Why? If a bunch of people are out of eyeshot but within range of your Combat Log, why shouldn’t you be able to figure out what’s going on?
“B-b-b-but my IMMERSION”
Correct. The coordinates that Spy provides are your own, which is why it communicates a “Near me!” message to other users. Spy simply uses any events by a hostile player as a radar “ping” to alert you to their presence, nothing more. It only flags unique events like Stealth, but it could be configured to flag any other spell if you wanted to modify the code. Other addons do exactly that, specifically for healing spells and such.
Might I add, since I edited those options I’m actually getting alliance locations in completely different zones. I saw markers in Felwood, Winterspring, the tower area slightly south of Tarren Mill. Went to there, and there’s a group of alliance I helped kill. So the marking is fully active actually. The zones were getting splattered with them.
As would be expected with everyone pinging and sharing pings within Combat Log ranges, but I’m not seeing any triangulation code in the LUA for synchronous pings (and you’d need several to even be remotely accurate). Sounds like you’re getting locations for where Horde were when they saw Alliance, not where Alliance themselves are.
EDIT: Okay so I dug through and found the location function Spy uses.
function Spy:GetPlayerLocation(playerData)
local location = playerData.zone
local mapX = playerData.mapX
local mapY = playerData.mapY
if location and playerData.subZone and playerData.subZone ~= "" and playerData.subZone ~= location then
location = playerData.subZone..", "..location
end
if mapX and mapX ~= 0 and mapY and mapY ~= 0 then
location = location.." ("..math.floor(tonumber(mapX) * 100)..","..math.floor(tonumber(mapY) * 100)..")"
end
return location
end
Spy only grabs the Spy-user’s location, and that is the data sent to everyone else using Spy’s “ShowMapNote” function.
Also note there are no references in the Spy LUA to the range of your Combat Log, meaning if someone were to modify the range to the max (200) or dramatically shorten it (to ease computer spam), there would be no way for Spy to notice even if it were trying to triangulate a location to place a pin.
So in short: any pins you see generated by Spy are locations of Spy users when they saw someone in their Combat Log, anywhere from on top of them to 200 yards away in any direction.
Unlike most people on this thread who either overtly or covertly want spy because they simply hate rogues or aren’t good enough to play against them without spy.
That’s what they’ve said many a time. Apparently when fishing, on a FP, mining, herbing, in an active battle with 2 undead warlocks, partially afk listening to Netflix in the background, still got those eyes on the combat log.
You need to get better is what they’re saying.
Me personally? Nah, too much staring… Can’t be doing that all day.
I don’t get why you think this is such a slam-dunk rebuttal, especially the part about being partially AFK. The default UI will flash and alert you that you’ve entered combat with something even if you’re alt-tabbed. Plenty of basic functions in-game without a single UI adjustment give additional alerts that don’t necessitate 100% attention.
Like I said to Rozen, the way you guys try to describe the Combat Log makes me really question just how young you all are, or how little you ever drive a vehicle IRL.
It was comedic, lighten up. You’ve been arguing for 5 days straight with us. You need to hit a blunt, man.
Don’t know what this has to do with it? Um, someone running by buffing and dropping said buffs won’t alert you unless you looked at the combat log at the time.
Sigh… yes real comedic when “use your combat log then” is never actually responded to with anything vaguely intelligent. For five days the red herring of “STARE AT IT 100% NEVER BLINKING” has been happening. It is tiresome and stupid.
The game fires alerts based upon Combat Log triggers. It is as simple as that. Blizzard opened up the Combat Log and API to let you setup other triggers that you like.
Yeah the “I’m only pretending to be stupid” card is a bit overplayed.
I’m of the mind most things can be made a bit comedic to lighten the situation up, people get too stressed over nothing and seem to think it’s normal. Chill, step back, and take another look at your situation from an outside perspective.
Some self help there.
It’s why I made a joke of it. Lighten up.
While you may think you look at it all the time, you’ve got to admit most people never did, nor do they now. Most people I’ve talked to didn’t even know you could edit the combat log to see this information, and found it crazy when I told them. Had to explain to a ton of people that Spy isn’t hacking lol. I might not agree with it as a function in game, but I still like to try to keep the information as correct as possible. It’s why I played with the settings in Spy to see if I could get the enemy location sharing to work.
This whole “staring” at the combat log (because people claim they glance at it because they moved it to a separate window so now they’ve got two boxes to look at) is done by the elite from what I’ve seen. Haven’t met any casual players that claim they did this, and I’ve talked to my guild and friend members that I’ve known for, well, this entire game? Was news to them, as it is still news to allot of people coming by and reading this thread.
So when someone replies to you astonished and asks if you stare at the combat logs, be honest. You glance at it when it moves, and check the information there. Now casual players have the same information that professional and hardcore players used. With this information, pvp in classic is no longer like it was in vanilla. Whether you agree with that or not, it’s your prerogative.
You want it to stay because it’s a part of the old system, I want it out because it was a part hardly anyone knew about, and it wasn’t something you saw literally every single time you log into a pvp server.
People are forgetting the point of this post. It is not necessarily about whether SPY itself should be banned. It is about whether the supposed-to-be stealthy rogue class should set off an alarm every time they use their core ability. Not only does it take away from the skill of playing against a rogue, it is immersion breaking and contrary to the spirit of vanilla.
There’s 2 arguments to this, and they are at odds with each other.
Mechanically, spy does nothing that isn’t allowed, and it’s hard to argue that something that doesn’t break the rules as an addon should be removed.
Ethically, spy removes the skill component of detecting rogues from the combat log, and it’s prevalence compared to classic makes the rogue kit less powerful than intended. It’s difficult to argue that it should be left as is from this perspective.
I tend to agree with the ethical argument, myself. It operates within the rules but the information it provides frees up enough focus on the player to provide a significant advantage, and that unfairly impacts rogues. It cheapens the experience for everyone involved- rogues become less threatening, less powerful, and more manageable to counter.
As to the #nochanges wrinkle- yes, this did exist in classic. But as an addon the argument is more nuanced. Blizzard has an obligation to try and recreate vanilla as best they can for classic, but does this extend to making sure addons, an optional downloadable content, continue to function exactly as they did? An argument could be made that nochanges does not apply to addon functionality.
“We didn’t know how powerful the Combat Log really is!” - This is not an argument. At no point did Blizzard expect everyone to master the code they provided, nor did Blizzard anticipate every single clever thing one could do with the information they freely provide, but they made the executive decision to outsource UI tweaks and improvements to the people who consistently playtest their product on a daily basis.
I’m sorry if this all strikes you, your friends, and posters on these boards as new and sudden, and the sheer volume of available information about every action you take is absolutely staggering when you really start to dig into it… but that’s just how it has always been.
The trick was never about the info being available, but how to efficiently code it so that it displays in a way that makes sense to the user. That’s why addons generally became increasingly popular with each passing year and why Blizzard integrated their own versions of many as well, along with opening up the Combat Log even more.
You can play this game with the default UI just fine. Minor adjustments within the UI can make your play even more enjoyable. But since there isn’t a flashing button on the side telling you “Hey look here, here are all the other things you can do and here’s some ready-made examples!!!” a lot of folks keep playing none the wiser to what’s readily available to them.
There’s just no way to do this without flatly blocking API functions we’ve previously accessed but with less experience doing so. We can no more rollback addon sophistication than we can lobotomize ourselves when it comes to discovering an area or gearing our characters or killing a raid boss.
That’s why it is Classic and not Vanilla. The nostalgia will always be a facsimile of our first run through.
That largely depends on the person.
Ive known people heavily into PVP that live by the thing, me? i would find that tedious and annoying, but then those people rocked at PVP
and i do not so
Good. Maybe you don’t know what it’s like getting corpse camped and murdered over and over by Rogues, because you can stealth away… but for the rest of us, Rogues are insane in PvP.
Like, my lvl 60 mage just has to leave a spot I’m camping, because the Rogue waits for me to engage, then stunlocks me until death. Awesome!