All right, I have seen plenty of people bashing add-ons and the whole concept of mods recently based purely on personal bias and ignorance. They seem to think their personal opinion, often quite limited in its actual grounding in facts or practical experience with modding, entitles them to call for blanket bans or policy shifts so I felt it necessary to put out a post to frame the issue and put it into some informational context. I doubt that many people who write these posts will be affected by the reason behind them (many being some form of odd techno luddite zealots) but it should prove useful for casual fence sitters that have the rather reflexive view of "mods are bad m'kay".

EDIT: Also as an FYI, updated as of 03/02/2014, ESO will indeed have at least UI modding via a LUA framework for the PC and MAC.

-elder scrolls online site /app/answers/detail/a_id/1925/ (can't post the link)

Firstly some background, of all the game franchises to fully embrace and implement modding in the UI department as well as in every other area from partial to full replacement, the Elder Scrolls games are nearly the DEFINITION of modern PC game modding from Morrowind on. Earlier games have held the mantel as well, Half-Life being chief among them, and on the MMO side for sheer volume games like WOW and RIFT have created huge mod communities through sites like Curse that synergistically helped their communities progress and ensured maturation of the games. Bethesda has also historically published full creation kit editors for all their games since Morrowind so that normal Joes can mod their games and create their own content without a huge background in programming.

I believe it is quite fair to say that without the modding community the Elder Scrolls series would have lost more than half of its adherents a year or so after the launch of each title, and a vast majority of them in the long term as people became unsatisfied with core elements and DLCs of the game (which cannot please everyone). The ability to add mods to tailor the game experience to the individual's personal wants and needs created a personalized individual loyalty to the game that transcended the core design. Without modding, the Elder Scrolls franchise as it stands today WOULD NOT BE, and there would definitely not be an online MMO version of it. That is the reason that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim have had the longevity that they do, that you can make the game your own.

Quite frankly I have been disappointed that the game is (to my knowledge) not launching with a mod or creation kit or toolset in this iteration to speed up the creation of these vital community enhancing mods. More so that there doesn't seem to be a way to create individually crafted side world spaces like unique player housing or community created dungeons/world spaces off of the main megaservers. A good mod community helps to shore up holes in a UI and with good developer support eventually helps them in later patches and versions to implement the best of the modded changes into the game. It also can provide insanely creative new content, imagine a way to have a side loaded phase of the map that only a guild could enter/see ala RIFT dimensions, RP'ers and modders alike would salivate at the mere prospect of it.

Secondly many (but not all) people are confusing automation scripts and "bots" with user interface (UI) augmentation mods, skins/texture packs, and actual content replacement/addition mods (which I would love to see but doubt to see in the short term without a major development push).

Bots and automation scripts are what most people seem to really fear when they talk about mods, they fully or partially automate the player input for the game client. Some of the most community feared are resource gathering (fishers and pattern miners/gatherers) and crafting bots (or other repetitive task cueing), these REPLACE the player input to the game and for the most part I agree are prone to abuse and can wreck an economy (though some of the craft cueing ones make life alot easier...) These however are not what most mods are.

Automation scripts for the most part run from EXTERNAL programs such as auto hotkey and other peripheral programs and as such are very hard to moderate since they don't actually interface with the core program except through normal key and click manipulation of the game client, the game can run searches of your personal computer to see if you are running such programs (very invasive and can lock you out for using a programmable mouse if they aren't careful, also not effective if the person renames the .exe file in any way) but really the only way to counter it is to have people report suspicious behavior and make a judgment call. A person fishing for 12 hours is easy to spot, but someone using a mouse assist targeting mod in the course of normal play is much less so.

UI Mods are the vast majority of mods and are simply displaying underlying game and situational group data in a more pleasing and easily accessible way for players. Zenimax has gone the way of the minimalist in terms of UI, and for experienced gaming people coming from other games (including other Elder Scrolls games) that have a more fleshed out UI and a healthy modding community it seems barren, uninformative, and for the most part pretty unconfigurable, this mostly comes from a design choice by Zenimax to make the game easily approachable by both casual players and simultaneously the console community without adding another option for the majority of players coming from games with other design philosophies. It has yet to implement the sort of data display and group management tools many feel are necessary for large scale group management and individual on the fly play style diagnostics that give feedback for DPS and threat trends that make large scale PVP and PVE tasks possible in a real raid threat level environment.

If you are just putzing around in single player, you don't really need UI mods like these, but if you ever want to seriously group for harder challenges like cutting edge PVE raids or engage in even simple multi pronged PVP battle command tasks you probably do. I have lead large guild progression raids in multiple MMO games and can say from experience the more MOD and companion program support you have to handle administrative things the better and some are simply vital such as VOIP communications and buff management tools. Without these mods and companion programs the serious players who run with the serious guilds who organize and attract large swathes of players to the game, could lose interest and leave. Casual single player content is nice and immersive, to a point, but it runs out the fastest of all the content types and takes a huge amount of time to create and release. PVE raids, and PVP content are what keep level capped people in a game between these glacial releases and they thrive with mod support.

And as for the large outcry of people who say that mods are cheating and create an unfair advantage or something, this is specious logic ungrounded in facts, your game client gives you the same damage output and choices as normal without mods. If a player is kicking your ass in PVP or doing better than you at PVE you may use MODs as an excuse, but it is FAR more plausible that they simply invested more time and effort getting better gear, researching and implementing better tactics and simply have better reflexes and situational awareness than you. I used no mods in the beta, but was able to do far better than people to the left and right of me because I actually took the time to read and understand the mechanics of the game, you don't NEED mods to succeed, and it isn't cheating, it is a tool, and we are tool using creatures, don't regress.

The last variety of "mods" are actually blatant hacks which use external software to have the client program lie to the server about such things as player movement/weapon speed, position and other variables. This isn't a mod or addon in the traditional sense, or even a script, it's a blatant hack of the game designed to mislead the server, and one that is fairly easily detectable if used in any real overt or prolonged way as it returns values to the server that don't fit. Many games however do suffer from low keyed speed or positional hacks that fall within a certain threshold that the server has built in to account for latency. These are the real black sheep that need to be rooted out fast as they can really upset the game balance applecart in PVP heavy games such as this one.

Example: metacafe.com /watch/737005/how_to_use_speed_hack_in_world_of_warcraft/

Well that's about it, sorry for the length, I just wanted to try and be thorough and somewhat informative to nip some of the misinformation running round in the bud, and by all means if someone has better or more current information than I do then sound off. If you don't like mods, fine, don't use them, but at the very least UI mods will be in the game as per Zenimax, and hopefully more. (I want posh mudcrabs with top hats and monocles dammit!)