Advertisement

Patches, addons and drama in the forums


While surfing the forums this morning, I came across a little gem of a thread protesting against Blizzard for the following:

  1. Breaking "our" addons and mods.

  2. Incorporating features from popular addons into the default User Interface, and thus breaking addons and mods. There's also a sentiment that Blizzard is "stealing" these ideas rather than being innovators.

  3. Fixing "their" bugs which in turn breaks "our" addons and mods. The suggestion is that they don't care, or could take steps to prevent this.

As you can imagine, all sorts of responses cropped up, including the usual people who get into arguments with other posters, players in agreement, joking and sarcastic responses, and of course, an awesome string of blue responses.
%Gallery-27848%

Before we address the juicy drama that includes some justifiably snarky blue responses and even an accidental admission of a Terms of Use violation, I simply must include some of the best points made against the complaints made.

  1. Patches don't come out very often, and there is lots of warning given. In fact, many developers of addons can fix their products before the patch by using the Public Test Realms.

  2. In most cases, all you need to do is update your addons. Using an updater program, this takes mere minutes.

  3. If you can't go a few days without certain addons, perhaps you are too dependent upon them.

  4. Adding and tweaking content will break other things, including third party applications. You might fix some terrain and end up with tiny Orc shoulder armor, because things aren't connected as simply as one might think.

If you have some time on your hands, I highly suggest reading through the entire thread for your own amusement. In case you don't, I've compiled the blue responses into a gallery for easy viewing, although they weren't the only good read in the thread. Don't forget to click on "high res" in order to see the pictures close up.

Where do you stand on the issue?