I want to create an addon with the help of a dev but don’t have money to hire one. Is it against the rules for me to give them gold as a payment?
you can pay players to dungeon/raid with you, or to dance on a mailbox, so no reason you cant pay them for other things.
theyre being paid to create it, not making you pay to use/access it so im pretty sure its not against the tos for them, and unless you complained about them to blizzard no one is going to know.
if anything they would be potentially breaching the tos in asking for payment for a mod, not you paying for it.
Open a ticket. This isn’t really an appropriate forum question, we’re not rules enforcers.
Here is my interpretation.
(Emphasis mine; I left out an important part that will be discussed below.)
If someone has already built an addon, they are entirely forbidden to charge you money for it. The rule above says that clearly in three different ways.
(This is the part I left out earier, emphasis mine again.)
Similarily, someone cannot contract with you any kind of “subscription” for continued use of an addon that is built or modified in any way for your use.
A prospective developer cannot advertise in-game (or even here on these forums, arguably) a desire for donations or payments of any kind. However, donations could be sought on addon distribution websites
I would infer that offering to pay for building an addon is also therefore okay… on one of those websites. But you are only paying for the development effort… once built, the developer MUST give you a permanent royalty-free license to use the addon to your heart’s content.
And, importantly, the developer CANNOT charge anyone else for the same development effort. (That would be maintaining a premium addon; illegal above.) If they want to distribute the finished product, they must do so freely (said three times above).
To your question about gold… I assume that if real money is allowed on Patreon then why wouldn’t gold be allowed? But honestly I don’t know. And Elvenbane’s suggestion of an in-game ticket is smart.
Source: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/ui-add-on-development-policy/24534
PS. I feel like I need to add this before someone jumps to very wrong conclusions about me and then starts a forum battle:
I do not accept donations for addon development. This post is only to emphasize that certain things are definitely against TOS, and indicate what things might be permissible.
I openly advertised custom guild advertisement addons for years with payment in gold in-game.
If that’s forbidden, Blizzard isn’t enforcing it.
I even had a subscription service for new ads on a monthly basis.
It wasn’t “published” addon and I had some rudimentary security in it (nothing even a beginner programmer couldn’t have bypassed) to “protect” my work.
I delivered it via email and updated it via email.
Didn’t have more than about half a dozen customers, but they were happy customers and all in it made me a little less than half a million gold.
All this shows is that the policy is difficult to enforce (and truly impossible when it comes to one-on-one private transactions through email or whatever).
I could say this “doesn’t make it right” but that would just be an opinion. Instead, I will say this:
Harvest (OP), when looking for someone to build your addon in a rules-compliant way, you should expect them not to do the things described in Ehiztari’s post.
BTW Harvest, what sort of addon are you looking to have made? Cuz it may already exist.
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I wasn’t suggesting that this was a correct way to do things, only that I openly advertised custom guild advertising addons in trade chat for quite a while and never got a sanction.
Delivery and update via email was simply practicality as the addon was custom - it wouldn’t make any sense to go through the overhead of publishing it for another guild - the ads were (deliberately) hard-coded into the addon.
My understanding is that the addon can’t contain a request for payment (it didn’t - payment was arranged in Trade chat) and can’t charge for updates (it didn’t - the subscription was for a NEW addon that had a NEW set of ads in it) and it can’t be for real-world money (it wasn’t - in-game gold only).
It doesn’t. There’s nothing out there like what I’m trying to create. I want to keep it as private as possible so if you’re interested, lmk.
Kaldara#11970 for a private conversation about this.
I sent you a friend invite.