What is too much for an addon?
Over the weekend, Blizzard's ever-loquacious Lead Systems Designer, Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, responded to a question about raid group reshuffling. As you may well be aware, it is not currently possible for players to change around their raid groups while in combat. The player asking the question wondered why, and Ghostcrawler responded as follows:
@incoherenc A little concern about a mod that puts the debuff target in slot 1 and lets the dispeller spam slot 1.
- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) July 2, 2013
So it seems that the main reason to prevent reshuffles is the potential for mods that make the game too easy. As WoW Insider's addon writer, this is something that I consider a lot -- at what point is an addon adding to much? What crosses the line from helpful augmentation into necessary, and what from there into almost-cheating?
Of course, any addon that actually allows players to contravene the terms of service is an obvious candidate for the "going too far" category. Morphing addons, for example, although they don't really do anyone any harm, are quite literally considered cheating.
Some would consider that Deadly Boss Mods is a step too far, with its timers and the like making it almost required for any kind of raiding. Others would say that any addon at all outside the basic UI is excessive, but others create completely custom UIs from scratch, and have no issue with it. It seems to me that Ghostcrawler's concern is excessive automation. If a mod automates the positioning of a debuffed player beneath the dispeller's mouse, that is an issue.
Looking back to the removal of well-used addon AVR during Wrath, Bashiok is quoted as saying the following:
So are there addons you can think of that fit the bill of removing player reaction and decision-making? It seems like DBM or Bigwigs and other boss-mod addons do just as good a job of that as AVR ever did.