AVR Mod Broken in 3.3.5
 

Bashiok posted Blizzard's plans to disable the ability for mods like AVR to exist, as of 3.3.5:

This is a notice that we’re making changes in 3.3.5 in attempts to break the ability for the AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) mod to continue functioning. For those unaware, this mod allows players to draw in the 3D space of the game world, which can then be shared with others who are also using the mod. In some cases this manifests itself through drawing/tagging/defacing the game world, but more popularly is used to give visual guides for dungeon and raid encounters.

We’re making this change for two reasons. The invasive nature of a mod altering and/or interacting with the game world (virtually or directly) is not intended and not something we will allow. World of Warcraft UI addons are never intended to interact with the game world itself. This is mirrored in our stance and restriction of model and texture alterations. The second reason is that it removes too much player reaction and decision-making while facing dungeon and raid encounters. While some other mods also work to this end, we find that AVR and the act of visualizing strategy within the game world simply goes beyond what we’re willing to allow.

The change we’re making in attempts to break the functionality is light in its touch and approach. When blocking any functionality we run the risk of affecting other mods, but we’ve targeted the changes as carefully as possible. If we find that the AVR mod (or any mod attempting to replicate its functions) are usable after 3.3.5 we will take further, more drastic steps.


The original notice is here.

Ahhh - blizz delaying the enevitable...let folks do things now, that in a few weeks, the ICC buff will let them do anyways...:)

YAY about time. Why the hell would I want something to tell me how to play? Addons are great, but those that "tell" you what to do is unwanted.

I want to enjoy the game, not be an autonomous robot.

I actually agree with you Galtar and feel the same, how ever, I recognize that what you and I may consider fun is different for someone else. The parts of the game that challenge us is fun for us, for others it may not be...so I'm sad to see Blizzard taking this stance.

Except that no one makes you use any addon at all. I'll assume that you wanna get rid of buff-helpers (Pallypower, etc), and item comparison mods that make it easier for you to compare the stats between 2 items...it's "making a choice" for you, by your definition, right?

Sad thing is, AVR is an addon that used the information already sent to the client to display stuff. Wonder when they are going to break AH mods so it's not as easy to list auctions.

Or click-to-cast mods so you can't click to cast anymore....or HUDs...<shrug>

They all make it easier.

(edit here) p.s.: If you raid, and use any sort of raid boss addon, I'll expect you to stop using it as well, based on your logic, as it tells you when things are happening, instead of you paying attention to the mob itself and making choices yourself based on what you, yourself, see, hear, etc...

I love people like you, you make me rich off your stupid assumption. A+ DUDE!

Yes. I raid with no addons! I'm elite like that! (That was sarcasm if you don't know)

DBM is not AVR.

Item comparison is not AVR.

Pally Power is not AVR.

Telling you where to stand because your stupid, is well stupid! DBM advises us on what is coming. It doesn't necessarily give you a big damn arrow or draw a circle on the 3d world saying "GO HERE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE IDIOT!"

There's a HUGE difference in advising, and TELLING. AVR was a mod that TOLD you what to do. It essentially took quick reaction and thinking out of the game. DBM still requires you to utilize what little pea size brain you have to go "Hmmm, what exactly does Inhale Blight do?"

You an argue the point all day long because you are just FAR superior than I, but frankly you just made an ass of yourself. If you want to talk, make sure you know what the hell your talking about.


I still stand on my grounds, AVR was a mistake and I'm truly glad to see Blizzard lock it down! Before you know it AVR mods WOULD have found a way to make it automatically control your character. Hell, anything is possible right? God, could you imagine raiding and doing nothing more than just staring at the screen while AVR makes your toon move from one highlighted spot to another?



PS. If you are threatened or butt hurt by my response, I apologize. I'm German and I don't really care about your feelings.

:banana:

Let me just jump in here to Marthisil's defense. Not everyone who plays is as elite as you proclaim yourself, Galtar.

Not everyone is as experienced in raids and dungeons as you seem to be.

Not everyone will know precisely where to stand or what to do at any given moment.

An addon such as AVR can and I'm sure is helpful in gaining some knowledge of what to do and when to do it.

Does a need to gain knowledge make a player a "stupid idiot" as you put it?

i don't think so...

Does insulting other people who post in this thread lamenting AVR's numbered days make the troll that throws the insults out like yesterday's trash make the troll a stupid idiot?

Quite possible...

Oh, if you can't tell, I'm not German, but I don't really care about your feelings either.

Well, you guys had damn well better care about mine.

Behave. All of you. You are out of line and you know better. If this is going to turn into another flame fest, it's getting locked.

Honestly, I'd rather see it locked. The point has been made and nothing constructive can really be added beyond what has already been.

Chaos, I realize that may be the way things are usually handled on the site you work on, but you know very well by now that we prefer to leave things open for people to be able to have discussions, as long as it remains civilized.

/sniffle

Welp, there goes my Ping Direction addon.

Too bad they didn't decide to do something such as, say, stop providing player coordinates while in combat...

Never used this AVR addon. Let me see if I understand this clearly...

The raid leader discusses strats and draws on the game world to show you where you should be standing (much like a football coach discusses the plays on the whiteboard). This is where I get confused.... after all that strat discussing and the event starts, AVR then tells you on the screen where you are supposed to go? Is there an audio voice in AVR that screams "DONT STAND THERE, GO LEFT!" or what?

I can understand not drawing on the game world. The bit I'm confused about is how the addon takes over once the event begins and tells you how to play. Someone please clarify.

There are many youtube vids showing it in action. Seeing it do its thing is the best explanation.

Never used this thing, never will. But that's cause I've never raided before, bwahaha.

I think AVR can help those who are new to raiding (like me, when I finally do one day), but it's a shame it's being locked down. I can see the logic behind Blizzard's argument, but AVR doesn't really follow the same rules as other addons. I know they're going to block it and similar addons because it's interacting with the game world, but I mean, that's not a real reason, is it..?

Edit: Also, just something quick, but I bet someone sooner or later would have used this to create awesome, 3D, pavement-art a la Julian Beever. Click!

I never used the addon, because I fully expected this reaction.
How is Blizzard breaking it? By not sending coordinates?

They're disabling camera CVar access.

Phew! I can live with that. I was actually concerned how they planned to prevent the addon from working. On the other hand won't that also break TomTom?

Oh, I'm sure whatever they choose to do to "break" AVR will inadvertently break a lot of other addons. They even state such, and that they will try to minimize it's affect on other mods.

Removing the camera access was the most elegant way to break AVR. Imagine them breaking the coordinates in instances.

It was really one of two choices:
1) Break the mod
2) Design encounters assuming everyone is using it

Remember Decursive in Vanilla? It was so efficient at striking down debuffs that they had to be both very strong and constantly splattered to have any effect at all on the outcome. It then became impossible to raid without it, until they disabled the key features in TBC.

Same principle. AVR is so efficient at telling people where to stand, that they'd have to design every encounter so that there is only a 3 pixel square that is safe to stand in, assuming everyone is using the mod and can find the square. So then it becomes impossible to raid without it. Better to disable it.

I do wonder if it affects the "Crazy Arrow" in TomTom though. I really like that thing.

I've never used the AddOn myself while raiding because, well, I don't like to be told what to do in the sense that AVRE does.

However, I was thinking of installing and using it, to draw in Dalaran, and see where that takes me until the next minor patch :P

I'm also glad, on another note, it's taking it's leave because Ruby Sanctum is coming, and I'm excited to do the encounter with little to no boss mod AddOns :) That is the best I MO, experience it first hand, without boss mods, because well, no one really does know the fights yet, now do they? At least, not the general public of WoW, maybe just DBM in the PTR or what have you....

...I'm babbling...

I tried AVR on my PC that is old and already gets only 5 FPS anyway. To be honest it didn't really help me too much as I know the fights and as a healer I have to pay attention to the raid health on top of where I am but it can be usefil to see things like if Im out of the AoE range or what not. Just my two cents.

Ugg. Sucks for anyone who has a camera mod such as myself. Unless they're still gonna allow access to the saved camera positions. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Let's hope they just disable access while in an instance, or even better, within combat in an instance.
Since they've already stated they don't have plans for more World Bosses, there probably won't be an encounter outside of an instance.

This would leave AVR working as a communication tool (which, admittedly, is very helpful) while strategizing, but prevent AVR encounters from telling people where to go when.

It won't, TomTom uses facing and other stuff, but not camera.

Having just player facing is okay I guess... was how pdir was written originally (guess I have no excuse to not go back and update it now... man I'm lazy sometimes...).

I guess I'm mostly sad since I had this 'ah hah!' moment one day when I realized I could get the camera cvars (what I was actually trying to do at the time was create automated camera moves for filming), and 'discovered' you could do stuff like this. At one point I had all these plans about drawing the ping into the 3D world (simulated of course), but well, the usual laziness took over. This was way way way back too... the demo video I posted on Google Video is... *searches* dated April 2007. I dunno if libcamera (which AVR doesn't use anyhow) came upon this independently or whatever, but I guess having figured this out myself at one point, I'm just sad to see it not work anymore...

As to AVR... *shrug* tried it out, it's neat, but never tried out AVRE for the boss mods thing, so won't be something I'll miss. Mainly will just miss the fact that one more neat hack is gone...

I think it's horrible that they are taking this out. It is a mod that is able to help people who have mental disabilities and are good at raiding and dps except for not being able to move where they need to. I know that people with disabilities will suffer from this.

And my medication makes me a bit slow sometimes, as I have Fibromyalgia and take Neurontin, so I know that this could have helped me when my medication makes me hurp durp durp.

Then enjoy the game by not using it, and quit complaining about something that doesn't effect you if you don't use the mod.

This. We had 2 deaf people in our guild, this mod definitely made it a lot less stressful for them too.

I'll miss it. It was a lot more convenient than running all over the place and jumping up and down to show where things would be happening/standing.

Their problem, though, is that they don't have any way to know that mod that can help the disabled is only being used by the disabled. And if today's players can find anything at all that increases their chances, they will use it, so this was getting used by perfectly healthy "normal" people to trivialize encounters.

OMG, couldn't they have told this before? I was halfway with AVRQuest...

If Blizzard feels that this is something they want to help players with disabilities, then make your voice heard on the official forum. They did add a colorblind mode for people who are that, so why not this?

The problem though, is that when the game plays itself, then it goes against what Blizzard wants from the game.

Let's just hope the authors don't find away around the lockout. Don't want Blizzard to take more drastic measures.

I'm kinda confused by the "game plays itself" bit.

Is there some functionality to AVR/E that I'm missing, that moved your character around/did stuff for you?

No, it did not. But it showed you exactly where to stand, the area of effect from attacks etc. I used the term to describe this, I apologize for not giving an example.

1st. It obviosly helped people more then blizzard wants.

2nd. they don't want addons alter the 3d world.

Blizzard broke addons in the past and will continue to do so... QQ won't help here :9

Dang, Megaman AVR drawings will be gone soon.

Code and maths behind AVR are very clever, so from a technical standpoint, breaking the mod is a shame :( but AVRE did simplify a lot some encounters and being able to draw pseudo-3D shapes on a overlay above the WorldFrame, though not on the WorldFrame itself, was a bit audacious!

I know of two popular boss mods that use big pointers to tell you which way to run for certain events. Does this mean the pointers will be gone, too?

People are mostly just mixing up how they are describing why it got removed.

AVR was superimposed onto the 3D world, it broke the barrier between the game UI and the 3D world, something that is already frowned on with things like texture modifications. Boss mod arrows are on the game UI, even thought they can visually look 3D, they aren't superimposed onto the game world. Nameplates are sort of a grey area, they are technically 2D but move based on 3D objects.
AVRE was Decursive all over again which lead to the secure lockdown in 2.0, if boss mods start doing too much (by whatever standard Blizzard uses), they'll break the portion they think crosses the line.

I'm not going to argue if it's right or wrong, but that's just the difference between something like AVR(E) and BigWigs.

It's a bit annoying that Blizzard are only banning it because it is superimposed onto the 3D world, rather than looking at what the addon provides and why that might be unacceptable, which is why I think this movement is out of order and should lead to the removal of many other 'big arrow' addons in terms of their similarity in function to AVR/E.

The problem here is your assuming blizzard had a problem with the function not the method. If they deem the overall function unacceptable then they will take the appropriate steps to break that as well.

I can see where someone can come to the conclusion that they broke it and are "hiding" behind the method justification (not your words specifically, more the general public consensus as to the "real" reason). I just don't see Blizzard needing to do so.

The fact that the camera CVars are no longer accessible means that nothing can tell you precisely where to stand anymore - superimposed or otherwise.

They could work with coordinates.

Camera coordinates were only needed to draw the shapes so that they matched the 3d world. All the information AVR Encounters used is still available. You just can't draw it in 3d but a 2d map is very much doable or you can point an arrow to a safe spot. In fact there already is a mod being developed that does something similar to what AVR Encounters did but using a 2d map. Whether that goes against the new rules is still a bit up in the air.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough - I was actually complaining that Blizzard were only taking these steps because of the addon's method and weren't looking at its function, which I believe is infinitely more significant. My moaning isn't going to help anything, though, so whatever.

Also, it's interesting that someone's already jumped to developing an addon like HudMap. It shows that the interface community will only settle for the best and will always find some way of getting the functionality they want, even if something like this happens.

While it is possible they didn't look at the function, I would find it unlikely that this is the case. The method they chose to employ speaks to the desire to kill only a methodology.

Being that there are numerous addons that have been around longer (in some cases significantly so) that fall in to a similar category without using the same methods I'm inclined to believe that they do not care about anything else but the method in this case.

In the end, without a specific statement from blizzard saying we only looked at X and not Y all we have is a bit of guess work and our personal take on how blizzard runs things.

I am pretty sure that people at blizzard had a very close look at the addon :)
Maybe they have just an other taste of what is acceptable?
In fact they remove all addons that are similarity in function in the way that they change the 3d world.

Banning Bossmods that give hints in the userinterface would require changes to the addon api you don't want... that would cause lots of colletaral damage.

I guess we will find out ;) If they don't like it they will probably lock down more functions in combat.

HudMap isn't being developed in response to the AVR ruling.

If you go to the wowace.com project page for the addon you will see the project was started on the 10th of May. The thread with the Blue ruling about AVR was posted on the 20th of May , a short time after a few addon programmers noticed something to do with Camera pitch CVARs on the 3.3.5 PTR and had contacted Blizzard about it.

Now unless Adrine's learnt how to time travel 10 days back in time then it would be fair to say the HudMap was not started in response to the AVR ruling. To be fair thou the HudMap addon is actually an extension of a feature of SexyMap just expanded into it's own addon.

I feel I should point out at this stage HudMap is being developed by Adrine the guy responsible for Omen , Threat2.0 , Chatter, SexyMap and SexyCooldown. I think he knows full well the consequences of something like this and has worked in closely with the wow ui developers in the past. He has contacted Blizzard to ask if his project is OK or not and he he gets notification that it's not he will end the project.

So far he has yet to receive that confirmation.

Just fyi, HUDMap is not being developed as a "replacement" to AVR or to counteract Blizzard's breaking of AVR. HUDMap was a part of SexyMap for... a year or two. And Antiarc started pulling it out into its own addon a couple of months ago.

edit: Also, Antiarc has contacted Blizzard to see if HUDMap is okay with them. If not, he'll pull it.

/editedit: bah, Blu beat me. :p

It's ok. You provided better timings then me.

pfft. Time travelling addon authors ?. Rather silly thought TBH :banana:

Al-tough. Might of been useful for those all nighters :

*zip back one day*
*submit new fixed commit from day ahead*
*go to bed*
*zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

Adrine? It's Antiarc. :D

He posts under the Adrine name on the UI / Macros forums.

Go do a forum search :)

Bah. You're right. It's been awhile since I visited the official forums.

I see, my mistake. Thanks for the tip.

I find your fail logic amusing.


Could you clarify, does AVR manifests its output as mere UI frames with textures that are a warped to match perspective?
Therefore at the same level as the oUF_HealLines i adapted from a couple other mods....

I mean there isn't some new API that lets you actually draw on the 3d world.

Its much like comic books when characters make references to them being in a comic. Known as breaking the 4th wall. It breaks the "illusion" of the game world by having graphics that are superimposed over it and keep perspective with your camera and motion.

While not physically in the 3d world it interacted (for the most part) as though it was. Blizzard as we have seen did not like this.

Strictly speaking, AVR is draws in the 2D world. It does some math magic using the camera info to figure out how to transform a 2D texture to appear as if it's 3D. That's why AVR can't accurately draw a correctly sized texture over stairs, because it has no knowledge of where, or even if stairs exist.

I personally use very little "helpful" addons. Most addons I use is just to make my screen look pretty and cause I forget to bring out my pet I use one for that. ^_^

I saw AVR. In order to go on a raid once it was required I downloaded it. I immediately disliked it. I pay blizzard to play this game, why would I pay to not play it now? That's kind of how I see it. I immediately deleted the addon and I'll never use it.

I understand why some people defend the addon.

"For people who don't raid, it helps them gain the knowledge of raiding"
"Some people just are not as good as others so they need the help"

But I don't see it as help I see it has hindrance. If you have something telling you what to do, you're not really learning, just avoiding to learn. They become dependent on this addon, and if it wasn't there, I don't think they would be as good.

Kind of like math and a calculator. ;) If I use the calculator to do all my math for me, how will I ever learn what 2+2 is?

But that's just my personal opinion. ^_^

Upon second thought over the whole 'It helps rookies' argument, I realised that it is probably better to do research on a raid before you do it for the first time, isn't it? You could watch some videos which guide you through the raid and all its major encounters (don't TankSpot do good videos like this?) or just ask some friends about it. This would then give you an actual knowledge of the whole raid, rather than just following some arrows, which might help some players, but I have the feeling that an awfully large majority of new players would end up relying on it and not using their own brain. I would probably fall into that trap.