Monster thread
So today I noticed the Overwolf App challenge submission deadline has officially closed, I’d honestly never taken a serious look at this thing until last night. When the contest was originally announced, I assumed it was a competition to make mobile apps that took advantage of the Gw2 api libraries in ways that could keep players connected to tyria via their smartphones. Cool. What I now realize is it’s basically just an in game graphics overlay program, and the majority of these “apps” are just photoshop overlays of the wvw map and scoreboard that update in real time according to the api.
Now, my initial reaction to this was “oh that’s kinda cool, I thought addons were frowned upon in gw2.” Then I was like “Wait, why are they using a 3rd party software to do this?” Using an overlay program just seem like a stupid and clunky workaround to not having addon support in your game, and pitting people against each other to make these fake* addons is really confusing to me. As a developer, why wouldn’t you just allow creators to throw these overlays into the client game folder directly? Having to load up a 3rd party app every time you play is a waste of the player’s time. The idea doesn’t even work as a marketing effort. I guess I could understand if some 3rd party company paid you a bunch of money to promote their software in your game, but you still must realize how cheesy this all looks at face value. People don’t see Anet promoting innovation and creativity, they see Anet leaning on some small 3rd party bloatware to provide a feature they should be able to implement themselves.
The potential
I can think of like 20 feature complaints/requests (improved death recap ui, party damage trackers, build templates, various ui improvements, ect..) that could have all been solved with simple addons in some way. Can’t you simply limit the access of modders? Like just giving access to just the string data of combat chat and the skill api library would solve death recap customization and let PvE heros use damage leaderboards to quantify/add a competitive element to dungeon run efficiency. Giving access to trait choice data would solve build templates (eg; parse through selected traits and store which traits are selected on client memory, then when they wanna re-apply that build, parse back through the stored trait choices and re-apply them, throw it into a ui that minimizes to an icon by the map and you’ve got build templates).
The opposition
So what’s the problem? With the FOV update behind us, what sort of advantages would addons give? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is maybe a window that displayed enemy cooldowns based on combat text (like when when you target someone, grab their name and parse through last 4 minutes of combat text and get the timestamps for when they used their skills and show me an approximation of their current skillbar), but even that would only be accurate for skills that do damage to the character, it wouldn’t track defensive cooldowns or things like lich form/portal (actual important skills).
We should also remember that people have been “modding” this game explicitly since release. You can still find speed/teleport hacks, wall hacks, anti gravity, botting engines if you know where to look. Setting up addons and re-evaluating what the client has access to would filter out a lot of these malicious tools.
TLDR: you’re throwing a competition to basically make addons then not supporting actual addons, why? Is there still an argument for addons giving unfair advantages over other players in combat? if so, what is it?