Increasing number of players using 3rd party tools

[Avidria]

They've never really been a big part of this games culture.

Add ons are a MASSIVE part of WoWs culture, though, and the WoW community is transitioning to FFXIV in not small numbers. Since there's nothing really stopping the use of add ons in this game, besides some mild inconvenience and an official/unofficial stance against them, I could see a culture shift happening.

Eh, people have been coming here from WoW for years. There's just more folks now.

The difference is that WoW is designed with add-ons in mind, and FFXIV is not.

And, admittedly this is just my personal opinion, WoW's base UI is hot ugly spiced garbage. It's not half as customizable as I'd like, a lot of the defaults just don't look good, and the font scaling options leave a lot to be desired. I have godawful eyesight and had to spend FAR too much time just trying to find an add-on that would change WoW's quest text into something I could read without leaning in and squinting at my screen. I had to get an add-on to make the chat log text bigger too.

I don't have that problem in FF. Partly because the font they use in the quest log is actually readable, but also in large part because it already has a lot of customization and scaling options built in.

Most of my add-ons in WoW weren't even really oriented toward combat at all, outside of the small handful that also make a pretty darn big difference in raiding (even then I only used a handful... Dbm, decursive, and details were all I really needed beyond basic UI stuff). It was mostly cosmetic and fun stuff anyway, like transmog and achievement trackers, rare spawn maps, adding coordinates to the map, etc etc.

I don't use add-ons here because I don't need to.