Not everything that
can be made
should be made.
But since addon authors are not some kind of monolithic group that can self-discipline and there will always be black hats, it falls to Blizzard to preserve gameplay.
- Blizzard declared babelfish (and similar in-game x-faction communication addons use to be bannable in original vanilla)
- They protected the movement functions in early vanilla as well because for those that do not remember there were addons that let you input a series of coordinates and they would walk/mount you across the world even taking ships and zeppelins automatically.
- They took steps to break original Decursive in BC.
- They took steps to break AVR in WotLK.
- They took steps to protect us from several Lua "virus"-like addons (some will remember addons that traded or mailed your gold when you went in-range of a mailbox or a specific player)
In other words they are fully within their rights to forbid and take steps to break addons that break their intended game design or can be used for unattended play (bot-like).
With that said.
This particular addon that they are targeting is both
- breaking the intended design as evidenced by them removing the built-in server AI that makes LFD possible on more recent versions of the game.
- allowing
AFK forming and joining groups (which is unattended play no matter how you slice it)
Addons existed in 2005 (for example CallToArms) that did chat parsing or even helping to format and post messages and collect those messages (be it typed out, hitting a macro or using an addon) in a
nice (for the era) GUI list.
vQueue (a more recent offering) did the same with an even nicer interface.
Both of them took existing information, collated it and presented it, but stopped short of automating the whole process start to finish.
You still had to use the familiar player context menu (or buttons) to /whisper or /invite which - from a gameplay perspective - is the equivalent of shift-clicking a message in the default chatframe to get class and level information on a poster and right-clicking to whisper or invite them.
If ClassicLFG stopped there and
didn't let you bot yourself into groups, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
We'd have another perfectly acceptable addon with an even more polished interface that helps organize the chaos of user chat, without taking the player out of the group forming process.
Hopefully Blizzard takes a measured approach and breaks just the automation part (for example makes group invite require a hardware event, like trading does) rather than taking a more heavy handed approach and breaking some or other part of the chat parsing or inter-addon communication chain which would probably cripple anything from chat addons, to rp addons, to bossmods, to spam filters etc.
Edit to add: I hope the people that are protesting this in the vein of "but muh freedom as an author" have no issue with
someone exercising that same freedom to make an AntiLFG addon that trashes the original; better not go down that road ..