I just scrolled through hundreds of messages given by people displaying overwhelming support for this feature – and an equal measure of disappointment over its removal – that has now been denied to them with seemingly no justifiable reason, and I don’t see even one blue post acknowledging anything being said. It’s one thing to implement a change, but quite another to refuse to communicate about it. As far as we know, it was decided on a whim to enforce the locked API, and we have no explanation as to why. I sincerely hope the Q&A addresses changes like these that feel alarmingly underhanded, otherwise there will be even more faith lost when a lot of people are already struggling to maintain it as it is for various reasons.
At the very least, Blizzard, your players deserve that acknowledgement. Your community deserves an explanation. They deserve communication from you about changes you implement. It might be your game to do with as you please, which is your right, but it wouldn’t exist without the players that remain dedicated to it.
Honestly, I think the overwhelming support for this addon shows more than anything that restricting chat between the factions is an archaic design that needs to just go.
The issue isn’t that it’s useless. The issue is that it’s positively disruptive.
The PVP rule set, including for us roleplayers, is designed to permit the players to self police by giving them PVP solutions to PVP problems.
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.
From an RPPVP perspective, the add on facilitates exploitation of a limitation of the mechanics regarding who can attack whom. Since it’s an exploit, banning it is the right thing to do.
The amount of people using it for friendly RP vastly outnumbers the amount of people who do what you talk about.
Honestly, I didn’t even know RPPVP was a thing until this topic. Most people hate having war mode on for RP because gankers ruin immersion.
(And that aside, if people want to be spies, I don’t know why they would use cross RP to do it when discord or a cross-faction community actually does the job easier.)
This is, at the most generous level, a reaching sort of point. Not only does it fail to take into account that just about no one – including those participating in the faction warfare ICly – uses War Mode in RP, something like that would occur so rarely that even bringing the point up makes it asinine.
I mean not to sound insulting, but it’s hard to make a sound argument against this. Even if it were “exploited” to speak with the other faction, so what? It’s never been easier to do so; it’s already crossed the point of being redundant with Communities.
Even then, if I remember correctly, doing so was possible even before communities. B/Velves can speak to each other, DHs, Pandaren, pretty sure some mages can if they get the arcane linguist thing. I dunno. Maybe I’m missing a point from what Irisse meant. It’s likely, but /shrug.
I’m not going to say this is implausible, but the number of steps needed to take here is already a barrier to this. In addition, it’s not like these “spies” can join the same group as your attackers, so party and raid chat is useless. They’d have to be within /y distance, at the most, which kind of seems like a big giveaway. It’d be easier to use discord for some coordinated ganking like that.
CrossRP functions via BNet groups, which could facilitate the “spotting” you’re talking about without using addons at all. Suggesting that CrossRP is an exploit because it facilitates cross-faction communication is disingenuous when cross-faction communication is a feature of the channel it uses.
Until they switched from server types to individualized war mode, the highest population RP server was an RPPVP server. The evidence is that at least as many find that gankers improve immersion as ruin it. The game is set in the middle of a faction war; you should expect occasional attacks from the opposite faction.
There are extremely limited and less subject to exploitation.
Cross faction chat doesn’t really contribute to griefing. As far as I’m aware, that’s not common at all (the bigger concern is it making people NOT fight). Let me put this into some perspective:
Evil Plan A:
Team 1 is on Alliance, and team 2 is on Horde. Team 1 establishes communication via some “shady” cross faction chat addon, so they can play as spies and sell out their allies, and team 2 comes to slaughter said allies.
Evil Plan B:
Team 1 establishes communication via Discord voice chat, so they can communicate even easier than cross-faction chat, and team 2 comes to slaughter said allies.
Evil Plan C:
Team 1 establishes communication via the new BattleNet community voice chat right in the game, which is possible with the game’s features, and team 2 comes to slaughter said allies.
Cross-faction chat is probably the most difficult solution to this sort of griefing.
As for the concern against the factions “getting along”, it’s not an easy problem to solve, but in another thread I mentioned about War Mode being something that could disable cross-faction chat to preserve a competitive gameplay, while otherwise there being more communication options, because the factions don’t really do anything with each other when PVP is disabled.
except you cant use it in warmode and,i feel this is the most important part, YOU HAVE TO BE APART OF THE SAME BNET COMMUNITY. just having the addon doesnt suddenly make you able to talk cross faction.
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.
It’s bound to happen from time to time, and like Tammy said, we honestly just need someone with authority to shed light on the situation.
With enough luck, tomorrow, we’ll have an answer, or maybe even a solution to our dilemma. Until then, again, it’s best to keep this thread as constructive as possible.
Common sense based on the evidence we’ve already provided?
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?
It’s also been addressed already that 90% of RPers hate war mode for those activities, because as stated, being ganked ruins immersion.
Ya’ll are just being silly naysayers at this point.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")