#1 - March 2, 2017, 12:47 a.m.
While, for the most part, we’re impressed with -- and encourage -- the creativity that addon authors bring to the game using the addon API, occasionally an addon goes too far in terms of automating or trivializing elements of gameplay that are meant to be highly challenging. Recently, we’ve become aware of a couple addons that were using visual adjustments to friendly nameplates as a method to automatically coordinate complex positioning requirements. This caused what was intended to be a difficult test of a group’s ability to identify positioning requirements on the fly to instead become a simple matter of following a visual marker.
In order to prevent this from continuing, we’ve had to disable the ability for addons to modify how friendly nameplates appear while inside of dungeon and raid instances. Nothing has changed outside of dungeons and raids – addons will still be able to customize the appearance of friendly nameplates everywhere else (most notably in PvP, where they’re most commonly used in ways we don’t consider problematic).
We also don’t anticipate that addon authors will need to update their code to accommodate this change; customizations should simply stop working once a player zones into a raid, and start working again once they’ve left. However, if you’d like to double-check, this change should now be active in the current 7.2 PTR environment.