This game badly needs mods and macros.

This thread just makes me so glad that I'm not poor and can afford things like my g13 and my razer naga. I can macro to my hearts content without any pesky in game macro system limiting what I can pull off. It is somewhat bad that I still can't pull off a mouseover macro but that is how it is I suppose.

Really, the problem with this game that's going to keep me from playing it once I've exhausted the basic content is the lack of compelling gameplay mechanics that drive you to make interesting and compelling decisions.

Sid Meyer of Civilization fame once famously said, "a good game is a series of interesting choices."

What makes a raiding MMO interesting is...the choices you have to make. I have this plethora of abilities that I can use to help my team beat the encounter. Which do I choose and when? People are taking damage...do shield this guy, HoT that guy, and heal the other? Or some other combination? That's the interesting choice that makes for a compelling game that makes me keep coming back for more.

If you've made a good game, all that addons and macros can do is help feed you the information you need to make those choices, and then efficiently deliver your decisions back to the game.

If your complaint about macros or addons is that people are going to be able to macro all their abilities into one button and spam that....well then it's pretty bad game to begin with. If your choices can be reduced to a macro...you don't have any choices.

HOLY CRAP I'M ON FIRE!

If your complaint is that addons are going to make information you need "too obvious," well...hiding critically important information from the player isn't good game design either. Some people have expressed outrage that addons like DBM in WoW flash your screen red and shake the screen when you're standing in fire or something. Ummmm....shouldn't the game do that by default? Isn't that kind of critically important information that your character in the game should be aware of?

In FPS games like Gears of War or Call of Duty when you're getting shot, your screen shakes, flashes red, your guy grunts and screams and eventually starts panting and wheezing while the screen closes around you. Makes it really obvious that BAD STUFF IS HAPPENING AND YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. In default-UI MMOs like WoW or SWTOR....the boss has put a spell on you that's causing you to burn alive in agonizing pain and you'll die in 4 seconds unless you do something and you get....a tiny icon barely distinguishable from others in the corner of your screen. That's challenging, compelling gameplay? Is that how you'd describe the 'challenge' of the game to a friend? "Dude this game is so challenging! Like, you'll have this thing on you and you'll be about to die and you won't even know it unless you stare at this tiny part of the screen away from the action!" Yeah, obfuscating information from the player isn't challenging, it's just annoying. The fact that your screen doesn't flash or shake by default when you're taking damage was a design flaw in WoW that SWTOR copied.

Heals inc via pony express.

Same thing with inputing commands back to the game via UI mods. I'm frustrated with the SWTOR healing interface because it's inefficient. In WoW I use an addon called Healbot. Don't let the name fool you, it doesn't make decisions for you...it's a joke...the player is the Healbot. It shows you all the life bars of the players in your raid in a configuration you choose, where you want it on the screen, and you input your commands by assigning abilities to different combinations of shifts and clicks. So I left click for a slow efficient heal, or I shift left click for a fast, inefficient heal, or I right click for a shield, or shift right click for a dispel. It's not making decisions for me...it's just the most efficient and comfortable way for me to enter my decisions to the system.

In SWTOR, I have to click on somebody's bar, then press another hotkey to cast the ability I want. It takes two clicks or button presses to input my decision rather than one. (Yes I know about F1-F4 for selecting party members, but that's still slower and doesn't work in Ops). That's the challenging, compelling gameplay you want? "Dude, this game is so challenging! You know how in other games you can choose what heal to cast in one click? In this game...IT TAKES TWO CLICKS! I wonder if they're going to come out with a super hardmode that takes 3 clicks..."

WTB interesting decisions, not clunky interface

So, if you're arguing that addons make the game less challenging by presenting information to the player and taking his commands more efficiently then I think you're looking for the wrong kind of difficulty. If I'm playing baseball, I want it to be challenging because the pitcher throws fast and accurate, not because the league decided I have to hold the bat by the wrong end.

The game is the decisions. All addons do is help you filter the information you want so you can make those decisions, and then allow you to enter your decisions back into the game in a manner you find optimal. If it's possible to make addons that can make all those decisions for you...you've made a bad game. If it's possible to make a macro that enters all your abilities in the optimal order no matter what's going on...you've made a bad game. This is why heroic raiding in WoW is still challenging despite the existence of mods and macros. If mods and macros played the game for you, every guild would just install those and kill every heroic boss in a week, but instead it takes weeks and months of attempts. And yes I've been a HM WoW raider for years...top 40 US 25 for Sinestra and heroic Rag, but quit DS to play this pile instead.

tl; dr: If the "challenge" of a game is making information about the game state difficult to find and commands inefficient to enter instead of the pressure of making interesting decisions quickly, then it's a bad game. Don't settle for a bad game.

Actually, I think a more accurate analogy would be the league questioning whether or not players should be allowed to use corked bats.

"No it doesnt"

It doesn't need to be implemented in my opinion. I never needed to use them, but if people feel like they'd have more fun using them as they wish.

So long as people don't want to force addons to me.

While there are concerns that some players will be at an advantage to those that choose not to use mods or that a clique of elitists will start denying groups based on what a mod tells them, what I think we all might want to consider is what happens when the devs start developing content based around the idea that everyone uses these mods?

Blizzard began doing that long before they thought to make some of those mod's behavior default in the game. Being required to run DBM in order to run an instance is not a place I want to be.

Oh, and if you NEED these mods so badly in order to play the game, then perhaps you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer. They should be quality of life and personal choice and utterly optional. The moment someone says you HAVE to use this or that mod it's no longer fun.

Mods are a slippery slope no matter the degree of API access.

I played WOW for about 6 years and the thing i hated the most about that game was any day that there was a patch and i had to go out and try to update 15 mods that wouldn't work well or at all for the next 2+ weeks.

If i had to put the standard WOW UI (which has had 7 years to improve and never has) versus the standard TOR UI (which they're working on improving) it would be about an equal battle of fail. I'd have to give the 1 big TOR inventory over the cluster**** of WOW bags any day.

The people that the made the WOW UI playable were the mod writers and they never got a damn thing from blizzard other than grief when they tried to make money off their mods.

Is TOR perfect, not by a long shot and i most likely won't be around long, but WOW hasn't been any good for years either. IMO the whole MMO genre has been spinning it's wheels and gone nowhere in the last 10 years.

No, it's nothing like that.

First, a corked bat gives you access to an ability you never had before with an uncorked bat (ie, the ability to hit the ball harder). UI addons don't give you new information or new abilities...it just means I can receive the information where and how I want. So instead of seeing a critical debuff as a tiny icon hidden at the bottom of my screen, jumbled in with other unimportant information, and a fading bar to indicate its duration, I can see it right next to my character with a number showing the seconds left on the duration. The game designers decided what information the API has access to...UI addons just allow you to change how it's presented to you.

The other thing about corked bats...nobody else gets to use one of those if they're playing by the rules. With support for mods and macros, everybody has access to the same tools. There's no unfair advantage. And a specific mod isn't even necessarily an advantage because you customize your UI to what works best for YOU, and that's not going to be what works best for me. If anything, mods even the playing field, because everybody gets what works best for them. Instead, everyone is forced to use the same UI, which works better for some than others.

Say they allow a better healing interface. I prefer click to cast. That is, I can bind left click on a player's bar to cast one spell, shift left click to cast a different one, control right click to something else, and control-alt-shift-middle-click to something else entirely. Maybe you prefer mouseover (hover mouse over player bar and press hotkey without having to select them as a target first). In addon world...i can heal with click to cast, and you can heal with mouseover. But if BW adds click to cast but doesn't add mouseover, then now I have an advantage over you. If only you had addons to even the field...

And yet another thing about corked bats...a lot of people already have them! I have a razer naga mouse, so I can program in macros. This is "allowed," as they sell SWTOR branded macroable mice. So, I can make some macros that people without such a mouse can't. For instance, if I'm playing a DPS class, I can make a macro in my mouse software that hits all the hotkeys for my DPS cooldowns and relics with one press. Someone without one of these mice has to press 2, 3, 4 buttons in succession. If only SWTOR had a software macro feature so they could do the same....

This guy ^ ,

Not a mod developer. Also talking about what happened in wow prior to PTR, which started in BC.

Many of the better authors out there and sites like Curse and WowInterface get interface changes, priority invites to Expansion Betas, and previews of UI changes before they're put on the interface forum. Many of the UI designers at Blizzard post on curse, aceaddon and wowinterface developer forums.

Even then, the interface forum? When new patches are released on the PTR, a thread will pop up with blizzard employees posting details about the newest interface changes.

If some random addon you used broke during a patch, it is because the addon author was to lazy or unable to read the information to work around the next patch, sometimes months before the patch actually hits.

Don't blame blizzard for making their interface better, for an addon authors inability to update their own addon.

You know whats great about your argument?

People say that Blizzard allowing UI mods and macro's give players that use them an unfair advantage.

Those same people later say if you want to use Macro's get a keyboard/mouse that lets you program macros.

Blizzard has a strict policy against keyboards (mice and software) where you can create macro's to chain abilities, as it gives an unfair advantage to that player.

Obviously blizzard can't create a client to sniff your PC's software to see if you're using that kind of software, but it's pretty obvious when you're chaining abilities with microsecond precision.


Seems kind of Hypocritical if you ask me.