It isn’t that high effort. At least not if your natural movement style isn’t a bunny on speed. 
But, yes, you need to care about the position of a second player too.
It is just what you make it. If you are perceiving that as tedious, then it is. (What would be absolutely ok.) Others probably take it as a challenge and actually like it.
Well, I guess you have no real idea how difficult/complex it is to play the game and dungeons/raids totally blind, compared with what you are doing as a sighted player. 
And yes, it is of course not totally breaking their game. It is just making their gameplay worse. They could do without that.
But why? The thing is, imho restricting FollowUnit is unnecessary, and just adressing the symptoms, not the cause.
Personally, I totally agree that boosting should be restricted. I don’t like it. (That is my personal opinion, though.)
But restricting that won’t change anything on boosting. Those guys will continue boost. It probably will get slightly less comfortable, but that’s it. But it will get much more uncomfortable for other audiences, who are using FollowUnit for a good and valid reason.
Boosters will just get back from Netflix to their PC every 20 minutes to press the follow key. Or set up a script that is doing that for them. They won’t really care about that change.
Blind players will have more effort all the time, as following is such an important part of their general gameplay.
So, where is the value of restricting FollowUnit?
As suggested, there are imho much better ways against boosting. No xp for afk players. Or xp only, if a player took part in combat during a specific time frame. In dungeons. That would keep boosters much more from doing their boost thing and won’t affect other players.
hi.
Other blind player here. i hope blizzard ill not block follow opportunities. it will made our gameplay more difficult
Yes, it is hard to have a discussion about something when someone can’t realistically put themselves in the other person’s shoes, but that doesn’t mean that my perspective is invalid, necessarily. Rather, I think what it means in this case is that it falls on those who have experience playing the game blind with a sighted guide, or who have heard from people who play blind with a guide to explain how the negatives of this change would outweigh the positives of it. What I haven’t seen and would like to see in this thread is someone who:
Identifies as either playing blind with a guide or knows a lot about the experiences of one such player
Fully understands the change and its implications, meaning they understand that this is not simply removing /follow from the game and that they further understand that addons still have the ability to, for example, play a sound in response to a chat message keyword indicating that they should /follow their guide, or that they could have a /follow macro whose target could be dynamically changed at any time via an addon
Explains their reasoning as to why this specific change negatively impacts the blind player experience, for X, Y, and Z reason, with specific scenarios
And another question for blind people who play with a guide, if you’re reading this - would you not feel more engaged if it was you who commanded your character to follow your guide, instead of just having your character magically commanded by another player to stop and start your character’s movement? From my perspective, even in a hypothetical scenario where I place the blind player experience at the absolute top of my priority list, I still am not convinced that blind players would actually have more fun with their movement being more automated. And again, fully acknowledging that I don’t have a great idea of what it’s like to play blind with a guide, which is why I’m asking you guys to explain why I’m wrong to think this.
Sure, it won’t be enough of an inconvenience for some people, but not everyone is equally inclined to boost; for some people it will be enough to stop them from doing it, or will reduce the amount they do it, both of which are positive effects. Furthermore, you’re only considering the boosting aspect of it - there are also multiboxers which benefit heavily from the current FollowUnit API. We should do what we can to discourage both boosting and multiboxing, as both have a negative impact on the game.
Now, if there were a perfect solution that would allow us to not restrict FollowUnit while simultaneously killing boosting and multiboxing, then sure, maybe I’d have a different stance here. But unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, there is no such perfect solution.
How can you possibly suggest no exp for afk players as a means of fighting boosting, when just one paragraph before that, you told me that requiring players to tab back from their netflix to get exp would be ineffective at fighting boosting? If I don’t get exp while afk, all I have to do is make a weakaura that plays a sound when I’m about to go afk so that I tab back every few minutes to reset the afk timer. Also does nothing to discourage multiboxing, but the planned change does.
That would be terrible. Let’s say I’m a healer, and my group is a bunch of pumper DPS with front-loaded burst damage. They go into a pack and immediately kill a mob, but I never got into combat, because I was drinking or just conserving mana. Well, guess I just won’t get as much experience as everyone else. 
Also does nothing to discourage multiboxing, but the planned change does.
Hopefully soon they do just ban it. That’s what I see coming out of all this accessibility discussion going on. The sooner the better.
And if you have to play the game in such a way that hurts you, I’d recommend not doing that.
Blizzard doesn’t have any problem making games that people play at a competitive level that cause RSI:
Aside from the fact that its incredibly fun, there are huge advantages to mulitbox play in WoW. I don’t want to derail the discussion however; I only wanted to post about the reality of how many play the game and call to attention the apparent contradiction in policy vs. implementation vs. reality.
I don’t genuinely believe that breaking the /follow mechanism is going to save the world from boosters or RMT. I only think it’ll cause negative issues for a small portion of the population, and do more harm (not just to me) than good.
So, you are a healer that isn’t part of the combat for, let’s say 5 minutes, because you were drinking and conserving mana? Why are you even part of that group? 
Because no xp on afk wouldn’t have unintended side effects on other players. It of course would be as useless and missing the intended effect as restricting FollowUnit would be.
Unfortunately the players that your are targeting with that change are exactly those people that are inclined to boost on a level at that they are even motivated to download and install weakauras to make it more comfortable. And they are for sure willing to just download some other tool to still do it.
Players that are not that inclined to boost most probably won’t even use the weakaura/FollowUnit.
Therefore the restriction won’t change anything on boosting and has no mentionable positive impact.
Throughout this thread and the one that he has posted on the Community Council forum, Kruffzz is advocating for change that he has unilaterally deemed to be inappropriate. He does not like people being able to afk while getting boosted. And he does not like people multiboxing.
Kruffzz even goes so far as to conclude that “We should do what we can to discourage both boosting and multiboxing, as both have a negative impact on the game.”
As to the boosting, the general consensus seems to be that boosting was too rampant and was bringing in a huge amount of gold into the economy via the mages and paladins’ ability to farm hundreds of gold per hour in raw drops. And the boosting also contributed to RMT arguably with people preferring to pay hundreds or thousands of gold to have their character leveled in lieu of playing in real groups or questing in the open world.
Blizzard has recently taken steps to reduce the prominence of boosting via select dungeon nerfs. We have seen that they have deterred the lesser geared players, but not much has changed for those in high-end gear that can kill quickly. At some point, if people want to pay very high prices which equate to literally thousands of gold to level their chars, there is not much anyone can do to stop that from occurring. With the release of the level 70 Blizzard boost in WOTLK, I imagine people will just buy the boost directly as opposed to hoping to find a Slave Pens booster. The focus should be on dungeon mechanics in WOTLK in the 70-80 era at this point in Classic’s lifespan.
As to the multiboxing, Blizzard has banned the use of broadcasting. It is still very much accepted to play multiple characters as long as you are abiding by the one click, per action, per character rule. Removing the ability to have multiple characters follow at once doesn’t stop multiboxing as it just creates another step in the macro, as others more tech-savvy than I have pointed out in both this thread and the other.
Long story short, Blizzard should not let Kruffzz’s crusade against boosting and multiboxing lead it to make a short-sighted decision that in reality will not change anything for either of the two types of gameplay Kruffzz’s is speaking out against.
I thought pressing one key to activate follow on multiple wow accounts is regarded as key broadcasting which is banned. I also multibox two characters, but use 2 computers and 2 keyboards with basic wow macros.
You are correct that “key broadcasting” is banned, but this is unrelated and the explanation is slightly technical.
This discussion is regarding the FollowUnit API, which is not a protected function and thus does not require a key to be pressed at all. Any non-protected functions can be used by addons (or WeakAuras, etc), which is necessary to enable the bulk of the games’ customization via these addons.
As an example of this sort of automation, the ItemRack addon can be configured to equip specific pieces of gear automatically, such as equipping +mount speed items when mounting, as doing this by hand is quite tedious and easily forgotten.
Per the linked post at the top, Blizzard intends to mark the FollowUnit API as being “protected”, which means that any attempt to utilize the functionality of following players would require a “hardware event” (i.e. a button press or mouse-click).
The controversy stems from the reasoning used to justify it — to inconvenience boosters.
If this change is made, boosters will be inconvenienced such that they will be required to have their “customers” press a button to /follow them, but this will only affect the laziest of their customers, as players already have to deal with automatic disconnects for any player that has been AFK for an extended period of time. (Note: the FollowUnit API does not clear the AFK flag)
Those that will be disproportionately impacted by this change, however, are the individuals that rely on this API to implement accessibility features to their game. While I doubt anyone would argue that players with disabilities are anything other than a tiny fraction of the entire player-base, any change that impacts this demographic should warrant some additional criticism before any knee-jerk decisions are made.
Lastly, to address the elephant in the room – multi-boxers – this change adds nothing beyond more minor inconveniences. This demographic is clearly in Blizzards’ good-graces, and this style of play is allowed, yet this change disproportionately affects these players as well.
In short, if the intent of the change is to prevent or otherwise abolish boosting, this isn’t the way to do it. As stated above by myself and many others, this change won’t fix that issue, and those that are emphatically saying otherwise are letting emotions cloud their vision.
So, feature removed with Wrath.
No value, but gameplay made worse for disabled players.
Great job. -.-
I wouldn’t mind some transparency regarding the results of this change. I’m willing to wait a period of time of course, as I recognize that it will take time for Blizzard to collect the data and write something up.
From my perspective though, boosting still occurs even after this change. It remains the responsibility of players to report them now, just as it was before.
Not only am I mildly annoyed that the change wasn’t the proverbial silver bullet to the problem, I now have the additional annoyance of being required to hand-hold my alts while navigating around the game world. I imagine that any players with disabilities that also relied on this functionality are experiencing similar annoyances, though Blizzard has yet to even offer so much as a “temporary workaround” for them. Despite the recommendations provided in this thread, Blizzard instead chose to rush this change in and shirked the responsibility of implementing solutions or workarounds to the playerbase. Asking addon authors to find alternative ways to enable play for these types of players is something I see as being very inconsiderate, not to mention discriminatory to any affected players, and I have immense sympathy for anyone who cannot play a game they love because Blizzard cares so little about them that they didn’t take it upon themselves to introduce any new functionality to alleviate any issues caused by the removal of this feature. I see it as a clear signal that Blizzard has no intention of treating disabled players as anything other than third-class citizens. The decision to implement this change was apparently made ~7 calendar days after it was suggested judging by the dates on the original thread in the Community Council forum, which is certainly not long enough for Blizzard to have “reached out to gamers with disabilities” as they said they would do.
I consider myself blessed that I do not have to resort to player-created addons and/or weakauras to trigger audible alerts telling me when I need to press a button in order to play a video game at its most fundamental level. I sincerely hope that affected individuals find a true solution that allows them to continue enjoying the game, as the decision to remove functionality that easily falls under the classification of “accessibility” is outright disgusting. The reasoning for its removal is the salt on the wound, as this was a thinly-veiled excuse specifically to prevent people from playing the game. For a company that so recently was publicly admonished for the mistreatment of its employees, I at least expected better treatment of the people that give them money.
I understand the difficulty in finding solutions to the player-created problem of “boosting”, but I don’t pay Blizzard every month so they can implement these sorts of cop-out “solutions” that remove features from the game instead of adding them. I am a huge proponent of inclusivity, but it seems Blizzard is not. Even though the recent change in the Dragonflight beta for “press and hold casting” is being advertised as an “accessibility” feature, its implementation rides on the coat-tails of new “Empower” spells, rather than it being the direct result of any internal objective to “improve accessibility”.
Seeing as how the amount of players with disabilities constitute such a small segment of the active playerbase, I fully anticipated that this thread wouldn’t see much traffic. Even so, I remained hopeful that somewhere inside of Blizzard there existed someone with a moral compass who would champion this cause and approach accessibility with some compassion, treating it (and the disabled individuals that so heavily rely on them) as first-class citizens.
Unfortunately, it seems I was wrong.
Please Google the term “ableism”. I’m sure your photo will be promptly displayed there.