Today's edition of Ask Massively is not exactly a cure for us poor recidivists, being instead an exploration of RIFT's upcoming addons and why some people are less than happy about this fact. It may also serve as a history lesson for some members of the audience. As always, you can leave your questions for a future edition of the column in the comments, or you can just wing them along to ask@massively.com.
Coriander asked: Why are people so upset at the idea of RIFT getting addons?
A lot of reader comments have mentioned very good reasons. GearScore, Decursive, Omen, Deadly Boss Mods, and several other addons are cited as excellent reasons to not necessarily greet the new feature with open arms. But really, those features aren't so much an issue of addons as of the way that World of Warcraft has fed on itself in terms of design, since addons are developed to trivialize certain parts of encounters and then the designers subsequently assume those addons will be used by the players.JuliusSeizure asked: How is a New Zealand band's clip not viewable in Australia?
Decursive was the first good example of this. Encounters were scripted such that they required players to be very astute with removing debuffs. An addon was designed, in turn, that allowed players to just hammer on one button and remove debuffs accordingly. So future encounters were designed with the expectation that players were using Decursive, which meant that trying to run said encounters without the addon was suicidal at best.
These days, GearScore is on most people's minds as something that made playing World of Warcraft singularly obnoxious. (Having the addon tacitly endorsed by the development team has certainly not helped matters.) That having been said, the odds of that happening are directly proportional to what the API opens up to potential addon authors, so time will tell what happens with RIFT's latest addition.
The band's name contains the word naked, and as such, you're not allowed to see it. This is what has been wrought with the lack of an R18 rating for games. Tell the people!
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