World of Warcraft Director ‘Overall Happy’ With Add-on Disarmament Ahead of Midnight Launch

Way back in April of last year, Blizzard began making gestures at something that would eventually be called “add-on disarmament,” effectively an effort to make competitive play in World of Warcraft significantly less reliant on externally downloaded mods, or add-ons.

Now, nine months later, those efforts are well underway, and uh, they haven’t gone over amazingly.

The premise doesn’t sound bad on paper. Initially, Blizzard talked about implementing some new in-game tools that would theoretically take the place of a lot of functions players typically wanted add-ons for. This started with rotation assistance, and has since followed in the World of Warcraft: Midnight alpha and beta with other new features such as a cooldown manager, damage meters, and other improvements. The idea is that Blizzard wants to put an end to situations where players feel compelled to download external programs for a competitive advantage in dungeons, raids, or other content. Meanwhile, the studio has said it doesn’t intend to touch add-ons that are purely cosmetic, such as those that offer item or merchant organization tools, quest support, or various visual customizations. Those add-ons can stay.

Now, on the cusp of Midnight’s release though, some players are still unhappy with how disarmament has turned out. Admittedly, a lot of Blizzard’s new tools are excellent. The rotation assists are helpful, the damage meters are extremely accurate, and a lot of the new tools were sorely needed for a long time. But the total loss of some of the game’s most popular mods (most notably WeakAuras, which essentially let players display all sorts of custom graphics and information in their game based on a variety of factors, most notably to help with combat encounters) has many hardcore players frustrated. With add-ons no longer able to draw from in-game combat information in order to function, players have lost UI set-ups, character configurations, or helpful tools they’ve relied on for years. It’s a rough transition!

Just ahead of the 12.0 pre-patch heralding the coming of Midnight, we sat down with game director Ion Hazzikostas to talk to him about how disarmament is going, and what the plans for the future of World of Warcraft’s relationship with mods might be. Here’s our interview in full below, lightly edited for length and clarity:

IGN: It’s been about nine months since you first started talking about add-on disarmament, around the one-button rotation idea when we first talked about that. And then it’s been about four months since you began really implementing it in a way that players could see and mess around with an Alpha and Beta. So, how do you feel it’s gone so far?

Ion Hazzikostas: Overall, we’re happy with how things have gone. We knew that this was going to be complicated. We knew it was going to be contentious. Certainly, it’s a large set of changes. And I think the path that we followed over the course of Alpha and Beta was really to start by rolling out what we saw as the most restrictive version of add-on API permissions possible, to ensure that we were hitting the mark in terms of preventing the computational stuff that worried us most. And then that cleared the air for us to spend the next few months shoring up our baseline offerings and working with the add-on developer community to restore functionality that was collateral damage. So, I think it’s been movement in one direction, pretty much in terms of more and more customization, more flexibility from September through today. And as we’re here on the cusp of launch, I think I feel good about what we’re going to be offering. And of course the work continues in terms of continuing to improve the base UI, continuing to work with add-on developers beyond launch. But we feel we’ve covered the essentials for the baseline experience.

Do you find that that’s reflected in player feedback? Because at least in the forums that I poked my nose into, people still seem to not be super thrilled.

Hazzikostas: I mean, I think there’s a mix of experiences and perspectives. I think the nature of discussion on the topic is inherently going to be a bit skewed towards people who are concerned about the changes. Because ultimately, if you’re someone who doesn’t use a bunch of add-ons, or you welcome these changes, there isn’t a lot to talk about really with regard to that. You’re just focused on other aspects of Midnight. Whereas, understandably for a lot of players who use add-ons heavily, who rely on them in the live game and The War Within today, the prospect of significant change can be an unsettling one. And there’s been a lot of changes to the landscape over the last few months. I think a big area of focus for us a couple of months ago was people being surprised that add-ons that they were used to using that didn’t seemingly offer any competitive advantage, were apparently not going to be able to function in Midnight. I’m talking about add-ons like ElvUI or Console Port or Bartender. And that was entirely unintended collateral damage, but became the subject of a lot of intensive collaboration between our UI engineers and the add-on development community as we did work to give them new functions, new API hooks, to ensure that they could keep as much of this benign functionality present.

So, for the majority of people, if you’re an ElvUI user, let’s say, you can update your UI next week and roll right into 12.0 and the Midnight pre-launch experience with most of what you’re still comfortable with and accustomed to visually. And just some of the restricted competitive advantage functionality won’t be there, but we’ve done everything possible to make this as the least disruptive experience it can be.

Do you have any metrics related to what percentage of users actually use add-ons? And if so, how many use certain popular ones that were maybe targeted by this change, WeakAuras or something like that?

I think the majority of users use add-ons in some form. I think it’s something like, 65% or 70% of players have at least one add-on. Now, there’s a huge gamut that’s captured by that, obviously. I think the single most popular add-on to our knowledge is some form of damage meter. So, no surprise that that was very high on the list of things that we knew we needed to offer baseline, if we’re restricting the ability to parse combat events in real time. And really, to be fair, that is a great example of something that should have been part of the baseline client for years now. And that we knew add-ons could do it, so it wasn’t a priority in the same way as it might have been.

But not being able to really understand your performance or whether the talents you chose are doing better for you or worse, without using an external tool, is something that we’re glad to have addressed. A lot of the other most popular add-ons are mostly cosmetic in nature, or things that help with collections, or other quality of life that we’re trying, that shouldn’t be directly impacted or are minimally impacted. And then, I think as you go on down the list from there, there are definitely suites of tools that help with encounters and combat enhancement. And that functionality is what’s going to be restricted, but it’s with the goal of creating a more level playing field, where players don’t need to turn to these outside resources in order to succeed.

And rather, add-ons can be about personalizing the experience in ways that suit you, rather than feeling you need add-ons that the community is asking you or requiring you to use because they’re broadly agreed to be an objective advantage.

Why did you end up choosing to suddenly overhaul the add-on landscape the way you did, as opposed to developing these replacements while the add-ons still existed and then having maybe a more gradual transition?

Hazzikostas: I think it’s something that, once we were resolved that a change needed to occur here, really requires a pretty clearly demarcated cutover. A world where add-ons existed in their full computational glory, and we were trying to build up some baseline offerings, is a world in which the majority of players would continue to use the full power of what add-ons could provide, where we would have to design around those add-ons. We never designed for add-ons, but we can’t ignore the tools that players are using to face the challenges that we’re creating. And so, it would have been another full expansion of pretty much what players have become accustomed to. There’s upsides and downsides there. I think it’s not something we took lightly at all.

But recognizing that this is a change that needed to happen on an expansion boundary, we spent most of the last year and a half thinking about what needed to change, how we would approach it, and how we would handle the rollout, with a bunch of check-ins along the way, to ensure that we felt good about successfully accomplishing this changeover in the Midnight expansion. There were points along the way where, if it felt this wasn’t going to come together and wasn’t going to be the experience our players deserve, we would have pivoted and either delayed it or taken a different approach.

But part of the last several months has been building confidence, making sure we’re hearing all of the feedback from as many parts of the community as possible, including our add-on developers, and that we’re able to address that feedback and feel good about where we’re going to land.

I have a bunch of questions about very specific things that are either impacted or notably have not been impacted by this change that I wanted to ask you about. So, I’m going to drill down a little bit. To start, do you have any plans to overhaul the current floating combat text feature? I know that add-ons in the past have allowed for more customizability that’s no longer available.

Hazzikostas: I think that is an area that is on our internal roadmap, but it hasn’t been a priority. Because ultimately, it’s largely cosmetic in nature. We’ve tried to focus on the areas that were going to be more impactful to people’s experience first.

Current UI allows percentage-based scaling of various things, unit frames and stuff like that. Is there any thought to getting that updated to support independent XY scaling? So, if you want a health bar that’s really long horizontally, can it not be three inches thick vertically?

Hazzikostas: Yeah. I think so, those are things we would like to continue to expand and we are continuing to expand Edit Mode functionality and the ways in which the base UI can be aesthetically tweaked. That said, that aesthetic space really is where add-ons shine. There are countless preferences that players have, for size, shape, color, flare, you name it. And add-ons continue to offer all of the power to customize that experience robustly. We want to be a bit wary of going too far with our built-in customization because that also adds layers of complexity to the interface and to the advanced options.

If we’re trying to offer options to suit every player’s niche preferences, at some point, that experience is going to be very, very bloated, versus people who want a particular look and are accustomed to it being able to just got an add-on that does what they want. To be clear, we embrace the power of add-ons to improve players’ experience in customizing the look and feel of World of Warcraft. It’s been a strength for 21 years. We do not want to change that. We do not want to retreat from that. And so, I think for purely cosmetic stuff, that hasn’t been a priority for that reason.

And there’s not any effort from you to stop people from having an add-on that changes the look of their boss frames or their raid frames or things like that, right? Even visual stuff that touches combat in that way. That’s still something we’ll be able to do.

Hazzikostas: Exactly. I think, altering the look and feel of the user interface of how information is presented, the size of things, the fonts, the colors, the shapes, that’s something that we are fully supporting. That’s not something we ever had any desire to restrict. The only place where there are restrictions are where combat logic is driving specific things. Where based on knowing that you have spell X, Y, Z on you, it’s making a special visual appear that’s just tied to that spell or something along those lines. Something that really was a big focus of our Alpha and Beta experience was understanding and fixing a lot of the collateral damage that our initial changes resulted in, for cosmetic add-ons. I’ve mentioned add-ons like ElvUI earlier in the conversation.

Those are the sorts of things that we never intended to break, but because of quirks of how certain add-ons were authored, 10+ years ago, when their developers first put them together, there were aspects of how they were approaching things that are incompatible with the current approach, but that’s no fault of their own. That’s just the approach they happened to pick a dozen years ago. And so, I know it was very concerning and alarming to a lot of players, who were hearing us talking about wanting to disarm combat enhancing competitive add-ons.

But then, we’re hearing that the add-on they relied on to make their unit frames have a different aesthetic was no longer functioning, or the add-on that they relied on to be able to easily plug a controller in and play the game on a game pad was no longer going to function. We’ve done work and collaboration with the add-on development community to give them hooks, to give them new tools to ensure the continued functionality of those add-ons. So, for a ton of people, this will just be a matter of updating their add-ons, like they do for any new expansion and having all the aesthetic customizations they’re used to, still in place, untouched.

I do think some of the frustration I’m seeing, and I’m having this problem too. I had maybe four total add-ons installed: DBM, Bagnon, probably something else, and then WeakAuras. And I used WeakAuras for rotation help, but I also used it to customize my UI and it was all just there, in one big box. And so, with that going away, I now have to seek out a bunch of other add-ons to recreate the experience that I had before. And it’s not just WeakAuras, but there are other add-ons as well that have been affected because of the combat element of it that now, people have to go out and find substitutes. And that seems to be where a lot of the frustration seems to lie on the customization aspects.

Hazzikostas: And that’s understandable. We can’t directly control what add-on developers choose to do. We can’t make an add-on developer keep developing the add-on if they’re no longer interested in doing that. I think we’ve tried to provide support where we could, to ensure that things continue to be possible. Many add-on authors have continued to carry their work forward. Some have not, and that is going to cause some users to need to find alternate solutions. But those have been popping up in numerous supply over recent weeks and months. We expect that to only continue. We wish we could have done more to limit the need for people to find new solutions, but we’ve focused on what we can control and trying to help support the community as best we can.

One more question on UI while we’re on it. Is there any thought to letting players be able to set a default UI or default settings for all new characters, instead of having to set it up each time? Not even just visual stuff, but even stuff just like Auto-Loot not being an account-wide selection or something like that. So, that when I make a new character, I don’t immediately have to go fix the Auto-Loot stuff, and where the bars start out, and everything else.

Hazzikostas: That’s an excellent point and request. I think there are several of our settings that are account-wide. There are still a bunch that are character-specific. A challenge there is that some people do prefer things meaningfully different on a DPS versus a Healer alt or vice versa. So, when we make things account-wide, often, we get complaints and push back in the opposite direction. They have to go back and undo or change things. But agreed, things Auto-Loot and the like should be as consistent as possible. I think that’s something I could take back and look at with the team.

So, WeakAuras is gone. We’re relying on the cooldown manager now to provide us information. Do you feel that the cooldown manager, as it is, is fairly complete in terms of the information that you want it to display for people or are there still areas where you feel you need to add more?

Hazzikostas: I think it’s in a really solid place for launch. There are planned areas where we want to add further polish and customization. I think a big one that we’ve talked about is the ability to add more custom items, or trinkets, or potions, or things, anything that has a cool down or timer. Ideally, you’d be able to drag that into the cooldown manager and track it there if you want. The initial focus has very much been on class abilities and rotation, but there are other things that are outside your character that fit into that ecosystem. And so, that’s something that we’re working on that’s part of our roadmap for 2026.

Alongside that stuff, filtering what buffs anddDebuffs show on party and raid frames, I don’t really need to know that everybody in the raid has a 10-minute cooldown on lust. I’m a Shaman, I know that, but maybe when I’m playing my healer, I do want to know who’s got Riptide on them or something.

Hazzikostas: I think so. The ability to filter, highlight, exclude specific buffs and debuffs, particularly on raid frames is something that has come up a lot, that the team talks about a lot. Our focus right now, and there’s more work being done on this, as we polish things for launch, is to improve the default, in terms of visibility. I completely agree, that Sated or the like just doesn’t need to show up on frames. It’s not useful information, that’s clutter. Our perspective is that you shouldn’t need to download an add-on to be able to hide that clutter, that it should be something that we are doing for you, that the defaults out of the box should be reasonable.

Now, as we get into more power user functionality, I think there’s definitely an appetite for the ability to prioritize or exclude things based on more fine-tuned inputs. That was not something we saw as a requirement at launch, but based on feedback and how things play out following launch, it may be something we add to the base UI.

Thinking about the damage meter, the information is still paired down from what some of the other add-ons like Details used to provide. So players who want that information have to go to external sites like Warcraft Logs to get information. Is that something you’re thinking of filling out eventually?

Hazzikostas: I think we definitely drew a line with some of the power user functionality that some of the more popular damage meter add-ons provided. I think we’re always trying to strike a balance between, “What is a broadly approachable experience that all players, including those who aren’t necessarily doing high-end content, want to use and be able to understand what’s there?”, versus “What really gets into more fine-tuned analysis?” And the ability to take a combat log and export that and analyze that if you really want to dissect how this five-minute raid encounter went for you and understand how your cool-downs were lining up and what your uptime was and your abilities, external tools are and continue to be great for that.

And I think that’s where a lot of that stuff has already happened historically. So, I think we focused more on the in-the-moment, “As I’m running this dungeon, as I’m doing this raid, or right after it completes, I want to get a sense of how I stacked up compared to my groupmates, how I stacked up compared to my performance from last time,” and some of the obvious stuff there. But as always, we’re going to continue to listen to feedback. If there are categories, if there’s specific parts of the damage meters that players feel need improvement or that are missing, we’re going to continue to expand upon them going forward.

It really does go back to a theme that I feel we just run up to again and again, when we’re interviewing about any subject. It’s that ultimately the loudest segment of the WoW populice are naturally the hardcore users, but there’s a quieter segment of players just doing dungeons and not necessarily playing that way.

Hazzikostas: I think we are trying to strike a balance always between offering the advanced functionality for players who want it, without overwhelming players who are already potentially struggling to wrap their heads around all of the complexities of World of Warcraft and its layered systems. And so, that’s an area where add-ons continue to provide a lot of value. If people want specific tailored customization of the way information is presented, that is what add-ons are for. Even if we could, it would actually not improve the experience for most people, for us to bake all of that functionality and all of those options and bells and whistles into the base UI, it would make it an overwhelming experience for most players.

What is your overall vision for support around these features, UI, the cooldown manager, things like that going forward? Should we be expecting new features and updates every patch? Is it just limited to expansion releases, just major patches? What’s the thought?

Hazzikostas: No, I think definitely updates with certainly every major patch and many of our minor patches. This is going to be a mix of polish and a mix of responding to the feedback that we’re getting for areas where players want to see the base UI improved. I think there are a couple of areas right now where add-ons can still offer some very useful customization of your experience that we would like to see the base UI offer down the line. For example, in Midnight, we built a new dungeon and raid encounter timeline system with Boss Alerts, and it shows you the abilities that are upcoming and when they’re on fire. Players have often requested the ability to filter out or highlight specific abilities within that framework.

Maybe you’re a healer and you don’t care about something that only damage dealers care about or vice versa, and so, you want to filter it out. Add-ons today will let you still do that in Midnight. A lot of the common raid add-ons are now going to be a layer of visual customization on Blizzard’s native tools. But down the line, we’d love to be able to let players go into the Dungeon Journal and on an ability-by-ability basis, choose what they want to suppress, what they might want to super emphasize, things along those lines. It’s not something we want to restrict add-ons’ ability to do, but we want to make it so that that functionality is there in the base UI if you want it.

Is there a sense that a lot of this is going to still effectively be being beta-tested even after Midnight launches?

Hazzikostas: I don’t think so. I mean, I think the beta test is what’s going on now and it’s wrapping up, and the reams of feedback that we’ve gotten from that have informed what we’re doing at launch. Now, that’s not to say that we’re not still listening to feedback and that we’re not going to continue to improve things, but we have accomplished everything that we set out to accomplish with this rollout. We had an internal roadmap, a list of features and sub-features we needed to add and felt were essential to address. All of those are present, but of course, we’re going to continue to listen to what players are looking to see more of or see less of, and evolve the feature going on beyond launch and thereafter.

There was a Wowhead post a couple days ago that–

Hazzikostas: Yes.

…was criticizing this whole situation. So, you’ve seen it.

Hazzikostas: Yes.

The big take away from it is the idea that, in trying to dismantle a certain class of add-ons and bring that functionality in-game, you’ve essentially pushed people to just use more different, worse add-ons. Because they went point by point and showed off all these things that you could still do that theoretically you shouldn’t be able to do, that add-ons are providing. What’s the response to that?

Hazzikostas: I mean, I think that theoretically, “Shouldn’t be able to do,” is very debatable. But I think if you shouldn’t be able to do it, we’re not letting you do it. And I think there are areas where players are interpreting some compromises that we’ve landed on, based on feedback from the community, as us either failing in our goals or backpedaling in those goals. I think we always set out to say, “We’re going to roll out the most restrictive version of this implementation at the start of Alpha, and then we’re going to spend the next several months triaging based on feedback, and restoring things, and building on this new foundation to get to a place where players have the functionality that they want.”

And so, again, the fact that aesthetic customization, that you can customize the sounds that are associated with certain abilities, things along those lines is possible, is not a misfire on our part, that’s deliberate. There’s a lot of accessibility value for a lot of that functionality. And I think everyone agrees that the computational stuff that has been our focus from the beginning here is no longer possible, that dynamically solving problems based on real-time combat information is not a thing add-ons can do. Now, if you want something to remind you to cast Tranquility at three minutes and 30 seconds into a fight, you could put something on a second monitor.

Even if we didn’t allow it in-game, it’s not really worth our time to try to further lock something like that down in ways that will just cause more collateral damage. So, I think overall, where we have landed is a pretty deliberate result. And yes, there are a couple of places where because certain add-ons have discontinued development, players are needing to turn to find new solutions. I think that transition is understandably and regrettably, going to be a source of frustration for some players, but on the other side of it, we should have a new stable norm and a new world in which we’re all living together, and it’s only going to continue to get better from there.

I don’t want to harp on this, but I do think the bit that concerned me the most from that was one of the examples they gave was, a dungeon or a raid encounter where the idea is you want to kill a group of enemies in a pretty specific order. And they had found an add-on that would basically mark them in the correct order, which does seem to be, on the fly, problem solving for the player.

And so, my concern is that, like I said, I have three, four add-ons maybe. Am I suddenly going to have to go into Midnight and find out that my raid leaders are saying, “Hey, you need to download these six extra add-ons because they disabled the Weak Aura functionality for this, but we need these to solve these encounters.”

Hazzikostas: Our goal is for the answer to that to be no. The specific encounter that’s being referenced was a Mythic mechanic on the Saldahar encounter late in the raid. There are a couple of loopholes that clever add-on developers have found that are still being closed. So, there’s this cat-and-mouse game that’s going on, but we’re actually redesigning a portion of that mechanic to make it less about this solvable predefined order and more about just reacting to how the encounter flows. I think it’s fair to say that if there are places where your raid leader tells you that you need to download a certain add-on, that’s something that we’re very interested in and would see as something that we need to change something to resolve.

It could be something about our encounter design, it could be something about how our add-on API works, but ideally, you are choosing the add-ons that make your personal experience suit you the best and that should be something that is personal. It should not be something that is a community norm that’s imposed upon you.

So, it sounds like there are at least some differences in the 12.0 release, from what we’re seeing on the Beta right now, updates, things that you’ve fixed. How different should we expect the add-on landscape to look like in the full release from what it is on beta?

Hazzikostas: So, it should match what’s on beta, so technically we have a 12.0 patch, which is going live next week, and that has most of our systems changes, Transmog, stat squish, our pre-launch events, et cetera. But then there’s a 12.0.1, small, just background systems update that’s going to go live in mid-February. That’s actually what’s running in our beta right now. And so, there’s a few more weeks of development represented in that, which includes fixes to bugs, polished to some of the add-on functionality, some new improvements to things, damage meters and more. People who are playing on the beta, I mean, week over week, you’ll see changes pushed in new builds, but that experience should match what you see when Midnight goes live.

But it sounds like the goal is to close at least some of these loopholes by the time the raids are active.

Hazzikostas: Certainly, yes. I can promise that that specific mechanic is not going to play out the way it did in the article that highlighted. And that’s part of the feedback we’ve been getting over the course of the last couple of months. I mean, I think that was one that was spotlighted, but there are other areas where raiders and folks who are very sophisticated, add-on developers testing our encounters, have pointed out places where, “Hey, there is a loophole here,” or “Hey, players, if nothing changes, we are going to be able to do this and therefore, feel like we have to do this. ” And that has led to changes in encounters. It’s led to changes now on functionality, which is part of the point. This all needs to be harmonious and we’re on the road towards delivering this ideal experience in March.

What is the best way to give you guys feedback? There’s not really a feedback system in-game.

Hazzikostas: I mean, no, there are bug report suggestion and feedback tools for anyone who’s playing the alpha or beta that are parsed, are read, are aggregated.

I mean on live, though.

Hazzikostas: On live, it’s mainly various online discussions. Forums, social media, Reddit, YouTube, we’re watching all of it. Players share their thoughts with each other and with us in a lot of different venues. And I think part of being a developer in a modern live service environment is going to seek out the feedback in all of those places to really understand what your players want and what you need to change.

Are you never going to add the feedback form from beta to live?

Hazzikostas: I wouldn’t say never. It’s not currently a plan though. We are actually working on having tools to do some in-game surveys to better capture maybe some of the player experience or perspectives that aren’t as represented on forums or social media. Because again, it tends to be, as you noted earlier, an area of discourse that’s a bit more dominated by some of our more hardcore play styles, and frustrations people are having with role play, with quests, with some of the more solo activities, aren’t necessarily bubbling up in the same way as in those mediums.

How do you feel that your relationship with add-on developers has been over the course of this? Does it seem like things are cool coming out of here or is this a relationship that needs to be repaired?

Hazzikostas: That’s a great question. It’s hard to aggregate such a diverse community into a single sentiment assessment, but I think it’s fair to say that there were, for sure, a couple of rocky months early in alpha and beta as we pulled back the curtain. Invited them into Alpha, but also rolled out restrictions and changes that were pretty wide sweeping. And it wasn’t clear what was going to last, what we were going to improve. And a lot of authors were left questioning whether they’d be able to continue serving and supporting their communities. We’ve done as much as possible over the last few months to have very direct dialogue with the maintainers of these add-ons, to understand what obstacles they were running into as they were trying to update their add-ons for Midnight.

And a huge portion of the work, that isn’t the stuff that’s captured in week-over-week Beta patch notes or the like, has been improving and adding to our add-on API that’s available to add-on developers, to interface with the game to let them solve the problems that they were running into. And so, when you’ve seen a couple of notable add-ons announce back in October, that they were ceasing development and weren’t going to be able to support things from Midnight, that have now been able to come back and say, “Okay, actually we are going to have Midnight version.” That’s been the result of that collaboration.

And I’m not going to pretend that that wasn’t a stressful experience for many of those add-on developers, but I feel we are incredibly appreciative of the partnership and excited to continue to work together to offer as much power, as much customization, to players as they want in this new era while clawing back that competitive advantage piece of things.

I recognize this is a very unique situation, and there is nothing that’s going to be identical to this that you are probably ever going to do in the future of WoW. But is there anything about how this rollout happened: how you announced it, how you communicated it, how you worked with the community on it, that you have either learned or would do differently for future big changes to the game that might unsettle people? Or do you feel that this was largely about how you would want to do big changes in the future?

Hazzikostas: That’s a great question. I may have a fuller perspective on it in a couple more months. I think that we definitely could have done more to communicate upfront, early in alpha and beta, about a more detailed roadmap of what was already in flight, what we were planning to change, what people were seeing that wasn’t a reflection of what we intended to ship, but was just our initial implementation, knowing that we were going to loosen things based on feedback. I think that a lot of players, because of those early weeks, a lot of the uncertainty and a lot of the anxiety that we saw across the community was a result of, potentially, misunderstandings of how things were going to land. And I can’t count how many people I saw talking about, “Well, I uninstalled all my add-ons to get used to how things are going to be in Midnight because Blizzard’s killing add-ons.”

And it’s, “No, we’re not. We’re very specifically doing everything we can to preserve the majority of add-ons the players use today.” But I think the shorthand of, “Oh, Midnight’s the add-on apocalypse,” “Add-ons are going away,” I think, led a lot of players to be very concerned and it required lots of rounds of communication to make it clear what was and wasn’t changing. And I’m sure that for many people, it’s still going to be… They won’t fully wrap their heads around it until they’re experiencing it next week.

You’ve drawn a pretty clear line here that add-ons drawing combat data are out, but everything else, customization wise, still fine. Is that a line you would ever move in the future? Do you see there ever being a point in time where you’re, “Actually, we need to be even more strict on add-ons?”

Hazzikostas: I think that’s unlikely. I think it’s very unlikely. I think that part of why we rolled out what we saw as a pretty strict ironclad rule set in September was so that we would only have to move in a generous direction of permitting and enabling and unlocking functionality rather than having to be in this back-and-forth game of locking things down and playing whack-a-mole. Now, I’m sure there will be some limited areas where very clever players and add-on developers find loopholes, find basically some exploits where they can find a way to get at some of this information. Those we would respond to by locking down. But the goal there is for that to be almost imperceptible. We fixed a bug, we fixed an exploit, not we’re going to take some entirely new class of information and protect that.

I think that we very much are committed to the continued vitality of the add-on ecosystem as a way of players being able to customize the look and feel of their experience, and also express themselves. And I think that’s been part of WoW strength from the start and not something we want to let go of.

Is there anything to the speculative rumor situation around the pulling back on add-ons being related to eventually considering some console release for World of Warcraft?

Hazzikostas: There’s no direct connection there. I mean, that may be a bridge that we cross at some point, but I think in general, the goal has always been for us, just approachability of the game and the deep-seated belief that the game should be playable out of the box. That we’re not doing our duty as developers if, in order to play the game seriously, it is just taken as a maximum that you have to pull in all these third-party tools in order to play effectively. And we were faced with the choice of just accepting that as the continued future of World of Warcraft or making a change. And I think you mentioned, we’ve been talking about this since earlier in last year, I would say, really, it was the end of 2024 when we first began to float this philosophical direction.

And this isn’t a change that we made just to suit our own whims as developers. It’s a change that was made informed by the feedback we’ve heard from broad swaths of the community who, while of course they want the transition to be managed as smoothly as possible, we’re tired of feeling they needed to download these add-ons. They were being forced to do them if they wanted to engage in the content that they preferred. And that’s really what led us to this point. And I think as we particularly look towards Midnight, look towards broadening the appeal and the range of activities that exist in Azeroth, namely housing, we want to make sure that there’s few barriers to entry and into really getting into all of the depth that World of Warcraft has to offer, and add-ons have traditionally been one of them.

I’m almost out of time, but I have a couple last weird bonus weird questions that I wanted to ask since I have an extra minute. Is there any thought to considering pet battle combat as combat for add-on purposes?

Hazzikostas: In the sense of add-ons giving you an advantage?

Yeah.

Hazzikostas: I mean, technically, yes, but I think that we have never tried to make pet battles a hyper-competitive, bleeding-edge activity, and that to the extent that players want to use assistance to help them with that, it doesn’t seem an area that’s of major concern to players. And so, we’re not looking to solve problems that aren’t player complaints.

And last one related to UI, are you ever going to add in baked-in coordinates on the map?

Hazzikostas: Yes, that is something that we definitely want to do. If you’re looking up a quest on Wowhead or wherever and you’re seeing a location, you shouldn’t have to use an add-on or some convoluted system to interpret that in the base game.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.