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06-25-10, 04:29 AM   #16
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Originally Posted by ComputerX View Post
I'm not a addon developer (hell, last time I touched lua was in mirc...) but I am an experienced programmer in other languages, so please excuse me if this is a stupid point...

The server has to send item data to the client so it can draw the correct armour every time you see a player. I'm just going to assume this is a simple skin id array. Why can't the server send an item id array, that the client looks up and loads the correct item data. This way, addons like gearscore won't need to do an inspect request, but access the cached item data instead.

Surely this would only increase server -> client player data by a small %, but allow the continued use of inspect-based addons without touching the inspect api at all?
Think of a zone like Dalaran, the majority of the players that are loaded you will never inspect, or Ironforge or Orgrimmar. A little bit of data adds up and you would have to add gems as well as non-visible enchants too. The vast majority of it would end up being unused, especially if the player isn't running an inspect mod.

If I had to take a guess, the majority of Gearscores requests are due to poor coding causing it to unnecessarily send requests on the same player. While caching would help it, it's an issue that could be fixed by competent coding. Anyway, if you want to believe the Blizzard post, it's not specifically due to Gearscore either. Tooltip mods do inspection requests on mouseover, various UFs do it on target, etc.
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