Third-party Tool Policy Suggestion

[KSops1]

I apologize if maybe this has already been raised. I know there's a lot of chatter about it recently and I don't think I saw it in any recent posts.

Instead of complaining and being satirical about this policy and situation, maybe we could be productive and suggest different approaches we could take for this issue.

My proposal would be for the devs to start a partnership program for authorized third-party tools. A forum could be dedicated for the community to promote popular add-ons and the dev team could assign one or two people for half a work week a month (or some other interval) to comb through the forums and research the upvoted tools. This list of "approved" or "partnered" tools gets updated and maintained thusly (I imagine they want to keep this list fairly short). The devs would have to make a stand about being able to use their discretion about what makes the cut and what doesn't without having to justify it to the player base; this is so that we bypass all the "why didn't my mod get accepted it's the most popular? why did the other dude get accepted?"

"Why would the devs waste their time maintaining such a program?"
I understand that the devs dont want to have to deal with it in the first place, but at this point in time, we're seeing users be petty with reporting harmless add-ons and getting people in trouble. Ideally we would be able to live and let live (minus actual cheating mods) but this is where we are. I feel like a lot of players are feeling uneasy and apprehensive about what's defined as a third-party tool so since it looks like the current policy of gray area feels like it might be collapsing, maybe we need to swing the other way and just provide a whitelist and/or blacklist of tools. It's also great that the devs want to bring enhancements to the game because they recognize some add-ons exist because players feel the game client is lacking. But if that's the case, why not leave the harmless ones in to patch up the deficiencies in the client while you work on your first-party fixes?

"What about PS4/5 players?"
Yeah, they don't have the nice shiny things, but hopefully these allowed addons aren't terribly impactful in terms of generating gameplay disparity. I totally get that there's a console base to support and I think it's beautiful we can cross-play. So we should trust devs to use good discretion on what's allowed.

I'm in no way saying I have all the answers. I just think we could maybe try exploring avenues with the devs by proposing fresh ideas. Posting this here to put the idea through scrutiny and iteration.

[Jeeqbit]

SE once considered making an API for plugins like WoW, but the work on it was cancelled because it would lead to a DPS meter that is within the rules and that would make it toxic like WoW.