Originally Posted by Shirik
That's funny. I thought Blizzard was a commercial company.
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You clearly don't work in IT - or at least not in the "boring but necessary" side of it which I usually refer to as 'commercial IT'
I mentioned it because I once did a research project for a 'commercial IT' consultancy - looking at the programming practices of gaming companies.
They were interested in how they shipped code to platforms where they had no ability to maintain it afterwards (e.g. releasing a game onto consoles) - they wanted to know what they could learn from them (as they generally shipped half-finished CRAP and then charged a fortune to patch it up thereafter!)
It was very interesting - what I discovered were some of the most highly rigourous programming techniques and disciplines I'd ever seen and what was MOST interesting was that they were born of necessity and experience (rather than the largely useless crap they teach in college!).
It was very enlightening - I learned a LOT - hence I'm kinda surprised not to find it in the WoW API.
I know that the US Forums get a lot of support from Blizz (or at least 1 member of Blizz's staff) - I know that some mod developers have submitted code which is now part of the API (as it's commented in the files) - but historically speaking, do you really think Blizzard intended us to write addons in the way that we have - or do you think they assumed we'd move a few things around and that was it?
It's obvious we did more than they intended - hence the secure templates etc. - and we certainly see more support and information than we used to - but I get the feeling that the API is still 'begrudged' to us at times...
That may, if it's true, be ironic - because right now the only reason I'm playing WoW is that I've (mostly) enjoyed developing O-Wheely! and O.B.I. - and I know people who spend more time on their UI than they spend on the GAME