Midnight Macro Changes Now Live: Target Markers and Chat Messages

What do you guys think goes through their minds when things like this get decided upon? Why have a macro system that is unusable.

Originally Posted by dess

What do you guys think goes through their minds when things like this get decided upon? Why have a macro system that is unusable.

It's only unusable in a very select set of situations that distill down to RWF guilds who are using a shot-caller who isn't in the group.

Originally Posted by dess

What do you guys think goes through their minds when things like this get decided upon? Why have a macro system that is unusable.

Tell me you don't know how to use macros without telling me

Originally Posted by eojsmada

It's only unusable in a very select set of situations that distill down to RWF guilds who are using a shot-caller who isn't in the group.

It also makes a significant number of things inaccessible to me with my disability.

Markers are how I'm able to know targets as I don't have access to visual (subtle shapes, subtle colours or name) information on targets whilst I'm playing in combat.

So if the raid leader says - target 'Brian the Troll', I now have no way of doing so. If I'm meant to target the one with the same shape on it as the shape on the wall - I now have no way of doing so (unless the shape is a basic shape).

It isn't just high end raiders, it is also bottom end players like me that depend on these things to even play badly (as I do).

Originally Posted by schwarzkopf

It also makes a significant number of things inaccessible to me with my disability.

Markers are how I'm able to know targets as I don't have access to visual (subtle shapes, subtle colours or name) information on targets whilst I'm playing in combat.

So if the raid leader says - target 'Brian the Troll', I now have no way of doing so. If I'm meant to target the one with the same shape on it as the shape on the wall - I now have no way of doing so (unless the shape is a basic shape).

It isn't just high end raiders, it is also bottom end players like me that depend on these things to even play badly (as I do).

Nothing changed here affects you at all with what you are describing you can still mark targets just fine

Originally Posted by schwarzkopf

It also makes a significant number of things inaccessible to me with my disability.

Markers are how I'm able to know targets as I don't have access to visual (subtle shapes, subtle colours or name) information on targets whilst I'm playing in combat.

So if the raid leader says - target 'Brian the Troll', I now have no way of doing so. If I'm meant to target the one with the same shape on it as the shape on the wall - I now have no way of doing so (unless the shape is a basic shape).

It isn't just high end raiders, it is also bottom end players like me that depend on these things to even play badly (as I do).

Then you've lost nothing. Everything will still work exactly the same way as it did before, for you. Read the text. Macros are prevented from setting a target marker on more than 3 units within a very short time.

This simply means that 4+ targets can't be instantly marked using a macro, but it will not cause any disruption to the normal flow of gameplay. Brian the troll will still be marked with skull, and there will never be any disruption to a tank calling "Kill the skull" - they will be able to mark skulls as often as they want, as you don't mark 3 skulls within a second currently do you? No of course not. The intent of this is to prevent marking everything at once as an automated process happening far beyond what a normal player would ever do. For your purpose, you could never read about this change, never know about it, and everything will function exactly as it did before.

This is the exact type of crap that I expected to see all over the place when Blizzard decided to fight their self-imposed war on addons. It was always going to end up worse than when it started. Everything is having "unintended side effects". They should have just done what they said they were going to do at the start and improve their UI so people didn't need addons.

They throttled the API for SendAddonMessage for a similar reason and that's forced addon developers to change how they communicate with other users that have the same addon. A lot of this was RP. Multiguild chat addons now have to delay messages in order to avoid hitting the message limit. And the worst part... here's the worst part... it didn't even do anything to raid encounters. Because so much of raid encounters are scripted down to the second, most communications are prepackaged. So, when you need to actually send a message, it's not hitting the limit at all.

Here's the next problem... if you have an external raid leader already pushing the SAME information they just blocked but through voice channels instead of chat, then what exactly is blizzard's stance on this? Hell, I could build a mechanic website in a couple of hours that players could have up to replicate exactly what blizzard just blocked. You have your shot caller sitting on the leader portal and when he clicks a call out, it sends a message to all of the web clients that are completely outside of WoW which triggers a visual and audio cue. Nothing touches WoW. Not even an overlay.

Blizzard picked a battle they can't win and the people they were trying to control don't care but the people they didn't want to impact got screwed. Not only is the addon situation worse now than before the change, but it's pissing off addon developers because of all the constant contradictory changes. When they reverted the raid frames changes for healers 2 days before the game released, that's just bullshit. You have devs desperately trying to get their addons to work and then all the sudden you completely change your position.

This management team is a joke.

Originally Posted by Duese

This is the exact type of crap that I expected to see all over the place when Blizzard decided to fight their self-imposed war on addons. It was always going to end up worse than when it started. Everything is having "unintended side effects". They should have just done what they said they were going to do at the start and improve their UI so people didn't need addons.

They throttled the API for SendAddonMessage for a similar reason and that's forced addon developers to change how they communicate with other users that have the same addon. A lot of this was RP. Multiguild chat addons now have to delay messages in order to avoid hitting the message limit. And the worst part... here's the worst part... it didn't even do anything to raid encounters. Because so much of raid encounters are scripted down to the second, most communications are prepackaged. So, when you need to actually send a message, it's not hitting the limit at all.

Here's the next problem... if you have an external raid leader already pushing the SAME information they just blocked but through voice channels instead of chat, then what exactly is blizzard's stance on this? Hell, I could build a mechanic website in a couple of hours that players could have up to replicate exactly what blizzard just blocked. You have your shot caller sitting on the leader portal and when he clicks a call out, it sends a message to all of the web clients that are completely outside of WoW which triggers a visual and audio cue. Nothing touches WoW. Not even an overlay.

Blizzard picked a battle they can't win and the people they were trying to control don't care but the people they didn't want to impact got screwed. Not only is the addon situation worse now than before the change, but it's pissing off addon developers because of all the constant contradictory changes. When they reverted the raid frames changes for healers 2 days before the game released, that's just bullshit. You have devs desperately trying to get their addons to work and then all the sudden you completely change your position.

This management team is a joke.

Yep. I've used discord bots on and off to workaround arbitrary Blizzard limitations. Oh, you don't want my group to queue bg's together? Then we will use discord bots to coordinate getting into the same bg. Stuff like that. And I'm just a casual gamer. It's all humans pressing things in discord. Like you said, nothing touches WoW, and a lot of the computation blizzard removes from addons can be put right into discord bots, which then communicate back with cues.

Also like you said, raid encounters are scripted, but with permutations (like who gets marked, gets a boss buff/debuff). You just have to send a cue to a discord bot, nothing touches WoW at all, to identify which permutation your raid got.

The only way to combat this is to make the most DDR like boss encounters, which are even more off-puting to casuals than downloading addons was.

Next Blizzard will say, you can't look at a separate window than WoW while in a raid or receive audio from outside WoW while in a raid.

It is astounding they are fucking around with this sort of shit when one of the core pieces of open world content they just delivered (Abundance) doesn't even work properly. The addon changes are supposedly for the same people that Abundance is, i.e. casuals, but they are more concerned with breaking addons than they are with making playable content.

You can say it's not the same team working on these two things, but it shows poor leadership that they even create these optics. If someone has a broken arm you don't get excited about "good news! we got a different doctor to fix your hangnail. Your arm is still fucked and we don't know how to fix it, but your hangnail is a-okay!".

Will this break my RP addons like TRP?

Great, just great, now how will everyone know when i summon my warlock mount?

Originally Posted by thegoodbroham

Then you've lost nothing. Everything will still work exactly the same way as it did before, for you. Read the text. Macros are prevented from setting a target marker on more than 3 units within a very short time.

Yep - the exact scenario which will affect me.

Putting 6 coloured markers on targets so the raid leader can say - go to square, rather than go to 'Name of Monster'.