Patch 8.1 and Cross-Faction Roleplay

Community General Discussion
446

Well I’ve already written a thousand words so…

447

If it’s giving a function other than that then I don’t care but if it got graved because you can talk to the other faction the rest in peace

448

To simply put it, in the US the rules stating that you cannot communicate cross faction no longer exist and haven’t since… 2017 if I recall correctly.

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449

Is that a “no” on reading the thread, then?

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450

It got graved for unrelated reasons to its function. The ToS no longer bans talking to the opposing faction, and you can already do that using communities which Blizzard themselves created (and is how this addon worked to begin with).

As the OP talks about, this got hit thanks to what we assume was an attempt at taking down a possible exploit and this just happened to be an unexpected side effect. This is not just affecting this addon-- other addons such as TRP, MogIt and DiceMaster are also being affected by whatever Blizzard has chosen to do.

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451

How on earth do you talk to the other faction in game? Is it that damn community feature?

452

It functioned very differently from that and it entirely relied on both the Alliance player and Horde player actively choosing (thrice) that they want to be able to communicate together in a linear step-by-step process.

It’s not an exploit; the addon was so well made that the only way for it to “break” involved Blizzard fundamentally locking off the same channel that at least a dozen other mainstream addons use.

Mog-It links no longer work in community channels, for example.

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453

Tammy is a gem in the community and we were lucky to have them in our guild for a time. Adding my voice to support this fully.

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454

It’s the community feature, yes.

455

Except it shuts down whenever you are in places where you are competing with the Horde, and Blizz allowing certain races to speak to one another does indicate that cross-faction communication isn’t frowned upon now like it was in the past.

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456

Oh god damn didn’t know that was cross faction well then ignore me I thought that was still faction restricted

RIP addon hope you can all get it restored

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457

You can also do it with pandaren, demon hunters, and void elves, for the record.

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458

If you’d read the original post, it’s all explained.

Basically the battlenet groups work across faction. All this addon did was took information posted in a channel ##RELAY and under certain conditions, displayed that text instead of the garbled character speech for others using the addon.

In order for it to work all parties had to:

  1. Join the same bnet group.
  2. Have the addon.
  3. Manually turn the relay on and set it to relay for that specific battlenet group.
  4. Had to be within 40 yards of each other.
  5. Had to not be in a Battleground/Arena/Etc
  6. Had to be on a RP server.

Only when all of those criteria were met, wherein all parties have gone to great lengths and are consenting, may they actually communicate. The same can be accomplished without the software, but it lacks elegance.

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459

Putting in my support for CrossRP’s rebirth or for Blizzard to allow something like it! :heart:

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460

I did but I was clueless to the fact that was cross faction and there was too much nerd speak in it

Won’t lie all I saw was talk to other faction under x condition and I was triggered

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461

Cross RP literally just takes Bnet communities, and makes them appear different. It makes them seamless when RPing. I can understand someone who doesn’t RP not understanding the importance of that, but frankly you don’t need to. The fact remains, it’s simply making an already-added feature look different, just like a million other addons already do, and there’s no reason at all to not allow it.

And again, I’m not even sure this was “banned”. It could in theory be an oversight.

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463

Onto what I came here to say…I’m all in support for the revival of this addon in some form or fashion. I know that it likely wasn’t Blizzard’s intention to take down this addon at all, and that it just happened to be in the path of their goal at the time. Since its original creation, I’ve been using it rather actively for storylines involving the horde on several characters.

Small events hosted by a group of my friends and myself, personal 1 on 1 storylines that were easier to do thanks to CrossRP rather than using Communities outright or Bnet…even large scale events like the Tournament of Ages of which I’ve attended multiple years now.

I’ve never seen the rp community so unified outside of ToA until this addon was created.

Tammy is a blessing with each new addon she creates to ease our rp needs, and I sincerely hope Blizzard acknowledges how much us a community would like to be able to communicate more easily with the other faction. Conflict is so much harder as a rper if you can’t argue and fight with the enemy in rp without the use of such roundabout methods.

I hope that even if Blizzard doesn’t step up and try to amend this, that we as a rp community continue to unite and find a new answer for this sudden loss so that we won’t lose the sudden ability of rping cross-faction so easily.

For the record, I really don’t want to go back to running 2 pandaren and cross-translating every single thing both sides of my events are saying, but I will if that keeps us unified again. <3

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464

Being triggered happens. But no there were a lot of things in place and nothing was being done that was not already possible using things like communities.

I think that the API being altered and it breaking this addon was like, an unforeseen consequence. That actually happens a lot with software development. Part of why people are posting is to try and let people know, “Hey you broke something great” and “We really wish you’d communicate with us and find another way to fix whatever it is you were trying to fix without harming our communities.”

It just takes a lot of support and noise to actually get the developers’ eyes.

1 Like
465

Thanks for the change of heart. :slightly_smiling_face:

It’s really quite clever how it worked, too.

Basically, the addon knew where your character was in the world, and what other addon users were in range to hear you. To use it, you had to have the addon installed and activated (it defaulted to off) and you and the cross-faction players all had to be in the same community that had been configured to use the addon with a designated channel.

While these conditions were met, the addon would intercept open chat (/say, /emote, and chat in a custom /rp channel) and relay them through the community channel. If you were in “hearing” range of another player in your active community who was also using the addon, it would intercept their gibberish and replace it with the text that was actually typed. It was basically the same experience you’d get with two demon hunters speaking Demonic to each other.

In other words, once you jumped through the hoops to activate it, it was a seamless, elegant of RPing with the other faction while blocking unwanted spam and harassment (the community owner could block a harasser, or you could move to another community.)

What’s more is that blocking it doesn’t actually prevent cross-faction RP (there’s nothing stopping you from using communities, Discord, Skype, etc.) but it makes it far less seamless and fluid, and takes you one step out of the world.

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466

Yeah damn blizzard

If you wanted to go down the rabbit hole you can even argue that we have all the faction leaders being able to talk and Jaina and trall clearing being bffs

But some how I can’t tell an ally to go suck on coal?

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