![WoW: The new patch could sustainably ruin the RP community [Update: Blizzard reacts]](https://images.mein-mmo.de/medien/2024/04/WoW-rollenspiel-vor-dem-Aus-titel-title-1280x720-1-780x438.jpg){kind=small}
RP fans in World of Warcraft must be strong or vocal now. Because their beloved “RP flags” will soon no longer work.
Update, April 30, 2024, 10:30 PM: Blizzard has listened to the concerns of the RP community. According to Blizzard, this change is a bug that is unintended. It is supposed to be fixed in an upcoming build of the patch. Community Manager Kaivax confirmed this in the official WoW forum. Thus, the RP addons are safe!
Original message: In World of Warcraft, the Patch 10.2.7 is coming next week (May 8). 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 primarily harm one group in World of Warcraft: role players.
Because their beloved addons, the so-called “flags,” will currently not function or will function very limited in the next patch.
What changes in Patch 10.2.7? With Patch 10.2.7, Blizzard drastically changes how strongly addons can communicate 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 will therefore be throttled by a factor of 10.
RP addons will basically become unusable
What does this mean for role players? In short: Nothing good. Role players use addons to add a description to their character.
This way, players can not only recognize other RP fans at first glance but also directly address the specifics of a character – such as visible injuries, first and last names of the character, strange behavior, or certain details that simply cannot be represented any other way in the game. These descriptions are called “RP flags” and can consist of many lines of text.
Or in other words: They consist of a lot of information.
This information is exchanged between the addons. If player A has a description of their rogue, player B must “request” this description. This happens automatically through the addons as soon as a character is targeted. Player A then “sends” their data to player B so that she can read the character’s description.
The catch: With Patch 10.2.7, Blizzard drastically reduces how much information can be sent by a single addon within a second.
Thus, loading a complete character description, which currently takes only a few seconds, could grow to 1-2 minutes.
Worse still: If multiple players load a profile, this time multiplies, as all characters send a request individually, and these are processed one after the other.
For example, if you go into a tavern and 10 other players want to read your profile (and thus load it), it could take up to 20 minutes for even the last attendee to fully view this profile.
Accordingly, the situation is even more dramatic when one imagines RP grand events with 50, 100, or even more characters.
What solutions are there? If the patch really comes in this form, RP players will have to resort to other solutions. Character descriptions would then need to be stored externally, for example, on wiki pages or Discord servers. However, this would harm the overall immersion and be rather cumbersome. Once external steps outside of World of Warcraft are necessary, one already loses part of the community.
Alternatively, players will have to wait a very, very long time to actually see all the flags of the players in the vicinity.
Why is Blizzard doing this? Addons have been a thorn in the side of the developers of World of Warcraft for a while now. While many addons only enable minor adjustments, such as customizing interface elements, over the years very clever and efficient addons have been created, such as WeakAura or other boss encounter addons, that communicate between different players and can thus facilitate fights.
Every now and then, the developers attempt to restrict the particularly problematic addons, so that boss encounters are not trivialized.
In this case, Blizzard is not specifically targeting role-playing addons. RP addons like “TotalRP3” are simply collateral damage since they use the same communication methods. Even if they are actually used for completely harmless content, such as descriptions.
Affected role-playing fans should perhaps use the remaining time to provide feedback on this change or look for alternatives. Because if this addon adjustment goes through next week, role-playing in World of Warcraft might never be as seamless as it has been until now.
And that would be really a shame.
Another change is already affecting “casuals” – they have practically not noticed it.
