Addon discussion

[Khalithar]

why do people want them so badly

I can understand this statement from folks that don't know just how awesome addons can be and how much the right ones can improve your experience with a game. I will give you a few examples of addons and why they want them:

1. DPS meters- these are very useful for raid groups to see if they have the dps to beat a certain encounter. While yes, there are players that think meters are the end all be all, good players know that a dps meter's results should be interpreted based on the fight and having an accurate readout of where you stand can really motivate someone to get better.

2. Chat addons- I don't know how bad the RMT situation is on your server, but on my server you will get dozens of tells every minute from RMT. WoW for example has a few addons that add extra filters to your chat and automatically block whispers based on words you set, the level of the person, and any other number of parameters you indicate. It blocks these whispers without even telling you and really improves the experience for a game that has a lot of spammers, like this one for example.

3. Combat addons- The UI editor this game has right now isn't horrible, but there are those who really like to go crazy and mod their UI in some crazy ways to make life easier or just for fun. I'll give you an example of a UI addon that WoW has, it's called Healbot, it adds a special raid frame that shows your party and allows you to just click that person's name to cast a spell on them without needing to actually target them. So if multiple people are taking damage, you can click their name and cast the spell rather than needing to target them THEN cast a spell. It's a small difference but it's really noticeable in practice, you can target the boss and heal without ever targeting anything else but the boss.

4. Gathering addons- This is another thing that could be done with this game that also has similar style of addons in other games, basically what it would do is show you the spawn time (in minutes/seconds) of when something was going to spawn. Imagine having that instead of having to look at the clock as a gatherer. Instead of saying "oh it's 1am eorzea time that node spawns at 5am" the addon would say "5am unspoiled node spawns X minutes Y seconds).

The whole point of addons is to improve quality of life and help get rid of those little nitpicks people have about the game or it's UI or just for fun. A friend of mine for example, downloaded an addon that played comic book style sound boxes and made cartoon sound effects whenever he got a critical hit or used a cooldown. He showed me it and it was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen. Addons are a fantastic thing that can really improve your gaming experience.

Edit:

why would you ever want to open a new window and play other games?

I had an addon that let me play Bejeweled while in another MMO. It was a fantastic way to pass the time while waiting on a dps queue, it also popped up automatically if you died to give you something to do while waiting for a rez or a respawn timer to finish, you could of course toggle it off at any time.