Poster: Ehakan at 3/31/2006 2:21:05 AM PST
Subject: Questions as to why Blizz broke addons |
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Some of the changes blizz made to the UI scripts are a little extreme in my opinion. I have to wonder at some of the reasons why they would break Auto Buff and Mana Conserve as they dont seem to have much to do with actually playing the game. There are a lot of people out there who keep saying "its fine learn to play your character" ect - but these addons DONT play your character. All they do is make tedious actions a little more bearable.
For example, my shaman has to rebuff lightning shield after every mob and windfury after about every 2 - 3. This is somewhat annoying after awhile, certainly not game breaking - but annoying. Is auto buff playing the game for me here? No, of course not. Without me moving, it does nothing. It does not kill mobs for me; it does not earn me gold; it does not move me from town to town; it doesnt talk to other people for me. Why make this addon unusable?
Was it for PvP reasons? That having auto buff makes some people have an advantage? My opinion is that people who use ASB during PvP are at a DISadvantage. Why? Because it sucks when youre about to kill a player only to have your Lightning Shield refresh (enacting your global cooldown) instead of casting Earth or Frostshock. Yes, a second is all that it takes for someone to get away or put on that cursed Pally shield. I think Blizzard should reevaluate their decision here.
What about Mana Conserve? I really can not find a suitable answer in any of the responses as to why they chose to break this addon. Mana conserve doesnt heal for you. It doesnt allow you to mindlessly heal your raid either. The only useful thing it does is to make sure that in those .5 seconds before your heal goes off that your target still needs healing. A lot of people think that .5 seconds should be enough to cancel a heal - I disagree. You might get lucky, you might not. The point being that Mana conserve just made a healers job a little bit easier. Healing in raids is one of the most tiring things to do. You already are focusing like mad trying to keep at least 10+ (for me anyways) people alive while also checking to make sure the other 30 arnt too low either. For non healers out there - this usually involves a lot of clikcing of button pushing involving fast targeting and spell casting. Healing rotations are nice, but I think most can agree that sometimes they dont work, and that its good to have a certain amount of flexability when setting up healing groups.
Mana conserve and Auto buff just make things a little less tedious and hectic, please consider giving them back to us.
Before I get trolls saying lrn to heal, Ive main healed every end game instance there is in WoW as a shaman - so please keep rude comments to yourself.
| | | http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-interface-customization&t=349938&p=#post349938 | | | Poster: slouken at 3/31/2006 7:00:59 AM PST
Subject: Re: Questions as to why Blizz broke addons |
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Q u o t e:
Ask any warlock what they think of decursive in PvP - and you'll have your answer.
Being able to bind it to a movement key meant that, it there was a class that could remove their stuff in the party of the person they were attacking - all of their debuffs were completely useless. A huge chunk of the class taken away, not by skillful play, but by a piece of code.
Mana conserve? The same thing - it takes any skill out of coordinating multiple healers on a tank - everyone just spams their heal and the code makes sure that the majority of them don't land, preventing wasted mana.
The reason the prevented calling the movement functions was even more basic - a while back there was a mod called "AutoTravel" that would automatically run a route for you. They don't want someone else's code playing your character for you: So, they implemented a requirement for a hardware event on all movement functions.
Some clever coders (who's name shall be withheld) essentially said "Oh yeah, well I can still beat that!" and came up with keyminder - a program that directed a stream of keypresses (either from a gamepad or from a 3rd party program) to the appropriate mods. This, despite being told that such a thing was against the spirit of the rules Blizzard had layed down.
Now we have a situation where auto-buff/auto-decursive/mana-conserve can work if there is a stream of keypresses coming in. I'd wager money that some folks have already started using the same technique to allow a stream of keypresses to make these mods work without user intervention.
That will force Blizzard to respond with yet more restrictions on what functions we can call -- they have made it clear that they do not condone this use of their API and that they will take action to prevent it. But the folks who keep finding loopholes are just going to force them to take more and more draconian measures until they are stopped.
The people who pay for that are the ones who used the functions in a non-bot way. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up restricting our access to buff information at some point.
And you'll have the authors of keyminder et. al. to thank for that.
/bump
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