Addons in ARRFollow

I like the idea of the game officially supporting them.

Everyone and his brother used windower plugins, so it'll be fun to see what people can come up with for ARR.

Never got to use them. Only MMO's I've played up to this point are FFXI on PS2 / 360 and DCUO on PS3. Should be interesting to see how it goes on PC this time around.

An add on is a player created piece of software. It can take many many forms. One form is a windower which allowed ffxi to be played in a sized down window rather than in full screen mode. This allowed players to have multiple other programs and other add ons running while still having ffxi going.

I also played ffxi on ps2 so I don't have many more examples but there were things like hate meters and stuff that would pull info out of the game that would not normally be displayed and show it to you. Then you have exploits like running under the map or bots that do things like fishing or claiming nm's for you while you're not even playing.

In ffxi se forbade all add ons. In FFXIV they will be allowing them which hopefully will mean they pay more attention and only let non exploitable software in.

To be honest, i like addons, and i will probably use one or 2. But i seriously hope we don't get to have the thousands of addons WoW used to have. I mean for every little thing you can think about you would find an addon. People would install an addon then the game would be updated and the addon would also need to be updated so you would have to wait for the creator to do so. Not to mention that if you had more than 2 or 3 you had to check each one of them for updates (although there were addon managers).

Well it would be good if zam did. The main site for addons back when i was playing wow was curse.com.

Just because an addon exists for something doesn't mean you have to use it.

Some people enjoy building entirely new UIs, and they accept that what comes with that is the vigilant updating of addons, especially at patch times.

In many cases actually, I've found it easier to rebuild a UI entirely rather than try to shoehorn some information I want into the existing UI that wasn't designed for it.

On the other hand. Having addons like Grid and Deadly Boss Mods have helped WoW quite a bit. Grid pointed out a serious flaw in the way raid healing was done, in that it presented information is much more efficient way; so much so that a version of it was eventually developed for the default UI.

DBM has enabled the WoW devs to create more complex encounters with more interesting mechanics than they could have if it didn't exist.

There's really no such thing as "too many" addons available. You choose the ones you want based on your own tastes and how you want information displayed.

Now, have there been addons that have done something bot-like in the past? Yep. And those get broken because they aren't good for the game. The original versions of Healbot and Decursive are good examples of this. An addon from a few years ago called AVR Encounters actually drew pictures on the game world to show you the ranges of abilities that were coming up. That was really dangerous to leave laying around, so the dev team just broke it instead.

There will always be tastes that differ, and with enough addon authors providing variety, almost all of those can be satisfied.

Well the issue with Healbot originally is that it would choose your spells for you based on the amount the target needed to be healed. Addons just can't do that anymore because of the obvious degenerative effects on gameplay.

I'm a healer too btw. I've done heroic raid progression as a healer in the last three WoW expansions. I'm afraid I don't see what you're talking about with addons like Healbot and Grid making healing too easy. Healing still requires a great deal of skill and awareness. Making the binds more comfortable doesn't remove that.

In all aspects on gameplay, and I made this point ad naseum before 1.0 launched, the goal of the player should be on playing the game... not playing the UI. The UI is a tool for playing the game, but it should never be an obstacle to playing the game. Making the player comfortable with the UI allows them to ignore it and move on to the gameplay, which is what should be happening. Now a healer isn't able to ignore the UI since it's pretty much 75% of what they're doing most of the time. But they can still have a comfortable experience with it so that their mental resources are spent on planning their own actions rather than beating their head against the UI.

So, you were, in essence, healing like a healer should? I fail to see how the addon made any difference considering watching timers and healing when HP starts to fall is what a healer does. The auto-select heal/cure based on percentage heal missing was automated but no less so than the ability in FFXI's Spellcast to set a cure based on %MP remaining or %HP target.

Addons boil to one of two stances: you either use them or you don't. Complaining that someone else uses XXX isn't going to stop Y person from using XXX, it just shows one likes to complain.

I disagree. I firmly believe that a healer could do well without an addon that simplified things even more.

"watching timers and healing when HP starts to fall is what a healer does" <-- I am aware that thats a healers job since i am healing in every single MMO i've played. What my problem is, is that you could say i wanted healing to be the old fashion way if that makes any sense.

I never complained when others said they are using healbot in my raids, more over it would op our chances for winning. But that doesn't mean that i shouldn't have my own opinion that i don't like it. Simple as that.

As a healer, healing HP in FFXI was the easy part since it was well represented and that was the usual purpose of healing so you were ready for it in every way.

What drove me crazy was clearing up ailments. You had to rely on catching it in your log which was filled with all the other crap that was going on at the same, and even then, half the time it didn't spell out who was afflicted with what so even addons couldn't really help. So you had to memorize the possible ailments from every mob's special move and quickly guess who got hit with what or you were the worst healer ever. Definitely the most dreadful part of being a white mage in my opinion.

Healbot had already long since been broken by Lich King so I have no idea what you are talking about here. That's all it does - let you see HP and some status ailments in the raid frame and you do your healing based on that. Yes, it was broken when it first released. Blizzard stopped that, and now it's just a convenient and useful add on like Grid+clique. Some prefer one, some prefer the other, and some use the default raid frames, but they all serve the same purpose and it's down to what you prefer.

As far as your other comment regarding too many add ons... Well you do realize that millions upon millions of people play WoW, right? Higher percentage of folks with programming experience + diverse desires for ease of information display= lots of adds on and people developing them. So what if there are 10k add ons? as a percentage versus 9+million people playing the game over the course of the last decade, that's pretty tame. All that shows is that people are interested in add ons and they add tremendous value to mmos.

I'm hoping for a robust enough API to at least have add ons like bartender and healbot. I like my UI in a very specific pattern and I like to be able to keybind my mouse buttons to cast spells. Currently WoW is really the only game out there with an API robust enough to make things like that happen. Even Rift, which boasted lots of functionality right out of the box has a nightmare of a UI that constantly does whatever it wants regardless of where you put things. Stuff like that is just better outsourced to the players, so the devs can focus on more important things like developing content, encounters, and hiding treasure for us to find. There's no way that they will ever be able to put together a one size fits all UI, so why even try? Keep it basic and say, "here's a programming kit, good luck!"

Then if something is developed that SE thinks is too exploitive or automates things, they can break it like Bliz does.

Add ons just add too much value and are too important in this age for SE to ignore. The more accessible the game is, the better chance it has of great success.

I have already stated why i don't like healbot so i don't see the point to say it again. I guess it goes down to "if people like it or not" and i didn't like it for the reasons i arleady said.

As for how many addons will be there its really not a big deal for me nor will it pains me if i see 10k 100k 1mil addons. Hey if that brings more players and keeps the game alive its fine by me.