Does anyone have an answer?
We used to be able to do it in Vanilla.
This topic is literally completely ignored?
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This has bugged me ever since I first stepped foot in a dungeon with a party.
Thought my addons were busted.
What’s the go?
Why doesn’t Blizzard address this?!?!?!!?!?!?!?
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those features are turned off because of exploitation.
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Can anyone describe how custom friendly nameplates could possibly be exploited?
It doesn’t make any sense. Custom addons can send party members any data they want in real-time (coordinates, position, auras, etc). What is the big deal with custom friendly nameplates?
Turning off this feature hurts a lot of people and I have not seen a legitimate explanation anywhere.
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people were using addons and name plates to cheese mythic dungeons, so blizzard made changes, these changes effect classic too.
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This doesn’t make sense because any information that could be placed on a nameplate can also be sent directly to other party members with addons.
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it makes plenty of sense, a lot more was possible than just showing information, you could actually modify the nameplates and use them to draw, a lot like the banned avr addon from wotlk
Okay, the addon TomTom is currently able to draw a real-time arrow that moves and changes color on the screen.
Addons can send positional data to other players who can then use that data to draw on the screen.
I am not seeing where the nameplate exploit actually is.
Do you have a video of something that could be done with custom nameplates that cannot be done without them?
Blizzard
With Patch 7.2, we’re disabling the ability for addons to modify the appearance of friendly nameplates while inside dungeon and raid instances.
While, for the most part, we’re impressed with – and encourage – the creativity that addon authors bring to the game using the addon API, occasionally an addon goes too far in terms of automating or trivializing elements of gameplay that are meant to be highly challenging. Recently, we’ve become aware of a couple addons that were using visual adjustments to friendly nameplates as a method to automatically coordinate complex positioning requirements. This caused what was intended to be a difficult test of a group’s ability to identify positioning requirements on the fly to instead become a simple matter of following a visual marker.
In order to prevent this from continuing, we’ve had to disable the ability for addons to modify how friendly nameplates appear while inside of dungeon and raid instances. Nothing has changed outside of dungeons and raids – addons will still be able to customize the appearance of friendly nameplates everywhere else (most notably in PvP, where they’re most commonly used in ways we don’t consider problematic).
We also don’t anticipate that addon authors will need to update their code to accommodate this change; customizations should simply stop working once a player zones into a raid, and start working again once they’ve left. However, if you’d like to double-check, this change should now be active in the current 7.2 PTR environment.
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This doesn’t make sense for the following reasons:
- Positional data can be acquired and communicated through other channels
- You can still draw on the screen, yes?
- Couldn’t they just disable friendly nameplates only in those certain instances where this was a problem?
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listen, it doesn’t have to make sense to you, it’s a change blizzard made in march 2017, accept it.
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When the official explanation doesn’t make sense, it raises questions as to the real motive.
Why was it not reverted to the way it was in Vanilla for the Classic experience? This is a massive negative change for regular players, without the real motive being known.
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it makes sense, you don’t understand it. it was more than simple positional data. if another addon was capable of doing the same thing, that feature too would be disabled.
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it’s an exploit, why would it be reverted?
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I am trying to understand it. I am asking for help in understanding it. A video, detailed explanation, or something, anything.
If it was only exploitable in certain instances, why degrade the dungeon experience in all instances?
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the blue post was a detailed explanation. name plates could be manipulated in a way blizzard did not intend in order to trivialize game mechanics, they remain disabled so that you can no longer do so.
Hardly an exploit when i can see mob namplates through doors and walls etc
i’d say it has to do with Blizzard being nothing but lazy and giving some half assed explanation as to why.
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This would make sense as an “exploit” for enemy mobs, but party members can use addons to share the state of their client with other party members in realtime.
There just doesn’t appear to be any “friendly nameplate exploit”
It took them time and effort to restrict those friendly nameplates to make them look like crap for everybody. “Lazy” isn’t the correct term. “Deceptive” might be closer.
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People were using nameplates to trivialize raid mechanics by using nameplates to automatically place icons over a players head or over their character model to indicate certain mechanic based status effects, or debuffs, or if they’re being targeted by mechanics, etc. Videos below for some of the stuff people had been doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVjfxViVEE&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5BTdavXUSc
Simply put, their were issues with addons effectively drawing in the 3D world to trivialize mechanics. The first thing they did to try and break this was remove coordinates from instances. (So you can’t get exact positioning — I don’t think you could get coordinates in instances in Vanilla, so it wouldn’t have been an issue then.) Then people found ways to use nameplates as anchors for similar mods, so Blizzard had to disable custom nameplates in instances. So, blame those who saw Blizzard break something and had to find a way around it that forced them to break even more stuff.
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