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.