See, I am of a different mindset. I understand the reasonings for not including addons. But as a developer and someone that likes to customize my information and how its laid out, I am a big support of addons.
I will use the example with Adibags in WoW. For the most part, it is a One Bag style addon. But it does something no other bag addon does, it creates categories and organizes the items in your bag based on those categories. In a game like wow where i have tons of items in my bags, between gear, consumables, quest items, crafting, toy items, etc. If it was all in 1 jumble, its hard to distinguish this. But this addon allows for that.
Lets say, Beast Burst implements such a bag for Scars of Honor. That's great. But then someone else will not like it, or want a normal bag. So they now implement 2-3 different variations of the same bag system but for different likes. And this is just 1 part of the UI. There are tons of things that make the game more pleasing for people, but they are different between people. Beast Burst won't have the people and resources to constantly maintain all the things people want out of a UI. That puts a huge burden on the team. Supporting the Core UI is one thing, but supporting every feature under the sun to the whims of their players is another.
Addons allow them to offload all the ideas and creativity of the masses to build addons. They can put limits into it to just be UI stuff, make it stricter than WoW and adjust over time. They can then overtime implement any ideas that become huge for the community into the core UI so that the addon isn't needed, but then they can see that as a positive investment because it will be needed by many.
Warhammer Online also had addons, similar LUA based ones like WoW. I actually wrote an addon for it. It was far more restricted than WoW, but still usable. There were a ton of great addons for it, but they were not game breaking and mostly UI based ones. and Warhammer Online had a very advanced UI position/customizability system. So they complimented each other well.
Long story short, I think addons are beneficial to the health of the MMO and the players, they just need to be designed and done right from the API standpoint.
Plus, addons will always happen, if not directly through official means, through Overlays and other injectors. So many MMOs have no addon support, yet have entire addon systems injected through DirectX wrappers and drivers. GW2 is a great example. It will be an ongoing fight that will just be draining for the Beast Burst team also. I rather they focus on making a great game and a great core UI, and let addons handle the rest of the customization and work.
Last edited: 2021-05-18 18:05:31