And if it did give everyone tracking abilities, I’d wholeheartedly agree.
But it doesn’t. It streamlines information you already receive in your combat log, and notifies you of the relevant parts. It doesn’t tell you where someone is, just that someone nearby did something that registered in your combat log.
If it suddenly gets upgraded to displaying the location of enemy players, and announcing their presence without any input from the combat log or visual confirmation, I’ll be uninstalling it asap.
Edit: Come to think of it, there was an addon (can’t remember the name) that did give everyone tracking abilities. And Blizz shut that sh*t down.
It is the worst thing happened to World pvp. It is by far ruining any element of surprise and ofc it is the most ANTI-ROGUE addon when you see all the time: Stealth player beware etc. It has to shut down ASAP.
It lets you target the enemy player and then you can mark them, send a pet… etc. It’s not literally tracking but it is very close to it.
You can be opposed to removing it. For example it is valid to say that Spy is part of #nochanges as it was probably possibly to make in Vanilla. Just don’t lie about the power of the addon. It is incredible. Easily among the most powerful addons I have seen in the history of the game.
Is it really though? It depends what you are comparing it to. Compared to someone having a well set combat log combined with marking hotkeys and using the /tar command, it doesnt seem super powerful, although still very useful. Its definitely not the most powerful addon in terms of complexity of what it actually does.
People dont like the spy’s functionality being in the game, but it already is part of the game regardless of the addon, just in a less convenient form.
Well it’s like those addons that used to paint the ground with the area that an incoming boss ability is going to be landing on soon. Sure it wasn’t powerful compared to someone who memorized the fight entirely and knew every pattern, but it was still insanely powerful for literally everyone else, and that ended up being the vast majority.
Spy also is not that powerful compared to someone who is actively scanning their combat log and using /target to catch everyone around them. In practice though it is one in a million players that can be bothered to keep doing that for hours on end at all times that they are out in the world. So for the vast, vast majority Spy does something that is not practically accessible to them otherwise.
Can you name an addon that you think vastly more powerful?
No addon can do something that is literally impossible to do without an addon. It’s just not a good metric to use. For example the old Decursive didn’t do anything that you couldn’t do manually. Blizzard still thought that it was far too powerful.
Please stick to addons that relate to combat in some way. So PvE or PvP. Not that ah addons can’t be crazy powerful it’s just really difficult to compare them with addons like Spy.
Not really. It’s comparing a sonar that lets you know something, somewhere nearby, is happening and a satellite homing in on the exact location of something.
I’m not opposed to removing specifically Spy. I’m opposed to the removal of addons that don’t break the game or the rules in general. It’s not a good path to go down
Blizzard has done that many times before. Decursive used to make dispelling a matter of spamming a single button: It was disabled. Healbot used to be almost a real bot that healed an entire raid with a single button: it was disabled. Addons used to be able to paint on the ground: That was disabled.
Doing something about Spy would just be a continuation of a patter that is more than a decade old. There are arguments to be made against it but yours is not a good one.
Not saying thats the metric, but when we try to evaluate an addon’s convenience, shouldn’t we compare it to someone trying to achieve the same effect instead of someone who isnt even trying?
You wouldnt compare someone using Aux to someone not using the AH at all and say “Its so powerful it lets you buy and sell stuff”, that would just be logically wrong.
Compared to someone using the combat log etc Spy isnt that powerful. People assume it is, because they compare it to not doing anything at all.
The Aux example was just to show Spy doesnt do anything technically complicated, not more so than other addons. As for PvP addons, Id say that addons that display CC icons on nameplates are just as useful or even more, especually in mass pvp and BGs.
We should compare to doing the same thing without the addon of course. What we shouldn’t hold as the metric for that comparison is the literal ability to do the same that the addon does at all. Rather the metric should be the effort required to replicate the functionality.
So for example with Questie the effort to replicate its functionality is minimal. It takes mere seconds to google a quest and several minutes to complete the quest in game. With Spy though you are talking about something completely different. You are comparing on screen alerts with actively observing a log, and using macros to target players in that log. It’s a whole other level of effort required to replicate the functionality of the addon.
The end result is that anyone with the addon installed gets a notification whenever pvp is going on nearby so they are free to beeline there with their mounts and pile in on the gank.
It messes up wpvp by providing way too much information. It also remains to be seen if the addon is merely using your combat log, or something more.
The effective area covered by the addon seems way too big.
Yes, because automation is against the rules. So like I said
If you equate disabling addons that break the rules to disabling addons that don’t break the rules, sure. Like I said earlier, there was an addon similar to Spy (early version of VanasKOS maybe?) that gave actual tracking (as in showing players on the minimap). That was disabled.
If Spy was against the rules, it’d be disabled. Or if Blizzard decides they want to limit it’s functionality, because it is against their design intentions (like they did with ground marking, before adding it themselves), it’ll be disabled.
And that’ll be fair enough.
If it is tapping into something that’s supposed to be unavailable, they’ll disable it.
But it has been 15 years, and it’s still there without any objection from Blizzard, so i doubt it.
You misunderstand the rules. These addons didn’t break any of them. It is not automation because every action has a corresponding player action behind it. Just because the player is only pressing a single button for every action does not change that. That is why the functionality was almost bot-like but not quite, and it was not against any rules. It was just too powerful for the game.
WTF are you talking about with it’s out for 15 years? Is Classic out for 15 years or almost 3 months? Don’t come comparing Classic to Retail cause that’s trying to compare a Apple to a Orange.
Just because a add-on is allowed in Retail and doesn’t break anything there, doesn’t mean it cannot break anything in Classic as they’re two complete different games.
Don’t give me bullsh* as that it only gives information from your Combatlog, when somebody is just walking by on their Mount nothing about them shows up in your combat log and Spy still notifies you with visuals and sound when people are close no matter what they’re doing.
It’s not my fault your precious add-on falls under the category of cheating, it’s simply a fact and shouldn’t exist cause of it.
If that add-on is allowed in your perspective, anyone else is allowed to use third program software to make PvP easy for them with no skill required anymore at all to kill anyone and everyone. (Yes stuff like that actually existed, might still exist to this day)
