Note: I have no stake in this game as I am neither the dev nor Blizz, so this is out of curiosity.
- Wowhead’s article: wowhead.com/news/warcraft-logs-releases-in-game-tooltip-addon-displaying-player-parses-and-376174
Archon’s page: archon.gg/wow/articles/news/archon-tooltip-release-for-retail-and-cataclysm
All users get access to the core addon and data for every character, which is updated weekly. Subscribers get a few more features, such as:
*Subscribers can use Shift to get more information in their hover tooltips.
*This gives you encounter-level data in-game.
*More Frequent Updates
*Subscribers get daily data updates with a bit more detail. This also updates YOUR data for everyone else daily.
- Blizzard’s addon development policy
All add-ons must be distributed free of charge. Developers may not create “premium” versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on.
8 Likes
That cat left the barn a long time ago.
Plus there’s the question about whether Blizzard really has a mechanic to sanction addons. It’s not like Blizzard distributes them, or validates them, or anything.
Zygor has been running afoul of it for years. Clearly nobody cares.
Id imagine the same way all the other big addons do premium features and get away with it, like the faster character refreshes and quicker updates for being premium, the information is free and availible on their website at all times, patreon just saves you a few clicks.
I can see this one getting actioned though, with how many people complained about io without knowing how it worked, blizz caved and made their own lesser version so they stopped complaining about the addon itself, but i dont think blizz can make a public parser themselves cause then theyd Have to acknowledge how unbalanced classes are in their own data and they woudnt do that.
So the premium might have to go away if enough people complain about how its ruining their chances at groups.
2 Likes
It becomes a grey area when the premium features are part of a patreon membership because you’re not paying for only the addon.
The extra data seems to fit into the grey area of ‘non-addon additional information’, but the ability to press shift & have the addon respond differently definitely sounds iffy under the letter of the law.
The reality is that what Bliz says goes though, so it’s a question of whether this upsets the community as much as the original non-Blizzard io & gearscore systems did… which does sound plausible in this case.
Another interesting suggestion I’ve seen is that it might fall afoul of the european privacy laws - which prevent gathering of data from electronically identifiable individuals without prior consent.
Even if true tho, that’d come down to whether WCL got all their legal disclaimers into their terms of use early enough and could potentially be solved by forcing Opt-In as default for EU zone players.
It’s hard to be sure. This impacts raiding, the Holy Grail of content. Blizzard has winked at all kinds of ToS-violating shenanigans until they affected raiding… and then just like that there’s nothing identifiable left from the smoldering grease stain.
Raid bots sim has been offering a premium subscription forever, through an interesting loophole where you can technically get all the features for free, even if the free version sucks.
Blizzard should probably do something about these addons because it puts the makers of these addons at an advantage over addon makers that obey the rules since they get money to run their addons.
The trick with EU GDPR is here: they only collect information about WoW characters, not the real persons behind them.
You cannot identify the real person, their age or place of living from the information available in WoW armory or similar pages. On the other side Blizzard claims that they own information related to the game, like WoW characters.
EU GDPR is about real personal data, not character data of fictive avatars in a fictive fantasy game. Hence there is no privacy issue.
The way i understand it the premium features are for the overwolf app, and it’s using their own servers to share and host the data. The addon is simply a tool tip reading, the real feature are in the app. The same way TSM works with its application
The answer is, it does violate it. And blizzard doesn’t take action, while telling (non-streamer) players if they color outside the lines they have strict codes of conduct and any violation will not be tolerated.
Countless apps have been flaunting that rule forever. Blizzard never does anything about TSM or zygors, I doubt they’ll do anything about this. If there’s enough outcry, they might cripple the add-on in some way, but it won’t be due to the no paid add-ons thing.
its in a grey area
the main add on is free and some features but stuff for an example like saves and such is behind a sub fee.
This doesn’t sound like a grey area to me. Pretty sure that paywalling stuff like that is not allowed.
But it’s pay walled in a program, not an addon
Well, Blizzard STILL hasn’t stopped them or any of the other addons that are doing similar stuff. So you can keep telling them its “not allowed” and they’ll just keep ignoring you. Thus, its a grey area…because Blizz IS allowing it despite what their TOS says.
i get denied regularly enough in m+ que that it doesnt even matter at this point lol. its not going to make my group finding experience worse. who cares really. they can just look it up anyway. I doubt anyone complaining about this type of thing would ever consider looking someone up on logs but those people that have it surely would… so its just saving them some tab time really. all that info is already out there so i dont really see a big difference other than speed of info gain vs tabbing to look up