World of Warcraft: Forever, a re-imagining of the legendary MMO, launches this Wednesday. The project aims to recapture the sense of discovery players felt when first adventuring across the world in 2004.
2026 is a different environment. Subreddits focused on the title are already flooded with AI-generated addons that copy the work of veteran developers. A company helping players track damage output is adjusting its API because of the influx of low-quality AI addons.
Warcraft Logs is a long-running site created by Archon.gg. It allows players to record and share data from specific in-game battles so they can analyse their performance. Users download Archon’s software to record fight data and upload it to the site. Warcraft Logs provides its API for free to other developers. It was previously mostly hobbyists, but Sildri Silentcrest, the CEO of Archon.gg and Warcraft Logs, told me the user base is shifting. He said commercial projects now dominate. These projects were supposed to request permission to ensure they did not break terms of service or fail 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.”
Many of these projects stem from the rise of vibe-coded sites and addons. Addons are custom software players load into the game for specific benefits. A user might want a guide showing the optimal questing path on their minimap, or they may wish to alter the user interface. Developers earn real money from these addons, either through Patreon or ad revenue from Curseforge, the main repository for World of Warcraft addons.
Recent posts on World of Warcraft subreddits show users claiming to have created new addons. Sometimes the poster admits to using AI; other times they add an update later after being called out. There is even a tool that lets players use Claude or Codex while inside the game, enabling them to write addons in real time.
Due to the flood of content, Warcraft Logs is changing its own API. “We’re changing our API to better align with the applications we want to enable,” Silentcrest said. “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.” He noted the site is introducing a paid commercial key so 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 found that in some cases the code in AI-generated versions is so similar 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.”
What it means
The shift from hobbyist tinkering to automated mass production is forcing game infrastructure to harden. Sites that once welcomed open innovation now must filter out low-effort scrapers to protect their data quality. For players, the result is a split between polished, community-driven tools and a growing volume of abandoned, buggy addons generated in minutes rather than months.
