The Removal of Action Cam

07/29/2016 03:41 PMPosted by Abolishment

Recently, Blizzard posted a message stating they were going to be disabling action cam for the time being. Apparently, "more than a few players" were accidentally enabling the action cam feature.

I'm completely befuddled as to how this would happen. It's a console command, therefore you have to go completely out of your way to enable it. It's not something you could click in the interface by mistake.

To clarify: This experimental mode is/was apparently being enabled in some cases through no direct action of users. The concern isn't that people could somehow accidentally type "/console actioncam full" and then be bewildered regarding how to disable it. The concern is that people have logged into 7.0.3 and found some of those features defaulted on, with no indication to that effect, and the game does not provide any clear direction regarding how to disable it.

"Action cam" will return. It was an in-development feature that ended up being accessible to players in one of our beta builds, and when we saw how much fun players were having with it, we decided to keep it around as a hidden toggle rather than disabling it immediately. It seemed harmless at the time. But there is now clear evidence to the contrary. The mode needs some extra safeguards, and we need to make it easier for players to know whether portions of it are enabled and if so, that it's an experimental feature, and how to disable it. That isn't possible without a real patch (that is to say, not a hotfix, but rather a new patch number beyond 7.0.3).