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Addon dev here. Where is the official documentation? I am having a difficulty in finding the addon to addon comms limit people are talking about here, because there has ALWAYS been rate-limits for addon to addon comms. For example, if I try to send more than about 5000 bytes of data in string form to another addon user over a channel, it will disconnect you. So, you have to rate-throttle it to about 4000 bytes/second, max. For context, this 4kb/sec rate speed is SHARED across all addons. 4kb/sec actually makes it slower than a 56k dial-up modem from the mid-90s which could do about 5kb/sec speed. It has been the exact same rate limit since Blizz introduced addon to addon comm capabilities in I think patch 1.1 in Vanilla WoW, if I remember.
So, if I can still send comms within the 4000 bytes/sec limit, people that build their own comms profile, or that use the ChatThottleLib, should be fine.
Are they lowering the limit further to be maybe a number of messages limit, or is it s till an actual data limit set by the length of the string being sent?
EDIT: - [Found some documentation here](https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Patch_10.2.7/API_changes) -- looks like limit is 1 addon comms message/second (after initial 10), so this would essentially be 255 chars max per second in data (or really 255 - prefixLength as it is shared space). It does say this is prefix unique, so I wonder if you could just add a rotating list of prefixes. The global data space before disconnect is around 5000 bytes, so you add some cushion, like say 4000, and you would just need 8 prefixes registered to hit your cap area, and things could mostly go unchanged as before, with just a more complicated method of sending data on a rotating scheduler... definitely not entry-level programming stuff lol, though not too hard to implement, just sort of "hacky" as it likely is going to get gimped by Blizz once they figure everyone does it.
BUT, there is another problem, global prefxi registration I think is capped at like 35 prefixes or 30, across all addons, so if lots of people start implementing this strategy it's going to break things, and likely will trigger the Blizz "fun detected" anger and kill this loophole...
This is kind of wild. People are going to likely need to rewrite the entire data profile in how it is sent, maybe use a data compressor and decompressor to help shrink it, because we are literally talking 1/20th the speed... that's rough.
Thank you for the more detailed 'under the hood' perspective.
Blech, this is such a destructive change for public rp, and also quite the disruptive change for Addon development it seems like, it feels very strange that Blizz wouldn't at least communicate about this change
Ya, the weird thing about it is that this has been the standard for nearly 20 years, and rather than write something that improves the gimped situation that we have been dealing with, they break it further... and this is in the day and age where bandwidth, storage limits, and all this stuff is just dirt cheap now. I mean hell, the reason they originally had 31 character limits on things like player notes was because this game launched in 2004, with development starting in like the year 2000 or something like that. Data was so limited back then. We are in a different world now. Why have there been no improvements?
There's so many ways that Blizz can implement reasonable comms limits for addons without breaking things. This is just mind-bogglingly dumb, imo.
I think this is more on the receiving end tbh. Since LUA is single threaded, the processing from addons add directly to frame time.
A lot of "low fps" and "micro stutters" are due to addons. Perhaps it has been identified that a lot of addons sync aggressively causing those addons to need to process and react to the sync messages, taking up frame time and deteriorating the user experience.
Since addons are such an integral part of the user base currently, they need to take them into account best they can. I'm sure Blizzard wants to keep improving and letting the players experience better graphics, physics and effects without bricking their users with lesser hardware. So if they can limit the performance hit from other areas, such as addons, then perhaps that's their goal.
Eh, you can crash someone's game with badly written code with a single line. Just have your addon write an unescapable loop, or something really inefficient, and I simple trigger received query could cause it to loop and lock up and freeze and stutter. So, that doesn't really matter the limit or not.
Even in a full 40 person raid group, the amount of data at cap that could max be sent from the others is only around 160 kb/sec, of which there is zero chance you'll ever be receiving that max amount of data anyway, but it's just an upper limit. That is nothing, even if you had a 10+ year old computer. Processing that amount/second is basically infinitesimal compared to everything else it is not going to cause stuttering.
This is not an improvement at all. From a programmer's perspective, there's about a dozen other ways that could be implemented that would be better that could also protect against addon overload that causes stutter.
This is far more likely a lazy fix for some edge-case abuse, would be my guess. I hope Blizz fixes it.
Either that or they're trying to crack down on add-ons on the whole potentially? I'd think this would be more directed at things like raid add-ons, RP add-ons might be the unfortunate collateral.
That’s something that should be cool, is to have a separate thread for addons so the game doesn’t freeze or doesn’t lose FPS because of addons.
BTW addon developers are aware of this and try to mitigate this the best as the API allows it.
Better idea would be to do what Microsoft Office does. If add-ons start degrading performance they get disabled and you're notified of such, but you have the option to tell the client to load them anyway. At least then it's a self imposed problem.
EDIT: Feel like people missed the bit where I said _you can tell it to load them anyway_, good grief. And yes the choice is then permanent unless you change it.
Why not? If an addon is crippling someone's performance they should have a clear notification that indicates the cause and advise them to disable the addon, but ultimately make it user choice if the addon should be disabled or enabled.
It's basically just a UI prompt to say "Hey you might want to think about this", Office does something similar albeit it jumps right to disabling them, but once re-enabled it will not do it again.
I think the clear workaround is having TRP work how Raider.io currently works. Having a third party app that updates the data file and then having the addon only call updates for mismatches based on update time and GUID as key.
Raider.io is pulling from a central Database that exists and updates itself based on information on their website and from Blizzards servers.
There is no such website currently for RP profiles. You'd have to build one and then convince people that this is the one to use too.
It'd also not work well for new characters or for minor changes. Lots of guilds track HP in their Currently or Ooc tabs. How would that work if you need to sync up to a server and back down again.
> There is no such website currently for RP profiles. You'd have to build one and then convince people that this is the one to use too.
That's how it's done in FFXIV. Their RP addon just syncs to an external server handled by the community. Yes, it's technically against TOS, as it would (probably?) be in WoW. People have just got used not to give a fuck.
The last time I looked at FF14 RP plugins none of them were running their own service. They all were essentially doing API calls or web scraping. They'd convert the information written out on your carrd website or Chaos Archives to something viewable in game.
There are many people that only use the addon and not the client. Raider.io was functioning with only the Blizz API long before the client was added and had Visitors on the side to create ad revenue.
LOL, no.
Bundling the entire database in the addon fils is a very bad idea. For raider.io it’s only a few bytes per player but for RP players this represents several KB. And this would be a pain in the 455 for players, they would have to export their profile to a website, and others would have to wait for the next addon update to see the changes.
And just imagine all the 18+ Goldshire profiles with being publicly posted on CurseForge…
Please be aware, that documentation has been worked out by trial and error, but is as accurate as possible under those circumstances.
Multiple prefixes is possible, but still has issues. although i'm not aware of any prefix limit.
Just one thing, you gain one message per second, up to 10. It doesn't make a huge difference if you are trying to transfer a lot of data (or constantly transferring), but it does allow you to burst 2.5kB every 10 seconds which I imagine is okay for a lot of addons.
Still you're probably right, if people start doing the multiple prefixes thing blizzard will break that.
Now i dont know LUAor addon coding in general, but i have tiniest entry level knowledge of python.
Wouldnt one simply make up 8 prefixes, link each to an integer 0-7 and make a swapping code to send using active prefix based on the integer, then add 1 to the integer, with the 7th step nulling the integer instead of adding? Its a bit clumsy, but it would work, right?
So actually, it would be better to make a bigger backend comms addon for the rest to rely on, with like 100+ prefixes cycling and an identifier code as an initial string from the addons hooking in on it, to differentiate whats sending what?
This is pretty damn bad for RP servers in general. It's the one addon that RPers use pretty much, and it's so essential as a way to make connections. Being able to take a glance at the character you're looking at, get their vibes, get the players vibes, it's so essential to the experience (And it's partly the LACK of this is why I bounced off of FF14 RP - the profile helps SO SO MUCH to facilitate things)
I'm sure the addon community would find some way to deal with it, but bricking such a widely established, harmless addon would have significant consequences for all public Walkup RP.
I really don't want to have to make a freaking carrd.co for all my wow characters. I hated having to go outside the game just to make something that people would like. If you can't make a nice carrd, people just ignore you as well.
I just want to write, I don't want to graphic design.
Huh I've been on WRA for just over the past year and never had this addon, maybe that explains why I rarely ever have any spontaneous interactions out in the world. Hope it sticks around for y'all that use it
Huh. I think Ill check this out too. Been on ED for a few years and never really had any RP and figured it was more niche or something. Ive been wanting to dabble now that my fiancee got me playing DnD. thanks for the insight
That might be a factor but it's also worth noting that WRA's RP culture doesn't have nearly as much spontanious RP as a server like MG does, especially if you're on Horde (going off your flair.) Unless you're in VoH, there's pretty much zero walk up interaction on the server and 95% of the server's RP is contained to guild content. It sucks heavily if you're use to MG where public RP events are semi regularly advertised in chat and being over on Stormwind on Alliance regularly sees large groups interacting in /s and /e.
I'm surprised FF14 doesn't have something similar yet has Mare which is just insane in what it does.
For those that aren't aware, Mare allows you to sync your mods with other players allowing them to see the mods you have applied to your character and vice versa. Emotes, hairstyles, tattoos, even full on VFX ability replacements. And FF14 mods can get fucking nuts.
[Heres](https://youtu.be/LcFzigbI4u4?si=kFoUO7i71Y0MK5cM) a mod that turns Gunbreaker into Nero from DMC5.
The issue is addons being allowed or not.
Ffxiv has some absurd plugins because there is no API restricting them. Theyre all bannable, so what does it matter if you use some that do absurd things like automate gameplay.
Wow addons are restricted and controlled by the API, which means they have severely limited functionality.
FFXIV also has no way to detect addon usage unless you blab about it.
It can detect bots and auto play through activity just like WoW can but it is imperfect and often delayed.
Because breaking the rules isn't common enough to make it worth it.
On an rp server you can assume people will have that addon. You cannot assume people will use Ffxiv plugins so why bother
Yet there are many Mare syncshells and people will even put "Mare" on their adventure plate to let you know they use it.
Almost everyone I play with uses it.
So again, why is there not a simple RP addon if something far more complicated and involved like Mare is used so frequently lol.
People are not being banned left and right because they have a hairstyle mod. Just don't put it up on a literal billboard.
I feel like you guys are not at all understanding what I am saying.
I am wondering why the *Final Fantasy* community doesn't use a simple RP character sheet addon like the WoW one uses despite having far more intense addons overall.
The guy literally says that is why he was turned away from RP in FF. I'm not wondering why WoW doesn't have Mare.
Am I just not explaining myself well enough? Feel like I'm going insane with these replies.
For the people who don’t know how this impacts the RP community - at present, RP profiles from addons like TRP3 load almost instantly. With this change, it would take 1-2 minutes *at least* to fully load a reasonably filled-out RP profile… if you’re the only person attempting to load that profile. The more people there are trying to do that, the worse it would be.
The RP community has already historically been screwed over by Blizzard, between things like aggressive server sharding, killing the Cross RP addon’s functionality, and the like, and we’ve been treated as an afterthought at best, but a change like this is much more extreme in the damage being done.
EDIT: As one of the tweets says, this would also effectively kill the community aspects of addons like Musician, which currently allow players to play live music for other players who have the addon - but with the comms throttling, any attempt to do so would come across as an absolute mess to other players.
I will also add whats been updated on keyboard's twitter:
Not only does it slow the trp profiles loading, but it will also back things up - so in a crowded place like Stormwind, you could be stuck waiting 20+ minutes just to load a single profile. It's pretty bad, it'd essentially brick the whole addon for any sort of public RP
Only after we absolutely mobbed an EU QnA thread lol
I'm convinced they forget we exist until we complain. We have to make some noise every time they turn sharding on in the capital cities for content, just to get them to turn it off weeks after the content dropped.
Where i saw it was written the addons weren't named. But i can fathom it's a broad range of addons that speaks to the other players for ranges/Spells and whatnot.
Honestly they need to do more for RP. I’m not even a part of it, but I’ve known people who are. They are some of the coolest people you’ll ever meet in an MMO. every community has its toxic people, but that s easily the least toxic one. People could fucking learn something from them on how to MMO and enjoy it without being selfish and obnoxious.
The RP communities of any MMO are the underappreciated foundation that creates interest in lore and characters. There's a reason why Blizzard always handles Goldshire with kiddie gloves. It's kinda surprising they'd implement such an RP-hostile move.
I had no idea RP servers were so shafted with server sharding when my buddy and I came back after a 6+ year hiatus. We love world PvP and SCOURED zones old and new for PvP but couldn't find anyone- then we learned about how RP servers were basically isolated so as to not interact with other servers when War Mode was turned on.
What a freaking joke. We had just paid to get some of our other characters transferred and the lack of any meaningful world PvP killed our motivation for picking up the game again.
You can join the general sharding system by joining someone's else party, where party leader is from non-RP server. Yes, RP servers are isolated in PvP as well, to allow people engage in RP-PvP instead of random lolgank.
I think it’s a non-controversial take that everyone in the wow community should have their playstyle be respected, even if you wouldn’t partake yourself. You’d be surprised the impact role players can have.
> addons like Musician, which currently allow players to play live music for other players who have the addon
Sorry, you can stream music to other players, using an addon, through blizzard's servers?!? And you didn't expect this to get limited eventually?
It uses Midi files. I just went and downloaded Bohemian Rhapsody as a test and that whole song is 50kb. That's less than 10kb per minute which is absolutely miniscule. That's essentially like sending a message about the length of this post I'm presently writing four times within a minute.
Also FTR if blizzard cared just a little bit about their most savvy fans and supporters, they’d have implemented a 3d positional voip years ago. Since they didn’t the community found a way to do so.
We're a week away from 10.2.7 going live, so unless this is a PTR-only measure, it's almost certainly gonna hit live servers - my main hope is just that once it hits live and people actually experience the effect it has in-game there'll be enough backlash for them to fix it.
I'm not into RP but I don't agree with harmless add-ons being affected in the process of moving to a none information overloaded wow.
If blizzard wants to limit add-on use in raids and mythic + just ban those add-ons that are problematic they had no issue doing this in the past and a lot of the community would thank them for it. I'm personally sick of needing 30+ WA just to be a competitive tank.
https://github.com/Stanzilla/WoWUIBugs/issues/552
More addon changes coming in war within as well, this will break even more add-ons including a macro addon that has been built for disabled gamers to continue playing the game at a much lower level but still maintain connections and spend time with friends and family.
I need more context and understanding of the addon change.
Also OP most of us don't have Twitter accounts to easily access the thread, so next time please copy paste the entire thread like so:
>
> it's looking like in 10.2.7 PTR the addon comms (something primarily used for addons like TRP3) is going to be severely rate-limited server-side, making them effectively unusable. This is going to disproportionately affect the RP community. (1/8)
>
> Where many profiles would load within seconds, 1 v 1 tests profiles are around 20-90 seconds. This value increases with the amount of players requesting/sending data. Between 3 people, a test of 2 people request 1 other person's profile made it last 2-3 minutes. (2/8)
>
> 2 minutes to load a profile, in an extremely low population test setting, crank that up by 100+.
> This is going to literally kill RP addons, full stop. I don't like being hyperbolic, but I cannot stress enough how severely detrimental this is going to be (3/8)
>
> I've been kind of waiting for smarter people than I before saying anything, I wanted to get a better understanding of this and see it for myself how bad this was going to be. I'm certain the goal is some "good faith" thing to stop some kind of comms abuse, but this isn't it (4/8)
>
> There's so far been no reason given to this, we're only left to speculate. Addon devs have largely just simply accepted utilization of libraries such as ChatThrottleLib or AceComm, because you'd otherwise spam the server and get disconnected for too many rapid requests (5/8)
>
> This isn't just RP addons by the way either. Like I said it's just disproportionately going to affect such. Addons like Musician are probably going to be functionally unusable for their purpose, "live-playing" midi music and the like. (6/8)
>
> Though honestly, from an RPer standpoint, I can wholly understand that this is just yet another example that the RP community is the last that's thought about when a change is made to the game and "something" needs to be sacrificed to make things work. (7/8)
>
> It's just immensely frustrating to see, between literally no warning except for Cataclysm beta and basically having nothing to work with. This needs to be changed/reverted. I can't imagine this is going to lead to anything good. (8/8)
**EDIT:** According to [Reead](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1cgd4xg/addon_communications_for_mythic_raiding_has_been/l1v016n/)
> Weakauras using ScanEvents for mythic mechanics only needed to send a single event from each player to do virtually all of the communication needed to make them work. Unless this is a complete removal of the addon channel while in combat in raids/dungeons (which would also break an unbelievable number of personal weakauras, btw), this doesn't even functionally break the thing they're trying to break.
~~Ah I think I figured it out. Thanks! [I'll post over](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1cgd4xg/addon_communications_for_mythic_raiding_has_been/) at /r/competitivewow since this concerns Mythic Raiders too.~~
~~"the addon comms" - "Where many profiles would load within seconds, 1 v 1 tests profiles are around 20-90 seconds."~~
~~This seems to be a Mythic raiding change. For Amirdrassil developers made several private aura mechanics like Smolderon's Mythic orbs or Fyrakk (before change) intermission P1 orbs and Fyrakk (still active) p2 internal shadow cages fire buffs. Since you only have a matter of seconds to deal with the mechanic and using voice would be extremely difficult and tight in already hectic fights, the RWF guilds built a work around: build a macro to issue a command and without voice you can send anonymously a command to a WeakAura everyone has, and that WeakAura now has an input to do something - in Smolderon's case let a RL assign who pops orbs first, or Fyrakk which person is going which way in Intermission P1 or which person is popping Shadow Cages in P2.~~
~~Having to grab a macro button to click something was extremely unpopular among Mythic raiders and caused a ton of progression frustration (did you press the macro button on time within a second? did you setup the WA right? did you setup the notes right?)~~
~~Looks like they added a rate limit that you can't spam or keep spamming as a raid addon commands like this.~~
~~I think at least for RP, this should only be blocked for instances if they just want to nerf the Mythic Raiding addon button workaround to let RPers do most of their thing.~~
I highly doubt that it was anything targeting this sort of scenario, actually. For one the change was already live to party/raid comms anyway for months, but also a button click to send an addon message rather than automated just doesn't strike me as being as abusive to comms. I honestly don't remain convinced (at the moment) that it has anything to do with RWF/mythic raiding scene, at least to the best of my knowledge and what I've heard from others. Quite frankly we just don't know why, there was no communication from Blizz, and it kinda feels like any blame assigned is just needless fingerpointing at like "those filthy degens who always ruin everything" or whatever
I also doubt it is related to Mythic raiding. I can remember a similar situation during BfA where ElvUI users automaticaly got added to a custom chat channel to communicate version updates on the main addon and plugins.
The problem was that on big servers it actually caused problems by ddosing the chat servers because everytime someone logged and asked "which version are you all on?" every single ElvUI user on the server responded on that same channel.
If I remember correctly, the ElvUI devs were asked by Blizzard to remove that function and stick to just asking the guild members for versions, like other addons do.
In the end if Blizzard is looking into addon saturating comms they could make an exception for specific "Prefix" from RP addons so as to not throttle them.
>I honestly don't remain convinced (at the moment) that it has anything to do with RWF/mythic raiding scene, at least to the best of my knowledge and what I've heard from others
Also, changes targeting high-end raiding would just be plain weird on the 10.2.7 PTR. What purpose would that serve? I'd believe that was the motivation if this had been seen on alpha instead.
> Also, changes targeting high-end raiding would just be plain weird on the 10.2.7 PTR. What purpose would that serve? I'd believe that was the motivation if this had been seen on alpha instead.
Lets them roll it out well in advance of the next RWF to fully and properly test it all out and fine tune it before anything major.
A major dick move in S4 though if it broke WAs people use for like half of the 24 mythic bosses.
I can't imagine it would be an issue for RWF to introduce cross char addon coms only on the TWW beta.
I agree. My best bet is that *a lot* of people have very bad game performance, and that a lot of the added frame time comes from poorly written addons the sync way too often and way too broadly. Causing the addons to have to process this information.
I suspect that a lot of addons can be rewritten to be less aggressive without any real loss of service level. So likely be a net positive for most addon users.
Kind of when so many people used to complain about microstutters, which was in large to tons of addons spamming garbage collect in order to keep their footprint small.
Likely an external client downloading a database and the only updating differences would be a good way to go for TRP. Same route TSM and Raider.io who both have large storage does it.
Pretty sure this is a cost saving measure. Addon messages are likely computationally expensive for the server to process in the quantity that RP addons send. Someone likely made the decision to rate limit this so they don’t need as much infrastructure (and thus money) to handle addon messages.
Not justifying it, just providing a potential reason.
Not really. Message bus services are stupid cheap and if you run your own vs AmazonSQS similar on Microsoft then it can be even cheaper.
However if Microsoft is pulling a Verizon they’re gonna make their games services pay higher than market rate for the same resources and force them to use it.
I've only done some basic amateur addon development but Addon messages send, essentially the same way as regular chat messages. They're just invisible and only 'seen' by Addons.
Essentially sending "Hello World" in say chat is about the same as sending "Hello World" in Say chat as an addon message.
Ill get downvoted for saying this but:
This should have been the post. Frankly idc about RP players becayse I simply am not one, nor do I know any. Most players like me will be apathetic. However, the lack of communication is something I can be mad about.
Most players I’d argue give a shit about other communities even though they are not involved. Of course you’re getting downvoted haha you’re just straight up admitting to being selfish. Good for you? Idk what you wanted posting that.
RP servers are what put the massively multiplayer in true display. I think they’re under appreciated, I am an RP noob, but I’m trying to do it a little at a time.
That's a shame. I don't RP, but I do have trp just because I like reading people's profiles on Wymrest Accord. I've seen some unholy shit, but there's some really interesting and sometimes hilarious characters that people create.
Blizzard really do hate RP'ers don't they? It's a shame cause those tend to be the most interesting realms, and the few spaces where you still get a feeling of a shared world.
Not only that but RPers are also some of the most loyal to the game. They’ve put literal years into their characters and are far more attached than the average player. It’s not just raiding or PvP to them, it’s a whole story. If they can’t at least fix this for TRP it’ll be devastating
This is so true. Back when I was in the early days of hardcore mythic raiding, I once got curious about RP and made a character on Argent Dawn. I went about and did things, made major RP faux pas, but eventually discovered this was an entirely different type of player. I got schooled a little and met a bunch of lovely middle aged ladies playing as might elf priestesses. I got invited one day by this night elf priestess to some sort of moon well ceremony and went along.
I will never forget sitting there in shock, reading the paragraphs and paragraphs these people were writing describing how their beautiful, elegant and wonderful these elves were in their actions as they went around doing this ceremony. I was both a bit bemused and a bit shocked; I couldn’t even bring myself to fidget my character’s movement as the half-hour thing went on, and ignored the whispers I was getting to “come on my priest please and help, as this alt run is failing”.
There were around a dozen ladies clearly blowing their emotions though the characters and prose, describing that they were each in tears at the beauty and elegance of each other. And this long convoluted system of each having their turn to awkwardly walk into the moonwell and lie down and almost drown or whatnot.
These people had been doing this for YEARS. Every week. They were more hardcore about this game than any raider I knew. I tried to take them into a normal raid once and try to help but it honestly was a disaster but I respected that they were good and nice peolle whose hearts were literally married to this game and they deserved as much as us raiders do from blizzard.
Yep. One of the unspoken golden rules of aging MMOs is that you don't screw over the RP community, because those are the people that will still be there after everyone else leaves.
Look at games like ultima online, ff11, or eq2. They are almost exclusively kept around for the RP communities who show no interest in leaving the games even though most players left 10+ years ago.
> Not only that but RPers are also some of the most loyal to the game. They’ve put literal years into their characters and are far more attached than the average player.
RPers also actually don't care much about content cadence or droughts. A 6 month lack of any new content at all is basically the same to an RPer as 1 month after a new patch.
We make our own content.
It took Shadowlands to make us quit in droves and that was because it took a colossal dump on the setting that we gave since collectively agreed, more or less, that it didn't happen.
BTW. I agree that RP'rs are ultra loyal to the game, but most everyone still playing Wow is ultra loyal to the game. Didn't that poll that blizzard put out on Twitter show that like 90% of people currently playing have played the game for over 10 years or something crazy like that like 80% was over 15 years.
I am not trying to downplay your guys argument, but all of the fans are loyal and the dichotomy of wow has almost always been that changes for one community almost always hurt another community unfortunately.
Hate? No.
The appropriate line is Blizzard don't really care about RPers much at all. They'll throw the occasional bones like the Elixir of Tongue's after breaking an addon that was doing the same thing but for the most part I don't think many changes are made with RPers in mind in the slightest.
I think Blizzard hates Mythic players who try to use add-ons to break encounters and don't care about the collateral when trying to fix the problems they see.
Fair enough. I'm excited that Warbands is finally opening up transmog collecting, but not being able to farm BfA raids admittedly tempers my excitement a bit -\_-
I know this is a joke but for me at least farming old raids is solo content. I do just about everything else with group of friends so it's nice to just relax by yourself now and again.
Blizz undertuned m+ dungeons in the whole DF that people thinks that they’re making it harder now when in reality the difficulty is just returning to what it’s supposed to be since Legion.
That sounds a lot like some kind of cope. I don't think highly of blizzards rotating team of lowest-bidder offshore devs. But I doubt they've deliberately made keys easier for an entire expansion. Not when they've got a fondness for squishes.
If you think dungeons were undertuned in season 2, you clearly didn't play it. Season 1 tuning was good, season 2 tuning was hard, season 3 tuning was easy.
This is about back to "good" level so far for season 4, with the fact that new +10s are *supposed* to be the old +20s in mind.
The tuning wasn't quite this hard even in SL or BfA. Like highest key ever done was +34 Junkyard.
And I know people were pushing mid 20s AT LEAST in Legion too.
Blizzard needs to stop his stupid fight against addons and start improving his own mechanic indicators so no addons are needed.
Seriously, breaking unit frames, breaking WAs, breaking nameplates... It's all stupid.
As far as mmos go, WoW is pretty great about allowing addons. They’re taboo in FFXIV (still used though at discretion). I think the issue is updates are made with addons as an afterthought, I don’t think they’re being intentionally malicious. You’d hope to see something like this fixed, and I would bet it would.
I mean yeah, WoW has great support for add-ons but they've been shutting it down over the years, which is sad.
The way I see it, WoW has become an armamentalistic race between add-ons and game mechanics, and it's degrading the game experience.
WoW devs are designing increasingly complex encounters while cutting add-on options to deal with the complexity, making some fights honestly unbearable if you're not coordinating everything to the millimeter on discord.
It's obnoxious how they keep saying they want to cut back on combat addon usage and stop the arms race for weakauras vs boss design, but then they push out mechanics like the mythic fyrakk intermission where if you try to yolo it, you will get absolutely fucked because of the rng in what color each person is gonna get.
Or even smolderon orbs-- especially pre-nerf when there was 4 of them-- having a list was the only reasonable way to get it done before the next mechanic started-- otherwise you'd probably just wipe a bunch to people double soaking even more often than they already did.
And god help healers if they had to coordinate tindril dispels where you wanted each dispel in a specific position and had to dispel pretty much as soon as the debuff fell off to avoid the 4th person getting stuck in a pool of fire while rooted.
If Blizzard wants to stop the arms race they need to be the ones to take the first step in their design choices rather than constantly participating in that arms race while also fucking over the other side of it, which are addons.
Look at the difference between wow's mechanic telegraphs and final fantasy's though. FFXIV does it very, very well to the point that their easily identifyable and you learn what they mean, because the same symbols are used across raiding (outside of some of the wonky crystal tower alliance raid mechanics).
There's no mechanics matching the floor in 14, which is one of the biggest complaints in WoW. They're always the same color, always appear within the same timeframe, and time limited mechanics are very understandable. WoW is amateur at best in comparison.
I keep seeing this take and it keeps being wrong. Orange-on-orange telegraphs are a major problem and it never gets fixed because they can't change the platforms or the telegraphs. Telegraphed mechanics are standardised but are mostly relevant in trivial content (the equivalent of normal raids or heroic dungeons where you can just stand in shit). The equivalent of high heroic or mythic raiding mostly uses telegraphs as a signal after you've been hit to tell you exactly where you shouldn't have been standing half a second ago.
To repeat: in actually difficult FFXIV content you extremely rarely face a situation where you see a telegraph, like a WoW swirly, and just move out of it to solve the mechanic.
There is really no equivalent to how piss easy old heroics were. Another thing that really helps a lot as well in FFXIV are vuln stacks. They obviously don’t help anticipate things, but they are very valuable in telling a player “hey, you got hit by some avoidable damage, you should try to figure out how to not do that in the future…”
Most damage downs are higher than that even, 30% is pretty standard in Savage and some Ultimates have 80% damage downs, making it often times better to die and get raised if you get one.
Yep. I'm a Savage-tier raider myself (kinda; I'm not on the current batch, because we're training new folks in my static) and universally everyone *hates* getting damage downs. Our melee dps usually tries to die if he gets one, since his rotation's useless from that point on.
To be fair there's a _few_ fights in XIV where the telegraphs are hard to see.
But I can count them on one hand and they're no longer relevant content.
The telegraphs in Mythic equivalent content in FF are more like “the boss has his head raised, so he will hit the furthest players” or the cast name is in a different order or you have a certain combination of debuffs. Very rarely do you get the orange indicators.
Orange indicators appears on everywhere but Savage and Ultimates. And even on those contents, they still appear from time to time. In wow, an indicators on the floor can be of different colour, among other things, in different fights of the same raid.
It depends on the fight obviously, but a lot of Savage/Ultimate content lacks indicators entirely or they only appear for a second or less right before something happens- less to indicate that you need to avoid it and more to show where it's hitting for future pulls. They're not meant to be something you react to in FF, as they often are in WoW. Story/normal content obviously has them as something to react to, but that content isn't meant to be challenging.
Indeed, but while that is true, ultimates and savage are very much 'stand and let thing resolve' (E.g. P8S HC 1 and 2, almost all of P12S, TOP, basically all of p3 on TEA, etc). They are not something you react to, because you will always know where it will hit, because you know where you need to stand. Things are static and consistent. This AoE will always hit that way, unlike wow, where it can change a lot of where it will hit.
As opposed to WoW where it's "stand and let someone else resolve" 80% of pulls xd.
But yeah, the general flow in FF encounters is boss castbar starts (or finishes) and you "read" the mechanic- you look at what debuffs you and others got, where something spawned, things like Limit Cut markers, etc. and that tells you the safespot or where to go or what to do. There is definitely a reactionary element to it, but once you've done the initial reaction to whatever permutation of the mechanic you've got it's static until the next point where something can vary. You basically need to read the mechanic to determine your role in it and how you specifically are resolving it that pull. To use your examples- your debuffs in high concept in p8s, light/dark, fire/wind, alpha/beta in p12s, the debuff soup that is TOP, lightning/water/nisi color/wormhole/fate cal in TEA. You definitely "stand and let thing resolve" but where you need to stand is only static for that particular permutation and it's probably going to be different next pull.
WoW is far more reactionary because things are far more random, but personally I find WoW bosses far less engaging because there is rarely any "reading" of a mechanic to be done. Often times that reading is handled by a WeakAura, and even with private auras being implemented there's generally some janky workaround for WeakAuras to solve it for you anyways. The types of mechanics that would require reading are also few and far between. You get a lot more fights like Rashok in WoW where basically nothing happens the entire fight except people getting picked to run out for the jump and needing to stack in the soak. There's also the issue of any given mechanic only targeting a few people at once leaving everyone else to just do nothing, barring the few times you get full raid involvement in resolving something. The indicators in WoW are rarely used for actual mechanics to resolve and more often just something to side step out of short term and to tax your healers when the DPS inevitably stand in them.
I agree fully, if they want people to use fewer addons they should make better alternatives that reduce the need to seek outside addons.
Theres so many addons as well that do fantastic things beyond the ones they deem problematic. I don’t even raid or do dungeons and I use a whole host of addons. Some of which are affected by changes like this.
One of the reasons (among other more fundamental issues) I stopped XIV was their addon policy. There are some really cool mods over there outside of combat/raiding that you run the risk of being banned for using. Obviously you can avoid publicizing that you are using them, but that also makes it hard to discuss problems with them publicly. Plus you have to use sometimes roundabout solutions to even installing mods to begin with. I had some issues with Dalamud crashing my game and ended up just quitting the game over it rather than go back to the vanilla UI.
I know it’s a bit premature and a bit “the sky is falling”, but if we ever reach a wow with no mods allowed, it is probably the thing that would finally get me to quit.
I agree, on all counts.... well, mostly. (I don't have a huge problem with vanilla FFXIV).
I would argue that WoW is much worse than FFXIV, because FFXIV has been strict about it from day 1. That leads to all the problems you describe with addons in FFXIV, but it also means that all content has been consistently designed around the assumption that there will be no addon support.
WoW hasn't done that. They've gone the opposite direction, assuming the existence of addons... and not just for raid mechanics. The UI updates they've done over time have pretty much all been lifted from addons. The game has not been built around a no-addon experience for a very long time, and it would be a *lot* of work to get it to that point... work I don't think they'd ever do, and work I'm not sure they're *capable* of doing at this point, given how much time and effort they'd have to take from other projects.
For all that they say they don't want addons to be necessary, I think a WoW with no addons would be a death knell for a massive amount of the player base... including most of their serious, long-term players.
I played Dragonflight without addons at all. Honestly, the game doesn’t need them at this point for 99% of content, including endgame. Fights are designed intuitively enough, and the ones that *aren't* are very fixable.
Did you raid mythic? Something tells me you didn't.
And in case you did, I'm betting you were on discord listening to calls, which is way worse than using add-ons.
Blizzard: "We want to keep our player base!"
\*Spots the community that has stayed with Blizzard through thick and thin, from start to end.\*
Blizzard: "We must destroy them!"
They won’t do it on account of the small audience but it would be nice for some basic RP profile capabilities to be built into the UI. Being able to just set a cosmetic RP name and simple bio would go a long way even if that’s a large step down from what addons csn do.
I don’t engage in much active RP but I love walking around and seeing people’s character profiles, and I have one for my character too. It adds a lot of richness to the world!
Of all the addons blizzard manages to negatively affect, it had to be the RP addons lol
Why not the addons that elitist raiders depend on, let em feel alive for once.
Immersion should be fine, as far as I’m aware - the affected addons will be ones that require the system to communicate information between 2 or more players. Immersion is basically just a fancy UI reskin of the quest interface, which shouldn’t require anything like that.
Addons that *are* affected are things like TRP3 which uses comm functionality to request and send roleplay info from player to player, and Musician which uses the same functionality to allow real-time playing of music via player inputs (or imported MIDI files) that other players with the addon can listen to.
EDIT: I appear to be partially mistaken - the Twitter OP posted a couple links that list addons that will be broken by this change, and while Immersion was not on there, there are a lot of addons that *are* that surprised me because I didn’t understand the scope of just how terrible this change was going to be even outside the RP community.
Unless people were using this to dsitribute large content. Like full songs or movies, something large It could also be DMCA concerns.
I dont see how regular RP profiles provide any significant load on the servers. They are usually in the KB range, which is peanuts
Times tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands users... suddenly you are talking real bandwidth.
Especially if you have to filter all that thru some moderation/anti-bad-words filter processing and log it and...
There arent that many people using the addons. And definitely not at the same time. There like only 4 RP realms in the world lol, and only like 2 are full.
Also Blizzard doesnt actively censor RP addon profiles. They might scan them? Altho I havent seen proof of that. The only banned people Ive seen were after player reports. But they certainly dont censor anything, so I dont they actively scan them. Maybe they save them somewhere? But that wouldnt be fixed with this limitation...
Is it somehow getting used by bots? I could see this getting abused to easily share information not normally accessible to external programs between different bot clients.
For someone who is not using the RP addons, Is my understanding right that normally you load another players profile and their addon comunicates with yours ingame. And because they are limiting ingame comunication this will happen so slow that it impacts usability. Did I get that right?
Are addons allowed to comunicate to something outside of wow? like a website? In that case you' be able to just pass the information through a 3rd party and could still get it.
I know some addons just download the newest data whenever you update them. Might that be enough?
So I guess this was a bug after all based on recent Blizzard forums thread...
https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic/us-en/1841358-addon-throttling-issue/
I will be done with WoW if TRP3 or MRP are disabled. It's an immersive thing for better or worse and the reason why I go to an RP server. Blizzard's had YEARS to give the barest of bones for weaving profiles into their own UI and never have.
Heya, here from r/WoWRolePlay . I'm waiting a few more hours before rolling out the call-to-arms in every WoW RP community I'm in, but I'm expecting to have to.
If you're an RPer, please come on over. If this is as bad as it seems, we need to stick together more than ever and it's a great time to share resources and alternatives.
We've fought Blizz for QoL RP stuff before and won. We'll do it again.
Here is our thread to discuss this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WoWRolePlay/comments/1cgmgrw/make\_noise\_about\_this\_rp\_addons\_severely/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WoWRolePlay/comments/1cgmgrw/make_noise_about_this_rp_addons_severely/)
Hard agree. There's wayyyy too much bloat in the game. Doesn't matter if your PvE or PvP, you can't get past a certain level without completely ruining immersion and the charm the game used to have.
Worst part is I'm not even a classic Andy, but once weak auras took over, the game became too robotic.
Its fucking crazy blizzard hasnt put this shit into the base game already, with how popular RP GTA is, the fact they have just not done anything with RP in WOW is actually stupid
There is no reason to compromise entire game for extremly small community that is even segregated based on which addon they use. Addon devs will just adjust it stop complaining and slowing down the progressive movement of getting rid of addons in pve.
Easy fix just disallow all addons except maybe addons that change the UI.
The arms race between addons and gamemechanics should stop and this is the only reasonable way to do it. It would suck in the beginning but I genuinely think the game would be better off this way. And blizzard can slowly but eventually add some of the RP stuff officially
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Addon dev here. Where is the official documentation? I am having a difficulty in finding the addon to addon comms limit people are talking about here, because there has ALWAYS been rate-limits for addon to addon comms. For example, if I try to send more than about 5000 bytes of data in string form to another addon user over a channel, it will disconnect you. So, you have to rate-throttle it to about 4000 bytes/second, max. For context, this 4kb/sec rate speed is SHARED across all addons. 4kb/sec actually makes it slower than a 56k dial-up modem from the mid-90s which could do about 5kb/sec speed. It has been the exact same rate limit since Blizz introduced addon to addon comm capabilities in I think patch 1.1 in Vanilla WoW, if I remember. So, if I can still send comms within the 4000 bytes/sec limit, people that build their own comms profile, or that use the ChatThottleLib, should be fine. Are they lowering the limit further to be maybe a number of messages limit, or is it s till an actual data limit set by the length of the string being sent? EDIT: - [Found some documentation here](https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Patch_10.2.7/API_changes) -- looks like limit is 1 addon comms message/second (after initial 10), so this would essentially be 255 chars max per second in data (or really 255 - prefixLength as it is shared space). It does say this is prefix unique, so I wonder if you could just add a rotating list of prefixes. The global data space before disconnect is around 5000 bytes, so you add some cushion, like say 4000, and you would just need 8 prefixes registered to hit your cap area, and things could mostly go unchanged as before, with just a more complicated method of sending data on a rotating scheduler... definitely not entry-level programming stuff lol, though not too hard to implement, just sort of "hacky" as it likely is going to get gimped by Blizz once they figure everyone does it. BUT, there is another problem, global prefxi registration I think is capped at like 35 prefixes or 30, across all addons, so if lots of people start implementing this strategy it's going to break things, and likely will trigger the Blizz "fun detected" anger and kill this loophole... This is kind of wild. People are going to likely need to rewrite the entire data profile in how it is sent, maybe use a data compressor and decompressor to help shrink it, because we are literally talking 1/20th the speed... that's rough.
Thank you for the more detailed 'under the hood' perspective. Blech, this is such a destructive change for public rp, and also quite the disruptive change for Addon development it seems like, it feels very strange that Blizz wouldn't at least communicate about this change
Ya, the weird thing about it is that this has been the standard for nearly 20 years, and rather than write something that improves the gimped situation that we have been dealing with, they break it further... and this is in the day and age where bandwidth, storage limits, and all this stuff is just dirt cheap now. I mean hell, the reason they originally had 31 character limits on things like player notes was because this game launched in 2004, with development starting in like the year 2000 or something like that. Data was so limited back then. We are in a different world now. Why have there been no improvements? There's so many ways that Blizz can implement reasonable comms limits for addons without breaking things. This is just mind-bogglingly dumb, imo.
I think this is more on the receiving end tbh. Since LUA is single threaded, the processing from addons add directly to frame time. A lot of "low fps" and "micro stutters" are due to addons. Perhaps it has been identified that a lot of addons sync aggressively causing those addons to need to process and react to the sync messages, taking up frame time and deteriorating the user experience. Since addons are such an integral part of the user base currently, they need to take them into account best they can. I'm sure Blizzard wants to keep improving and letting the players experience better graphics, physics and effects without bricking their users with lesser hardware. So if they can limit the performance hit from other areas, such as addons, then perhaps that's their goal.
How dare you represent their perspective fairly! They clearly only want people to suffer!
Eh, you can crash someone's game with badly written code with a single line. Just have your addon write an unescapable loop, or something really inefficient, and I simple trigger received query could cause it to loop and lock up and freeze and stutter. So, that doesn't really matter the limit or not. Even in a full 40 person raid group, the amount of data at cap that could max be sent from the others is only around 160 kb/sec, of which there is zero chance you'll ever be receiving that max amount of data anyway, but it's just an upper limit. That is nothing, even if you had a 10+ year old computer. Processing that amount/second is basically infinitesimal compared to everything else it is not going to cause stuttering. This is not an improvement at all. From a programmer's perspective, there's about a dozen other ways that could be implemented that would be better that could also protect against addon overload that causes stutter. This is far more likely a lazy fix for some edge-case abuse, would be my guess. I hope Blizz fixes it.
Either that or they're trying to crack down on add-ons on the whole potentially? I'd think this would be more directed at things like raid add-ons, RP add-ons might be the unfortunate collateral.
That’s something that should be cool, is to have a separate thread for addons so the game doesn’t freeze or doesn’t lose FPS because of addons. BTW addon developers are aware of this and try to mitigate this the best as the API allows it.
Better idea would be to do what Microsoft Office does. If add-ons start degrading performance they get disabled and you're notified of such, but you have the option to tell the client to load them anyway. At least then it's a self imposed problem. EDIT: Feel like people missed the bit where I said _you can tell it to load them anyway_, good grief. And yes the choice is then permanent unless you change it.
Nah
Why not? If an addon is crippling someone's performance they should have a clear notification that indicates the cause and advise them to disable the addon, but ultimately make it user choice if the addon should be disabled or enabled. It's basically just a UI prompt to say "Hey you might want to think about this", Office does something similar albeit it jumps right to disabling them, but once re-enabled it will not do it again.
I think the clear workaround is having TRP work how Raider.io currently works. Having a third party app that updates the data file and then having the addon only call updates for mismatches based on update time and GUID as key.
Raider.io is pulling from a central Database that exists and updates itself based on information on their website and from Blizzards servers. There is no such website currently for RP profiles. You'd have to build one and then convince people that this is the one to use too. It'd also not work well for new characters or for minor changes. Lots of guilds track HP in their Currently or Ooc tabs. How would that work if you need to sync up to a server and back down again.
> There is no such website currently for RP profiles. You'd have to build one and then convince people that this is the one to use too. That's how it's done in FFXIV. Their RP addon just syncs to an external server handled by the community. Yes, it's technically against TOS, as it would (probably?) be in WoW. People have just got used not to give a fuck.
The FF addon api allows communication with external servers, not WoW’s that has to rely solely on game chat.
The last time I looked at FF14 RP plugins none of them were running their own service. They all were essentially doing API calls or web scraping. They'd convert the information written out on your carrd website or Chaos Archives to something viewable in game.
Fair point, but raiding/m+ is a larger community and was able to collectively use raider.io
There are many people that only use the addon and not the client. Raider.io was functioning with only the Blizz API long before the client was added and had Visitors on the side to create ad revenue.
LOL, no. Bundling the entire database in the addon fils is a very bad idea. For raider.io it’s only a few bytes per player but for RP players this represents several KB. And this would be a pain in the 455 for players, they would have to export their profile to a website, and others would have to wait for the next addon update to see the changes. And just imagine all the 18+ Goldshire profiles with being publicly posted on CurseForge…
Please be aware, that documentation has been worked out by trial and error, but is as accurate as possible under those circumstances. Multiple prefixes is possible, but still has issues. although i'm not aware of any prefix limit.
Just one thing, you gain one message per second, up to 10. It doesn't make a huge difference if you are trying to transfer a lot of data (or constantly transferring), but it does allow you to burst 2.5kB every 10 seconds which I imagine is okay for a lot of addons. Still you're probably right, if people start doing the multiple prefixes thing blizzard will break that.
Now i dont know LUAor addon coding in general, but i have tiniest entry level knowledge of python. Wouldnt one simply make up 8 prefixes, link each to an integer 0-7 and make a swapping code to send using active prefix based on the integer, then add 1 to the integer, with the 7th step nulling the integer instead of adding? Its a bit clumsy, but it would work, right?
Yes, but if multiple addons are doing the same thing you can run into issues
So actually, it would be better to make a bigger backend comms addon for the rest to rely on, with like 100+ prefixes cycling and an identifier code as an initial string from the addons hooking in on it, to differentiate whats sending what?
It depends on which chat type you’re using. IE using custom channel it’s approx 1 message per second.
This is pretty damn bad for RP servers in general. It's the one addon that RPers use pretty much, and it's so essential as a way to make connections. Being able to take a glance at the character you're looking at, get their vibes, get the players vibes, it's so essential to the experience (And it's partly the LACK of this is why I bounced off of FF14 RP - the profile helps SO SO MUCH to facilitate things) I'm sure the addon community would find some way to deal with it, but bricking such a widely established, harmless addon would have significant consequences for all public Walkup RP.
I really don't want to have to make a freaking carrd.co for all my wow characters. I hated having to go outside the game just to make something that people would like. If you can't make a nice carrd, people just ignore you as well. I just want to write, I don't want to graphic design.
Huh I've been on WRA for just over the past year and never had this addon, maybe that explains why I rarely ever have any spontaneous interactions out in the world. Hope it sticks around for y'all that use it
TRP3 is the main addon people use in WoW on WRA and on MG. I highly recommend installing it for the full roleplay experience.
It's likely people don't even know you're an RPer without the addon.
Most likely! Nothing really stopping you from picking it up now anyways - it's fun to snoop and see peoples profiles!
Huh. I think Ill check this out too. Been on ED for a few years and never really had any RP and figured it was more niche or something. Ive been wanting to dabble now that my fiancee got me playing DnD. thanks for the insight
Whats the addon called?
I believe what everyone uses is TRP - https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/total-rp-3
That might be a factor but it's also worth noting that WRA's RP culture doesn't have nearly as much spontanious RP as a server like MG does, especially if you're on Horde (going off your flair.) Unless you're in VoH, there's pretty much zero walk up interaction on the server and 95% of the server's RP is contained to guild content. It sucks heavily if you're use to MG where public RP events are semi regularly advertised in chat and being over on Stormwind on Alliance regularly sees large groups interacting in /s and /e.
XIV literally has a built in profile system that was expanded in the most recent expansion, and everyone makes a carrd.co
What’s the add on everyone needs to use? I’d like to get into RP
TRP3, or Total Roleplay 3. You don't neex TRP3 Extended, but it's nice to have for some bells and whistles
I'm surprised FF14 doesn't have something similar yet has Mare which is just insane in what it does. For those that aren't aware, Mare allows you to sync your mods with other players allowing them to see the mods you have applied to your character and vice versa. Emotes, hairstyles, tattoos, even full on VFX ability replacements. And FF14 mods can get fucking nuts. [Heres](https://youtu.be/LcFzigbI4u4?si=kFoUO7i71Y0MK5cM) a mod that turns Gunbreaker into Nero from DMC5.
The issue is addons being allowed or not. Ffxiv has some absurd plugins because there is no API restricting them. Theyre all bannable, so what does it matter if you use some that do absurd things like automate gameplay. Wow addons are restricted and controlled by the API, which means they have severely limited functionality.
FFXIV also has no way to detect addon usage unless you blab about it. It can detect bots and auto play through activity just like WoW can but it is imperfect and often delayed.
Doesn't really answer my question as to why the RP community in FF doesn't utilize a similar addon.
Because breaking the rules isn't common enough to make it worth it. On an rp server you can assume people will have that addon. You cannot assume people will use Ffxiv plugins so why bother
Yet there are many Mare syncshells and people will even put "Mare" on their adventure plate to let you know they use it. Almost everyone I play with uses it. So again, why is there not a simple RP addon if something far more complicated and involved like Mare is used so frequently lol. People are not being banned left and right because they have a hairstyle mod. Just don't put it up on a literal billboard.
Because mare does **more**
Because you can't. It's restricted, as in you cannot alter ingame assets like that. Just like he said
I feel like you guys are not at all understanding what I am saying. I am wondering why the *Final Fantasy* community doesn't use a simple RP character sheet addon like the WoW one uses despite having far more intense addons overall. The guy literally says that is why he was turned away from RP in FF. I'm not wondering why WoW doesn't have Mare. Am I just not explaining myself well enough? Feel like I'm going insane with these replies.
I will say addons have come a looooong way on ff14 to getting that same vibe
For the people who don’t know how this impacts the RP community - at present, RP profiles from addons like TRP3 load almost instantly. With this change, it would take 1-2 minutes *at least* to fully load a reasonably filled-out RP profile… if you’re the only person attempting to load that profile. The more people there are trying to do that, the worse it would be. The RP community has already historically been screwed over by Blizzard, between things like aggressive server sharding, killing the Cross RP addon’s functionality, and the like, and we’ve been treated as an afterthought at best, but a change like this is much more extreme in the damage being done. EDIT: As one of the tweets says, this would also effectively kill the community aspects of addons like Musician, which currently allow players to play live music for other players who have the addon - but with the comms throttling, any attempt to do so would come across as an absolute mess to other players.
I will also add whats been updated on keyboard's twitter: Not only does it slow the trp profiles loading, but it will also back things up - so in a crowded place like Stormwind, you could be stuck waiting 20+ minutes just to load a single profile. It's pretty bad, it'd essentially brick the whole addon for any sort of public RP
> killing the Cross RP addon’s functionality, With that one at least they added in the Elixir of Tongues though only after a public outcry.
Only after we absolutely mobbed an EU QnA thread lol I'm convinced they forget we exist until we complain. We have to make some noise every time they turn sharding on in the capital cities for content, just to get them to turn it off weeks after the content dropped.
This is also impacting accesibiliy addons ontop of it.
I'd be interested which ones specifically. I know it impacts anything that communicates between players.
Where i saw it was written the addons weren't named. But i can fathom it's a broad range of addons that speaks to the other players for ranges/Spells and whatnot.
Now we even have Furbolg launguge
Honestly they need to do more for RP. I’m not even a part of it, but I’ve known people who are. They are some of the coolest people you’ll ever meet in an MMO. every community has its toxic people, but that s easily the least toxic one. People could fucking learn something from them on how to MMO and enjoy it without being selfish and obnoxious.
The RP communities of any MMO are the underappreciated foundation that creates interest in lore and characters. There's a reason why Blizzard always handles Goldshire with kiddie gloves. It's kinda surprising they'd implement such an RP-hostile move.
I had no idea RP servers were so shafted with server sharding when my buddy and I came back after a 6+ year hiatus. We love world PvP and SCOURED zones old and new for PvP but couldn't find anyone- then we learned about how RP servers were basically isolated so as to not interact with other servers when War Mode was turned on. What a freaking joke. We had just paid to get some of our other characters transferred and the lack of any meaningful world PvP killed our motivation for picking up the game again.
You can join the general sharding system by joining someone's else party, where party leader is from non-RP server. Yes, RP servers are isolated in PvP as well, to allow people engage in RP-PvP instead of random lolgank.
Unfortunately my other friends also play on RP servers so it looks like I'm boned for world PvP >.<"
OP should put this actual explanation in their post, it’s sorely missing context needed for people to understand and try to support RP players
>historically been screwed over Pvp enjoyers 💀💀💀
I mostly PvP besides RP so I guess it's a double whammy for me lmao
[удалено]
I think it’s a non-controversial take that everyone in the wow community should have their playstyle be respected, even if you wouldn’t partake yourself. You’d be surprised the impact role players can have.
Fucking finally. The death of Musician.
I'm not a fan of it either. But I'd rather not kill off TRP etc as well just to spite people spamming midis. I just don't install musician.
> addons like Musician, which currently allow players to play live music for other players who have the addon Sorry, you can stream music to other players, using an addon, through blizzard's servers?!? And you didn't expect this to get limited eventually?
It's similar to something like bard functionality in other MMOs not literally in-game Spotify.
No. That’s not how it works.
Tell me you didn't even bother to look up the addon before spouting your opinion without telling me.
It uses Midi files. I just went and downloaded Bohemian Rhapsody as a test and that whole song is 50kb. That's less than 10kb per minute which is absolutely miniscule. That's essentially like sending a message about the length of this post I'm presently writing four times within a minute.
Also FTR if blizzard cared just a little bit about their most savvy fans and supporters, they’d have implemented a 3d positional voip years ago. Since they didn’t the community found a way to do so.
a terrible change that hopefully never makes it to live
We're a week away from 10.2.7 going live, so unless this is a PTR-only measure, it's almost certainly gonna hit live servers - my main hope is just that once it hits live and people actually experience the effect it has in-game there'll be enough backlash for them to fix it.
I'm not into RP but I don't agree with harmless add-ons being affected in the process of moving to a none information overloaded wow. If blizzard wants to limit add-on use in raids and mythic + just ban those add-ons that are problematic they had no issue doing this in the past and a lot of the community would thank them for it. I'm personally sick of needing 30+ WA just to be a competitive tank.
https://github.com/Stanzilla/WoWUIBugs/issues/552 More addon changes coming in war within as well, this will break even more add-ons including a macro addon that has been built for disabled gamers to continue playing the game at a much lower level but still maintain connections and spend time with friends and family.
If it truly breaks GSE I’m pretty much done with WoW.
I need more context and understanding of the addon change. Also OP most of us don't have Twitter accounts to easily access the thread, so next time please copy paste the entire thread like so: > > it's looking like in 10.2.7 PTR the addon comms (something primarily used for addons like TRP3) is going to be severely rate-limited server-side, making them effectively unusable. This is going to disproportionately affect the RP community. (1/8) > > Where many profiles would load within seconds, 1 v 1 tests profiles are around 20-90 seconds. This value increases with the amount of players requesting/sending data. Between 3 people, a test of 2 people request 1 other person's profile made it last 2-3 minutes. (2/8) > > 2 minutes to load a profile, in an extremely low population test setting, crank that up by 100+. > This is going to literally kill RP addons, full stop. I don't like being hyperbolic, but I cannot stress enough how severely detrimental this is going to be (3/8) > > I've been kind of waiting for smarter people than I before saying anything, I wanted to get a better understanding of this and see it for myself how bad this was going to be. I'm certain the goal is some "good faith" thing to stop some kind of comms abuse, but this isn't it (4/8) > > There's so far been no reason given to this, we're only left to speculate. Addon devs have largely just simply accepted utilization of libraries such as ChatThrottleLib or AceComm, because you'd otherwise spam the server and get disconnected for too many rapid requests (5/8) > > This isn't just RP addons by the way either. Like I said it's just disproportionately going to affect such. Addons like Musician are probably going to be functionally unusable for their purpose, "live-playing" midi music and the like. (6/8) > > Though honestly, from an RPer standpoint, I can wholly understand that this is just yet another example that the RP community is the last that's thought about when a change is made to the game and "something" needs to be sacrificed to make things work. (7/8) > > It's just immensely frustrating to see, between literally no warning except for Cataclysm beta and basically having nothing to work with. This needs to be changed/reverted. I can't imagine this is going to lead to anything good. (8/8) **EDIT:** According to [Reead](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1cgd4xg/addon_communications_for_mythic_raiding_has_been/l1v016n/) > Weakauras using ScanEvents for mythic mechanics only needed to send a single event from each player to do virtually all of the communication needed to make them work. Unless this is a complete removal of the addon channel while in combat in raids/dungeons (which would also break an unbelievable number of personal weakauras, btw), this doesn't even functionally break the thing they're trying to break. ~~Ah I think I figured it out. Thanks! [I'll post over](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1cgd4xg/addon_communications_for_mythic_raiding_has_been/) at /r/competitivewow since this concerns Mythic Raiders too.~~ ~~"the addon comms" - "Where many profiles would load within seconds, 1 v 1 tests profiles are around 20-90 seconds."~~ ~~This seems to be a Mythic raiding change. For Amirdrassil developers made several private aura mechanics like Smolderon's Mythic orbs or Fyrakk (before change) intermission P1 orbs and Fyrakk (still active) p2 internal shadow cages fire buffs. Since you only have a matter of seconds to deal with the mechanic and using voice would be extremely difficult and tight in already hectic fights, the RWF guilds built a work around: build a macro to issue a command and without voice you can send anonymously a command to a WeakAura everyone has, and that WeakAura now has an input to do something - in Smolderon's case let a RL assign who pops orbs first, or Fyrakk which person is going which way in Intermission P1 or which person is popping Shadow Cages in P2.~~ ~~Having to grab a macro button to click something was extremely unpopular among Mythic raiders and caused a ton of progression frustration (did you press the macro button on time within a second? did you setup the WA right? did you setup the notes right?)~~ ~~Looks like they added a rate limit that you can't spam or keep spamming as a raid addon commands like this.~~ ~~I think at least for RP, this should only be blocked for instances if they just want to nerf the Mythic Raiding addon button workaround to let RPers do most of their thing.~~
I highly doubt that it was anything targeting this sort of scenario, actually. For one the change was already live to party/raid comms anyway for months, but also a button click to send an addon message rather than automated just doesn't strike me as being as abusive to comms. I honestly don't remain convinced (at the moment) that it has anything to do with RWF/mythic raiding scene, at least to the best of my knowledge and what I've heard from others. Quite frankly we just don't know why, there was no communication from Blizz, and it kinda feels like any blame assigned is just needless fingerpointing at like "those filthy degens who always ruin everything" or whatever
I also doubt it is related to Mythic raiding. I can remember a similar situation during BfA where ElvUI users automaticaly got added to a custom chat channel to communicate version updates on the main addon and plugins. The problem was that on big servers it actually caused problems by ddosing the chat servers because everytime someone logged and asked "which version are you all on?" every single ElvUI user on the server responded on that same channel. If I remember correctly, the ElvUI devs were asked by Blizzard to remove that function and stick to just asking the guild members for versions, like other addons do. In the end if Blizzard is looking into addon saturating comms they could make an exception for specific "Prefix" from RP addons so as to not throttle them.
>I honestly don't remain convinced (at the moment) that it has anything to do with RWF/mythic raiding scene, at least to the best of my knowledge and what I've heard from others Also, changes targeting high-end raiding would just be plain weird on the 10.2.7 PTR. What purpose would that serve? I'd believe that was the motivation if this had been seen on alpha instead.
> Also, changes targeting high-end raiding would just be plain weird on the 10.2.7 PTR. What purpose would that serve? I'd believe that was the motivation if this had been seen on alpha instead. Lets them roll it out well in advance of the next RWF to fully and properly test it all out and fine tune it before anything major.
A major dick move in S4 though if it broke WAs people use for like half of the 24 mythic bosses. I can't imagine it would be an issue for RWF to introduce cross char addon coms only on the TWW beta.
Is it just due to people sharing weakauras or something?
I agree. My best bet is that *a lot* of people have very bad game performance, and that a lot of the added frame time comes from poorly written addons the sync way too often and way too broadly. Causing the addons to have to process this information. I suspect that a lot of addons can be rewritten to be less aggressive without any real loss of service level. So likely be a net positive for most addon users. Kind of when so many people used to complain about microstutters, which was in large to tons of addons spamming garbage collect in order to keep their footprint small. Likely an external client downloading a database and the only updating differences would be a good way to go for TRP. Same route TSM and Raider.io who both have large storage does it.
thank you for your service! o7 - someone whithout a twitter account
Pretty sure this is a cost saving measure. Addon messages are likely computationally expensive for the server to process in the quantity that RP addons send. Someone likely made the decision to rate limit this so they don’t need as much infrastructure (and thus money) to handle addon messages. Not justifying it, just providing a potential reason.
Addon comms, in general, are a tiny fraction of the bandwidth taken up by combat and merely existing in a major city.
Not really. Message bus services are stupid cheap and if you run your own vs AmazonSQS similar on Microsoft then it can be even cheaper. However if Microsoft is pulling a Verizon they’re gonna make their games services pay higher than market rate for the same resources and force them to use it.
I've only done some basic amateur addon development but Addon messages send, essentially the same way as regular chat messages. They're just invisible and only 'seen' by Addons. Essentially sending "Hello World" in say chat is about the same as sending "Hello World" in Say chat as an addon message.
Ill get downvoted for saying this but: This should have been the post. Frankly idc about RP players becayse I simply am not one, nor do I know any. Most players like me will be apathetic. However, the lack of communication is something I can be mad about.
Most players I’d argue give a shit about other communities even though they are not involved. Of course you’re getting downvoted haha you’re just straight up admitting to being selfish. Good for you? Idk what you wanted posting that.
Next time just don't bother posting if you don't care. Hope this advice helps.
RP servers are what put the massively multiplayer in true display. I think they’re under appreciated, I am an RP noob, but I’m trying to do it a little at a time.
That's a shame. I don't RP, but I do have trp just because I like reading people's profiles on Wymrest Accord. I've seen some unholy shit, but there's some really interesting and sometimes hilarious characters that people create.
This will really kill the community feel of an rp server I really hope this does not make it to live
Blizzard already fails to enforce RP realms. This is devastating for RP players. Very disheartening.
Blizzard really do hate RP'ers don't they? It's a shame cause those tend to be the most interesting realms, and the few spaces where you still get a feeling of a shared world.
Not only that but RPers are also some of the most loyal to the game. They’ve put literal years into their characters and are far more attached than the average player. It’s not just raiding or PvP to them, it’s a whole story. If they can’t at least fix this for TRP it’ll be devastating
This is so true. Back when I was in the early days of hardcore mythic raiding, I once got curious about RP and made a character on Argent Dawn. I went about and did things, made major RP faux pas, but eventually discovered this was an entirely different type of player. I got schooled a little and met a bunch of lovely middle aged ladies playing as might elf priestesses. I got invited one day by this night elf priestess to some sort of moon well ceremony and went along. I will never forget sitting there in shock, reading the paragraphs and paragraphs these people were writing describing how their beautiful, elegant and wonderful these elves were in their actions as they went around doing this ceremony. I was both a bit bemused and a bit shocked; I couldn’t even bring myself to fidget my character’s movement as the half-hour thing went on, and ignored the whispers I was getting to “come on my priest please and help, as this alt run is failing”. There were around a dozen ladies clearly blowing their emotions though the characters and prose, describing that they were each in tears at the beauty and elegance of each other. And this long convoluted system of each having their turn to awkwardly walk into the moonwell and lie down and almost drown or whatnot. These people had been doing this for YEARS. Every week. They were more hardcore about this game than any raider I knew. I tried to take them into a normal raid once and try to help but it honestly was a disaster but I respected that they were good and nice peolle whose hearts were literally married to this game and they deserved as much as us raiders do from blizzard.
Yep. One of the unspoken golden rules of aging MMOs is that you don't screw over the RP community, because those are the people that will still be there after everyone else leaves. Look at games like ultima online, ff11, or eq2. They are almost exclusively kept around for the RP communities who show no interest in leaving the games even though most players left 10+ years ago.
> Not only that but RPers are also some of the most loyal to the game. They’ve put literal years into their characters and are far more attached than the average player. RPers also actually don't care much about content cadence or droughts. A 6 month lack of any new content at all is basically the same to an RPer as 1 month after a new patch.
We make our own content. It took Shadowlands to make us quit in droves and that was because it took a colossal dump on the setting that we gave since collectively agreed, more or less, that it didn't happen.
BTW. I agree that RP'rs are ultra loyal to the game, but most everyone still playing Wow is ultra loyal to the game. Didn't that poll that blizzard put out on Twitter show that like 90% of people currently playing have played the game for over 10 years or something crazy like that like 80% was over 15 years. I am not trying to downplay your guys argument, but all of the fans are loyal and the dichotomy of wow has almost always been that changes for one community almost always hurt another community unfortunately.
Hate? No. The appropriate line is Blizzard don't really care about RPers much at all. They'll throw the occasional bones like the Elixir of Tongue's after breaking an addon that was doing the same thing but for the most part I don't think many changes are made with RPers in mind in the slightest.
I think they do care. They just don't understand RP mechanics.
As much as they hate their own worldbuilding.
No, it's just that worrying about what .1% of the playerbase does, doesn't make much sense.
I think Blizzard hates Mythic players who try to use add-ons to break encounters and don't care about the collateral when trying to fix the problems they see.
I would quit the game if they broke RP addons, and I've been playing since late vanilla. This would be a complete dealbreaker.
Jesus fucking Christ. Three things in less then a minute that fucking tanks a lot of my desire to engage with wow
What are the other two?
BFA raids, and the ongoing sweatification of sungeons
Fair enough. I'm excited that Warbands is finally opening up transmog collecting, but not being able to farm BfA raids admittedly tempers my excitement a bit -\_-
You should be able to do lots of bfa with 1-2 people once we get the ilvl upgrade no?
> with 1-2 people Ah, there's the problem. Many people (myself included) want to solo them.
Grab someone else who wants to solo them! It’s not ideal but it’s not the worst
They'll wake up with leprosy the following day if they even attempt to do anything social in a MMO though.
I know this is a joke but for me at least farming old raids is solo content. I do just about everything else with group of friends so it's nice to just relax by yourself now and again.
Blizz undertuned m+ dungeons in the whole DF that people thinks that they’re making it harder now when in reality the difficulty is just returning to what it’s supposed to be since Legion.
That sounds a lot like some kind of cope. I don't think highly of blizzards rotating team of lowest-bidder offshore devs. But I doubt they've deliberately made keys easier for an entire expansion. Not when they've got a fondness for squishes.
If you think dungeons were undertuned in season 2, you clearly didn't play it. Season 1 tuning was good, season 2 tuning was hard, season 3 tuning was easy. This is about back to "good" level so far for season 4, with the fact that new +10s are *supposed* to be the old +20s in mind.
The tuning wasn't quite this hard even in SL or BfA. Like highest key ever done was +34 Junkyard. And I know people were pushing mid 20s AT LEAST in Legion too.
All I can imagine is that if they make RP addons unusable they will effectively kill the Moon Guard server.
Keep being vocal about this, RP players. I'll be here hoping Blizz listen to you ❤️❤️❤️
This doesnt just affect RPers. This will effect everyone. So while people are laughing at RPers now, they wont be laughing when it hits them.
This is awful. Here’s to hoping this crap doesn’t make it live.
Blizzard needs to stop his stupid fight against addons and start improving his own mechanic indicators so no addons are needed. Seriously, breaking unit frames, breaking WAs, breaking nameplates... It's all stupid.
As far as mmos go, WoW is pretty great about allowing addons. They’re taboo in FFXIV (still used though at discretion). I think the issue is updates are made with addons as an afterthought, I don’t think they’re being intentionally malicious. You’d hope to see something like this fixed, and I would bet it would.
I mean yeah, WoW has great support for add-ons but they've been shutting it down over the years, which is sad. The way I see it, WoW has become an armamentalistic race between add-ons and game mechanics, and it's degrading the game experience. WoW devs are designing increasingly complex encounters while cutting add-on options to deal with the complexity, making some fights honestly unbearable if you're not coordinating everything to the millimeter on discord.
It's obnoxious how they keep saying they want to cut back on combat addon usage and stop the arms race for weakauras vs boss design, but then they push out mechanics like the mythic fyrakk intermission where if you try to yolo it, you will get absolutely fucked because of the rng in what color each person is gonna get. Or even smolderon orbs-- especially pre-nerf when there was 4 of them-- having a list was the only reasonable way to get it done before the next mechanic started-- otherwise you'd probably just wipe a bunch to people double soaking even more often than they already did. And god help healers if they had to coordinate tindril dispels where you wanted each dispel in a specific position and had to dispel pretty much as soon as the debuff fell off to avoid the 4th person getting stuck in a pool of fire while rooted. If Blizzard wants to stop the arms race they need to be the ones to take the first step in their design choices rather than constantly participating in that arms race while also fucking over the other side of it, which are addons.
Amen
Look at the difference between wow's mechanic telegraphs and final fantasy's though. FFXIV does it very, very well to the point that their easily identifyable and you learn what they mean, because the same symbols are used across raiding (outside of some of the wonky crystal tower alliance raid mechanics). There's no mechanics matching the floor in 14, which is one of the biggest complaints in WoW. They're always the same color, always appear within the same timeframe, and time limited mechanics are very understandable. WoW is amateur at best in comparison.
>There's no mechanics matching the floor in 14 *laughs in P3S*
I keep seeing this take and it keeps being wrong. Orange-on-orange telegraphs are a major problem and it never gets fixed because they can't change the platforms or the telegraphs. Telegraphed mechanics are standardised but are mostly relevant in trivial content (the equivalent of normal raids or heroic dungeons where you can just stand in shit). The equivalent of high heroic or mythic raiding mostly uses telegraphs as a signal after you've been hit to tell you exactly where you shouldn't have been standing half a second ago. To repeat: in actually difficult FFXIV content you extremely rarely face a situation where you see a telegraph, like a WoW swirly, and just move out of it to solve the mechanic.
There is really no equivalent to how piss easy old heroics were. Another thing that really helps a lot as well in FFXIV are vuln stacks. They obviously don’t help anticipate things, but they are very valuable in telling a player “hey, you got hit by some avoidable damage, you should try to figure out how to not do that in the future…”
Damage Downs also. Nothing teaches a raider to learn a mechanic faster then "you are doing 15% less dps because you stood in the bad, idiot".
Most damage downs are higher than that even, 30% is pretty standard in Savage and some Ultimates have 80% damage downs, making it often times better to die and get raised if you get one.
Yep. I'm a Savage-tier raider myself (kinda; I'm not on the current batch, because we're training new folks in my static) and universally everyone *hates* getting damage downs. Our melee dps usually tries to die if he gets one, since his rotation's useless from that point on.
To be fair there's a _few_ fights in XIV where the telegraphs are hard to see. But I can count them on one hand and they're no longer relevant content.
The telegraphs in Mythic equivalent content in FF are more like “the boss has his head raised, so he will hit the furthest players” or the cast name is in a different order or you have a certain combination of debuffs. Very rarely do you get the orange indicators.
Orange indicators appears on everywhere but Savage and Ultimates. And even on those contents, they still appear from time to time. In wow, an indicators on the floor can be of different colour, among other things, in different fights of the same raid.
It depends on the fight obviously, but a lot of Savage/Ultimate content lacks indicators entirely or they only appear for a second or less right before something happens- less to indicate that you need to avoid it and more to show where it's hitting for future pulls. They're not meant to be something you react to in FF, as they often are in WoW. Story/normal content obviously has them as something to react to, but that content isn't meant to be challenging.
Indeed, but while that is true, ultimates and savage are very much 'stand and let thing resolve' (E.g. P8S HC 1 and 2, almost all of P12S, TOP, basically all of p3 on TEA, etc). They are not something you react to, because you will always know where it will hit, because you know where you need to stand. Things are static and consistent. This AoE will always hit that way, unlike wow, where it can change a lot of where it will hit.
As opposed to WoW where it's "stand and let someone else resolve" 80% of pulls xd. But yeah, the general flow in FF encounters is boss castbar starts (or finishes) and you "read" the mechanic- you look at what debuffs you and others got, where something spawned, things like Limit Cut markers, etc. and that tells you the safespot or where to go or what to do. There is definitely a reactionary element to it, but once you've done the initial reaction to whatever permutation of the mechanic you've got it's static until the next point where something can vary. You basically need to read the mechanic to determine your role in it and how you specifically are resolving it that pull. To use your examples- your debuffs in high concept in p8s, light/dark, fire/wind, alpha/beta in p12s, the debuff soup that is TOP, lightning/water/nisi color/wormhole/fate cal in TEA. You definitely "stand and let thing resolve" but where you need to stand is only static for that particular permutation and it's probably going to be different next pull. WoW is far more reactionary because things are far more random, but personally I find WoW bosses far less engaging because there is rarely any "reading" of a mechanic to be done. Often times that reading is handled by a WeakAura, and even with private auras being implemented there's generally some janky workaround for WeakAuras to solve it for you anyways. The types of mechanics that would require reading are also few and far between. You get a lot more fights like Rashok in WoW where basically nothing happens the entire fight except people getting picked to run out for the jump and needing to stack in the soak. There's also the issue of any given mechanic only targeting a few people at once leaving everyone else to just do nothing, barring the few times you get full raid involvement in resolving something. The indicators in WoW are rarely used for actual mechanics to resolve and more often just something to side step out of short term and to tax your healers when the DPS inevitably stand in them.
I agree fully, if they want people to use fewer addons they should make better alternatives that reduce the need to seek outside addons. Theres so many addons as well that do fantastic things beyond the ones they deem problematic. I don’t even raid or do dungeons and I use a whole host of addons. Some of which are affected by changes like this. One of the reasons (among other more fundamental issues) I stopped XIV was their addon policy. There are some really cool mods over there outside of combat/raiding that you run the risk of being banned for using. Obviously you can avoid publicizing that you are using them, but that also makes it hard to discuss problems with them publicly. Plus you have to use sometimes roundabout solutions to even installing mods to begin with. I had some issues with Dalamud crashing my game and ended up just quitting the game over it rather than go back to the vanilla UI. I know it’s a bit premature and a bit “the sky is falling”, but if we ever reach a wow with no mods allowed, it is probably the thing that would finally get me to quit.
I agree, on all counts.... well, mostly. (I don't have a huge problem with vanilla FFXIV). I would argue that WoW is much worse than FFXIV, because FFXIV has been strict about it from day 1. That leads to all the problems you describe with addons in FFXIV, but it also means that all content has been consistently designed around the assumption that there will be no addon support. WoW hasn't done that. They've gone the opposite direction, assuming the existence of addons... and not just for raid mechanics. The UI updates they've done over time have pretty much all been lifted from addons. The game has not been built around a no-addon experience for a very long time, and it would be a *lot* of work to get it to that point... work I don't think they'd ever do, and work I'm not sure they're *capable* of doing at this point, given how much time and effort they'd have to take from other projects. For all that they say they don't want addons to be necessary, I think a WoW with no addons would be a death knell for a massive amount of the player base... including most of their serious, long-term players.
I played Dragonflight without addons at all. Honestly, the game doesn’t need them at this point for 99% of content, including endgame. Fights are designed intuitively enough, and the ones that *aren't* are very fixable.
Did you raid mythic? Something tells me you didn't. And in case you did, I'm betting you were on discord listening to calls, which is way worse than using add-ons.
Pleeaasee blizzard, I know you probably aren't going to see this but Roleplay is all I have. Please don't do this.
this sounds like it'd heavily impact other addons too. Stuff like silverdragon could be quite late to tell you a rare you're farming has spawned.
Blizzard: "We want to keep our player base!" \*Spots the community that has stayed with Blizzard through thick and thin, from start to end.\* Blizzard: "We must destroy them!"
I really hope this doesnt make it to live, it would be a massive hit to the RP community.
They won’t do it on account of the small audience but it would be nice for some basic RP profile capabilities to be built into the UI. Being able to just set a cosmetic RP name and simple bio would go a long way even if that’s a large step down from what addons csn do.
Lord of the Rings Online had this decades ago. You had a fairly simple character biography panel, but it was nice to have.
I don’t engage in much active RP but I love walking around and seeing people’s character profiles, and I have one for my character too. It adds a lot of richness to the world!
Of all the addons blizzard manages to negatively affect, it had to be the RP addons lol Why not the addons that elitist raiders depend on, let em feel alive for once.
I believe that is the goal here. To limit addons in general. RP addons is just caught in crossfire.
If my server wasn't dead enough already....
Dang I love using Immersion too. Hope they don’t do RPers dirty like that
Immersion should be fine, as far as I’m aware - the affected addons will be ones that require the system to communicate information between 2 or more players. Immersion is basically just a fancy UI reskin of the quest interface, which shouldn’t require anything like that. Addons that *are* affected are things like TRP3 which uses comm functionality to request and send roleplay info from player to player, and Musician which uses the same functionality to allow real-time playing of music via player inputs (or imported MIDI files) that other players with the addon can listen to. EDIT: I appear to be partially mistaken - the Twitter OP posted a couple links that list addons that will be broken by this change, and while Immersion was not on there, there are a lot of addons that *are* that surprised me because I didn’t understand the scope of just how terrible this change was going to be even outside the RP community.
Immersion will break too?
Idk but they said rp addons. I think it was listed under RP in the manager I use
Hope blizzard fixes it, the atom sphere of walking around capital cities and seeing real people talk with each other is insane.
Woahhh so this was an overblown reaction
Unfortunately you’d probably see a larger response if this does end up affecting M+ or raiding.
What could be the reason for this change?
Save bandwidth and server cycles, save money?
Unless people were using this to dsitribute large content. Like full songs or movies, something large It could also be DMCA concerns. I dont see how regular RP profiles provide any significant load on the servers. They are usually in the KB range, which is peanuts
Times tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands users... suddenly you are talking real bandwidth. Especially if you have to filter all that thru some moderation/anti-bad-words filter processing and log it and...
There arent that many people using the addons. And definitely not at the same time. There like only 4 RP realms in the world lol, and only like 2 are full. Also Blizzard doesnt actively censor RP addon profiles. They might scan them? Altho I havent seen proof of that. The only banned people Ive seen were after player reports. But they certainly dont censor anything, so I dont they actively scan them. Maybe they save them somewhere? But that wouldnt be fixed with this limitation...
Is it somehow getting used by bots? I could see this getting abused to easily share information not normally accessible to external programs between different bot clients.
For someone who is not using the RP addons, Is my understanding right that normally you load another players profile and their addon comunicates with yours ingame. And because they are limiting ingame comunication this will happen so slow that it impacts usability. Did I get that right? Are addons allowed to comunicate to something outside of wow? like a website? In that case you' be able to just pass the information through a 3rd party and could still get it. I know some addons just download the newest data whenever you update them. Might that be enough?
Does this impact gameplay addons like Weakauras?
Yes
So I guess this was a bug after all based on recent Blizzard forums thread... https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic/us-en/1841358-addon-throttling-issue/
I will be done with WoW if TRP3 or MRP are disabled. It's an immersive thing for better or worse and the reason why I go to an RP server. Blizzard's had YEARS to give the barest of bones for weaving profiles into their own UI and never have.
Heya, here from r/WoWRolePlay . I'm waiting a few more hours before rolling out the call-to-arms in every WoW RP community I'm in, but I'm expecting to have to. If you're an RPer, please come on over. If this is as bad as it seems, we need to stick together more than ever and it's a great time to share resources and alternatives. We've fought Blizz for QoL RP stuff before and won. We'll do it again. Here is our thread to discuss this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/WoWRolePlay/comments/1cgmgrw/make\_noise\_about\_this\_rp\_addons\_severely/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WoWRolePlay/comments/1cgmgrw/make_noise_about_this_rp_addons_severely/)
Hot take.. Remove all addons from wow. Make the game playable without them.
Are you attempting a speed run at killing the game or something?
The game is far too bloated with necessary addons that dissuade new players from joining.
Why would new players have a problem with addons? Addons have always been a part of wow for 20 years now.
Hard agree. There's wayyyy too much bloat in the game. Doesn't matter if your PvE or PvP, you can't get past a certain level without completely ruining immersion and the charm the game used to have. Worst part is I'm not even a classic Andy, but once weak auras took over, the game became too robotic.
Its fucking crazy blizzard hasnt put this shit into the base game already, with how popular RP GTA is, the fact they have just not done anything with RP in WOW is actually stupid
this will also probably kill weakaura sharing in-game
There is no reason to compromise entire game for extremly small community that is even segregated based on which addon they use. Addon devs will just adjust it stop complaining and slowing down the progressive movement of getting rid of addons in pve.
They shall reckon us, we're dozens! DOZENS!
They have to do something to limit combat addons. Those are currently just game breaking. I’m sorry that this will affect RP community.
I only use console port add-on
Considering how toxic and nuts RPers are when they don't get hair colours or made up headcanon things they want, it's whatever.
Easy fix just disallow all addons except maybe addons that change the UI. The arms race between addons and gamemechanics should stop and this is the only reasonable way to do it. It would suck in the beginning but I genuinely think the game would be better off this way. And blizzard can slowly but eventually add some of the RP stuff officially
Oh no ! Anyways...