World of Warcraft: Forever, a re-imaginging of the legendary MMO, comes out Wednesday. The idea is to recapture the feeling of discovery and wonder players had when adventuring across its world for the first time back in 2004.
But 2026 is a very different time. Subreddits dedicated to the game are already overrun with AI-generated addons that rip off longtime developers’ work, and a company that helps players track their damage output tells me it is making changes to its API because of the inundation of AI slop addons.
Warcraft Logs is a long-running site made by Archon.gg that lets players track and share their logs of particular in-game fights so they can analyze them for ways to get better. This works by players downloading Archon’s software which records the data of their fights and uploads them to the site. Warcraft Logs makes its API available for free to other developers. It used to be mostly hobby developers, the CEO of Archon.gg and Warcraft Logs, who goes by Sildri Silentcrest, told me. Now, it’s increasingly commercial projects, which are supposed to ask for permission in order to head off projects that would break Warcraft Logs’ terms of service or wouldn’t be able to scale.
“There’s been [an] explosion of development,” Silentcrest said. “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.”
At the root of many of these is the explosion of vibe-coded sites and addons. Addons are custom pieces of software a World of Warcraft player loads into their game for a specific benefit. Maybe they want a guide on the most optimal questing path to take, so an addon shows them the way on their minimap; or they want to make big changes to the UI. Some developers make real money from these, either by running Patreons or receiving ad revenue from Curseforge, the main repository for World of Warcraft addons.
If you scrolled any of the World of Warcraft subreddits in the past few weeks, you likely came across someone posting about the new addon they ‘created’. Sometimes the poster discloses they used AI, other times they add an update later after being called out. There’s even a tool for players to use Claude or Codex while they’re in World of Warcraft, so they can keep making addons in the game.
And with the flood, Warcraft Logs is changing its own API. “We’re changing our API to better align with the applications we want to enable. We like things that help our community to dive deeper into their data, like tools that give you a deep dive on why you died to a boss or how you can improve on your next attempt. We don’t like things that effectively scrape lots of the data from our site to show surface-level info on their own site. Unfortunately, the ‘scrape and show basic statistics’ type has become much more prevalent,” Silentcrest said. They said Warcraft Logs is also introducing a paid commercial key “so that developers with commercial ambitions can support the foundation for the projects.”
Addons have been a crucial and thriving part of World of Warcraft for essentially the game’s entire life. Developers have spent many, many hours crafting those over the years. Now, AI is ripping those off too.
“People are making rip-offs of my work and copying my ideas,” plusmouse, a well-known addon creator, told me. Plusmouse gave one example: a particular design for nameplates in the game, which are the bars that appear above an enemy’s head.
“Prior to that releasing I hadn’t seen any addons adopt that style of design, and now, it feels like every AI addon ends up using that idea,” they said. Plusmouse has found in some cases the code is so similar in the AI-generated versions, that they submit copyright complaints to 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 said. Plusmouse said they made some of their GitHub repositories private, which they believe has stopped LLMs from using their code.
Another key part of World of Warcraft: Forever is that the game is letting players engage with it in their own, preferred way.
“If I can be hopeful, the ubiquity of services under development will allow people to pick their own experience,” Silvercrest added. “If they want to take their time and explore in a relaxed manner, then they can. If they have limited time and want to get to endgame content quickly, they can do that too. On the flip side, my worry is that there will be lots of abandonware that will frustrate users with out-of-date information, buggy software, and vulnerabilities.”
Silvercrest said staff at Warcraft Logs “feel pressure to do more,” 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?”
They added, “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. 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? We seriously love some of the tools that this coding accessibility has enabled, but policing API use has become a struggle.”
