It’s come to my attention that emotes are no longer audible to other players in Classic WoW.
I believe this has actually been the case for a while now but it appears that many emotes are slowly becoming no longer audible to other players even in groups. I know for a fact that /silly isn’t audible in Alteraac Valley to the rest of the group. Albeit that may have to do with being from different realms. Is this a bug? Is this intentional? I’m really not sure.
Be that as it may, I know for a fact it didn’t used to be like this in Classic WoW. Some people in retail may think it’s a good idea because apparently emotes are “annoying” and they didn’t give “consent” to hear noises from other players. But come on. This isn’t retail.
I’d like to think this was an oversight. A file that got transferred over, unnoticed, from retail to Classic, copying over aspects that weren’t intended to be there. At least, I’d prefer to think that over the alternative that Blizzard did it on purpose in their mission of making every other player have as limited “negative” interactions with other players as possible. But the whole POINT of audible emotes is for other players to hear them.
It’s hard to test these things out but I am wondering if call-outs even work in BGs anymore. For example: /incoming, /healme, /oom, /charge, /openfire, /followme.
But let’s pretend that all those emotes I mentioned work in BGs, and parties and can be heard by everyone in the group. They still can’t be heard by players outside of the group. One, that’s not how the original game is and it’s pretty inconsiderate if Blizzard intentionally made it that way. Two, if it wasn’t intentional, I may be the only one, but I find it very disappointing and immersion-ruining to have another player type /thank or /bye because I helped them with a difficult kill or saved their life only to be greeted by silence and orange text at the bottom of the screen.
