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10-01-14, 09:55 AM   #2
Phanx
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There's nothing technically impossible about your idea, and in theory it would be useful to know I don't need to bother flying halfway across the world to look for a certain rare, but in reality there's a reason there aren't that many addons that rely on addon communication with random players. They can work if you have a large number of people online, in the right places at the right times, and all using the same addon, but otherwise they're so unreliable as to be basically useless, and they're complicated to write, so generally it's just not worth writing them in the first place.

Another point to consider is that while addons of this sort do work for non-competitive stuff, like the Higher Learning books in Dalaran, hunting for rares is extremely competitive. Sure, if you're looking to tame Rare X, you probably don't mind letting everyone know when you see Rare Y nearby -- but if you've got this system set up where everyone tells everyone when they see a rare, then you're only making it harder for yourself to get to Rare X before anyone else.

Originally Posted by littlebuddha79 View Post
On the surface, it would behave like NPCScan w/NPCScanOverlay, except instead of using your local machine's cache, it would use an internal database of Rares:
NPCScan and SilverDragon both already use an internal list of rares. The only thing they use your cache for is detecting when one of the models on that list is loaded into the game client's memory, since that generally means the mob using that model now exists somewhere near you in the game world. (That's also why hunter pets trigger NPCScan, because the tamed rare pet still has the same mdoel as the original rare mob, but all the cache can say is "yep, this model is loaded".)
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