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Addons in ARRFollow

#1 Mar 05 2013 at 7:02 PM Rating: Good
Ok, so we have heard that there will be support for addons maybe 6 months into the release of ARR during the interviews, my question is; is everyone OK with having damage meters, aggro control addon, and all other addons that will make the game/events more controllable/manageable?

Personally I'm ok with this, and pretty much used to addons (played a lot of other mmo's that had addons). I know this will streamline ARR towards games like WoW but imo that doesnt have to be something bad. With the possibility of addon for micromanaging large raids or even hard-mode dungeons, maybe SE can step up the "skill" level of the content without players complaining to much?

There is a lot of other areas that can be covered or interactive with addons, so I for one think this is a great move by SE. So what do you think ?
#2 Mar 05 2013 at 7:31 PM Rating: Excellent
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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.
#3 Mar 05 2013 at 8:11 PM Rating: Good
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Don't care for 'em.
#4 Mar 05 2013 at 10:26 PM Rating: Decent
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.
#5 Mar 06 2013 at 12:41 AM Rating: Good
Whats an addon? And whats a windower lol im not down with the hip slang
#6 Mar 06 2013 at 2:57 AM Rating: Excellent
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jarradstone wrote:
Whats an addon? And whats a windower lol im not down with the hip slang


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.
#7 Mar 06 2013 at 5:43 AM Rating: Excellent
In FFXIV specifically addons are probably going to be UI elements that you can use to see more information about what is going on in game. Yoshi-P told me in my interview that they would be sending a ton of data to the client that isn't displayed by default, so as not to intimidate new players. More experienced players can create or download other user made addons for a better idea of things like their damage output, quest helpers, etc.
#8 Mar 06 2013 at 7:05 AM Rating: Excellent
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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).
#9 Mar 06 2013 at 7:08 AM Rating: Excellent
I'm hoping Zam can host Addons for the game, that's one thing I'm pushing for.

They're going to release a tool for Windows that will let you create them, so hopefully it's robust enough that non-coders can make their own stuff without having to know some scripting language like LUA.
#10 Mar 06 2013 at 7:15 AM Rating: Excellent
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Wint wrote:
I'm hoping Zam can host Addons for the game, that's one thing I'm pushing for.

They're going to release a tool for Windows that will let you create them, so hopefully it's robust enough that non-coders can make their own stuff without having to know some scripting language like LUA.


Well it would be good if zam did. The main site for addons back when i was playing wow was curse.com.
#11 Mar 06 2013 at 7:23 AM Rating: Excellent
Yeah I was hoping we could become a hub like that. We do have a site already, MMOUI so the groundwork is there already.
#12 Mar 06 2013 at 10:52 AM Rating: Good
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teravibe wrote:
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).


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.
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#13 Mar 06 2013 at 11:07 AM Rating: Good
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Archmage Callinon wrote:
teravibe wrote:
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).


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.


I never said that i need to test all 10.000 addons (actual number) that are out there for WoW. But i still believe that 10k addons are a lot for just one game. I used to have around 10 addons at all times but to be honest some addons changed the gameplay a lot. For example i was a healer, and there was this addon that helped you heal. Setting hotkeys for faster heal etc. I tried it for a bit and it was actually a really good addon. The problem with it? It made healing too easy. Some may say that this is good and it might be but for me its not. You are not playing the game how its meant to be played. You are just pressing 3 keys and you are done.

I am not against addons that will fix something the game designers didn't make correctly or addons that show you info like dps or best healer in the party etc, or even those small minigames during flight addons.

Anyway this is a personal opinion but i do not want that many addons or at least addons that affect gameplay like that.
#14 Mar 06 2013 at 12:09 PM Rating: Good
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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.
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#15 Mar 06 2013 at 12:25 PM Rating: Decent
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Yes i do agree with most you say (even though i still believe there were just too many "useless" addons there :P but putting that aside) but i should point out that healbot (and that was the addon i was talking about) even after they fixed it, was still problematic in my eyes. It would let you as i said set hotkeys like right mouse click that heal left mouse click that heal ctrl left mouse click the other heal etc. Practically it makes healing really easy.Especially for a healer like me, a druid resto with a **** ton of heals. The healer would put the "least" amount of effort to heal in a party if he had some skills. That is what bothered me. While others liked the way it helped them it still felt like cheating to me, even though blizzard apparently believed that the addon wasn't a problem anymore.

#16 Mar 06 2013 at 12:32 PM Rating: Good
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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.
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#17 Mar 06 2013 at 12:52 PM Rating: Decent
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Well before all i must say that i stopped playing in the lich king expansion. I was doing heroic raids for it (in fact my guild was the first in the eu server i was in to get the the lich king down etc) and with all honestly with healbot was extremely easy. Not trying to sound like a smart a** but thats how i was seeing it. Of course when you are doing this kind of raids its not a walk in the park. But still once or twice that i used healbot it made it for me 50% easier to heal. Don't get me wrong it was still hard but for me it was way easier to heal. Basically it helped me with managing my heals, having quicker reaction, keeping a better watch for the timers for my active heals on my mates and also a way better view of the actual hp of the whole raid.

With that i basically gave a lay out of what makes a good healer. I would have accepted healbot if it was just letting me see my mates hps and also the timers for my heals and let me do the rest by myself

When i had healbot on i was just looking at it and i was just refreshing my healing timers and giving a healing boost when someones hp started falling.

I could think one or two changes i could do for it that would greatly help me but not make me feel like cheating. If i could just select one of the players in the healbot ui and heal him the normal way then it would be better. Not how it was set to heal with a hotkey without even needing to target the actual player (you basically had to click the name of the player with the heal you had set on that key).
#18 Mar 06 2013 at 1:00 PM Rating: Decent
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teravibe wrote:
When i had healbot on i was just looking at it and i was just refreshing my healing timers and giving a healing boost when someones hp started falling.


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.
#19 Mar 06 2013 at 1:05 PM Rating: Excellent
The impression I got with the addons for XIV would be they are for display only, I'm not familiar with the WoW addon world but something like Spellcast would probably remain a third party (and hence illegal) addon. That will probably make some people happy and some mad, but that is my impression of where they are going for this.
#20 Mar 06 2013 at 1:06 PM Rating: Decent
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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.
#21 Mar 06 2013 at 1:08 PM Rating: Good
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It'll depend on what the API allows. It always does.
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#22 Mar 10 2013 at 7:43 PM Rating: Excellent
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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.
#23 Mar 10 2013 at 10:58 PM Rating: Excellent
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I like certain add-ons and things like parsers because I wanted to see how much a certain piece of gear helped, to why that DRK was gathering so much hate. I also used the macro creator to save time creating macros offline.

Granted, this can lead down a slippery slope of meta-gaming with number crunching, but in the end I really don't mind that.

On the other side, things that were add-ons a few years ago like "quest-trackers" have become commonplace and included in MMOs from the beginning.

However "auto" this or "auto" that (in game) probably shouldn't be allowed, though the game should be accommodating enough and reward the skillful. The game should provide ample information and ways to tackle any situation. If you have to create a third-party app to beat content then there's something wrong.
#24 Mar 11 2013 at 9:42 AM Rating: Excellent
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Quote:
I would have accepted healbot if it was just letting me see my mates hps and also the timers for my heals and let me do the rest by myself


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.
#25 Mar 11 2013 at 9:53 AM Rating: Excellent
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I like the idea of addons and mods. They give a game life in a way that nothing else really can. Yeah, it becomes stupid when the try-hards say X, Y and Z mods are required to do raid A or something, but aside from that small subgroup mods do nothing but add to the game. As an individual no one forces you to use a mod, and more options for something is always a good thing. SE has shown that they're also willing to consider player feedback in a much larger way than before, so I think there's a decent chance you'll see incorporation of mods into the base code of the game eventually, like what Blizzard did with WoW and scrolling combat text for example.
#26 Mar 11 2013 at 10:04 AM Rating: Decent
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Torrence wrote:
Quote:
I would have accepted healbot if it was just letting me see my mates hps and also the timers for my heals and let me do the rest by myself


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.
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