Section 10 "Bizarre Blizzard" (Why does blizzard break my mods each patch? Why don't they care about them?)
First of all, it's important to clearly state that Blizzard does not officialy support any addons. By supports, I mean Blizzard is in no way responsible for their proper functioning, and does not guarantee their in-game stability. Blizzard guarantees that their default UI (User Interface) functions at all times, and it does, eventhough a large part of modders do believe it to be somewhat lacking in versitallity. There a two way of viewing this lack of versatillity. The first one, the most popular one, is believing that Blizzard left a job undone. That like a lot of things in World Of Warcraft, the default UI is "lacking in content". However most of the modding community ( those who code the addons) see the reasons for this "ineffective" UI as Blizzard's will to let the modding community grow, and offer a plethora mods to users which will allow them to have their very own unique UI, entirely fitted to their tastes and to the way they play the game. This belief has been strongly reinforced with the possibilty, since in patch 1.8, to disable some parts of the default UI. The modding community views this as an encouragement , from Blizzard, to change, replace, reuse, rework, hash, cut, destroy... their UI. We strongly believe that Blizzard's UI ,intentionaly, only lays down the foundations of a UI (a foundation which does offer more than basic functions), to offer us infinite possiblities to tinker, customize, our UI. There is no way Blizzard can satisfy every players tastes with only one UI, and we believe they have done so by not imposing one type of UI.
This being said, why does every patch break my addons? Well technicaly speaking, not every patch breaks your addons, only the patches that apply changes to the API ( in other words, the functions used by your addons) or the way addons work. For example, in patch 1.7, Blizzard added a LoadOnDemand option and function. This would allow addons to be loaded in-game. This "broke" every mod because it required every mod to state if it was loadable on demand or not. Since this function never existed before 1.7, well no addons stated that they were loadable on demand, which led to the "breaking" of most mods. What you have to understand, is that Blizzard will, most times at least, add only beneficial functions to the UI. At first, this might lead to errors and break downs, but it will always result in the better function (less memory usage for example) of your moded UI! How cool is that?!
So Blizzard does care about mods. They want customized UI to be as effective as possible, as versatille as possible, as stable as possible (test realms help alot in pre-updating of mods) and they want mods to be out there in numbers. They don't support mods, but they all they can to make them possible, they deserve a big thank you fom all of us.
Trying to limit the OMG NERF BLIZ threads on patc days.
And add a link to
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...p=1#post208350 in section 4.