Two households, both alike in genre, in fair AddOn-a, where we lay our scene.
Alright, let me roll up my sleeves and deliver unto you some lore. Not just any lore: mod lore. Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft, two of the biggest MMORPGs on the market, have always tackled their modding scene—or AddOns, as they’re often called—very differently.
World of Warcraft has historically embraced AddOn creators with open arms, giving a ton of the game’s information to them in-client through its API. Crack open the shell of any WoW raider’s client and you’ll find a homebrew moonshine concoction of custom raid frames, sound effects, and WeakAuras telling them what buttons to push and when.
In fact, Blizzard was so dependent on its AddOn community that two things wound up happening. First, it didn’t overhaul its user interface until 2022. Blizzard spent 18 whole years assuming that any player who didn’t want to wrestle with its old, archaic interface could simply download a batch of mods to deal with it. Which they could, but boy that’s a big ask.
Secondly, all of those combat AddOns caused an arms race between Blizzard and the game’s players. Raid mechanics became incredibly complicated, with world first raider teams having on-staff AddOn coders who’d puzzle out the best way to solve a mechanic with code, not skill.
Meanwhile, class design remained complex—in some places, untenably. I’ve been playing an Outlaw rogue for 3 years and I couldn’t tell you what my Roll the Bones Debuffs do. I’ve got a WeakAura for that.
Final Fantasy 14, in comparison, took a different approach—outlawing the use of UI mods entirely. Well, in theory. In practice, FF14’s always had a lively mod community, but it operates on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy—billboards aside.
See, director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has been open about the fact that Square doesn’t look at what your computer’s doing, so if you aren’t outright cheating, and you don’t cop to using mods in game, and nobody reports you? You’re pretty much fine. I mean, you still shouldn’t do it, Square’s within its rights to ban you, but also it hasn’t done that and so there’s an ecosystem.
This means that both MMOs have had completely opposite problems. While WoW has had to wrestle with its increasingly modded-up community, designing its game around their whims, Final Fantasy 14’s Yoshi-P has had to wearily say, multiple times: Please stop talking about mods. Seriously. Stop talking about them. For the love of god, stop.
But things have changed in recent years. A gravitational pull has drawn these two MMOs together, rather than pushing them apart. And when I consider how Blizzard and Square Enix handle their modding communities in 2025? I’m starting to notice an uncanny number of similarities.
