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Comment by vitamen | Hacker News Reader

As a Game Master we could see all these hidden communications betweens addons, and it would dwarf the amount of true communication a player would participate in. A raid group could be filled with 1,000 lines of addon chat a second, often contributing to lag that they would then complain about. Addons were powerful, but were certainly a source of many issues, and nobody wanted to hear that they needed to disable their addons to fix their issue.

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If this had been explained exactly as you did here, we might have listened. All we ever heard was, "Disable your addons", which from a technically-inclined user's point of view is akin to your ISP saying "power cycle your modem" for a problem that seemed unrelated.

This is one of those times where I have to wonder why so many companies feel it's such a bad idea to get technical with their users.

I think one of the main problems would be that the loud and angry forum types wouldn't care about know why disabling addons (by the entire raid) would fix the issue.

They would still see it as a problem with "the devs" and not a problem with the addon.

Communicating it clearly to addon developers, that may have helped I think. You know, use the com channels sparingly and for short, targeted messages only, because "lag".

From what I remember there was quite a bit of pride surrounding having the most used addon. And the ability to say "my raid addon doesn't cause lag like the old favourite" would have spurred on some devs to get even more creative with limited resources.

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