You do raise a good point in that using google to search for quest objectives does not give the optimal route to complete them while Questie does provide you with the information to determine that. So there is more to Questie than I described in terms of addon power for sure.
The distinction that I would still make is that to replicate the functionality of Spy you need to be at all times observing a combat log. Every single second that you are out in PvP areas you need to be watching the log, and there is no end to it. You don’t just hit level 60 and then it’s done. No, you have to always, for the entirety of your time in Classic, be laser focused staring at every event in the log. That to me is an insane thing to do. Maybe it is easy for some but I cannot imagine that “some” to be a large segment of the player base.
I could also mention that to replicate Questie’s functionality you’d need to use third-party tools like wowhead, but I felt that’d be a lazy argument on my part and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there.
Anyway, just to make sure we’re on the same page on this, you do understand you can make a separate combat log window that would only show the enemy players’ actions? In which case you don’t really have to focus on every event, because any line that appears there will contain an enemy name. That doesn’t sound very daunting to me. In fact, that seems exactly like something people who do wpvp would do.
And yeah, you’re of course right about the fact that much more people use Spy now than the amount of people that would bother with combat log if Spy didn’t exist. But, I mean, doesn’t that simply mean Spy just levels the playing field and makes it more fair?
How is Questie affecting anything? It doesn’t tell you “Hey you should do this quest first and then do that quest etc etc” it simply tells where you can pick up quests and show markers on the map if you have quests for it active in your quest log.
Questie simply saves me a lot of time of looking up co-ords (which everyone did back in the day) and just points me into a direction I need to go in order to complete my quests.
If I want to know what would be the most efficient way questing wise, I can just go to a website that will tell me exactly which quests to pick up, when to pick them up and it will even tell me where to go with co-ords too. No need for a add-on for that. Not that a add-on saving people from going to a website would make any difference to that.
The problem with Spy is the fact some of the functions are game breaking, especially for Rogues who rely on the element of surprise which is completely taken away with Spy. Anyone using Spy or having used Spy can confirm it literally takes away the element of surprise when it comes to PvP as you know exactly who is around.
If a Rogue cannot surprise a Warlock or Shadow Priest it’s impossible to kill said classes, unless the people playing said classes are complete retards.
That’s what’s wrong with the add-on and game breaking, cause why should anyone play a Rogue if they can’t even sneak up on someone? The core a Rogue relies on.
I’m not saying it should go, just because I main a Rogue. I would still say it needs to go if I played any other class as I would completely understand how it breaks the class.
If Blizzard doesn’t do anything about it in time, I will have to deal with it and learn my ways around it but I would want to see it go no matter the class I would play.
I can respect that. Personally I would enable all the crazy addons in Classic that were possible at an equivalent stage in Vanilla. Healers would be spamming a single button to heal and another to dispel. That to me is a valid argument in defense of Spy. What is not valid is pretending that it doesn’t provide a massive advantage because it does. I use it and it is hilarious how powerful it is. Not using it is just doing it wrong.
No, that’s not a problem with Spy, that’s a problem with combat log giving that information to players in the first place. Spy merely takes that information and presents it in a more visible way. If you think taking Spy away (in whatever way you imagine it could be done) will take that information away from players, you’re wrong - it’s still gonna be there.
I understand why you don’t want this info to be available to your enemies, I just want to point out it’s not Spy that provides that info, its the combat log. I can respect your opinion if you think Blizzard should somehow remove such info from the log, even though its unlikely and will also affect other addons.
But I can’t respect the fact you’re just asking for a single addon to be banned, which isn’t going to achieve anything.
It does, yes. It’s very useful. I just don’t think it gives advantage to a higher degree than other useful PvP addons, because it doesn’t do anything more complicated than other addons. Reading the chat and formatting the data from there is the least you would expect from an addon to be able to do.
That is a very reductionist way to describe the addon. What outcome it has on gameplay is not accurately depicted by going over how the addon operates. Decursive just read what there was to dispel in the raid and that is the least you would expect an addon to be able to do…
I understand the fact of how Spy works and that it’s getting it’s information from your Combat log and those of others. But since when are people who are simply walking around on their mount (not doing any form of combat) in the combat log? Far as I know, that was never the case and still isn’t. (correct me if I’m wrong!)
The other thing about Spy is the fact it’s giving people all the information, they would never get from simply keeping their eyes on the combat log as there’s simply too much information being presented in the combat log for the human eyes and brains to follow.
It’s basically doing something, that’s humanly impossible to do.
You can say “but DBM works in a similar way” and my response to that is that DBM is for people who are blind and can’t respond within 10 seconds so they use a tool that screams at them what to do and when to do it and thus making them able to react in time.
If your response time is longer then 10 seconds, you should never drive a car either but that’s a different story and most people’s response time should be around 2 to 5 seconds and not 10 seconds or longer.
I think it kinda is though. The complexity of the addon’s actions reflects the complexity of actions it saves the user from having to do.
So when you’re saying its hilarious how powerful Spy is, are you comparing it to the times you had to use your combat log for that, or to the times when you didn’t even try to get that info about enemies from anywhere? That seems to me like a major difference.
Look, people who do wpvp will do that if they don’t have Spy anymore, that’s not even close to the limit of lengths try-hards are ready to go to.
You’re right, it also gives you the info you could get by targeting these players. But that’s about it. And no, there’s not too much information in the log if you set it the right way, unless there are too many enemy players doing combat at the same time, in which case Spy isn’t really that useful anyway, it excells at small-scale wpvp and that’s it.
I don’t use DBM and I have no idea how it works, so I can’t really comment on that.
Spy was around back in vanilla, I Know I was there. Its also around in the up to date version of the game. Does it highlight that someone on your kos list is around and should die? Yes. But it does not tell you where they are. You still have to use your eyeballs for that.
You might as well moan about hunters running around with little red dots on their mini map highlighting the player they want to track.
It also does nothing if the person nearby has not triggered anything readable by your local logs, so its still possible to sneak up on people with it.
My response to that is probably what most player would respond: I didn’t scan my combat log at all times when out in the world. It’s just not something that I would ever wish to do. However with Spy I get all that information in an incredibly convinient form. I get a neat list of enemies around me and alerts when someone goes stealth near me, and I don’t need to bother with actively reading logs.
But then its not really a fair comparison.
We’re going back to my example of using Aux and saying how overpowered it is as it lets you buy and sell things, because you didn’t bother using the native AH with bad UI. Well no, you could already buy and sell things, just because you didn’t doesn’t mean that an addon that lets you do that more conveniently should get credit for stuff you could do already anyway.
Well yes, but that is what makes any extremely powerful addon powerful. They make things that take a lot of effort to do effortless. Spy isn’t special in that sense it’s just new to the Vanilla environment. It really is like the old addons that were so powerful that you were playing wrong if you didn’t use them. I suppose that is alright even if I don’t personally like this one.
I guess I just look at it a bit differently. I don’t like the fact that combat log has too much info about enemy players. But since it does, making such an addon was a good and the right thing to do.
You actually attribute moral value to making the addon? That is a bit weird for me but I definitely don’t blame any addon authors for making the strongest addon that they can make. Whenever the limitations of that go too far the blame is entirely on Blizzard.
I would be most happy if Blizzard gave us the API that was really in 1.12 and then let whatever happened happen. What they are doing now is kind of weird in that we have some insane addons that were not at all popular back in Vanilla and we don’t have the stupidly powerful addons that actually were popular then.
Are you people special? I only ask because if you do a basic search, this addon was around back in the original version of the game, its not some super new thing that just got created for the re-launch of vanilla, we all used it back in the day as well. Stop trying to change things that don’t need a change.
Well for the same reason you’ve mentioned: a lot of people wouldn’t bother using combat log, leaving them at a big disadvantage. But then some people would. Having an addon that lets everyone use that combat log functionality in the same way definitely makes things better and more fair.
It was not around during US launch of (Vanilla) PvP, I can assure you of that.
Cosmos UI and Thottbot was 100% a thing back then, and those were both in their infancy, to have an addon as advanced as Spy, back then and to have slipped past every member of my guild who were heavily PvP focused well, I have to call BS sir.