19, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. – The upcoming patch 10.2.6 brings lots of class adjustments and a new event. As part of the event, the developers are also banning add-ons in WoW – a big step that could have far-reaching consequences.
With the new Plunderstorm event, the WoW developers are taking a high risk in patch 10.2.6. They chose this event to intentionally push some of the game's previous boundaries and experiment. The Battle Royal mode itself is certainly the most important thing. But there are many more.
So we don't play with our own characters, or even with a specific class in Plunderstorm. We don't take any falling damage and suddenly all characters can double jump.
The fact that the Plunderstorm takes place within WoW (buy now) but not on one of the WoW servers (but on its own server) offers the developers the opportunity to dare to experiment further and impose restrictions. This includes a new action bar and a ban that many WoW players won't like at all.
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WoW developers completely block addons in the new game mode
In Plunderstorm we don't have to rotate our usual skills and talents. Instead, we get new skills and items throughout each game. This in turn led the developers to keep the action bars significantly smaller than we are actually used to.
In addition, addons of any kind are prohibited in Plunderstorm!
Since the Plunderstorm takes place on a separate server, this shouldn't be particularly difficult for the developers and they will simply block any API interfaces there and thus block the addons, similar to the early alpha versions.
Experiment for the future?
The developers have aggressively communicated that they placed a lot of value on the visibility of visual effects in Plunderstorm, in order to generally reduce the need for add-ons. Many players see this as an experiment for the future. If the game mode runs smoothly without addons and works well, Similar adjustments could make the add-ons “superfluous” in the actual WoW.
Do you think we're seeing the beginning of the end for addons here? Or maybe the developers simply wanted to save work and not even touch on addon accessibility for the new mode, since the event will be over in a few weeks anyway? Switching off the APIs causes significantly less work than supporting the interfaces.