Patch 8.1 and Cross-Faction Roleplay

[Darastrix-alleria]

Common sense

So that’s a no to a source then.

Why would someone use this addon to be some weird pvp spy when they can literally just use discord or the in-game features such as voice chat for less effort?

Because they can and ruining others fun is what some trolls/jerks enjoy?

It’s also been addressed already that 90% of RPers hate war mode for those activities, because as stated, being ganked ruins immersion.

98% of all statistics are made up on the spot

[Azhaar-wyrmrest-accord (Azhaar)]

Stay positive, y’all. That includes not engaging people who are obviously just here to troll.

Like, f’rinstance, a 55DK alt posting nothing but random contrarianism. Please don’t feed trolls, folks, this is such a positive thread overall.

[Alison-moon-guard (Alison)]

Several people in this thread have explained to several different people why this addon wouldn’t be abused, nor why someone looking to abuse or cheat through gameplay would want to use it or anyone else of its kind. “The path of least resistance” is quite literally common sense and it’s as reasonable a source as any, when it’s been contended by multiple separate individuals and the conflicting alternative is baseless.

On the flip side, if you’re able to educate us on how someone can use these things to ruin someone’s fun in a way that’s very specific to this niche utility, I’d be happy to hear it.

Do you have a source to provide that this addon was used to harass, circumvent gameplay, or otherwise become a detriment to someone else’s experience?

Or are you just shooting into the wind?

Please don’t feed trolls, folks, this is such a positive thread overall.

Oops.

[Domína-moon-guard]

Like, f’rinstance, a 55DK alt posting nothing but random contrarianism. Please don’t feed trolls, folks, this is such a positive thread overall.

Could you at least add something to support the topic rather than spamming “Good vibes folks! Don’t feed the trolls!” ?

[Darastrix-alleria]

Not agreeing or joining your echo chamber doesn’t make someone a troll.

People are allowed to have a view that opposes yours.

[Darastrix-alleria]

Do you have a source to provide that this addon was used to harass, circumvent gameplay, or otherwise become a detriment to someone else’s experience?

Or are you just shooting into the wind?

I never said they did.

The question was why would someone abuse this addon. I have no idea why someone would go out of their way to harrass/abuse an addon. There are a lot of things people do that I find hard to understand. That doesn’t mean those things don’t happen.

I was also questioning the made up statistics. With out a source, they don’t help anyone or anything in a discussion like this.

I honestly hope they do restore access to the api for this addon, presumming they don’t have a reason for blocking it in the first place.

[Zandrae-wyrmrest-accord (Zandrae)]

So it looks like other addons were also running into problems or are now non-functional due to the API change. Some of which have absolutely no tie to cross faction roleplay or roleplay at all.

• GreenWall guild to guild relay is also dead.
• Sharing weak auras with people in guild is also broken.
• Any add-on that alters guild chat display in any way no longer does so. This includes RP names.
• Addons that alter how guild chat looks probably don’t work either.
• Addons that might log guild chat, such as Elephant or Wim probably can’t do that anymore.

This is really poopy.

[Swifts-wyrmrest-accord (Swifts)]

As much as this sucks, this is at least hopeful for our situation! It means they more than likely weren’t specifically targeting CrossRP. With all of these things broken, there’s even more of a chance that they’ll need to either reverse this or find some way of making it work without breaking these things.

[Nearo-emerald-dream (Nearo)]

I don’t think you have read up on how this add-on actually works. Please take the time to understand how this add-on works and why none of the things you’ve cited as potential pitfalls have any reasonable possibility of existing given that there are many much more practical, easy, immediate and seamless methods to harass members of the opposite faction without having to install an add-on and jump through a bunch of hoops to do something that still requires consent from the intended victim, who can then easily blocked the offending party to nullify all their efforts.

Having said that, I don’t understand your argument that it is immersion-breaking to be able to talk to members of the opposite faction.

Every character in the game’s history has been able to communicate with members of the other races, including members of the opposite faction. You are even able to communicate with and understand enemy NPCs out in the world when they do their war cries and when they say something to the effect of “For the Dark Lady!”(etc.) when they attack you (or you attack them).

The dialogue adds immersion to the game.

You can hear the enemy faction leaders talking during quest dialogues such as all the scenarios in Darkshore, Arathi and beyond.

This all adds to the immersion as well.

The fact that you can’t understand enemy players is the part that is immersion-breaking. It makes absolutely no sense from an RP and lore perspective when everywhere you go and everything you see and throughout the entire history of the game, the enemy factions are able to communicate directly without any issue.

The language barrier was implemented not because of RP considerations, but very much despite of them. At it’s core, it’s a cost-cutting measure Blizzard implemented to reduce their need to receive reports for harassment on PvP servers (which no longer exist). PvP servers no longer exist, everything is opt-in, and so should the language barrier.

[Alison-moon-guard (Alison)]

That doesn’t mean those things don’t happen.

And I was interjecting on the notion of how someone would go out of their way to abuse the tool. It’s like suggesting someone malicious would want to break a person’s window with foam instead of a brick; there’s better tools that are easier to use for the task.

As far as statistics go, we can look at the 600+ likes this thread’s OP has and then follow through the the 600+ replies made to discern that nobody has come forward with any actual recollections of a poor experience. A biased study, obviously, but I hope that does become more telling to any Community Managers that read through this page that there were more people being hurt by their locking the API than there were people being helped. lol

I honestly hope they do restore access to the api for this addon, presumming they don’t have a reason for blocking it in the first place.

I’m really hopeful that Zandrae’s check-through of all the different add-ons broken by this change is implicative that the choice wasn’t intended to break this addon and, by extension, will have alternative APIs for developers to utilize going forward.

There really is so much potential but unless we get a post tonight or tomorrow, I’m expecting most of the company to be on a “slow” coasting for the holidays.

[Yoloswagweed-thrall]

I want to give an explanation to those who who don’t fully understand what occurred with 8.1. Whenever there is a chat message added, be it from you or another player or even NPCs, there is a relatively specific event that fires with certain arguments. Think of the arguments as like the ingredients to make a recipe. When you have a player named bob on the server arthas send a message with the text “this is my message.” the game ties in several of these arguments to print out the message you see on your screen “Bob-Arthas says: this is my message.”

Currently, the arguments for the CHAT_MSG_GUILD event are the same that they’ve always been. However, it seems that blizzard has added a hidden function that obfuscates the messages for guild chat. Instead of seeing “Bob-Arthas says: this is my message.” the game actually sees something like |Kv26|k. the |K and |k that proceed and follow the message are actually similar to hyperlink wrapping. In fact, the |K and |k wraps are used in battle.net names in your chat. The problem with this strategy, is that you can’t, in anyway, alter chat messages using lua or xml code if they are sent to guild. This is because we have no way of “decrypting” the wrapped hyperlink that holds your message. In other words, the game sends an “encrypted” message in guild that we no longer have access to “decrypt” it. Thus, any addon that in any way “listened” to the CHAT_MSG_GUILD event, and “intercepted” the messages to alter them is functionally broken.

This includes addons that have literally nothing to do with cross-realm, cross-faction, or anything coming close to breaking ToS. Like my own addon that simply colors names of players and generally makes guild chat prettier/more uniform.

[Jalanilí-moon-guard-4790 (Jalanilí)]

So, reading down and noticing the whole API thing and seeing that not only Cross-RP is down, but others as well makes me kinda curious if it is reversable. I may not be the most constructive here, but what I can say is that we need to stop assuming that Blizzard specifically targeted this add-on.

For all we know, Blizzard was just fixing a possible security hole in the newest BNet feature, and as Zandre said before, sometimes altering code has unexpected consequences. I don’t have formal schooling in coding, but I HAVE coded sites and blogs for fun in my spare time, and let me tell you how completely easy it is to accidentally screw something up by mistyping, miscalculating, etc etc.

The fact that this has gone on for a couple of days with almost 700 posts and no response from Blizzard either way means that they’re in their infamous watch-and-wait mode. Which means that intentional or not, they’re waiting to see how much noise people make and for how long to judge if they want to allocate the resources to seeing if there’s an alternative method of coding in whatever they were trying to do that did this.

[Liger-stormreaver (Liger)]

I support this addon and its intention for roleplay use. Please don’t ruin fun!

[Adraenon-wyrmrest-accord (Adraenon)]

Here’s to hoping the change was one of those “Fix one issue, two more pop up” sorta things.

Didn’t use it much personally, but was and is something that only helps the game for RPers long term.

As for the potential griefing issue, why go through the trouble of installing an addon when you can literally just use the communities tool Blizzard themselves gave us?

[Derscha-cenarion-circle (Derscha)]

At the very least, I just hopped onto my main & secondary accounts and did some test posts in /g and Elephant picked them up just fine.

[Ashoká-wyrmrest-accord]

@Irisse-maelstrom

Cross faction communication tools, including this add on, undermine that by permitting people to form cross faction teams that are partially immune to PVP solutions. For example, you can have a gank squad which facilitates Horde ganking of Alliance by using Alliance spies to track the gank squad’s Alliance targets.

That doesn’t leave us faction based roleplayers unaffected; it actually undermines our roleplay immersion. The whole reason for going to a RPPVP server, and now, to turn war mode on when roleplaying, is the freedom to attack opposite faction players who are doing things my faction objects to, such as attacking my faction’s NPCs. Unfortunately, that can’t happen when the attacking team’s spotters are on my own faction and is thus unattackable by me.

But banning this addon doesn’t prevent that. Battle . net chat and cross-faction communities still exist in the core game. What’s more, CrossRP was a WORSE tool for spying/spoiling PvP than just using the community as-is because of the distance limitation on communication through it.

Even if you DID shut down battle.net chat and cross-faction communities, what’s stopping them from using Discord?

The only thing this addon does is take data that’s still present in the game-- crossfaction battle . net community chat-- and present it in a way that’s seamless to the RP experience.

[Kenshimoo]

You literally don’t make sense.

If this was the goal, then they would delete cross faction communities and voice chat. But they don’t. Do you know why that is?

(The answer is because RPPVP spies is literally a non-issue, and is something that you guys have just made up just for the sake of being against this, it seems.)

[Zandrae-wyrmrest-accord (Zandrae)]

That doesn’t mean those things don’t happen.

And I was interjecting on the notion of how someone would go out of their way to abuse the tool. It’s like suggesting someone malicious would want to break a person’s window with foam instead of a brick; there’s better tools that are easier to use for the task.

As far as statistics go, we can look at the 600+ likes this thread’s OP has and then follow through the the 600+ replies made to discern that nobody has come forward with any actual recollections of a poor experience. A biased study, obviously, but I hope that does become more telling to any Community Managers that read through this page that there were more people being hurt by their locking the API than there were people being helped. lol

I honestly hope they do restore access to the api for this addon, presumming they don’t have a reason for blocking it in the first place.

I’m really hopeful that Zandrae’s check-through of all the different add-ons broken by this change is implicative that the choice wasn’t intended to break this addon and, by extension, will have alternative APIs for developers to utilize going forward.

There really is so much potential but unless we get a post tonight or tomorrow, I’m expecting most of the company to be on a “slow” coasting for the holidays.

I think Cross RP is just a casualty, one of many. I can also at this point make a slightly reasonable case why it should remain accessible to addons.

I fear the ignore extending add-on I use for my sanity may also be broken.

The author of TRP has been tweeting at Blizzard about the API changes. He was saying other addons are also broken for stuff like guild chat.

I’ve the nature of the changes I was concerned about logging software because accessibility. I haven’t had a chance to log in and fully test it.

I almost wonder if all this has something to do with the European privacy laws and deleting data. Who knows.

At the very least, I just hopped onto my main & secondary accounts and did some test posts in /g and Elephant picked them up just fine.

That’s fantastic. It means I’ll be able to keep reading guild chat even on bad days when I need bigger less sans serif text.

[Tammya-moon-guard]

At the very least, I just hopped onto my main & secondary accounts and did some test posts in /g and Elephant picked them up just fine.

That’s fantastic. It means I’ll be able to keep reading guild chat even on bad days when I need bigger less sans serif text.

Unfortunately not… The way it works is that you receive a temporary ID whenever someone posts something in guild chat. That temporary ID lasts until you relog or restart the game, and then your logs will disappear. I expect the guild chat breakage to be undone, if anything, because you can’t even make clickable web links anymore.

[Zandrae-wyrmrest-accord (Zandrae)]

At the very least, I just hopped onto my main & secondary accounts and did some test posts in /g and Elephant picked them up just fine.

That’s fantastic. It means I’ll be able to keep reading guild chat even on bad days when I need bigger less sans serif text.

Unfortunately not… The way it works is that you receive a temporary ID whenever someone posts something in guild chat. That temporary ID lasts until you relog or restart the game, and then your logs will disappear. I expect the guild chat breakage to be undone, if anything, because you can’t even make clickable web links anymore.

That is curious.

Am I understanding that when gchat is logged by add-on, when you relog it poofs from the addon?