We’re about one week deep into the Midnight prepatch at this point, and my god, it has been hilarious in some ways.

With the prepatch came Blizzard’s new UI restrictions, hiding most data during combat and combat-adjacent scenarios (Mythic Plus runs and other instanced combat scenarios), and while the alpha and beta phase of Midnight have been eventful with new addons and changes, the first week of these restrictions out in general population has been insanely weird and funny in some ways.

Blizzard’s UI Kinda Sucks And This Is What We Feared

Blizzard wasn’t ready for primetime, just straight up.

Players without any addons can have LUA errors due to…Blizzard’s own UI elements referencing black-boxed secret values! A few common scenarios have emerged, with tooltips often triggering errors due to secret values being components of them, which is quite funny, but I think my favorite so far is the money glitch.

Unlike a fun glitch involving money, in 12.0, when you are in combat and happen to loot an item while still in combat, if you, god forbid, mouse over the item and it has a vendor value, you are boned, because that will generate a LUA error as the gold value of the item is…you guessed it, somehow inexplicably a secret value! It is actually so bad that an addon from a fan exists to fix this by suppressing that information from tooltips using a different function to work around it (the addon is called MoneyFrameFix and it works really well, give it a download if you’re having this issue!). Blizzard’s own Edit Mode, added in Dragonflight to facilitate more customization of the stock UI, also can error out, and glitchy files from it can persist even through a full uninstall and reinstall of the game, as I learned last week, requiring you to find the edit mode cache file in your game install and manually delete the contents of that file (but not the file itself as it will just redownload the whole thing errors and all from the server cache!).

It’s been a mess, and these LUA errors accumulate for players and lead to performance degradation and unstable gameplay, or weirdness like tooltips no longer working until a reload, where even then you are on borrowed time until the game trips over itself into a black box value from IT’S OWN FUCKING UI COMPONENTS SANS ADDONS and starts sliding downhill all over again! IT TAKES AN ADDON TO FIX A BLIZZARD UI COMPONENT VIOLATING BLIZZARD’S OWN RULES WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK! Okay, caps lock for fun and affect over, because while it is highly annoying, as I have found these problems and figured out workarounds and solutions, it has been kind of darkly funny that so much of Blizzard’s push had shady implications about addon authors (they force-enabled the addon performance profiler back in 11.1.5 specifically because they wanted so badly to point the finger at the community devs for why the game sometimes runs poorly even though it was mostly the addon profiler killing performance) but in a clean, 100% Blizzard environment, it is possible and in fact quite likely that you will encounter a reload-triggering number of LUA errors if you just play the game normally and loot something while in combat or try to mouse over a world quest on your map while an addon corrects at least a portion of this issue for Blizzard!

The Great Vibecoder Wars of 2026

In the early alpha cycle of Midnight, ElvUI joined Weakauras with a softer version of a similar announcement – the black box API changes meant that ElvUI would need to be majorly restructured and thusly, the addon was not committing to continued development beyond The War Within.

Tons of WoW players use ElvUI as a comprehensive one-stop shop with a fully-functioning kit for play right out of the box, so a void was created that many developers rushed to fill. The chief contender was Quazii, a Mythic Plus title-pushing tank player who has made a lot of helpful tank videos and M+ videos over the years, alongside maintaining an ElvUI customization profile he made available for free. His videos claimed his UI was “free until the end of eternity” and even in mid-TWW, he forked his UI, creating a non-ElvUI version that was supposedly more performant and just as capable. When the ElvUI team announced the potential death of their project, Quazii rushed to promote QuaziiUI – his own solution, taking that fork without ElvUI he made in TWW and turning it into a full project with his own branding, advertised as having “pixel-perfect scaling” and a smooth, mimimalist theme. Of course, it was a little strange given that he hasn’t really been known as a software developer, and his addon was relatively strong and came into existence very quickly…so of course, it became clear it was vibecoded. Or stolen. Or both! The guy who uses AI thumbnails for his channel art, using AI to code? Say it ain’t so!

Luckyone, the project lead on ElvUI, which did very much come back for Midnight, made the claim that QuaziiUI contains ElvUI code – not just ideas or similar execution, but literal functions, comments, and references that still point at ElvUI functions, and that Luckyone had reported it to Patreon for investigation. You see, while Quazii loved saying his UI was “free until the end of eternity” back in TWW, this new QuaziiUI was very much not free – it was paywalled behind his Patreon. Quazii made a couple of sloppy posts that didn’t even deny or apologize for the code theft, but the first one basically attempted to sanitize breaking Blizzard TOS by selling his addon by pointing at other addons and profiles that are locked behind paywalls (which is, to be fair, a valid point even if not exonerating!), and then the second post came as he hosed his Patreon, his Discord, his YouTube channel, and basically went into hiding by proclaiming that he was done with WoW, with a very bizarre anecdote about seeing your life flash before your eyes in a car accident topping off a post that reads like it was written by AI (because it sucked).

While all this drama was building, a second contender to the ElvUI throne, NephUI, was brewing. NephUI launched in Midnight beta and looked pretty promising – it hooked into Blizzard’s Edit Mode, had a similar look and feel to ElvUI with a much less daunting setup process and set of options, and ran fairly well out of the box with the core feature being a strong reskin of the Blizzard Cooldown Manager which included resource bars and looked pretty good. It was a strong start. However, tension was brewing in that first week of prepatch, as Neph, the “author,” claimed that QuaziiUI had stolen features from his UI project, and then, almost the same day as Quazii, announced that he was done supporting NephUI and that no further builds would be coming out. But why?

Well, a third character enters the stage – Danders. Danders makes DandersFrames, a unitframe replacement addon that claims to make the Blizzard frames better by introducing more cosmetic customization and formatting within the official constraints of the new API, and hey, cool, right? Well…DandersFrames is also a vibecoded tool, and Danders made the claim that NephUI stole their frame implementation from Danders. Instead of handling this like a normal person, they handled it like an AI dipshit – by claiming that NephUI stole “their” code (that they didn’t write) and making it so that launching both DandersFrames and NephUI would prompt a user to chose one due to a vague “conflict.” If you chose Danders from this dialogue prompt, the addon disables NephUI and reloads UI and you get what you get, but if you chose to keep NephUI, you got a message that tells you you made the wrong choice, that NephUI is stolen code from Danders, and forces you to choose DandersFrames by only offering it as the choice and then doing the same disable and force-reload that choosing Danders does in the first message. Which is…uh, a choice. Like, for me, I found it extremely offputting because they weren’t actually incompatible and would work fine together when I did test them both (and you could, at least from some reading around, dig into the DandersFrames LUA to disable that version check and get both to play nice), so I was basically being dragged into an IP dispute between two dipshits who used AI to write their addons and want to pretend they made something novel and special. Like, if I take Danders at face value (and there is some history to the NephUI implementation of unit frames to suggest that maybe there is fire there), what are the odds they both used the same vibecoding tools and both plagiarized the same code from another project resulting in identical or at-least similar output?

So Neph quit with a similar-to-Quazii non-apology where it seems like he got caught, didn’t deny it, and then stopped development…until he then restarted a couple of days later and removed the “no longer in development” from the addon description. Danders is still trucking, although who knows for how long given the turnover in the vibecoding dipshits department with addons in this game, and Quazii is still very MIA with a cleaned-out YouTube channel. I can’t speak to QuaziiUI, but on his content, I can say this isn’t entirely unprecedented. I like Quazii in a general sense and think he makes great tank videos even if they get rambly and long at times, but his personal attitudes to criticism are pretty malformed in my opinion. In Shadowlands he went on rants about “social justice” (always a red fucking flag that someone sucks ass behind the scenes) over the stupid wall art paintings in the wake of the Blizzard lawsuit and he also made a very performative show of deleting his WoW toons to leave for FFXIV, only to come back ready to roll in time for Dragonflight. Nothing wrong with changing his mind, obviously (I also quit Shadowlands halfway through and came back for Dragonflight, albeit without the character deletion stream!), but the battles he chose to fight with Blizzard over their sexual harassment and abuse issues were very telling in a strongly negative way. He also violated the license terms of ElvUI pretty clearly with proof from the ElvUI devs, so while people want to complain about open-source or that code theft isn’t real, ElvUI is an “all rights reserved” license and explicitly states it cannot be used in the way Quazii used it. Given that Quazii quite clearly did steal ElvUI code (comments and all), I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to see the same was true for NephUI, although little evidence was really provided of that claim by the Neph developer so hey, and even if it was true, I would have a harder time mustering sympathy for “theft” from a vibecoded project where the author can’t even be fucking bothered to write their own code.

In truth, while I didn’t even consider this outcome for WoW, it makes some amount of sense. A lot of new developers just use AI to do the majority of work for them and in the initial absence of ElvUI, it tracks that a newer developer would step in to try and fill that void and gather mindshare. What’s funny to me is that if I didn’t have to deal with their personalities, be exposed to them being shitty weirdos online, I would have likely kept using NephUI and Dandersframes. They were weirdly made and had lots of rough edges I didn’t like, but they were fine enough and did the job, especially after using NephUI in beta and seeing issues with font selections on all frames and issues with global font overrides (which persisted into live but were also minor in the scheme of things). This whole vibecoder war that emerged just soured me on them and pushed me back into ElvUI’s waiting arms, and while ElvUI has never been a perfect solution, their Midnight version is pretty comprehensively well-made by passionate players writing and maintaining a codebase over the long term, so even with performance issues and some strange bugs at times, it wins over the AI dipshits yelling at each other about stealing their non-original code.

And that’s where we are now, at least in microcosm – existing addons grappling with Blizzard’s new restricitons, Blizzard shadowboxing themselves and inexplicably getting punched in the face, and vibecoders demonstrating why most AI zealots are assholes that you can only count on to be socially maladjusted losers who feel entitled to whatever they want just because they typed some words to the stupid hallucinating robot that’s killing the planet and eventually the economy.