"We probably should've done something sooner": World of Warcraft director says the MMO's addon changes have been a long time coming, but better late than never

The pre-patch for World of Warcraft: Midnight has rolled out ahead of the expansion's launch in March, and that means the first stage of Blizzard's big revision to UI addons is here. The devs have presented this change as a way to "level the playing field" for players, but there's always been a big question lingering: why now?

Addon use goes all the way back to WoW's beta days, senior game director Ion Hazzikostas tells our friends at PC Gamer. "What we started to see 10 years later in Warlords of Draenor was increasingly bespoke add-on solutions that were designed to simplify and solve specific mechanics," he says.

"That was just the beginning," Hazzikostas continues. But there was no "one specific function" Blizzard could block to address the issue, and since addons were by then fully ingrained into WoW's player culture, the team essentially said, "'Okay, I guess this is how it's going to work now." But the issues the team began to take notice of in Warlords of Draenor had only become more "pervasive" in modern WoW.

"We've probably let this go farther than we should have," Hazzkostas admits. "But we really just boiled down to the question of, do we want this to be what WoW is forever? We probably should have done something sooner, and it would have been a less-jarring transition for the community."

Hazzikostas puts it another way: "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today."

The addon crackdown – or "disarmament," as Blizzard has put it in the past – is intended to keep combat addons from changing the expectations for how high-level content should be balanced. Players with a ton of information naturally have an advantage in high-end raids, and Blizzard doesn't want to have to keep balancing around both addon users and those who stick with the native UI.

But the team doesn't want to kill UI mods entirely. "Our goal was never to stamp out the add-on ecosystem," Hazzikostas says. "It was to move away from it being something that feels like a required competitive aspect of the game."

These are the best MMOs you can play today.