The Spy Classic addon has been used for numerous nefarious purposes by others, and it’s extremely widespread. Gank squads have been using it en mass in order to locate lowbies from literally hundreds of yards away when they otherwise would never have been noticed. City raids have been completely stopped in their tracks since warlocks wanting to try and sneak summon people into the city in order to get past the chokepoint can’t do that anymore. Any possibility of using the element of surprise in world PvP has been completely choked out, as anyone with the addon will know if you come even remotely close to them, making Stealth ineffective both to sneak up on enemies or to sneak away.
I know some of you are going to say “Addons did this back in Vanilla too, so it shouldn’t be broken”. Addons also did the same thing ClassicLFG did back in Vanilla, but that didn’t stop that addon from being broken here in Classic, and the combat log addons back then were far less widespread than Spy is now.
If ClassicLFG, an addon that not many people used and didn’t behave anywhere near any of the LFG tools that Retail has seen in its history got broken, then Spy Classic should be broken as well.
Indeed, I saw the full extent of how easily this addon could be abused, it was when I joined a small scale raid into Duskwood. I was looking forward to some wpvp, but what I experienced sickened me. my party just typed out a chain of coordinates every few seconds/minutes and swarmed on unsuspecting alliance like a heat seeking missle. Upon unsuspecting players, which under normal circumstances would not have been discovered. We didn’t even have a hunter! ( who’s special skill set btw is highly devalued by this addon )
If addons like this existed in Classic, and were then used in BC til BFA, and have essentially always been a part of the game, why would it be broken now?
How do you know how widespread it was then, and how widespread it is now? Anecdotal? How big a difference is it, how do you know its even true, and how do you measure it?
What is unique about Classic specifically that necessitates breaking this all of a sudden?
I’ll be neutral on the topic itself, I could take it or leave it because I see it as something that doesn’t matter as long as its available / unavailable to both factions. That said, I’m not entirely following the justification for removal.
I never used any combat log addon in Vanilla. And I don’t recall ever getting ganked by people that shouldn’t have known I was where I was. So not sure if there was an addon like spy around, or how widespread it was.
What I do know… is Spy is completely broken as f*** OP. After all this hype finally got me to go download it I couldn’t believe how crazy it was. I’ll be questing and names/classes/levels of horde players are constantly popping up on my screen saying they’re close. Majority of them show up on the addon before they’re even close enough for me to target them with /target.
Rogues and druids pop up when they enter or leave stealth, even when they’re still too far away for me to target. It’s insane how much information this mod can acquire. And it does not just use the combat chat to monitor, because when horde using their flight paths fly by me, even out of view, the addon picks them up. When they ride past on their mounts, it detects them.
Many of the horde picked up by spy for me should have never been noticed. It’s just broken. That being said the edge it gives me on a horde dominated pvp server is too big to pass up, so until blizzard breaks it I’ll continue to use it.
Oh the autogroup feature the addon dev took out because the streamer sheep threw a fit? No one in their right mind would use it to put a group together. Lol.
Correct. I wouldn’t/didn’t use that.
That addon is far from broken. Last time I looked the downloads for it were steadily increasing and another one is gaining popularity.
The same thing is happening with this one. So I don’t think spamming the forums is working out for the alt posse. Lol
I’m curious how you would like them to handle this.
The addon is basically a chat parser, it parses your combat log for enemy actions and displays the enemy’s name. It’s very basic.
Do you want to disallow addons that parse chat at all? That means no more recount/details, lfg addons, etc.
Meanwhile, even if this happens, people will just have their combat log open and turn enemy player text bright orange or something and accomplish the same thing as Spy.
This post is a waste of space, you clearly have no idea how this addon works. You can simply make a combat log separate to your chatwindow and see that enemies are nearby this addon does not have anymore range than the combat log does because THATS what it uses to do what it does.
TLDR quit crying about stuff that has been in the game since vanilla, back then it was called paranoia and everyone used it on pvp servers.
Significantly shorter. It’s whatever your draw distance is set to.
The other thing people seem to be missing, is that Spy is often incorrect for that exact reason. It’s not a magic bullet. Anyone whose used it has had situations where a target pops up, and registers as the wrong class, or the wrong level, because the information it has on the fly is actually very limited. From combat log parsing alone, it’s really just making a series of educated guesses based on abilities used, and level requirement for the ability itself.
The only time it becomes accurate, is when you’ve verified it yourself, by manually targeting the player in question.
Yeah, that was one of the cool things about hunters - having humanoid tracking so it was hard to get the jump on them. Spy does wreck that advantage considerably.
I’ve used it in retail. Not happy to see it in Classic.
Yes, that is a solution I would be more than willing to deal with.
Not many people in comparison to those who use Spy are going to manually check the combat log because they’re going to be focused on other things, and the issue of Spy is that it automates so damn much. The combat log also isn’t going to show the nameplate of whoever appears on it from hundreds of yards away, which is a significant improvement from what we have to deal with now.