Well, if Wowup makes any kind of deal with Overwolf, I guess I’ll go back to manually installing mods.
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If you’ve installed overwolf make sure you run a malware scan after uninstalling it. Yes, I’m serious. Run Malwarebytes.
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I’ve yet to see a website block what’s basically a wget request. I guess Overwolf could require an account and login to be able to just download addons, but I believe a) they can’t by Blizzard’s EULA and b) they’d be shooting themselves in the foot in regards to ease of access, possibly driving addon makers to host on good old Wowinterface.
just ignore the ramblings, there’s nothing wrong with over wolf, people just mad things changed on them.
I have not even noticed all these “terrible adds”, just open it up, go to curse, update, and done, go ahead and close it.
What I’m gathering is they had problems way back in the day… but so did most sites back then
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o_O
I have Overwolf and have had zero issues. I don’t know wth people are talking about with ads and haven’t gotten malware from it. It does exactly what twitch did but frankly without all the bs twitch came with…
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No they’re not. In fact they’re talking about making a special API just for the addon authors. But that won’t come until further down the line and is in talks only.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen any of these problems. I only downloaded it like a couple of weeks ago.
I’ve not found any concrete proof so far. My computer gets a daily malware and virus scan. I’ve also submitted their programs to virus total a few times which scans 126 antiviral programs.
It’s rather telling that they’ve made posts on the Malware bytes forums and had their software whitelisted a time or two. I don’t believe the Malware Bytes team are idiots that would whitelist potential malware just at the malware makers say so. I think they would check things first.
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I will not be using Overwoof. Once burned, twice shy.
If wowui goes away I’ll be installing addons by hand. Not that big a deal.
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There’s nothing in Blizzards EULA preventing needing to login to download addons.
Overwolf could require authentication keys in order for their API to be used but from the looks of talks being undertaken I don’t believe they’ll go that far.
AFAIK Ads haven’t been activated yet as they haven’t fully migrated 100% of the back end as yet. They’ll be working with https://www.geoedge.com/ to curate their ads so there’s hope there.
My question is, do we even need the API? Every addon zip file has a unique adress on their CDN. That’s what the download request from the download button actually calls (you can check Network calls in your browser’s developer console).
For exemple, Details is https://edge.forgecdn.net/files/3131/655/Details-DetailsRetail.9.0.2.8002.144.zip.
My understanding is that short of blocking the calls behind authentication, you can just catalog these adresses and call them directly from any app.
Last time i checked anyone could launch an addon service. Overwolf doesn’t own wow addons, blizzard does. They can’t legally go after someone for it.
The problem is not with Overwolf’s hosting addons on Curse and owning addons. Overwolf does not and cannot own the addons. By copyright, their respective authors do. You’re absolutely right that anyone could make their own platform. Though anyone cannot grab an author’s addon and re-host it; the authors own copyrights and would need to upload the addons themselves to platforms of their choosing. That’s the difficult part in establishing a new platform: convincing the creators to mirror or migrate.
The problem is with Curse/Overworlf, the largest and most known addon repository in the WoW community, refusing third party applications from interfacing with their library. They consider any use that doesn’t go through their website or app “unauthorized use”. They want their adds to be seen.
Curse was traditionally an open platform as far as third party access was concerned (they even made an API for it), but Overwolf wants to close that access or rope third party into modifying their software to display Overwolf’s adds. Which defeats the purpose of using third party managers in the first place.
I was under the impression that the addon developers don’t own their addons. Blizzard does.
Hard to trust Overwolf after knowing what they did in past. I don’t like giving anyone who had hand dirtied with malware a chance.
With that said, WoWUp is very simple and lightweight. Love it.
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Addons are derivative work. Circular 14: Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations
Blizzard content belongs to Blizzard, but new code, ideas, graphics, etc. belong to the addon creators. It’s pretty much the same in every modding community across gaming.
That’s why Skyrim and Minecraft are so rich in delicious drama: addon authors telling each other “no you can’t use my stuff” is only possible because they really do own their derivative work. If the company did, tweaking anyone’s addons would be fair game for anyone, as fair game as modding the base game itself. But we clearly see it’s not. Try forking WoW’s TSM or Skyrim’s Unofficial Patch, see the TSM team or Arthmoor come down on you with the wrath of angry gods.
The EULA can say whatever it wants, but corporations being cute with a “we own whatever you make and if you don’t agree don’t bother making anything” scary-lawyer-speak approach would defeat the entire principle of protecting derivative works in the first place. Like going after Fair Use. No gaming company to date dared to test it in court.
Then again, a simple user getting in a legal dispute with a publisher is a surefire way to get your entire account with that publisher nuked (yay for digital libraries you don’t own, amirite?), so I’d say the scare tactics tend to work in the publisher’s favor most of the time.
2 things, So theoretically nothing is stopping someone from downloading every addon through overwold / keeping them updating and sharing their interface file? Interesting concept right? A little bit of automation here and there and boom you’ve got a client that’s so grey area I don’t think anyone would know what to do. (not that it would matter anyway, as anyone who wants to go against overwolf just need to host in a friendly country)
Second thing, It’s hilariously easy to block overwolfs ad’s just FYI for anyone looking into it.
We do to be polite and efficient with their bandwidth.
Sure you could write a bot that essentially just loads up the addon page and guesses what the download URL is. But that would use up a lot more bandwidth then just using the API to initiate the download.
I think you meant to say here that Addons are NOT derivative works.
Derivative works need to contain significant parts of the original to be considered derivative works. In a emulation lawsuit a judge ruled that the function calls and variables used in an API wasn’t significant enough to be copyrighted (while the code was).
In fact it’s fully possible to write a wow addon that runs purely on Lua with absolutely no Blizzard related function calls or variables used it in. In fact you probably use one already - LibStub is an example of an addon with nothing Blizzard related inside it.
You wouldn’t be able to rehost someone else’s addons as , by the Berne convention an Author owns the copyright to it the instance it’s in tangible form. The moment they start typing in the code for their addon they own copyright to that addon and only they can change their license for it.
While there are more permissive licenses not every single addon author out there is going to up and change the license on their addons to those more permissive licenses.
And sure you could make a scraping bot that reads the addon page then guesses the URL from that requires using a lot more bandwidth then simply making an API function call. If you did this you would run the risk of addon sites taking action to stop people using such a method to download. In fact inefficient bandwidth use is probably the main reason why they blocked wowmatrix from downloading from Curse/Wowinterface. That thing was loading up the entire addon page , ads and all 3-4 times … per addon download.