Add-On Hell!

As in “I’m in it!”

I haven’t updated my add ons for quite a while, just checking the “load out of date add ons” every patch.  Generally, everything works fine.  However, since it’s been quite a few patches since I’ve really updated, I have started to get some errors here and there with enough frequency to become annoying.  With a couple hours to spend last night, I set myself to the task of updating everything.  Why does this activity take so long and become so frustrating???

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that Blizzard opened this up to the player community and it’s obvious from the amount of add-ons we have to choose from that that variety of choice would not have been able to be generated by Blizzard.  Add-ons I (and you presumably), can’t live without.  But why does the process of updating them have to be so cumbersome, time-consuming, and sometimes fruitless?  For instance, I use FuBar over Titan and I always have a ridculously tough time finding complete Fu updates, whereas Titan seems to be all over the place.   A couple other add-ons I have I can’t even find on the major sites.

In my perfect world, I see one site for all World of Warcraft add-ons, where they are tested and debugged and put on a central server with unlimited connections and bandwidth.  Blizzard programmers busy themselves to create an add-on manager for the game client that automatically manages the download and installation of updated add-ons.  Additionally, those same programmers also continuously ensure that they add no code to the game that will break old add-ons, even if they are never updated.  If an add-on isn’t updated for a particular patch in a reasonable amount of time, and at least one player uses it, then Blizzard updates the add-on themselves.

/wakes up, shakes head and wipes drool off desk

I suppose you can’t have it both ways: you can’t have the creativity of the player community at large along with centralized management by the game developer (or probably anyone for that matter).  I also know that there are some auto-updaters out there, although I’ve never experimented with them.  I gotta think though that some enterprising player out there has the same gripes, is a lot smarter than me, and could figure out how to solve this issue.  That person would be my hero. 

 How about you guys?  I try to keep my add-on list to a minimum and I still have a bunch.  I know there are some of you out there with tons of add-ons.  What’s your strategy to keep them up to date, yet preserve your sanity?