See my above post. If an old school feature (in this particular case, stealth showing up in the combat log) can be abused by modern technology or player behavior to such a degree that it contravenes the spirit of vanilla, it is subject to fixing. Blizzard has unequivocally set that precedent.
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I support anything that makes rogues suffer.
Let me ask you this. Say an exploit was found that takes advantage of an old mechanic. Say if you jumped backwards three times in row on top of a rock in Ashenvale, your character teleported you GM Island became immune to all damage and CC until you logged out, and this was found to have existed in vanilla and was a feature put in by GMs to have them access GM Island.
No changes because it existed in vanilla, right?
You see the logically fallacy in your argument, sir?
They could remove stealth from the combat log for the opposing faction? That could fix a majority of the issues without breaking other addons.
Absolutely they could. And probably will. Just a matter of time.
Stop crying, I always watch my combat log regardless of spy addon. get gud
I see zero evidence of this. Spell Alert existed in Vanilla, as did all its subsequent variants and improvements, from as early as pre-release. Patch 0.8 was July 7, 2004, Spell Alert was first made in July 12, 2004.
It uses 15yr old API calls.
Yeah this is comparable… 
False equivalency. The existence and support for API access to the Combat Log is in no way comparable to a glitched method to access an otherwise inaccessible area that players were punished for accessing in the past. Furthermore, we have plenty of history showing Blizzard punishing people for abusing mechanics that circumvent intended game mechanics, like that guild who Evade-bugged the adds on Yogg-0, or the other guild that made LK’s platform reform.
You’re going to have to do a lot better than this hilarity.
Not without redesigning the Combat Log to include new parameter flags for this explicit purpose.
And it also says, right on the landing page by the author himself, that it’s practically useless for and not intended to be used in group PvP.
That’s not dissimilar from the other add-on you linked, which explicitly states (in an all caps “WARNING” no less) that the auto targeting and auto generated list functions can’t be used simultaneously due to network and performance limitations.
It’s patently obvious that you just don’t want to give up your advantage.
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Every blue post and add-on you’ve linked to indicates the “time” was in TBC.
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That’s irrelevant to the point. The API functions existed, in Patch 0.8.
So the authors wrote less efficient, terrible code… this has been noted already and you got all mad when I pointed it out. The Gizmo code never unregisters anything so it is just adding more and more info endlessly. The early Spell Alert, which later became Witch Hunt and SpellAlerter, uses near endless if/then loops to check for individual combat events. Both of these are horrendously optimized and like so many other addons of the Vanilla/TBC era, ate up memory and lagged machines without careful use.
None of this refutes their existence or the API functions they relied upon.
/giggle
Nice rebuttal. You try to compare Spy to somehow finding your way to GM Island that also inexplicably turns on God Mode and when called on it your rebuttal is just a baseless attack on my motivations, not even my argument.
HAHAHA
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Oh yes… Patch 0.8 is definitely “TBC”
Just stop.
I didn’t get mad. I pointed out that you are taking issue with the author’s code when it’s documented that the API calls you think he should have used to clean up his code didn’t exist until TBC.
Spell alert existed before TBC, but the author himself said that it wouldn’t work and shouldn’t be used in group PvP, which is what this conversation is discussing.
Whatever else you want to argue, your original claim that “Spy” existed and was used in vanilla is false.
You established a specific target API didn’t exist, not that scraping unfiltered events didn’t exist. You can read the Blue post on the Combat Log update for Patch 2.4, they didn’t add unfiltered scraping, they added filtered scraping. You could always get unfiltered data.
That’s how DBM and SCT and so many other addons work.
/facepalm
The onus is on you to demonstrate that the API calls and functionality of the current iteration of Spy existed during the vanilla timeframe because we are on a modern version game client with a different set of API calls than existed in vanilla.
I provided some evidence that they were not the same, but that was simply me acting gracious. The burden of proof is not on me; that said, I’ve already provided prima facia evidence that they were not the same.
At no point has this conversation been about group or organized PvP. The chief complaint about Spy is how the element of surprise is removed from a Rogue attempting to attack someone in wPvP, ie ganking.
You just can’t help yourself making things up, can you?
The original claim was always that what “Spy” does, regardless of the addon name, has existed forever. Splitting hairs over the efficacy of some mod authors code, popularity, etc, doesn’t change the fact that I could always track every event in the Combat Log and feed that into a separate window.
I’ve already done that, scroll up. Unfiltered event parsing has always existed, you can even browse the changes here:
https://wow.gamepedia.com/COMBAT_LOG_EVENT
The big, gee-whiz, change of 2.4 was being able to run multiple filters simultaneously so you only pulled precisely what you wanted. That’s why Recount was able to look at so much more info, quickly, and without bogging your computer, by no longer needing to manually filter with LUA code. Spy doesn’t care about filtering at all, it just uses the existence of an enemy player entity event in the log as a ping. It is that simple.
You found proof of a change in targeting by name because Patch 2.4 gave us targeting by GUID, which is irrelevant to Spy, Witch Hunt, Gizmo, Spell Alert, or any other addon that simply tries to track events like a radar.
Heh. Like I said the other day, this isn’t even your best trolling, you’re so out of your depth now.
This guy just isn’t very bright. Blizzard’s complete lack of a response does not imply they blessed it in any way at all - such a disingenuous stretching of reality.
So because you seem incapable of understanding why this addon is a problem I’ll take this slowly…
Imagine for a moment you are in BRM with your raid and as you enter there is another raid of the opposing faction already there. For illustrative purposes let’s call this a 40v40 situation. This addon reads what could be hundreds of lines of data to give you an incredibly accurate portrayal of the opposing raid group with relative locations by parsing information from the combat log. It is not humanly possible to analyze that much data within milliseconds so the argument that people can do all this by simply looking at their combat log is frankly ludicrous. You are provided information you couldn’t humanly have without this addon.
Now because I’m sure you will go off on a tangent about how damage meters do the same thing, I want to heavily stress this is absolutely not the same thing. Damage meters are simply an informational mechanism that provides me with no advantage over another player - sure I can interpret the meters and have some form of benefit but the onus is on the individual player to do that, and not the addon. The Spy addon is entirely different from that because it gives you (admittedly some of the data you could figure out yourself, such as smaller number PvP interactions with less lines of data flooding the system) information that puts you at a clear advantage over those without the addon without the player needing to do anything at all - it is a crutch.
The important distinction with this addon is it requires nothing from the user to be able to have an advantage, all you have to do is have it. Certainly there are addons, such as Gatherer or Auctioneer that provide a lot of quality of life enhancements, but you can do everything those addons do without the use of them, albeit much more difficulty.
It’s fairly obvious this addon skews balance heavily - far different from your incorrect idea of imbalance.
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This is true with Spy as well. You seem to be in denial about this simple fact.
You seemed to have been incapable of reading my response. So if you can’t do that why bother replying?
SOME of what spy can do can be done manually but as you see in my wall of text there is an easy example of a time when it’s not humanly possible to do what the addon does.