Honestly, I think calling it “broad communication” is coloring it the wrong way, especially because the functionality of what this addon did was already in place in multiple systems. Players of an Alliance and Horde community could replicate the same scenario by being in a Battle-net Community in game.
It wasn’t really broad; it was limited and the benefit of using it existed solely in how it connected the dots of existing features for a more seamless experience.
Limited to a 40 yard range for most features.
What I mean by ‘broad’ is that anyone can talk to anyone else. As Zandrae just pointed out:
If it was based on proximity, then it didn’t function the way chat channels (in game or Community groups) are meant to and simulates in-world, proximity based communication like what you have between members of your own faction and if Blizzard determined they didn’t want to allow that, I’m not surprised.
Only the people in the community chat could hear the other faction that was also in the community chat.
As described earlier by the addon author, that was a choice of its development. In no way, shape, or form did that translate to breaking a term of service or breaking someone’s experience in the gameplay, and it didn’t have a direct conflict with the game’s design philosophy because it was entirely Opt-In at 3 separate levels between both users.
It wasn’t a magical “If you download the addon you immediately can go to Orgrimmar and talk to whoever you want.”
It was a a small jump from talking to someone in a Battle-net community, to being able to RP with them in /say or /e by using that battle-net community’s API.
You would have to find someone who can help you join the mutual battle-net community after downloading the addon, connect to the community’s relay channel through the addon, and go physically to find the person you want to talk to.
What you just described as a reason for Blizzard to want to turn it off, is unironically one of the safety features put into it to avoid any bad experiences.
If it simulates a function Blizzard does not want to allow players to have, then it doesn’t matter how many people are doing it or what you have to do to achieve that simulation. Blizzard has to determine whether to let it be or end it.
if they chose to let it be, then they can no longer make a reasonable case why they don’t just open that function to everyone at all times.
I think they would then have to defend why they don’t allow cross-faction guilds or cross-faction raids.
They already cannot make a reasonable case given the myriad of exceptions to the restriction that already exists, including the shared languages between a few specific races/classes.
Don’t you think it’s at least a little bit bizarre that we can chat with people on entirely different games from our phone while at work, but talking to the exact same people face-to-face in-game through /s is prohibited?
I’m going to reiterate this again for the people that missed it the first dozen times.
We don’t know at this point if the API changes had anything to do with Cross RP or if this is an unintended consequence.
The purpose of this thread seems to be to express support of the add-on and share our positive opinions, stories and experience so the developers can see how the software helped the community and the harm of this unintended consequence.
It’s not a thread for those with faulty logic and poor reading comprehension to smugly talk down to people on a topic they know literally nothing about and argue about if it’s against the rules.
Ion explained (Blizzcon 2017 Q&A) that the reason they don’t have cross-faction communities or guilds is because those groups are meant to be a collection of people that can play the game together. You can’t do dungeons and raids or world quests together if you’re on opposing sides, so that’s why they don’t want you in the same community - because from a game design perspective, that’d just be confusing to normal players.
He also explained that if you want to chat across factions, then you can use the new BattleNet groups, though emphasized that those are player to player rather than character to character (as orcs and humans don’t get along).
In the case of roleplay, people like to blend the rules a lot more, play the game differently than how the game mechanics strictly are, and I really don’t think Blizzard would intentionally block the API for this purpose alone, especially when they want to encourage more “community” this expansion, with all these new communication features.
I’m not saying I know any better than anyone. Like I said, I just think two things can be true at once. I’m interested in whether or not they say anything though.
To many people’s understandings and after a few people managed to communicate with employees, it wasn’t and while it isn’t a short reach to assume Blizzard’s previous policies were involved in this decision, there’s no documentation on the matter that effects it anymore.
Frankly, I think having left it to a gray area would have been fine and it was a general consensus that Blizzard didn’t want to put an answer on the addon at all.
I missed that quote at the time. I would’ve definitely remembered Ion saying something so utterly silly.
I have an idea, it’s not as elegant as an add-on that makes it possible to RP across faction in game but it’s a work around. Discord. Set up a Crossfaction Discord for RP purposes. You could have chat channels and voice chat channels for each RP realm.
There are numerous discords for that purpose. It’s generally more awkward than RPing in-game, is all.
Possibly. They could’ve left it alone. I could understand if they felt like they needed to address it though.
A lot of people already do discord RP already but tbh it’s not very easy for me to get immersed in. The opportunities for that already exist and the activity would, ultimately, be completely different compared to being in-game.
There are actually a ton of RP oriented Discords.
I am a moderator of Wyrmrest Discord, one of the larger server oriented servers with a small population of about 2000 users.
There are Discords for anything you want to play. Every race. Some classes with unique identities.
Unfortunately Discord RP removes the need to log on.
A lot of posters here came from Discord.
The issue is again, volume of players. Not to mention you’d have to be constantly tabbing in and out, and it’d be hard to tell how close someone is to you reading discord.
A discord with 1k+ ACTIVE speakers would be complete and utter chaos to the point of unusable. Think of any discord channel that has more than 10 or so active speakers, it becomes a complete mess of chattering over each other more often than not.
Otherwise, I would more than support this solution.
Don’t worry I’m just speaking my opinion in general there. ![:smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smile.png?v=6" ":smile:")
My post isn’t an exact quote, but Ion was replying to someone who asked about cross-faction communities or guilds.
People use Discord for voice?