Addon Developer Interviews
 

I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and I am working on a research project which is examining the use of AddOns in World of Warcraft and the Blizzard AddOn UI model. I would be interested in speaking with any AddOn developer with any level of AddOn development experience. It doesn't matter whether you develop AddOns for public use or just your own personal use. I anticipate that the interviews will take between one and two hours and we can conduct them online. I have conducted the majority of my interviews in WoW through RealID chat. Please let me know if you are interested, and I look forward to speaking with you!

Tim Arnold
Master's Candidate in Information Studies, Expected 2012
The University of Texas at Austin

[email protected]

That's usually a scam, you know. Original research? How are we to know this is real?

-Crissa

Not always...

Asking for real id conversations though is risky. That provides people with your account login name basically. I would only do this if you have a authenticator.

Seerah - do you have inside info that this person is legit?

No, I do not. But I prefer not to be accusatory. :) Though you are correct - one should always be careful.

I'm sorry, I didn't consider that one might think that this is a scam. If you feel at all uncomfortable chatting over RealID, I would be more than happy to use any other IM service. I have actually conducted a number of interviews over Gmail's IM, but I could definitely use any other IM.

As to verifying my identity: my name is Tim Arnold. I am a dual Master's degree candidate in Information Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In both disciplines I mainly focus on new media, online communities and online culture. I can provide you with links to various net profiles which verify this information:

Here is a short profile on the website of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies which lists my name and my enrollment in the dual degree program (along with a really unfortunate photo of me, ugh).

This is the website for the grant-funded program in videogame preservation at the School of Information at UT for which I am a research assistant.

I also have a Twitter account and a LibraryThing profile which corroborate some of the information I listed above.

I will definitely make copies of my final paper available to all of my interviewees, and with luck it will be published in the proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association. I applied to speak about this research project on WoW Addons at their conference next September. I'll find out whether my proposal was accepted next month.

If there is anything else that I can do to set your mind at ease, please let me know!

Also, just to explain why I asked to conduct the interview over RealID - up to this point, most of my interviews have been with AddOn users and I have found that it has been helpful to interview people about AddOns in the environment in which they use them so that they can easily refer to their AddOns during the interview if they need to. So RealID has been my preferred method of communication, though, as I mentioned earlier, I have conducted interviews over other IM services and I'm more than willing to do so again. :)

Tim

That is the typical field of study one deals with in a research paper for a master's degree nowadays, AddOn development in World of Warcraft? Holy moses!

LOL! I'm not really sure that I'd call it "typical." I'm just interested in pretty unconventional topics.

I have seen at least 2 schools in the last month or so that includes World Of Warcraft programming in the course, as a matter of fact they are using the World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons.

I tell ya what, its a great way to learn LUA and XML.

Tim - Im on the road for the next 3 days but I'll partake in your interview when I get back Tuesday evening.

Great, thanks Grimsin! I look forward to hearing from you then.

Safe travels.

Perhaps you can provide more information on what your paper is about, how the the information from the interview will be used, what types of questions and their scope you will be asking.

Since you said you are in Austin, you should also consider the additional efforts needed when trying to talk to people that are not from the US WoW servers. I can probably agree to help you, since I've done a similar thing in the past with another graduating student doing a similar and related paper (not sure how related, since your paper's detail isn't clarified) 2 years ago.

Many addon authors are often available on #wowace and #wowinterface on the Freenode IRC servers at all times of the day.

I didn't want to be accusatory, but I've been reading forums on the internet for... Umm... Longer than a grad student might be alive. So I've seen scams before.

Thank you for providing more details.

-Crissa

Being someone from outside the states time zones are an issue.

The sort of questions and answers you need surely could have been put into some sort of questionaire format that can be filled in and sent back ? I'd gladly partake in that sort of question/answer system rather than a one to one personally. Just make sure there is a N/A option for those answers that people may rather not answer.

Crissa, no offense was taken, I understand why one might be skeptical of such a post given its generality and ambiguity.

And Xinhuan, I understand your concern about how this research might be used but I assure you that it will only be used for academic purposes.

In a broad sense the objective of my research is to translate the experience of using and developing AddOns to an audience who do not use them and may not be aware of them. I don't want to be any more specific than that mostly because I don't want to suggest to you how you should think about the questions before I ask them. I'm primarily concerned with eliciting what you think is important about AddOns and AddOn development, so my questions will be broad and open-ended: "Why did you decide to start creating AddOns?" or "How did you get the idea to a create (a specific) AddOn?" These are a couple of examples of the kinds of questions I'll be asking.

After we have conducted the interview, I would be happy to talk more specifically about the hypotheses that I have started forming as a result of my research thus far.

I recently created an IRC account, so I can definitely use that service, though I am new to it so I am still getting my bearings. Send me a private message here if you are interested in setting up a time for the interview. :)

psst - #wowuidev ;)

Xrystal,

I do have a list of questions that I could send you, but I would much rather ask the questions personally so that we can have a conversation about them. As I stated above, the questions are very open-ended (there are very few yes/no and multiple choice questions) and I would like to be able to ask follow-up questions during our conversation.

That being the case, if the time difference (I'm in US-Central Standard Time) is such that it makes a real-time interview too difficult to coordinate, I could send the list of questions with the caveat that you allow me to ask follow-up questions to your responses. If you would prefer this method, feel free to email me at [email protected], and I will send the list to you.

I will suggest that if you wish to contact me for some questions, to use IRC and hang out/contact me on Freenode IRC servers (I'm on #wowuidev and #wowace). I'm usually on all day 24/7, although I might not respond immediately, or even for a few hours depending if I'm awake.

Primarily, I only log on WoW for raids between 6am-11am Texas time (which is 7pm-12mn Singapore time in my case), with a time zone difference of 13 hours, and conducting an interview during a raid (after is fine) is not ideal. You can find me on as Xinhuan on US-Barthilas-Alliance. (My guild raids Wed/Thurs/Sun/Mon).

I also told Mr. Tim Arnold to just "get an IRC client and hop on #wowuidev", but he seems dead set on having an appointed/specific time .. I think that kinda defeats the purpose of IRC :rolleyes:

Thank you both for your suggestions and your interest, they are much appreciated. Unfortunately, my schedule is such that I must set appointed times to conduct these interviews. If setting an appointment time is not feasible for you, I can definitely send you the list of interview questions and you can respond to them at your convenience. If you are interested in this option, feel free to send me a private message.

The purpose of IRC is so that you can hop on at any time you wish to chat with whoever happens to be awake at the time of your choosing. It seems totally backwards to me that you wish to have specific time windows, and yet not use these time windows to just hang out and observe the addon author community (people chat a lot on random stuff, and non-wow programming, but a lot of it is Lua based), see some of the help that people get once in a while from people asking questions.

You claim that your research is to "translate the experience of using and developing AddOns", but yet you are choosing not to participate in the community. You don't even have to actively participate, just run an IRC client 24/7 and record/view all the text in the chat at your own convenient time.

Although at this stage of WoW in its 6th year of maturity, the "golden age" of addons have passed about 1-2 years ago, there's very little that hasn't already been done on the addon scene, so in the grand scheme of things, there's not much "new and innovative" addons these days, its just the constant refinement and updating of addons as each wow patch flies by.

You are the one doing the research, you should be proactive in contacting authors individually and manually, not sit back passively and "wait for people to PM you", because I'll be surprised if more than 2 or 3 authors PM you out of the 2000 or so total addon authors in the world (based on the fact there's only about 4000 addons on Curse and WowInterface), half of which aren't US-based, and only a small portion of that number actively participate on these forums. The larger portion of forum users are addon users, not addon authors.

Do you know that only about 12 authors (their addons) account for about half the addon downloads on Curse?

Thank you again for the suggestion. I didn't mean to sound like I was writing it off. Participant observation is a widely-used research method, and if I had the kind of time that a PhD student has to write a dissertation I would rely heavily on this method because I totally agree, it is probably the best research method for this kind of study. But I am not working on a dissertation, and my time is limited so I need to use it in a way that is more focused which is why I'm conducting research interviews. That being said, I do plan to devote some time to IRC. If I decide to continue this research beyond this initial paper, I'm sure you will be seeing a lot of me there. :)

I should also state that I am not a complete outsider. I am a WoW player and an AddOn user, but I did not know that so few AddOn developers create the majority of AddOns which are currently in use (although this isn't entirely surprising). Along these same lines, it's interesting that you say that the "golden age" of addons has passed. How and why do you think this eventuality came about?

I'm also curious about this. By "golden age", are you (Xinhuan) referring to production quality/quantity, or level of activity & enthusiasm in the AddOn/UI development community (or something else)?

As Xinh mentioned, the game has been out for 6+ years now. Except for when Blizz makes something entirely new possible through a patch (new features/new API), most great ideas have been thought of already. It's not often that you come across something totally new and groundbreaking. The Pick of the Week here searches for those groundbreaking, creative addons, but much of the time it's just new, cool stuff (maybe with a different flavor or perspective to it).

I would say that the golden age of automobiles has passed, too. We are just expanding, refining, and reskinning them. If something new is added to a car that is groundbreaking, it's because of technology advancements (ex. new features/API in WoW) or a high level of creativity and ability to think outside of the box.

Yeah, it's more or less down to maintaining and customizing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It implies, that a certain standard has been reached.

WoW allows us to use Lua as a programming language to do whatever we wish in WoW. However, Lua in itself isn't useful unless we are able to use it to interact with the WoW interface, and this is provided to us in the form of APIs that we can call. These APIs impose limits on what we can do, what actions are allowable, what is possible, what isn't possible.

Before patch 2.0 (TBC), addons had a much wider freedom of possibilities, including the possibility of canceling spells in midcast, moving the player automatically (so if you have enough waypoints and data on terrain, you can auto-walk between 2 locations in WoW), intelligently choose which spell to cast, and much more. As authors push the limits of the WoW system, Blizzard adds restrictions to counteract undesirable addon behavior to the game.

However, the game is still growing then, with subscribers still multiplying (http://www.mmogchart.com/ - See charts link on the side, and the FAQ/Analysis if you're interested), so there's still a lot of possibilities to explore within addon development. There hasn't really been a game before this where the user interface is SO MODDABLE, letting users script and right the exact behavior they wish with a fully featured programing language (minus the OS library), with Blizzard's unofficial support and thru Slouken - Blizzard's UI programmer. Blizzard wanted to see what the community could do and if anything undesirable occurred, they can always ban the addon and break its functionality.

When Blizzard added the ability for addons to track CPU usage of each addon, vast addon programming paradigms occurred, shifted from writing addons in general, to writing GOOD and EFFICIENT addons. A lot of experimentation was done to determine how you could do X using the least amount of CPU time or memory, how addons could share resources and resulted in the creation of many of the wow addon libraries you see today.

During TBC, the UI saw various improvements, and major changes, particularly when they revamped the combat log system so that it is far more addon friendly (i.e we don't have to parse English (and other languages) sentences anymore to figure out who did what to whom in combat). Other significant changes were the addition of the threat APIs, Lua coroutine libraries, and in general, large additions that opened new possibilities and ideas to happen.

Addons were rewritten and vastly improved in TBC (think KTM->Omen, Titan Panel-->FuBar-->LDB-based, etc, as good case studies), and addon communities formed (you should research on how/why/when wowace/wowinterface/curseforge formed). Various automatic addon updaters/installers proliferated (with its own history and updater wars, notably the Curse/WowInterface versus WoWMatrix war, this itself is another good research topic - it sparked a whole debacle about addon copyrights and addon author rights, with many authors changing their addons' distribution license).

Post 3.0 (Wrath) though, these changes become infrequent, and Slouken moved on to other projects. Ideas begin to die down, what's possible and what isn't became more well known. There's only so-many-ways you can write a boss mod. There's only this many ways you can display a HuD, only this-much-stuff you can do with a bar addon. New addons that popup would often just improve on an older addon, there isn't really anything particularly revolutionary except perhaps the AVR addon that Blizzard decided to break.

One main thing you may not realize is that the majority of addon authors write addons for themselves - rarely for the community. Many do not mind sharing their work online on sites like these and provide some support in their spare time - and that's the extent of it. That said though, programming itself is an interesting and challenging pastime, almost nobody writes WoW addons for money, and Blizzard even decreed that addons must be free in their addon policy and contain no advertising, when Carbonite addon overstepped their bounds and added some advertising in their demo version of their paid addon product.

WoW by now, is a mature game, and as a byproduct, addons also matured, the UI's limitations are known. Subscriber numbers are stable, but not because people aren't quitting WoW - people ARE quitting WoW, but new subscribers come in from new countries and languages that WoW is being launched in, such as Russia, and it will soon be localized to Brazilian this year. Addon authors quit wow too, and many addons die with them.

The Golden Age has passed, and this is evident by less activity on the UI forums, these/wowace/curse forums, and less WoW/addon related talk on the IRC chat channels. There hasn't been any great debacle or notable incident since the "Ban Gearscore" ones, and that was over a year ago.



[[The above are my personal views and not representative of others, you may use it for your research. Information provided may not be accurate, especially in the time line, as they are from memory.]]

It's not appropriate for a researcher to take interviews without permission. He was giving his awake times, since that would be when someone could talk to him who wants to.

I don't use the IRC chat. I just haven't touched the stuff for fifteen years.

-Crissa

I don't see how using IRC prohibits him from getting permission from whomever he is speaking to before the interview. :p There are even PM chats.

Thank you, Xinhuan! That's a lot of really useful information! Also, thank you for granting me permission to use it in my research :)

And, yes Crissa, if I were to use anyone's statements I would be sure to ask their permission first.

I'm curious about the incidents and debacles that have occurred in the history of WoW AddOn development. Xinhuan, you mentioned the "Ban Gearscore" debacle which I remember and I also know of the Decursive controversy. To what extent do you think these controversies have defined what is and is not allowed in the realm of AddOn development, and who makes these decisions? Is Blizzard the only arbiter? Is it players? Is it AddOn developers? Is it all three? What kind of stakes have these parties had in these controversies? These are loaded questions, so, if you don't mind, could we focus on the "Ban Gearscore" debacle? What do you think was the result of this controversy, whose viewpoint do you think "won" in the end, and what kind of effect do you think the controversy has had on AddOn development?

Feel free to refer to other controversies if you feel they are relevant.

I'm curious what kinds of [realistic] feature additions from Blizzard you guys think would spark new ways of thinking about the UI...or is it pretty much just about skin tweaks from here on in? :p

I was always somewhat curious about the statistic here on WoWI "Most users ever online was 40644, 10-15-2008 at 12:44 PM", suggesting 3.0 was an apex of sorts. Thanks for writing all of that, I found it very informative. (I'd never even heard of Slouken. :o)

Thank you from bringing up that statistic, Aprikot. That's very useful.

Is Slouken one person or a group of developers?

Slouken is also known as Sam Lantinga, who was the lead Software Engineer at Blizzard until very recently. He is also the creator of SDL - the Simple Directmedia Layer, which was originally aimed at Linux but has since seen widespread use in games on other platforms (Angry Birds uses SDL).

Blizzard is definitely the arbiter, because users/players do their own thing, and addon authors do their own thing. Similarly, Blizzard is the one that decides what is allowed/disallowed in the realm of addon development, but their decision can stem from how players use/abuse an addon.

There is no result for the "Ban Gearscore" controversy. People continue to use it, people continue to hate it, and neither side won. Blizzard did not do anything to encourage or discourage it. HOWEVER, Blizzard did implement and show you your "Item Level" number in your character stats since Cataclysm, and they have already been using this number for the /lfd dungeon system to filter out players too weak for ICC 5-mans.

The GearScore addon, simply takes the iLvl of each of your equipped gear, and multiplies it with a "rarity multiplier" and a "equipment slot multiplier". It adds up the score of all those gear, and that's your GS. The iLvl is the amount of stat budget that is assigned to a piece of gear, and the GS formula is identical to it.

The problem is, GS isn't revolutionary by any means, iLvl of an item is available to addon authors since vanilla WoW when it launched on day 1, its just that nobody has ever really thought to use it as a quick gauge score for someone's gear, partly because in vanilla, you actually had to be in a fairly hardcore raiding guild to get T2 and T3 gear. There's almost no such thing a a pugged Blackwing Lair in those days, so having a GearScore addon then didn't make much use or sense. You were either in a good raiding guild, or you were not.

Decursive on the other hand (along with other addons like Healbot, boss mods, raid frames (CTRaid then)), changed boss encounter design significantly, Blizzard devs have already said they actually have to design encounters not to be too easy even with boss mods. This is really both good and bad, players now see interesting bosses with interesting mechanics, but on the other hand, addon automation and addon decision making was removed because it was considered undesirable by Blizzard. The result was patch 2.0 that broke nearly all combat-related, unit frames, bar addons and much more and restricted a ton of stuff. That was really significant and proved that Blizzard was willing to do what it takes to make addons not trivialize the game too much.

That's not what he said. What he said was that the top 12 most downloaded addons account for over 50% of ALL addons downloaded from curse.com

Which means that those 12 addons are immensely popular on curse.com. There are others which are updated more frequently on their own websites so I'm guessing their popularity can't be figured as easily (Deadly Boss Mods (deadlybossmods.com), Auctioneer (auctioneeraddon.com), etc)

That's not what I said. To be more specific, I said that approximately 12 authors (who in total add up to some 50+(?) addons, I didn't count this one) account for about half the downloads based on Curse Client install-base counts.

Deadly is #1 and Auctioneer is number... 20-something on Curse.

But Auctioneer is coded by a group, so I don't think the one person model works.

It's hard to tell how many of each author is actually being used; only Blizzard could tell.

-Crissa

To give a quick insight on this particular discussion:
I've imported the data from the 200 most downloaded WoWInterface AddOns, and I conclude the following:

• The sum of the top 200 most downloaded WoWI addons is 102,009,814
• The top 10 authors account for roughly half of the WoWI total downloads with 29 AddOns (51,800,477 = 50.8%)

AddOn downloads paste: http://wowuidev.pastey.net/148005
Author downloads paste: http://wowuidev.pastey.net/148006

Disclaimer: The information showed can be incomplete/faulty, since it's only gathered from the top 200 most downloaded WoWInterface AddOns. Authors could also take over each other's addons, and/or work in teams/groups. Some AddOns, e.g. Fubar, are abandoned/"end of line". Curse definitely has different statistics/environment, but I couldn't import Curse's downloads information ><

Great list! It's interesting to me that the most popular ten or so AddOns are all designed to ease the identification & completion of PvE objectives, including endgame content, and have nothing to do with interface aesthetics.

@timmerino: if you didn't already know, Cladhaire "wrote the book" on WoW programming. :)

lol, I didn't know that Cladhaire is James Whitehead aka jnwhiteh

I was suspecting though ..

Edit:
oh nvm ><

In the spirit of Ketho's list I was curious about the most popular UI compilations on WoWInterface:

• LUI: 646,151
• SpartanUI: 316,199
• Roth UI: 251,670
• Caith UI: 191,852
• ElvUI (Tukui-based): 179,672

(Tukui, including user edits, is pretty popular, but not available for download here on WoWI.)

These numbers suggest to me that, while compilations are much less popular than certain individual AddOns, 100% replacement of Blizzard's UI graphics is a popular compilation attribute. (No sh*t :p)

Feel free to contact me off-thread. I won't do interviews via RealID, but I'm happy to do them via Google Talk/MSN/AIM/etc. I'm available @gmail.com and @wowinterface.com.

Wow! Thank you for compiling all of that data Ketho! :) Do you mind if I use it in my paper?

And I'll shoot you an email in a bit, Cladhaire. I look forward to chatting with you!

(Thanks for the heads-up, Aprikot.;))

I'm also available, but like cladhaire, MSN/GT/AIM are better, I can PM you info if you're interested.

I only got #24, sad :(

Oh, sorry, I didn't notice this disclaimer. I'll be sure to compare it with the numbers on Curse.

On a related note, I was surprised to find that "Recount" recently surpassed "DBM" on Curse as the most downloaded AddOn. What do you all think about this development?

Aw, lol! Well, I would still be happy to interview you!

Yes, by all means, any IM service is fine. PM me with whichever you prefer.

Yes, I've noticed this too, and, from what I understand, in China compilations are much more popular. In fact I've heard that it's relatively difficult to download stand-alone AddOns in China.

I've never actually used a compilation before, but I have talked with players who use them and like them a lot. They seem to appreciate the aesthetic unity of a compilation. What do you think are some of the pros and cons of compilations vs. stand-alone AddOns from a player and/or a developer perspective?

DBM has their own website (http://www.deadlybossmods.com/) and host alpha/beta versions of their addon there. People go there directly to download the latest code with, for example, slightly fixed timers for various bosses, especially the latest BWD boss timers. Recount on the other hand, hosts alpha/betas directly on wowace/curse.

Gatherer and a number of other addons (for eg, Atlas) also have their own dedicated websites, thus you need to take into account these factors.

You also need to decide between counting an addon's "user install base" which is X amount of users installed this on their PC, versus "Y amount of downloads", which is a number that only counts downloads, so if AddonM released a new update every 2 days, it would attract more downloads. X is measurable only by Curse Client data (which is what my top 12 authors on Curse approxs half the downloads, if you only count 1 user downloading exactly once, and obviously only counts Curse Client users), while Ketho's damage is based on Y. I am unsure if either site shows or counts Y on multiple downloads from the same IP address. You need to research/figure that out, and not blindly use numbers.

You can also email me about an interview.

Edit: My email is @pacific.net.sg

I never got around to changing my username on the sites. The name I've always used (previously) in the technology and programming world is indeed 'jnwhiteh'. When WoW first came out and the community was first coming together in the official WoW forums, we had to use our characters to post and my first main was a rogue named 'Cladhaire'. By the time I had moved onto my priest, I had enough work out that it didn't make sense to try and change my name.. so I've been living a bit of a double life!

I think the requests of users have changed. Today People want more Out of the box stuff. I will try to resume my thought:

Integration.
Users are looking for integrated UI and this is the reason of the success of Tukui, nUI and Compilations. Using a base UI, users can add a raid frames, a damage meter, any other addons etc. But Today, People prefered to reduce the number of addons.

Adaptation.
The possibility to switch all the user interface depend of if you are a healer, a tanker or because you change your spec. I know some people have two or three installation of WoW, with differents addons, different configurations.

Customization and Simplicity.
More the list of customization option are big, more you loose in simplicity. These two words are opposite in fact. For example, you can do what you wish with oUF, but you have to learn LUA. Some authors prefer to limit the customization and their addon is easier to use. The goal is to find the right middle between customization and simplicity.

I am not agree with Xinhuan when he say the golden age of addons is over and there is no more innovative stuff. This is more because you are staying in the world of Ace. Ace did never evolute and is still in version 3.

I want to highlight RDX 8, the addon I am responsible. RDX 8 is about to be the new golden age. Just spend 15 minutes to test it and you will be like all these people who PM me or send me a email, explaining their surprise and congratulating the job done. You will understand the concept.

To install:

RDX core and mediapack:
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...7-OpenRDX.html
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...MediaPack.html

RDX Theme: (Download and install them all)
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...3-OlokAUI.html
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...XenoraAUI.html

A quick tutorial has been integrated at startup of RDX.

For any questions, you can use our RDX section here on WoWI.

The final version is coming soon with so many more theme.

Cheers

I'm sure he wants to make that subject of his work. How RDX heralds the start of the new golden age of addon development with all its awesome.

The thing though, is RDX is just 1 innovative addon. When I say golden age, I mean in general that there is a lot of innovation and new stuff going on. While RDX is good and all, its just one of the very few bright spots of development remaining.

In the past, my buffer couldn't even hold 1 day of commits on #wowuidev-commits, but nowadays, I can read up to 3 days worth.

Wow, I didn't realised this thread was for shameless self-advertisement. May I throw my hat into the ring or something? ;)

Number of downloads can't proof anything, because it is not the amount of users. It *can* be a tendency, but I would not consider it a "scientific" fact.

I'm not sure if wowinterface has the information, but if you did number of downloads for each version, you'd have a much better idea of the number of 'users' or trends for a given addon. Curse has a similar problem in that it only counts those who use the Curse Client, which isn't everyone. Looking at the two sites together does give you a good view, however.

I can't really see how there was a golden age of addon development at such a random point of time as "1-2 years ago". When I'm reminiscing about the time of my first raids in MC I think I basicly had everything that I have now. Sure since DamageMeters or KTM things have evolved. Naturally new features are coming and code gets more efficient but the concepts were already there or even worse they were not. Even without a taint system there wasn't so much groundbreaking stuff out there because back then development was more decentralised and painstaking as coding standards and libraries weren't as established as today. That's no surprise, the game was new and no one really cared about a fully modded interface. When WoWAce went big and it has been made easier to put ideas into action was there any new groundbreaking stuff? Well yes, but not more than before or after that point for most of the existing ideas were just ported or improved. Today it's more about standardization. Try to establish a new boss mod and you will most likely fail. So people focus more on the looks and isolating those features of big addons that they really need (think of Prat at the time vs the billion of chat mods out there now) mainly because the standard UI has been significantly imroved itself over the years. I don't have more or less moment these days where I see a new addon and think "Wow, thats clever" than 2 years ago.

I would approve, what hank said...

When I remember my "starting with addons" it was "MetaMap". Just because it provided some information/features, that I liked.

When I got started with "styling" my UI, it was Perl and then Pitbull. Today I'm trying to create aestetically mathing UIs with a mixture of oUF-layouts and "self and only for me written"-addons which are styled the same way. There is no ground-breaking thing ever.

I often tend to say: "I'm good at tanking, because my UI is optimised for this task, I see everything I need to see when I need to see." But on the other hand, there's a girl in my guild which uses only two addons: Healbot and DBM and she is performing extraordinary well.
So I conclude it is a matter of "getting used to" and "choose what you really need".
I'm proud to say that I haven't used AtlasLoot throughout WotLK, but running PUG-raids make me very sure, this is the only addon some guys use. ;)

It will be very difficult to measure the impact of addons on the game.
As a matter of fact, Blizzard included some cool stuff into their game, which first was provided through addons, thinking of MoveAnything or perhaps the new, grid-style raidframes.

On the other side, the UFs haven't change, but in MY eyes they're just bad in terms of functionality and they are not fitting my personal sense of beauty (talking about player/target/focus).

I don't really get, what is the focus of your work, but you will have to make sure to ask more people than the addon-communities here or elsewhere, just because the people in this coms are just "mad on addons", we're using them where we could. But we're not representative for the whole community of WoW-players, who will only use a very distinguished sort/amount of addons.

I somehow got lost... Could I make any point of sense? ;)

That's the thing. The setting up of wowace and wowinterface were huge factors that allowed WoW addon programming in general to flourish, to have a forum of discussion. In particular, I want to mention the WowAceUpdater (WAU), it made addon updating so easy that much more users were willing to try out modding. That and the fact addon hosting sites went up, caused addons to be used widespread.

"A golden age is often ascribed to the years immediately following some technological innovation. It is during this time that writers and artists ply their skills to this new medium."

It wasn't just about "new and groundbreaking addons", it is also about the technology and other factors that made it possible.

I'd have to lean to agreeing with Xinhuan.


Saying Ace 'still' at version is silly, 3 was a major shift from 2 that's still had some improvements and fixes made. There isn't a need for a 4 because 3 does everything fine and didn't have a lot of the issues that 2 did.

RDX 8 addon you linked doesn't look like it's anything exactly new. Maybe you make some improvements over existing addons, but RDX itself is quite old, and nothing you added into it at a quick glance is a "new golden age"

Ok so your standpoint now is that you look on the technological advancement behind addon development and its execution as two different aspects which your previous statement implied otherwise to me. If that is your position the development evolution if you will was moot as it didn't help to create new concepts. I totally agree with you that most things have been done already, so you can't expect a new AVR every week. But imo the fact that now you have so much more collected knowledge to access, it is easier to build upon existing libraries and the expertise of the typical users who play the game for a long time is advancing as well gives opportunity to more output for the addon community. This of course is a consequence of the the provision of knowledge via growing communities and frameworks what you call the golden age. But my point is that the same things have been done over and over again. So if you want to create something new now would be the best time and so I'm happy to develop addons after your definition of the golden age and it's everything but sad that this time has passed. I'll leave it at that.

I agree with Xinhuan as far as a timeframe for the golden age. It corresponds roughly to the time when I was in college until after I graduated and got a full time job.

I also think that WoWAce's transition to Curse was a big contributor to the end of it.