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12-04-12, 12:23 AM   #25
Phanx
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Originally Posted by SDPhantom View Post
In vanilla WoW, HP values for any unit other than the player were strictly provided as an integer percent. This changed in BC because of addons that calculated mob HP from how much damage they took before dying, then applied that to exact copies of the same mob. At one time, GUIDs weren't available to addons. The same time Blizzard overhauled the Combat Log system, they added this as a way to track info about a specific entity. Up until LK, Blizzard didn't provide information about mob threat levels. Addons like Omen had to calculate this themselves by taking in damage and healing info from the combat log. There are more examples, but this is all I can think of at the moment. All of which fall into different categories of necessity and luxury, things people suggested and things people worked on to obtain themselves.
I was around for all of those changes, and they all have one thing in common -- they allowed addons (or the default UI) to give players new access to information directly relevant to real-time gameplay decisions. There's just no situation where (a) it's relevant to your immediate gameplay to know which faction a player belongs to but (b) that information isn't already available through some existing API.

If you think eliminating a one-second-at-most delay to determine someone's faction in the one-in-a-million event of them being an enemy pandaren /saying or /yelling something in Pandaren instead of their faction default language is really so critical Blizzard needs to spend time adding to the API, I guess we just have radically different ideas about what is important. I'd much rather they spend time fixing actual bugs instead, and there are certainly plenty of those for them to work on.
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