The WoW UI updates have come for Peggle, but its author is looking into it—as unexpected casualties of Blizzard's war on combat mods abound

World of Warcraft is tackling combat mods (addons) in the pre-patch coming this week. In theory, this update is only designed to hamstring addons that provide a concrete advantage in combat. In practice, there are plenty of other mods getting caught in the crossfire. Like poor Peggle Classic, a six-year-old addon with almost 600,000 downloads that creates the unfair combat advantage of… checks notes, being able to play Peggle in WoW.

Alright, I've got my tongue in my cheek here: Blizzard is not taking aim at silly UI minigames—though its sweeping changes are going to have broad and unforeseen impacts. The warning alarms have sounded for Peggle Classic before the patch hit the retail servers because, as one user in the mod's comments points out, "it appears the TBC Anniversary API was updated entirely to the new structure".

Basically, while the mod's not been directly slain on Classic by anti-combat addon changes coming in Midnight—it's this writer's understanding that anniversary and classic servers will still permit combat mods, given class redesign has been a huge part of making retail WoW playable without addons—it's a surefire sign of things to come, because tweaks to the API are still messing with mod authors.

Especially since previously, when an addon was out of date, Blizzard would let you load it with a sort of 'suit yourself' warning, taking the consequences of any instability or crashes on the chin. Per the Midnight pre-patch notes, however, "addons that have not been updated by their authors for Midnight will not be allowed to load in Midnight and beyond."

I'm not sure if Blizzard intends to keep this philosophy up for Midnight's major/minor patches, or whether it's just planning on doing so for the initial expansion launch of Midnight to enable a 'wipe the slate clean' situation, but the point is that a lot of addons simply won't show up as loadable at all once servers come back up for the pre-patch later in the week.

Some have discovered that tweaking this is as straightforward as fiddling with a text file, though. As user DoverBoys on the r/WoW subreddit explains, all you've got to do is dip into your addons folder and change their .toc file's "##Interface:" number to 120000. I say all you've gotta do—doing this might still break your game.

For what it's worth, anything that would've given you a straight-up combat advantage is liable to get you in trouble with Blizzard for circumventing them. Not that it's likely they'll work, chances are you'll just get a boatload of LUA errors, but for wee humble little addons like Peggle Classic it'll probably be enough.

The only sad thing here is that addons that were outdated, but functional—with authors who aren't supporting them in perpetuity—are going to get caught in this net. As for Peggle Classic, addon author Ketho17 has reassured Pegglers that while "there is going to be some work involved to update for the new API … I'll try to look at it next week". Phew. The game is saved.