Rumors were flying at the end of last week that Blizzard would begin throttling server information requests, like inspection requests used by mouse-over add-ons that look at the gear of the player being examined piece by piece – like the infamous GearScore.

Just as soon as the rumors started to hit the boiling point and people on both sides of the discussion were claiming hallelujah, this was the end for GearScore or alternatively, how dare Blizzard target GearScore with a change like this, Nethaera made a post on the official forums to both confirm the point and clarify the reasoning behind it:

It’s important to understand that the throttling that is being done isn’t intended to break any functionality of add-ons, but merely to control the amount of queries that are being sent to the server at any given time. (Thus throttling the queries.) The queries will still occur, it just won’t happen as quickly as they currently seem to. You can read the statements that WoW Ace and WoW Interface have up for a bit more information on these changes. We wanted to give mod authors a heads-up prior to making the change so that they could make any adjustments they needed to on their mods.

http://wowinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33432
http://www.wowace.com/announcements/blizzard-to-start-throttling-inspect-requests/

Nethaera makes a great point. I try to keep a technical eye on the machinations behind the scenes at Blizzard (see Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched: A Technical Perspective) and the rationale makes sense. While I don’t think that GearScore alone is breaking the game – which is the defense that some people are raising – I think that the proliferation of add-ons that query the game servers regularly in rapid succession can definitely drag down overall performance, and it wouldn’t take too many people running the same series of add-ons regularly that insist on querying the servers for in-game information that the default UI traditionally doesn’t make available (especially on-mouseover) to drag down server performance for everyone.

Still, what do you think? Is this the end of GearScore and add-ons like it, or will their developers simply find ways to adapt over time? Are you glad to see add-ons like these go, or are they just valuable tools that people are using poorly? Sound off in the comments!