WAR Herald promotes 3rd party addon

The WAR Herald had a recent update titled ”Spam Me Not: New Mod Available For WAR!” on the site promoting a 3rd party addon to help block spam messages.

Setting aside the actual purpose of the message (to help people avoid gold spam), I found the fact that they promoted such an addon on the official website very interesting.

On the one hand, you could make the argument that if they see the need for such an addon – why don’t they include something similar to it in the default UI?

Promoting such an addon is a bit of an admission that there a) is a problem and b) that what they are doing isn’t really fixing the issue. There are several such flavors of these addons in WoW, so it’s not much of a stretch to think that Mythic could have anticipated the need for such a thing instead of relying on users to develop it.

But on the other hand, kudos to Mythic for recognizing that there is a problem and promoting a way to fix it even if it’s not official.

I’m a big advocate of addons in general because they allow users to fix issues they find annoying rather than waiting for an official fix that may never come. I sincerely hope such announcements continue to be a trend. AND… I hope that it doesn’t just stop with awareness but also continues into incorporating the really good ideas into the default UI.

The reality is that good ideas are not the exclusive property of the developer and addons allow the user community to contribute to making a better game.