That particular “social addon” would be VERY difficult to kill.
All it needs is an Addon communication channel that can use a global communication that is outside of guild/raid/party chat.
It doesn’t have to exchange much data for that matter. Just announce details when a new person indicates interest and have others that previously communicated interest “ping back” and check to see if they have a “viable” group consist at that point.
It should also be mentioned that I recall such addons existing during Vanilla and TBC, just most people didn’t use them. Which takes us back to why Blizzard’s implementation was cross-realm in Wrath: Because home-server only addon options existed, and people weren’t using them.
There are non-systemic ways of “breaking” addons too. Which is how they tend to “break” the advertising addons, or paid addons, by suing them into the ground.
They would have to prohibit addons from using global chat channels. It is the only way to break such an addon. Considering addons could use global chat channels in Vanilla, I highly doubt they’re going to break that functionality just to prevent a LFG-type addon.
Because I’m pretty sure it would break a number of other addons that would make a lot of other players very unhappy.
Yes, they could do it, it is one change to the API, but the screaming that one change would cause…
I honestly do not remember any add-ons that would have used global chat channels.
Perhaps you could refresh my memory.
I suspect that some people are terrified that those precious LFG type add-ons may be prevented from functioning. I point no fingers at any particular persons, though.
Remember, that until TBC there were no such thing as “channels” for addons to use, so if addons were going to “talk” to other players in order to syncronize data, they’d be using a in game chat channel. Which meant the choice was: Say, Yell, Whisper, Party, Raid, Guild, or Global keeping in mind that users would see what the addons were sending unless they specifically disabled visibility of that channel.
The grand-daddy of them all that everyone would recognize: Damage Meters. Threat Meter addons were the thing in TBC that also introduced addon specific “channels” which is another Non-Vanilla Feature that Classic is likely to retain. (If you don’t remember, by the start of TBC the “theorycraft” around threat had reached the point that player-made threat meters were starting to become reliable, so people were starting to use them. By the time that Kara opened up, enough people had started using those threat meters that the message spam said meters were generating was sufficient that it started crashing the chat servers, which had unintended ramifications in the game world at large.)
The Add-on specific channels retain those same levels of function, only now they can operate as a “sub channel” to Party, raid, and guild chat.
But now, you’re going to say “Damage Meters have no need to use anything above Raid chat. So not a problem.” (That and “modern Combat logs,” also introduced in TBC don’t require syncing data for meters)
I said Damage Meters and Threat Meters were the highest profile users of such things. Off-hand other things which used global chat channels include:
Social Event Scheduling addons. Not just for scheduling events for one guild, but for many guilds. (This particular use also complicates the verbage Blizzard would need to use if they simply tried to make a LFG addon against the TOS/EULA for Classic)
Guild Chat linking addons, for those mega-sized guilds that hit the character/player limit in the first one, and have since started a second or even third Guild.
“Reputation Trackers” for players on a given realm to try to track bad players/ninjas/etc.
Those are just the ones I can recall offhand, I have no doubt there are others, it has been a long time, after all, since I’ve really paid any attention to addon options for WoW.
Personally, I want to see the current group finder make it into the game. To me, Vanilla and TBC was a complete failure in the fact that if you wanted to do a dungeon, you were pretty much tied to the capitals until a group was formed, you couldn’t really go out and do anything in between. Working on your attunements meant that you were logging on to NOT play WoW until you found 4 other people, which if it was during the day, could take hours.
Blizzard stated that they may, or likely will, prevent add-ons that replicate social functions added later (after vanilla). These social functions would include the TBC version of LFG, as well all the other versions after that.
Personally, I’m hoping that the only “group finder” tool in Classic is what was available in vanilla, namely the meeting stones.
Actually, they specifically said that they were looking for a middle ground. They’re not necessarily going to break them, but they’re not going to let things be completely automated.
No, they’ve flat out said that the dungeon finder was not part of the Vanilla experience and wouldn’t be in game. They have said jack sh!t about a middle ground on this topic.
“On the other end of the spectrum, the modern API offers some additional functionality for creating social features that could also undermine the authentic classic experience. We’re still figuring out the details and looking for a good middle ground. We’ll be keeping a close eye on feedback from the community and add-on authors on where we should be setting those boundaries.”
Again, they specifically said that they were looking for a middle ground
I’m aware of the context in which you’re referring to - and his ANSWER (the part you cherry picked) was designed as a answer to ALL “social” types - not dungeon finder specifically.
They have specifically said that things like dungeon finder are not part of the experience, that it takes away from the social aspect, that the traveling to the dungeons is exciting etc.
I wholeheartedly disagree. While the initial spam repeat isn’t, it forced you into building social networks to avoid having to do that spam. Most often, I as a healer had tanks I could call on, and then we’d fill DPS from our willing guildies. My flatmate in another guild was a rogue, but he developed a network of healers and tanks that liked him and he liked, because he wouldn’t pull threat, or he’d stun things attacking the healer. He was known.
LFD removes the known and pits everyone against the unknown. On a single Server maybe (big maybe) that would be lessened but the system would have to take into account blocks, and “won’t group with” declarations and a host of other things.
Can someone make it? Probably. Is it a good thing for the social dynamic, that’s very hard to declare without the system already built, and running. Just like LFD was welcomed by most people in Live, and now is scorned by most people.
There’s an even easier fix for that. On our server, we made a “WorldLFG” channel. It was no chatter, just LFG spam and you could join and leave it as you wished. Since it was widely used, it was always on, and you could go out into the world and adventure, because you didn’t have to listen in General chat.
People spamming in cities generally got shouted down and told to go to WorldLFG, so you weren’t missing anything either. It also reduces the city noise down to things you do in cities.
The problem with that is that they have to join it. It would be better to have something that’s there by default. And I’m not sure they’re going to be willing to add back the very short lived global looking for group channel
LFD will not happen. Let me disabuse you of that notion now. So assuming someone makes the equivalent, you would have to install it. That’s far more work than typing a command into the client.
We made a channel. Just like you had your Raid Heal channel and your Raid Tank Channel. We had a channel with about 1000 people at any given time, and people were good about avoiding the chatter. Blizzard doesn’t need to bring back the short lived official LFG channel, we made our own.