Blizzard isn't "walking back" plans to remove World of Warcraft combat and UI mods: "Our goal was never to stamp out the addon ecosystem"

As World of Warcraft developer Blizzard prepares its decades-old MMO for new expansion pack Midnight's arrival on March 2, fans continue to grapple with changes to handy combat add-ons.

For anyone out of the loop regarding add-ons' removal, Blizzard unveiled its plan to remove World of Warcraft combat mods last year, stating that it was to "level the playing field" for the long-running MMO. The team doubled down on this, going on to assure that it was axing add-ons so as "to set ourselves up for being able to build content that will better serve all of our players." Well, this promised process of removal is now underway.

Midnight's pre-patch last week saw the first stage of Blizzard's big revision to the World of Warcraft UI come to fruition, with senior game director Ion Hazzikostas saying the devs "probably should've done something sooner." Understandably, though, removing add-ons hasn't come without backlash from the community, and Hazzikostas has worked to assure players that this move wasn't made lightly.

Now, however, discussions surrounding the removal of add-ons have moved toward the other direction. Is Blizzard having cold feet and thus reversing its changes? Hazzikostas tells PC Gamer no – in fact, this was always the devs' idea. When Midnight first launched into its alpha testing period, the studio wanted to see how things went, how much would break, and how it would all actually play out in action.

"I was surprised, and I learned a lot about exactly how many of our add-ons are written in the first few weeks of alpha," he recalls. "We realized pretty quickly that a ton of these add-ons were written in ways that relied on many of the functions that we had now restricted." He then adds, "I see discussion in the community to the effect of, 'Blizzard's backtracking on this. Blizzard's walking back their plans.'"

None of this was unintentional. "This was always the intent: to swing the pendulum to the other end and then creep it back in a measured way." As Hazzikostas concludes, "Our goal was never to stamp out the add-on ecosystem. It was to move away from it being something that feels like a required competitive aspect of the game." Whether or not the community is in agreement with this plan is hard to tell – everyone feels differently, after all.

It's not easy to please everyone, especially when it comes to MMOs. Hell, it's not exclusive to World of Warcraft – just look at Final Fantasy 14 and the back and forth its fans (it's me, I'm fans) indulge in regarding "third-party tools."

World of Warcraft Midnight pre-patch follows tradition with a colony of bugs, filling the sky with dragons and turning hills into squishy gray lumps: "I just expect them to try and do better for once."