It’s no secret that there are some addons that are either completely walled behind a purchase, or have extra features for a paid version. I think Rested XP guides sort of goes in the spotlight here due to its huge popularity in Classic/era, and for its blatant pay-walling. I would like to note that I am not necessarily saying the authors of RXP guides are bad people, or even doing something morally wrong, but objectively speaking, walling your addon behind money is very clearly violating Blizzard’s addon policy, whether you agree with the policy or not:
As a novice addon dev myself, I completely understand an addon dev’s desire to be rewarded for their hard work for providing an awesome service to the community. But my perception at the moment is that Blizzard basically does nothing to enforce this “policy”. This effectively means that some addon devs get paid for their work, and some addon devs, who are trying to abide by the rules, don’t. And that seems very unfair to me. What’s the point of making rules if they aren’t going to be enforced?
I’ve also been wondering which reality is the best; At some point in this discussion, one must ask themselves: what’s better - having all high quality addons be for-pay, and potentially having an abundance of awesome addons? Or having most addons be free and lower quality with some devs who try to get away with hiding away advantage behind money walls? Even if you do successfully prevent every single money-for-addon exchange, there’s still nothing stopping a powerful addon/WA developer from developing a powerful Ulduar WA package for example, and then only distributing it to their guild and/or close friends. At this point, the highest performing guilds become those with powerful programmers close to them.
If you’re doubting my claim that addons significantly improve raid performance, then look no further than the current Algalon strat that top guilds are starting to do, which is having as many star deaths as possible occur while the raid is in the black hole. This is normally made possible by having warlocks curse of doom the first round of stars on a very tight timer after the fight starts (trivial with a simple weakaura). But this strat is technically possible even with no curse of dooms. Someone in the community has already made a complicated WA that shows the amount of damage needed to explode the stars at the perfect time above each star’s nameplate. Good luck ever doing that consistently without any addons, especially the no-doom version.
12 Likes
My opinion is if an add-on violates the add-on policy in any way, it should be disabled.
I couldn’t find a way to report an add-on - have you submitted an in-game suggestion for such feature to be added?
Have you contacted Blizzard at the email address at the end of the policy?
You are discussing what is better - high-quality paid add-ons or lower-quality free add-ons. I think add-ons should be free otherwise paid add-ons devs will be profiting from intellectual property they do not own.
Regarding the topic about an add-on giving advantage to only one guild. I agree this cannot be prevented unless all add-ons are disabled for highly competitive play - the benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks.
Me personally I don’t use add-ons except Questie because the player I was playing with asked me to. I don’t care if another player with whatever add-on is better than me.
4 Likes
So, I’m sure some people have seen a recent video regarding the HC community and its leadership’s involvement with Blizzard. Personally I think there is a lot wrong with the video, but my takeaway was that there is clearly a heavy financial motive behind a lot of what RXP leadership does, as they make tons of money from RXP addon sales. So I hope Blizzard takes that into account when they are discussing HC server rules. And more importantly, I agree with the video author that it’s a very bad look when Blizzard is directly involving RXP leadership in the development of official HC servers while simultaneously giving them a pass on breaking the addon-development policy, especially when they have been breaking it for so long now.
Now, some people try and argue that, “oh, the RXP addon is a free/open-source framework that anyone can make guides for.” Okay, but so what? At the end of the day RXP is still distributing pre-packaged guides, with some having additional leveling instructions that the free version doesn’t have. The policy explicitly states that “Developers may not create “premium” versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features”. Regardless of any possible semantical debate, I think it’s fairly obvious that the intended spirit of the rule is “we don’t want normal players to have to pay to be on an even playing field with everyone else”, which RXP’s actions are clearly in violation of.
The definition of an “addon” seems to be something the community doesn’t really agree on. Why not change the policy to read something more like “Any file not provided by Blizzard that is read by WoW must be distributed and updated free of charge.” Doesn’t that pretty much cover all of the bases? What would be the downside of this? Either that, or simply remove the quoted bit of the policy so that all addon developers can be rewarded for their work and not just the ones that Blizzard chooses not to action for whatever reason.
8 Likes
It is a case to be reported if there is any sort of financial gain further than voluntary donations. That is how I read it, so my view being, the add-on should be 100% available for free, and not locked behind payment requirement, or donation walls (Patreon).
6 Likes
At the very least, this is to the point where it needs to be addressed officially.
9 Likes