Sad News
 

[Edit] Okay, yeah, this was our joke for this year's April Fools. :D We'll stop deleting posts that gave it away, now. :p Thanks to those that played along. ;)

It is with great sadness that I have to make this announcement. I’ve found out why we haven’t been given any beta keys to give away to authors yet. They have decided that, going forward, they will no longer allow AddOns in World of Warcraft. As of 5.0 (Mists of Pandaria), AddOns won’t work. They said it was a combination of factors that has finally led them to this decision. They feel that there is too much time spent by their support staff due to bugs caused by AddOns being out of date, conflicting with each other, etc. As well, they are (in my words, not theirs) ‘tired of having to deal with all the complaints that AddOns give unfair advantage, they make the game unbalanced’ and so on.

We started to get the feeling that there was something going on when we got to see the Beta during the Press Conference and discovered that the AddOns button was no longer on the Character Select screen. In previous betas the button has remained, it was just disabled. We had also been hearing some rumbles before then that had us wondering, but we didn't know for sure. We were finally able to get them to confirm no more AddOns during the Press Conference. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to say anything until now.


As well, since there isn’t going to be any point to having a site for WoW AddOns, we will be shutting down WoWInterface when the expansion goes live, if we (the entire community) hasn’t been able to change Blizzard’s mind by then. We will still be running all of our other sites - EQI, EQ2I, VGI, LotROI, DDOI, RiftUI and our soon-to-open SWTORUI, as well as opening new sites for any other games that come along. We’ve really enjoyed getting to know all of you and we hope that we’ll continue to see many of you on our other sites.

Thank you all for making this the best WoW AddOn Community out there. From myself, Dolby and our wonderful volunteers - best of gaming. It’s been a great seven years and we will miss you all.

I'm sad to see you go...

Grr, addons were the only reason I was staying in wow .. hopefully for them I'm not the nly one otherwise they may lose more subscribers ... oh well more time for real life.

Hopefully they will change their minds before release of the expansion :( Like tomorrow already :(

Well, then. That's sad news~ :p

oh teh noez omg /wrist :'( :'( :'(

As it stands this is rather depressing. Partially due to the loss of a great community. Rather than just toss in the towel I'm sure many of us will send sternly worded letters. I for one certainly plan to. Lets not forget that past issues have been addressed (real ID anyone?) with an outcry from the community.

From my point of view, half the fun of playing is designing UI's. On occasion I have (previous to the new free till level 20 bit) purchased time just to fiddle with UI ideas. Of course I end up playing for quite a while afterward. Laughable as this all my sound it is very true. Several times in the past year Ive done so only to have the Mrs. giggle at my obsession.

Hate to see it all end sadly. After all this is a fantastic community. Hopefully we can put a stop to this. Anyway ill go back to lurking and keep an eye on events.

Aawwww.... :(

Yes! No more having to constantly update addons! :banana:

its about time! AddOns are of the devil and are responsible for the decline of moral dignitude in our gaming communities!

YES!

Finally I'll stop getting requests to update Chatterbox. :)

True, you won't have to update addons now, but I heard it from my friend's brother's friend's cousin's brother-in-law that Blizzard is going to open source WoW, and stop all work on it. Instead of updating addons, the community will have to update the game itself.


Oh well, so much for being lazy. /sigh

Agree 100%, hopefully they start shifting this game to be more like Guild Wars 2 and TERA.

It seems if you are a "Premium" subscriber and pay for a year you get the Addon button back because I had one yesterday. But it could be a bug, it's still a beta. :rolleyes:

No more addons in WoW? Clearly this is an attempt to replicate what Diablo III's plans are.

:).

The Addon Proliferation Rallying Internet Leets 1st task force will do the utmost to combat this decision!

Noooooooo :'( why.... this is sad.... i think im gonna quit now.. :(

This is actually welcome news for me. I love this community, but after two years of updating an UI, it gets tiresome to both think of new features and to fix everything every time Blizzard releases an other patch. Finally I'll be able to play WoW in peace :)

Aww, man. This is terrible news.

Maybe it will be easier to get WoW to work on mobile devices with this decision.
They can focus on creating a usable interface and not have worry about an addon making it unplayable.