Why are 3rd party addons not allowed?

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1

I mean why would a publisher or development studio choose to not allow them?

My story? I literally stopped playing cause I went from game start to auction house, before doing any pvp mind you. I see how bad the UI is in the auction house and how hard it is get information from it. I google addons for the auction house to fix it and find only minimap UI addons are allowed. I stop playing the game at this point, but decide to at least share my story with you.

I’m curious why though. Why is it only minimap UI? Why aren’t addons allowed?

I searched and found a thread like this:

And you can see that the lack of addons is making the game worse, well before I came along.

Why not allow addons? It’s like having free designers create the things that you can’t. As a company gets larger and projects get older, the harder it is to design or re-design properly, addons is like keeping your ear to the ground of what the customers want in visual format. Hope that makes sense. I can pull up some references if needed.

2

One thing I found a player was worried about (it’s hard to find a specific reason). They were worried about the game encouraging

elitism that comes with dps meters for example, or addons that act like cheats (telling you stuff like stealther nearby and things like that). Addons can indeed make a game better, but its more likely they will invest the community with the same plague that also happened with all the other games around allowing them. Best examples: WoW and Elder Scrolls Online PC version.

I agree with the cheating part. At no point should an addon give you data that doesn’t already exist in the game in some sort unless devs allowed that info to be seen by players (ie: some games have extra options hidden in config files that don’t have a checkbox in the settings).

The UI for the Auction and the economy needs help. It has taken, other games that allow addons, years before their community figures out the best design for the Auction House. That’s just the auction house.

I’m curious why 3rd party addons are not allowed.

3

mayhaps because these add-ons can introduce ways to exploit the weak spaghetti code that makes up the framework of NW.

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4

That is preventable by monitoring those that use an API

One thing. Any data that is readonly that is sent to the player will not allow exploits. To a limit. Things like other players IP address, account names, passwords, real address, private info, and then in game stuff like, stealthed players. Clearly none of that should be sent to other players ever.

Sending data back to the game always has a chance of being exploited if it’s not handled properly. Also at nopoint ever should any data sent from a player be stored onto another players computer (cpu,ram,hard drive). and if so those functions are under minute by minute monitoring as they’re used to prevent real-world hacking taking place between players.

5

idk its rly a sad thing

6

Because addons take away a lot of thought and focus, and many aspects of the game are performed for you.

7

but is AGS capable of that? not looking to get into an argument, I was just stating why these addons are not allowed by AGS. that is the reason.

8

simple answer. they want to keep the Purity of their dogshit UI.

  • the Group frame HP bars only update every 500ms.
  • cant move anything around.
  • Buff / debuff bar is the same bar.
  • no reliable way to see your own group members healthbars among 40 other bars with the exact same blue tinge. its a fucking joke.

they can allow read only API for simple shit like

  • your buffs / debuffs.
  • your mana stam health.
  • Group members Health.
  • Your cooldowns.
  • Consumable cooldowns.
    and a setting to disable individual UI elements.
    a combat log would be nice but end of the day id rather my eyes not bleed. looking at Dogshit UI than have a combat log.
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