Hells Bells

Add-ons -  does anybody play World of Warcraft without them? They are both a boon and a bane, and almost everybody uses them. Blizzard in their infinite wisdom gave us a UI which is full customisable, then left us with a UI that was functional but mostly not up to the task of Raiding, PvPing, crafting and Auction House activity.

If you don't believe me try playing without one of these:

1. Raiding - Recount or equivalent information gatherer on Damage per Second, Healing per Second, dispels, and damge done (I nearly missed off Deadly Boss Mods).
2. Raid Healing - Healbot Continued or one of the multitude of alternatives.
3. PvPing - whilst not essential, in order to be most effective I use Healers must Die.
4. Auction House - without Auctioneer or one of the alternatives.

The game allows for infinite customisation, but that comes at a cost. The cost for most of us is updating addons on a semi-regular basis. I remember a time before Microsoft did auto updates on the middle Wednesday of every month. There is no excuse for your PC to be without the latest update, only the downside of automation is allowing Microsoft to chuck out the occasional bad bit of coding. I have seen it crash every laptop at one company I worked for, to smaller quirks like Excel updates that stop it printing graphs with legends on. The same is true of add-ons and I have no plan to automate the process from Curse.com. So I am left with a tedious job of manually updating my army of add-ons.

Am I wrong to not trust a 3rd party to refresh my add-ons? I don't know my WoW install is very important me and takes an age to re-install. How well do you trust somebody elses code to update an important part of your favourite game?

When there is a new patch out and I see the EULA and ToS screens, I am not thinking about the wonderful new content I am wondering which of my favourite add-ons are broken and no longer have any support for it.

I have recently re-installed an unsupported add-on Auction Profit Master, this used to be such an important weapon in my arsenal of glyph making tools. The addon still contains all my previous settings and the buttons have been improved but ultimately it does not post my glyphs at the right price. My alternative is to install and master  what I believe to be the much more complexed TradeSkillMaster, which comes with a host of modules, and whilst I am at it I might as well updates all those other add-ons that are no doubt out of date.