World-of-warcraft – Bot software and add ons for WoW, difference

world of warcraft

After finding out that bots do indeed break the TOS:

You agree that you will not, under any circumstances:
A. use cheats, automation software (bots), hacks, mods or any other unauthorized third-party software designed to modify the World of Warcraft experience;

This has me wondering about the difference in using addons from the likes of Curse, ElvUI, etc…

These are third party software designed to modify the WoW experience, yet somehow come these are authorized while the likes of something like, say, a simple mining bot is deemed "a glitch in the matrix".

Granted not everyone wants the default UI but why is it one rule for one and one rule for the other? The likes of DBM makes EVERY fight in the game so easy with it's timed mechanics on raids so this itself is making the user less prone to the full game experience by telling them what's coming up.

I don't feel that automation software and addons are all that different. Using my DBM example it automates the way in which the fight mechanics happen by giving times etc.

So, from that my question is: What is the main difference between bots and addons in regards to breaking the ToS?

Best Answer

Bots will typically be external programs, they run in their own process and affect the client in ways not intended.

Add-Ons use the APIs that Blizzard have presented, in the Lua scripting language. They run inside of the client. What they can actually achieve is limited by Blizzard so that it doesn't, in their mind, affect the game experience in a detrimental way.

The majority of add-ons will be focused on providing the user more information as opposed to automation of 'bots'.