Originally Posted by timmerino
I'm curious about the incidents and debacles that have occurred in the history of WoW AddOn development. Xinhuan, you mentioned the "Ban Gearscore" debacle which I remember and I also know of the Decursive controversy. To what extent do you think these controversies have defined what is and is not allowed in the realm of AddOn development, and who makes these decisions? Is Blizzard the only arbiter? Is it players? Is it AddOn developers? Is it all three? What kind of stakes have these parties had in these controversies? These are loaded questions, so, if you don't mind, could we focus on the "Ban Gearscore" debacle? What do you think was the result of this controversy, whose viewpoint do you think "won" in the end, and what kind of effect do you think the controversy has had on AddOn development?
Feel free to refer to other controversies if you feel they are relevant.
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Blizzard is definitely the arbiter, because users/players do their own thing, and addon authors do their own thing. Similarly, Blizzard is the one that decides what is allowed/disallowed in the realm of addon development, but their decision can stem from how players use/abuse an addon.
There is no result for the "Ban Gearscore" controversy. People continue to use it, people continue to hate it, and neither side won. Blizzard did not do anything to encourage or discourage it. HOWEVER, Blizzard did implement and show you your "Item Level" number in your character stats since Cataclysm, and they have already been using this number for the /lfd dungeon system to filter out players too weak for ICC 5-mans.
The GearScore addon, simply takes the iLvl of each of your equipped gear, and multiplies it with a "rarity multiplier" and a "equipment slot multiplier". It adds up the score of all those gear, and that's your GS. The iLvl is the amount of stat budget that is assigned to a piece of gear, and the GS formula is identical to it.
The problem is, GS isn't revolutionary by any means, iLvl of an item is available to addon authors since vanilla WoW when it launched on day 1, its just that nobody has ever really thought to use it as a quick gauge score for someone's gear, partly because in vanilla, you actually had to be in a fairly hardcore raiding guild to get T2 and T3 gear. There's almost no such thing a a pugged Blackwing Lair in those days, so having a GearScore addon then didn't make much use or sense. You were either in a good raiding guild, or you were not.
Decursive on the other hand (along with other addons like Healbot, boss mods, raid frames (CTRaid then)), changed boss encounter design significantly, Blizzard devs have already said they actually have to design encounters not to be too easy even with boss mods. This is really both good and bad, players now see interesting bosses with interesting mechanics, but on the other hand, addon automation and addon decision making was removed because it was considered undesirable by Blizzard. The result was patch 2.0 that broke nearly all combat-related, unit frames, bar addons and much more and restricted a ton of stuff. That was really significant and proved that Blizzard was willing to do what it takes to make addons not trivialize the game too much.