Over the years there have been various libraries and addons to inform others that you play with about:
Talents
Professions
Gear including enchants, gems, durability, itemlevel
Spell Cooldowns
Mythic+ Keys
Conduits
Renown
Covenants
Player Positions
Pending & Incoming resurrections
Potions, Flasks, Weightstones & Food
Quests
Achievements
To reduce the dependencies on OpenRaidLib, LibRes, LibHealComm, AstralKeys , LibGroupTalents and various old and new variations , it would be great if the wow api would allow us to get this data in real time directly.
If people don’t want to share any of that it could be made configurable so you can share only your location in the world or your keys with your friends and or guild and not everything with every random stranger you meet in an instance.
Blizzard seem happy to release the API and let addon makers do it (be nice if it was in game though so everyone had access - many players know nothing about addons or have no desire to install them.
Need to be careful as you suggest though, we have seen what the community does with too much information (and it is rarely good)
What kind of abuse do you have in mind?
I only remember the augmented overlay for raid bosses back in the sanctum where blizzard broke the rendering as it was too powerful.
Just the usual – over inspection of people, more metrics to meet before being invited, the ever continental insistence on perfection (when they often don’t have it themselves) … the usual stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. I was agreeing with your post… it is time Blizzard did more of the heavy lifting here and not rely on addons (they started it with M+ score) but far more could be done… why is there no Res timer in the default raid frames? Do they even play the game?
The reason blizzard doesn’t do this is it’s already very hard to get into groups with the checking people do already, more will just more elitism and it being harder for people to get into groups.
I hate that I need to have curve to join a group that’s only offering curve as a reward.
Maybe we need to separate things here.
There are things that are useful once you are in the group
There are things that are useful to see regardless of the group status (like map positions of friends or their m+ keys)
There are things that might or might not decide about your chances for joining a group and may be critical for applicants.
For the latter we have things that can be inferred. If you have a dps shaman or a mage and you know that they can bring bloodlust or a monk increasing melee damage most likely. This would be easy to just show directly like raidassist do for you .
If you need bloodlust and you only have two hunters that have no suitable pet with them, that will be a disappointment if you find out later.