Addon Devleoper Interviews

[timmerino]

Thank you both for your suggestions and your interest, they are much appreciated. Unfortunately, my schedule is such that I must set appointed times to conduct these interviews. If setting an appointment time is not feasible for you, I can definitely send you the list of interview questions and you can respond to them at your convenience. If you are interested in this option, feel free to send me a private message.

Originally Posted by Xinhuan I will suggest that if you wish to contact me for some questions, to use IRC and hang out/contact me on Freenode IRC servers (I'm on #wowuidev and #wowace). I'm usually on all day 24/7, although I might not respond immediately, or even for a few hours depending if I'm awake. Primarily, I only log on WoW for raids between 6am-11am Texas time (which is 7pm-12mn Singapore time in my case), with a time zone difference of 13 hours, and conducting an interview during a raid (after is fine) is not ideal. You can find me on as Xinhuan on US-Barthilas-Alliance. (My guild raids Wed/Thurs/Sun/Mon).

Originally Posted by Ketho I also told Mr. Tim Arnold to just "get an IRC client and hop on #wowuidev", but he seems dead set on having an appointed/specific time .. I think that kinda defeats the purpose of IRC

[Xinhuan]

The purpose of IRC is so that you can hop on at any time you wish to chat with whoever happens to be awake at the time of your choosing. It seems totally backwards to me that you wish to have specific time windows, and yet not use these time windows to just hang out and observe the addon author community (people chat a lot on random stuff, and non-wow programming, but a lot of it is Lua based), see some of the help that people get once in a while from people asking questions.

You claim that your research is to "translate the experience of using and developing AddOns", but yet you are choosing not to participate in the community. You don't even have to actively participate, just run an IRC client 24/7 and record/view all the text in the chat at your own convenient time.

Although at this stage of WoW in its 6th year of maturity, the "golden age" of addons have passed about 1-2 years ago, there's very little that hasn't already been done on the addon scene, so in the grand scheme of things, there's not much "new and innovative" addons these days, its just the constant refinement and updating of addons as each wow patch flies by.

You are the one doing the research, you should be proactive in contacting authors individually and manually, not sit back passively and "wait for people to PM you", because I'll be surprised if more than 2 or 3 authors PM you out of the 2000 or so total addon authors in the world (based on the fact there's only about 4000 addons on Curse and WowInterface), half of which aren't US-based, and only a small portion of that number actively participate on these forums. The larger portion of forum users are addon users, not addon authors.

Do you know that only about 12 authors (their addons) account for about half the addon downloads on Curse?

[timmerino]

Thank you again for the suggestion. I didn't mean to sound like I was writing it off. Participant observation is a widely-used research method, and if I had the kind of time that a PhD student has to write a dissertation I would rely heavily on this method because I totally agree, it is probably the best research method for this kind of study. But I am not working on a dissertation, and my time is limited so I need to use it in a way that is more focused which is why I'm conducting research interviews. That being said, I do plan to devote some time to IRC. If I decide to continue this research beyond this initial paper, I'm sure you will be seeing a lot of me there.

I should also state that I am not a complete outsider. I am a WoW player and an AddOn user, but I did not know that so few AddOn developers create the majority of AddOns which are currently in use (although this isn't entirely surprising). Along these same lines, it's interesting that you say that the "golden age" of addons has passed. How and why do you think this eventuality came about?

Originally Posted by Xinhuan The purpose of IRC is so that you can hop on at any time you wish to chat with whoever happens to be awake at the time of your choosing. It seems totally backwards to me that you wish to have specific time windows, and yet not use these time windows to just hang out and observe the addon author community (people chat a lot on random stuff, and non-wow programming, but a lot of it is Lua based), see some of the help that people get once in a while from people asking questions. You claim that your research is to "translate the experience of using and developing AddOns", but yet you are choosing not to participate in the community. You don't even have to actively participate, just run an IRC client 24/7 and record/view all the text in the chat at your own convenient time. Although at this stage of WoW in its 6th year of maturity, the "golden age" of addons have passed about 1-2 years ago, there's very little that hasn't already been done on the addon scene, so in the grand scheme of things, there's not much "new and innovative" addons these days, its just the constant refinement and updating of addons as each wow patch flies by. You are the one doing the research, you should be proactive in contacting authors individually and manually, not sit back passively and "wait for people to PM you", because I'll be surprised if more than 2 or 3 authors PM you out of the 2000 or so total addon authors in the world (based on the fact there's only about 4000 addons on Curse and WowInterface), half of which aren't US-based, and only a small portion of that number actively participate on these forums. The larger portion of forum users are addon users, not addon authors. Do you know that only about 12 authors (their addons) account for about half the addon downloads on Curse?

[Aprikot]

Originally Posted by timmerino ... it's interesting that you say that the "golden age" of addons has passed. How and why do you think this eventuality came about?

I'm also curious about this. By "golden age", are you (Xinhuan) referring to production quality/quantity, or level of activity & enthusiasm in the AddOn/UI development community (or something else)?

[Seerah]

As Xinh mentioned, the game has been out for 6+ years now. Except for when Blizz makes something entirely new possible through a patch (new features/new API), most great ideas have been thought of already. It's not often that you come across something totally new and groundbreaking. The Pick of the Week here searches for those groundbreaking, creative addons, but much of the time it's just new, cool stuff (maybe with a different flavor or perspective to it).

I would say that the golden age of automobiles has passed, too. We are just expanding, refining, and reskinning them. If something new is added to a car that is groundbreaking, it's because of technology advancements (ex. new features/API in WoW) or a high level of creativity and ability to think outside of the box.

[Dawn]

Yeah, it's more or less down to maintaining and customizing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It implies, that a certain standard has been reached.

[Xinhuan]

Originally Posted by timmerino I should also state that I am not a complete outsider. I am a WoW player and an AddOn user, but I did not know that so few AddOn developers create the majority of AddOns which are currently in use (although this isn't entirely surprising). Along these same lines, it's interesting that you say that the "golden age" of addons has passed. How and why do you think this eventuality came about?

WoW allows us to use Lua as a programming language to do whatever we wish in WoW. However, Lua in itself isn't useful unless we are able to use it to interact with the WoW interface, and this is provided to us in the form of APIs that we can call. These APIs impose limits on what we can do, what actions are allowable, what is possible, what isn't possible.

Before patch 2.0 (TBC), addons had a much wider freedom of possibilities, including the possibility of canceling spells in midcast, moving the player automatically (so if you have enough waypoints and data on terrain, you can auto-walk between 2 locations in WoW), intelligently choose which spell to cast, and much more. As authors push the limits of the WoW system, Blizzard adds restrictions to counteract undesirable addon behavior to the game.

However, the game is still growing then, with subscribers still multiplying (http://www.mmogchart.com/ - See charts link on the side, and the FAQ/Analysis if you're interested), so there's still a lot of possibilities to explore within addon development. There hasn't really been a game before this where the user interface is SO MODDABLE, letting users script and right the exact behavior they wish with a fully featured programing language (minus the OS library), with Blizzard's unofficial support and thru Slouken - Blizzard's UI programmer. Blizzard wanted to see what the community could do and if anything undesirable occurred, they can always ban the addon and break its functionality.

When Blizzard added the ability for addons to track CPU usage of each addon, vast addon programming paradigms occurred, shifted from writing addons in general, to writing GOOD and EFFICIENT addons. A lot of experimentation was done to determine how you could do X using the least amount of CPU time or memory, how addons could share resources and resulted in the creation of many of the wow addon libraries you see today.

During TBC, the UI saw various improvements, and major changes, particularly when they revamped the combat log system so that it is far more addon friendly (i.e we don't have to parse English (and other languages) sentences anymore to figure out who did what to whom in combat). Other significant changes were the addition of the threat APIs, Lua coroutine libraries, and in general, large additions that opened new possibilities and ideas to happen.

Addons were rewritten and vastly improved in TBC (think KTM->Omen, Titan Panel-->FuBar-->LDB-based, etc, as good case studies), and addon communities formed (you should research on how/why/when wowace/wowinterface/curseforge formed). Various automatic addon updaters/installers proliferated (with its own history and updater wars, notably the Curse/WowInterface versus WoWMatrix war, this itself is another good research topic - it sparked a whole debacle about addon copyrights and addon author rights, with many authors changing their addons' distribution license).

Post 3.0 (Wrath) though, these changes become infrequent, and Slouken moved on to other projects. Ideas begin to die down, what's possible and what isn't became more well known. There's only so-many-ways you can write a boss mod. There's only this many ways you can display a HuD, only this-much-stuff you can do with a bar addon. New addons that popup would often just improve on an older addon, there isn't really anything particularly revolutionary except perhaps the AVR addon that Blizzard decided to break.

One main thing you may not realize is that the majority of addon authors write addons for themselves - rarely for the community. Many do not mind sharing their work online on sites like these and provide some support in their spare time - and that's the extent of it. That said though, programming itself is an interesting and challenging pastime, almost nobody writes WoW addons for money, and Blizzard even decreed that addons must be free in their addon policy and contain no advertising, when Carbonite addon overstepped their bounds and added some advertising in their demo version of their paid addon product.

WoW by now, is a mature game, and as a byproduct, addons also matured, the UI's limitations are known. Subscriber numbers are stable, but not because people aren't quitting WoW - people ARE quitting WoW, but new subscribers come in from new countries and languages that WoW is being launched in, such as Russia, and it will soon be localized to Brazilian this year. Addon authors quit wow too, and many addons die with them.

The Golden Age has passed, and this is evident by less activity on the UI forums, these/wowace/curse forums, and less WoW/addon related talk on the IRC chat channels. There hasn't been any great debacle or notable incident since the "Ban Gearscore" ones, and that was over a year ago.



[[The above are my personal views and not representative of others, you may use it for your research. Information provided may not be accurate, especially in the time line, as they are from memory.]]

[Crissa]

It's not appropriate for a researcher to take interviews without permission. He was giving his awake times, since that would be when someone could talk to him who wants to.

I don't use the IRC chat. I just haven't touched the stuff for fifteen years.

-Crissa

[Seerah]

I don't see how using IRC prohibits him from getting permission from whomever he is speaking to before the interview. There are even PM chats.

[timmerino]

Thank you, Xinhuan! That's a lot of really useful information! Also, thank you for granting me permission to use it in my research

And, yes Crissa, if I were to use anyone's statements I would be sure to ask their permission first.

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.

[Aprikot]

Originally Posted by Seerah As Xinh mentioned, the game has been out for 6+ years now. Except for when Blizz makes something entirely new possible through a patch (new features/new API), most great ideas have been thought of already. It's not often that you come across something totally new and groundbreaking. The Pick of the Week here searches for those groundbreaking, creative addons, but much of the time it's just new, cool stuff (maybe with a different flavor or perspective to it). I would say that the golden age of automobiles has passed, too. We are just expanding, refining, and reskinning them. If something new is added to a car that is groundbreaking, it's because of technology advancements (ex. new features/API in WoW) or a high level of creativity and ability to think outside of the box..

Originally Posted by Dawn Yeah, it's more or less down to maintaining and customizing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It implies, that a certain standard has been reached.

I'm curious what kinds of [realistic] feature additions from Blizzard you guys think would spark new ways of thinking about the UI...or is it pretty much just about skin tweaks from here on in?

Originally Posted by Xinhuan The Golden Age has passed, and this is evident by less activity on the UI forums, these/wowace/curse forums, and less WoW/addon related talk on the IRC chat channels.

I was always somewhat curious about the statistic here on WoWI "Most users ever online was 40644, 10-15-2008 at 12:44 PM", suggesting 3.0 was an apex of sorts. Thanks for writing all of that, I found it very informative. (I'd never even heard of Slouken. )

[timmerino]

I was always somewhat curious about the statistic here on WoWI "Most users ever online was 40644, 10-15-2008 at 12:44 PM", suggesting 3.0 was an apex of sorts. Thanks for writing all of that, I found it very informative. (I'd never even heard of Slouken. )

Thank you from bringing up that statistic, Aprikot. That's very useful.

Is Slouken one person or a group of developers?

[Torhal]

Slouken is also known as Sam Lantinga, who was the lead Software Engineer at Blizzard until very recently. He is also the creator of SDL - the Simple Directmedia Layer, which was originally aimed at Linux but has since seen widespread use in games on other platforms (Angry Birds uses SDL).

[Xinhuan]

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.

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.

[Marthisdil]

I should also state that I am not a complete outsider. I am a WoW player and an AddOn user, but I did not know that so few AddOn developers create the majority of AddOns which are currently in use (although this isn't entirely surprising)

That's not what he said. What he said was that the top 12 most downloaded addons account for over 50% of ALL addons downloaded from curse.com

Which means that those 12 addons are immensely popular on curse.com. There are others which are updated more frequently on their own websites so I'm guessing their popularity can't be figured as easily (Deadly Boss Mods (deadlybossmods.com), Auctioneer (auctioneeraddon.com), etc)

[Xinhuan]

Originally Posted by Marthisdil That's not what he said. What he said was that the top 12 most downloaded addons account for over 50% of ALL addons downloaded from curse.com Which means that those 12 addons are immensely popular on curse.com. There are others which are updated more frequently on their own websites so I'm guessing their popularity can't be figured as easily (Deadly Boss Mods (deadlybossmods.com), Auctioneer (auctioneeraddon.com), etc)

That's not what I said. To be more specific, I said that approximately 12 authors (who in total add up to some 50+(?) addons, I didn't count this one) account for about half the downloads based on Curse Client install-base counts.

[Crissa]

Originally Posted by Marthisdil I'm guessing their popularity can't be figured as easily (Deadly Boss Mods (deadlybossmods.com), Auctioneer (auctioneeraddon.com), etc)

Deadly is #1 and Auctioneer is number... 20-something on Curse.

But Auctioneer is coded by a group, so I don't think the one person model works.

It's hard to tell how many of each author is actually being used; only Blizzard could tell.

-Crissa

[Ketho]

To give a quick insight on this particular discussion:
I've imported the data from the 200 most downloaded WoWInterface AddOns, and I conclude the following:

• The sum of the top 200 most downloaded WoWI addons is 102,009,814
• The top 10 authors account for roughly half of the WoWI total downloads with 29 AddOns (51,800,477 = 50.8%)

9,003,738 Cladhaire: LightHeaded, TomTom, Clique, PerfectRaid 8,321,834 carboniteaddon: Carbonite 7,349,742 Hegarol: AtlasLoot Enhanced 5,300,713 lonadar: QuestHelper 4,850,819 Tuller: Bagnon, OmniCC, Dominos, Bongos2, SellFish, Bongos3, Combuctor 4,305,906 arith: Atlas 4,067,069 Xinhuan: Omen Threat Meter, Postal 3,352,053 Nechckn: GathererDB WoWHead, Auctioneer Suite, Auctioneer Classic 5.0.0. Suite (Preview) 2,774,545 Strife[CUK]: HealBot continued 2,474,058 ckknight: Cartographer, FuBar 3.6.5, FuBar - DurabilityFu, FuBar - ExperienceFu, FuBar - LocationFu, FuBar - PerformanceFu, FuBar - ClockFu, FuBar - HonorFu

AddOn downloads paste: http://wowuidev.pastey.net/148005
Author downloads paste: http://wowuidev.pastey.net/148006

Disclaimer: The information showed can be incomplete/faulty, since it's only gathered from the top 200 most downloaded WoWInterface AddOns. Authors could also take over each other's addons, and/or work in teams/groups. Some AddOns, e.g. Fubar, are abandoned/"end of line". Curse definitely has different statistics/environment, but I couldn't import Curse's downloads information ><

[Aprikot]

Originally Posted by Ketho To give a quick insight on this particular discussion: I've imported the data from the 200 most downloaded WoWInterface AddOns

Great list! It's interesting to me that the most popular ten or so AddOns are all designed to ease the identification & completion of PvE objectives, including endgame content, and have nothing to do with interface aesthetics.

@timmerino: if you didn't already know, Cladhaire "wrote the book" on WoW programming.

[Ketho]

lol, I didn't know that Cladhaire is James Whitehead aka jnwhiteh

I was suspecting though ..

Edit:
oh nvm ><