Seriously? Have you learned nothing in 15 years?
Blizzard does not have to justify their decisions TO YOU. You don’t run Blizzard. You aren’t the final authority they must please.
They do not have to “explain” everything to every single player in terms that each of us will find acceptable.
So they don’t.
Due to the huge inaccuracies with that addon there was huge amounts of spam threads on the forums complaining about balance on PvP realms.
They broke it because it’s revealing serious issues(that people who took off the rose colored glasses predicted) like faction imbalanced realms and class ratio issues. It’s basically the equivalent of putting a piece of tape over the check engine light on your car.
Because the data it gathered had enough “noise” to indicate it wasn’t great, for one. Because blizzard had said these kinds of Addons don’t capture a clear or compete picture, for two. But, even if you tin-foil-hat away blizzards comments on the census efforts, anyone can analyze the data and tell its complete Garbo.
Hopefully Blizzard with it’s correct internal numbers can perform damage control for the servers once the launch hype is dead.
I don’t want to be on Alliance Mankrik with only a dozen other players and have to reroll another server.
Server mergers if needed should be an option.
As for the addon, I’m indifferent. There are going to be wild ideas on the reasons it was broken. Until there is an official communication, which they should do!, it’s their game.
A simple,“the /who requests were jamming up the servers, or we feel it’s not int the spirit of classic, etc.” Would be sufficient for me.
Wow. Just wow.
I didn’t read the post you replied to but sheesh.
In my experience pretty much all aspects of life are made a lot easier with communication.
This is just patently not true.
I looked at the code for ClassicLFG, and it only calls SendWho() in one place (in a situation where someone whispers a group leader - it calls SendWho() on them to get info on the person).
Meanwhile, CensusPlusClassic’s entire existence is using SendWho() to gather character data…
My guess is it was done to alleviate server load - especially as more and more people were running the addon, doing /who calls basically constantly. (More on my thoughts in this thread: Breaking CensusPlusClassic (making SendWho() protected) ).
There were a few other addons that took collateral damage from this, unfortunately.
Given Blizzard has never had issues w/ the Census addon (which has existed for 15 years in one form or another), I’d like to hope/expect it is allowed back at some point - unless Blizzard would prefer to publish their own census data (updated regularly) instead…
None of those reasons give any real proof that the census data is wrong. It’s all speculation. And I haven’t seen anything about Blizzard saying the data is wrong. From what I’ve seen the data looks pretty accurate.
This seems to be a fairly logical reason.
The reason is obvious, so players will roll on imbalanced servers.
Yea i couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t want fragmented information causing hysteria on the transfers.
Really blows my minds too bruh
because it was grossly inaccurate, it had one EU server as 99% alliance, while 99% alliance is not impossible, it is incredibly unlikely, and people then take this inaccurate data as law.
I’m no wow server maintenance or usage expert, but I’d probably say all those queries sent to the server so often contributed to server lag. on top of other sources of lag. …like AT&T.
It’s probably mainly due to the server load from the API calls on the servers. When 1 app sending 100+ calls to server to update a website is fine, but when 1000s of players with the addon sending hundreds of thousands calls to the server, it will eventually bog down the system. The fact that it also also hide the player population numbers is probably just an bonus consequence.
And it’s not the first time that Blizzard has done this, I recall Blizzard also once broke a key API used by the gearscore addon. It wasn’t they were against the addon but too many players using an addon API that was not intended for mass use so they had to restrict it.
It’s not inaccurate. It just isn’t showing exactly what people think it’s showing.
Apologies, I was getting a bit technical there. Statistically speaking, the data falls outside of certain tolerances and so it’s pretty easy to determine that it’s missing or fragmented as a sample, and not useful for extrapolation. That data was never hurting anyone’s experience before, but the server architecture for classic is somewhat different than live, and the performance impact is felt more.
From an IT perspective, it absolutely makes sense.
From a statistics standpoint, we’re not losing any valuable data.
Seems like an obvious choice to break, imho.
It’s more the addons that use /who to guild invite you based on being unguilded, as well as whatever gold sellers were using to bombard you with “JOIN MY CHANNEL PLEASE!” where it was actually an advertisement in the name.
HAHAHAH!! it wasn’t considered inaccurate when it was reporting a year ago, and ppl said, yep, it works… BUT just after this garbage expansion, and sub numbers are at an ALL time low, it’s no longer accurate…
THEY FIRED THE CEO FOR A REASON!!! LOLLLLLLLOLOLOL
This being the simplest and least tin-foily explanation, does seem the most likely.
It was broken for the same reason blizzard stopped reporting sub numbers when they began declining…
PR/Damage control…
It’s a publicly traded company and this is arguably their flagship product…
Retail is dying (or at the very least getting absolutely embarrassingly out performed by a 15 year old game), and the addon was capable of providing proof of that…
It’s all a smoke and mirrors show to keep investor confidence high and not tank the stock price leading up to blizzcon.
It’s also why classic and retail share a subscription… Blizz can mask retail’s numbers with classic only players.
Furthermore, the free transfers to balance out the realms can be counted on the report as “character services”… and again masking over retail’s numbers with inflated metrics (in this case, metrics that are NOT “paid character services”, which are the largest source of revenue for retail as a whole)
The point is to project a position of strength on the reports that will satisfy anyone who isn’t familiar enough with the brand/product to look under the hood… The narrative is going to be that Retail wow is doing great! Look at how much participation we had this quarter! Massive upticks in active population and character services usage!..
Except the near entirety of the boost was from classic, a 15 year old game still more innovative and better designed than the current “flagship”… and classic isn’t nearly as easily monetized as retail currently is… which is a really bad thing from an investor standpoint… Blizz really needs to hit a home run at Blizzcon this year with their “next big thing”… and I’m not sure a new wow expansion is going to cut it, given where retail is headed currently… nor am I super optimistic about a rumored Diablo 4 being able to do it either, considering what a watered down dumpster fire D3 ended up being.