Enemy castbars give an advantage.
Cooldown monitors give an advantage.
Weakauras give an advantage.
Even debuff monitor isn’t built in. There’re dozens of addons and macros that give advantage in PvP. Ban them all?
Spy doesn’t even prevent ambushes. Sure, you can start spamming Arcane Explosion as soon as something goes into stealth near you, but would it save you? Nah, most likely it would just drain your mana and make you an easier prey.
This whole thread is overly dramatized.
If you use any addon that another user doesn’t use, you have a potential advantage over that user. In PvP for example, there are plenty combat addons. If your opponent has not got them and you do… that’s a potential advantage for you.
However, you both have equal access to those addons. You chose to install them, your opponent chose not to. PvP skills can nullify the advantage. Non issue.
You can argue semantics all you like. It doesn’t change the fact that an add-on specifically designed to make it easier to see stealthed enemies is cheating.
But you obviously won’t be convinced because in your eyes any add-on is fine, simply because it’s an add-on. It must be nice to have such a simplistic point of view.
you cant remove that addon. it track combatlog for enamys, if you remove it, you remove combatlog. so no.
It can be true, the technical part was not in consideration here.
Though even technically, we cannot say exactly whether it is possible or not.
Sometimes systems can be very complicated.
Back in the days I had separate window for combat log with filters for enemy player’s actions + targeting macro. Same stuff, but add-on is more convenient ofc.
Both were allowed long before Activison came in to the picture.
Your argument is flawed in the sense that you’re trying to put a border between “legit” addons and “cheating” addons. There is no border.
All addons make stuff easier to do, and you’d be ridiculous to pretend that you doing things more easily doesn’t affect other players in the same way as Spy does.
What about addons that show you enemy’s spellcasts? Should they be banned as well?
What about itemrack that allows you to switch gear sets almost instantly? It can affect combat as well, therefore making it harder for your enemy.
Lets just get real, whatever is made possible for addons to do is not cheating by definition, because it wouldn’t be possible if it was.
IMO there’s a border between customization of default UI and adding new elements of UI which are not accesible or realistically accessible to users of the default UI. Yes, enemy casts, debuff timers are example of those “cheating” addons and I would prefer that they not exist. Also threat meters, damage meters and so on. Though it’s unrealistic to expect that they’ll be removed as majority can’t imagine playing without it, but one could dream. It’s OK to move already present buff to more convenient place, for example.
Well, feel free to believe that, but you just gotta expect that most people won’t agree with you on that.
Most of these addons, like dps and threat meters add more depth to the gameplay, not the other way around. If the boss’ behaviour depends on those threat numbers, its better to have the actual numbers available for players, otherwise you just get more random gameplay.
And why those numbers were deliberately removed from Lua API by developers? There’s API to get precise threat values in retail but they just cut those functions in Classic client. Not just removed from UI, but removed any way to access it, even by addons.
I don’t know why it was removed or not added. Classic is by no means a perfect game, most addons make it better, in my opinion. But I feel like we’re derailing a little bit from the topic.
Here I call only cheatobox as a cheating.
Addon Spy - isn’t in the same degree as pure cheating, though it gives huge advantages to users, and can influence the game too much to be allowed.
But you do realize that Spy doesn’t do anything a player can’t do themself?
So would you campaign to ban all addons that allow you to do things faster than you would manually (which is almost all of them)?
Tell that to Blizzard when they cracked down on Healbot choosing heals for you. The name wasn’t just catchy. It did what it said on the tin.
Last time I checked being able to move my action bars around the screen tells me absolutely nothing about what other players are doing with their class abilities. Not really comparable with being able to see through another player’s stealth more easily. I seriously doubt a bag add-on which makes all the bags into one has any impact on anyone but the user. Sorry not all add-ons have the same or any impact on other players.
The game does this already if you’re targetting the enemy. You can spot them with spell animations as well.
As for something as sophisticated as DBM, well Blizzard had to make raid content far more challenging partially because this add-on trivialised content. Blizzard never officially labeled it as cheating, likely because they couldn’t do anything against it because it would mean changing how the game handles encounters at a very base level, but it’s obvious they were not happy with how much impact it had on raiding given they increased the difficulty quite significantly after its use became very common. The raiding scene would have evolved quite differently without DBM to hold countless hands.
Yea because Blizzard have never once in the entire lifetime of WoW deemed an add-on or an aspect of one to be unacceptable. Oh wait they did.
Sadly not everyone is bright enough to see this.
That’s a good example, but I imagine blizzard did it not by just outright banning one addon, but by changing the scripting available to addons in general so it wouldn’t be able to choose targets for you. If they did the same with the combat log so that there would be no info on enemy abilities in there, I wouldn’t be opposed to that at all. But that’s different to just banning Spy and still letting people do the same stuff manually.
Not all addons are equally useful, obviously. But all addons that make it easier for you give you an advantage that indirectly affects other players.
But by the same logic, the game already shows you all the info that Spy does. There’s nothing it does you can’t do yourself.
Do you say the same about your feign/trap macro not working?
The point is they found an aspect of an add-on to be unacceptable and they reacted by making said aspect either banned or unusable in-game. If this happened in the past before, chances are it will happen again. It also means that just because something is an add-on doesn’t automatically mean it’s okay to use, which is an incredibly flawed argument some here like to use.
I’m really struggling to understand how a basic bag add-on grants an advantage over other players.
Which is why I brought up DBM, because Blizzard directly reacted to its popularity by making content more difficult. They did not think its impact was okay enough to leave it affect the community’s completion of content unchecked. They ended up having to create content with add-ons like this in mind.
So who knows, maybe Blizzard will react to something like Spy by changing how the game tracks stealth.
I have the addon and it doesn’t work as well as you think. Afaik it only notices enemy players who are close enough to you that you can click them anyway. Except it also notices rogues in stealth… but, well… tbh - rogue ganking around Hillsbrad is pretty scumbagy anyway. -.-
They made decursive change too. Blizzard haven’t just allowed add-ons because they work, if they don’t like how they work they do something about it. I wondered why I was seeing warnings in chat, now I know it’s that add-on. Most add-ons work just for the user. If you don’t have dbm or questie you can’t see or hear them. Even threat meters only share information between those who have them.
This one shares too much information too fast to everyone and impacts on defensive as well as offensive PvP. I would imagine Blizzard are looking into it.