On Wednesday, 4 November, at three in the afternoon Pacific time, Blizzard opens the gates of World of Warcraft: Forever all over the world at the same moment. The promise is a return. Players are to feel again what they felt in 2004, when Azeroth was unmapped and every road led somewhere unknown. Announced at BlizzCon on 12 September, Forever is a third permanent version of the game, running alongside the modern one and Classic, and access comes with an existing subscription or game time.
But nobody returns to the country they left. The country has moved on, and so have they. As Joseph Cox reported for 404 Media, the subreddits devoted to the game are already full of AI-generated addons, many of them lifted from the work of longtime developers. The flood is heavy enough that one of the oldest institutions in the game’s unofficial economy is changing how it lets anyone in.
The record-keepers
That institution is Warcraft Logs, built by Archon.gg. Players download Archon’s software, which records the data of their fights and uploads it to the site, and there they pick over each encounter looking for ways to do better. The site has long given its API away to other developers for free. Its CEO, who goes by Sildri Silentcrest, said those developers used to be mostly hobbyists. Now more and more of them are commercial projects, which are meant to ask permission first, so that Warcraft Logs can stop tools that would break its terms of service or could not scale.
“There’s been [an] explosion of development. Now, we’re averaging a[t] least one commercial ask per day. And I’m sure there are more that are commercializing without our approval. One new World of Warcraft analysis company every day! It’s hard to keep up.”
The copyists
Addons have been part of the game for almost its whole life. They are small pieces of software a player loads in for some particular advantage: a minimap guide along the fastest questing path, or a rebuilt interface. Some people earn real money from them, through Patreon or through ad revenue on Curseforge, the main repository. Over the past few weeks the subreddits have filled with posts about newly “created” addons. Sometimes the poster admits to using AI. Sometimes the admission arrives later, in an edit, after someone has called it out. There is even a tool that lets players run Claude or Codex inside World of Warcraft, so they can keep building addons without leaving the game.
The well-known addon creator plusmouse put it plainly: “People are making rip-offs of my work and copying my ideas.” Their example is a design for nameplates, the bars that float over an enemy’s head. Before it came out, they said, they had seen no addon in that style; “now, it feels like every AI addon ends up using that idea.” When the generated code is close enough, plusmouse files copyright complaints with Curseforge. “Sometimes the code is so similar the complaint results in a takedown, other times it’s just different enough to get away with it, despite feeling like my solution. Borrowing ideas is normal in addon development, but doing it on the scale that AI permits isn’t.” They have made some of their GitHub repositories private and believe this has stopped language models from drawing on their code.
So a craftsman who spent years working in public now pulls the shutters down. Other small houses have gone the same way. A refuge for game decompilers closed its doors under a similar flood only last month.
The ratio
Warcraft Logs has chosen to redraw its border. “We’re changing our API to better align with the applications we want to enable,” Silentcrest said. The company likes tools that help players understand why they died to a boss or how to improve on the next attempt. It does not like sites that “effectively scrape lots of the data from our site to show surface-level info on their own site,” and that kind, Silentcrest said, has become much more common. A paid commercial key is coming, “so that developers with commercial ambitions can support the foundation for the projects.” According to one affected project’s GitHub tracker, a beta of new hourly point limits began on 20 October and is due to run until at least the end of November, older keys keep their old limits unless their owners opt in, and for-profit apps will need the new commercial tier, for which no price had been given.
Then came the figures, the part that sounds most like a ledger of loss:
“Two years ago, say we had 200 developers using our API and two or three or four were being abusive. Today, 10,000 developers are using our API and 1,000 are being abusive. The ratio has changed, and that really feels bad.”
That is fifty times as many developers, and somewhere between 250 and 500 times as many abusers. “It used [to] be developers respecting other developers’ hard work. I’m not sure what’s changed. Is it that Claude doesn’t read the ToS? Or is it that the new developers don’t care as much as the old?” The CEO was careful to add that the team loves some of the tools this new accessibility has made possible, “but policing API use has become a struggle.”
A reflection, and only that: whoever builds a free road for merchants will one day find caravans on it they never invited, and must then choose between closing the road and charging a toll. Warcraft Logs has chosen the toll.
The small team
The pressure works inward too. Staff “feel pressure to do more,” Silentcrest said, and the site has used some AI itself, for research and some code review. “We have a small team. People are using our API to vibecode features that are on our own to do list. Should we take those features off our list? Or should we bite the bullet and lean into AI tools ourselves?”
Forever is meant to let every player choose their own pace, and Silentcrest allowed some hope there: the sheer number of services being built might let the unhurried wander and the busy go straight to endgame content. The fear runs alongside it. In the CEO’s words, “there will be lots of abandonware that will frustrate users with out-of-date information, buggy software, and vulnerabilities.” The old world reopens on Wednesday, and some of what has been built around it may already be left to rot.