RP fans in World of Warcraft now have to be strong or loud. Because your beloved “RP flags” will soon no longer work.
Update, April 30, 2024 10:30 p.m.: Blizzard has listened to the concerns of the RP community. According to Blizzard, this change is an unintended bug. It should be fixed in an upcoming build of the patch. Community manager Kaivax confirmed this in the official WoW forum. Accordingly, the RP addons are safe!
Original message: Patch 10.2.7 is due out in World of Warcraft next week (May 8th). It brings new quests and also “WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria”. But at the same time, the patch changes some details in the background that are particularly damaging to one group in World of Warcraft: role-players.
Because your beloved addons, the so-called “flags”, will no longer work or will only work to a very limited extent in the next patch.
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What changes in patch 10.2.7? With Patch 10.2.7, Blizzard is drastically changing how much addons can communicate with each other in the open world.
Previously, addons could send 10 messages with 255 characters of code per second. In the future, this amount will be limited to one message with 255 characters of code per second.
The communication of addons that require larger amounts of data is throttled by a factor of 10.
RP addons essentially become unusable
What does this mean for role players? In short: nothing good. Role-players use addons to add a description to their character.
Not only can you recognize other RP fans at first glance, but you can also directly address special features of a character – such as visible injuries, the character’s first and last name, strange behavior or certain details that are simply not presented differently in the game can. These descriptions are called “RP flags” and can consist of many lines of text.
Or to put it another way: They consist of a lot of information.
This information is exchanged between the addons. For example, if player A has a description of his villain, then player B must “request” that description. This happens automatically through the addons as soon as you target a character. Player A then “sends” their own data to player B so that she can then read the description of the character.
The catch: With patch 10.2.7, Blizzard is drastically reducing how much information can be sent by a single add-on within a second.
This means that loading a complete character description, which currently only takes a few seconds, can increase to 1-2 minutes.
Worse still: If several players load a profile, this time is multiplied because all characters send a request individually and they are processed one after the other.
If you go to a tavern and 10 other players want to read your profile (and thus load it), then it could take up to 20 minutes until the last person present can fully view this profile.
The whole thing is correspondingly more dramatic if you imagine major RP events with 50, 100 or even more characters.
What solutions are there? If the patch actually comes in this form, RPers will have to resort to other solutions. Character descriptions would then have to be stored externally, for example on wiki pages or Discord servers. However, this is likely to harm the overall immersion and be rather inconvenient. As soon as external steps outside of World of Warcraft are necessary, you lose part of the community.
Alternatively, you will have to wait a very, very long time before you can actually see all the flags of the players in the area.
Why is Blizzard doing this? Addons have been a thorn in the side of the World of Warcraft developers for a while now. While many addons only allow small things, such as customizing the interface elements, very clever and efficient addons have been created over the years, such as WeakAura or other boss fight addons that can communicate between different players and thus make fights easier.
Every now and then the developers try to limit the particularly problematic add-ons so that boss fights, for example, are not trivialized.
In this case, Blizzard is not taking specific action against role-playing add-ons. RP addons like “TotalRP3” are simply collateral damage because they use the same channels of communication. Even if they are actually used for completely harmless content, such as descriptions.
Affected RPG fans may want to use the remaining time to provide feedback on this change or look for alternatives. Because if this addon adjustment goes through next week, RP in World of Warcraft could never again be as problem-free as it was before.
And that would be a damn shame.
Another change is already affecting “casuals” – they basically haven’t noticed it.