I mean it’s not. A service would be like “Hey download this addon, it doesn’t really do anything but if you pay $15 a month we have a launcher that attaches to your addon folder to send over our data”.
A service is like charging something in order to make the addon function. It’s a completely stand alone addon that doesn’t technically need anything to function. Someone made a good comparison about a music player. This would be like banning people for selling music that can be tied into an addon.
Bro what? What aren’t you getting?
Yeah actually it is. Because if you are following the words on a very specific definition they are in the clear. Maybe you’re just not familiar how lawyer speak works, that’s alright.
Okay well having an optional folder that has a guide in it isn’t a service so there you go.
I just want to be crystal clear here just so there isn’t any confusion. It is. Period.
Okay well once again, the addon itself is completely stand alone and functions and works completely free of any charges.
They make guides that they sell on the side that you can buy if you want to. People charge for weakauras, world first guilds use to pay people to make them weakauras I’m pretty sure. Another thing to keep in mind, the guide itself can be used on a website and not on the addon itself they just created functionality within the addon so it can be used there.
Honestly I think you just don’t understand how loopholes work and you’re confused why they are allowing something that seems like they are trying to ban. But that’s what a loophole is…lmao.
People describe themselves as offering services for certain things all the time. It’s a pretty far reaching term to use for an intangible benefit you provide of value to a customer.
Yeah, I don’t really want to act high and mighty here on this because I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll reiterate I work in a legal field and thus have interacted with lawyers, listened to how they interpret things, gone to seminars, literally write and review legal descriptions, review legal documents, and so on so I’m actually more confident about putting myself in this kind of mindset than someone who wants to construct an argument around the idea that if something is forbidden but the offender does it anyways it might be ok because there are other options available to people. No; when something says X is forbidden X is forbidden. The only actual debate here is whether or not the guide is a service and anyone arguing otherwise is simply ignorant.
But hey, I guess a lawyer could make that argument if they wanted to…but all that would tell me is they have no good argument to make and they’re just throwing stuff at the wall hoping it sticks.
Ok, so what is it then? We have this company that compiled a bunch of information together for their customers to use as a way to make their life easier. What is that thing called? Because so far you’ve only called it as a “thing” yet I would think if one was confident in it not being a service you’d be more forthcoming at describing what it is.
Ooooh, my turn my turn! Let me be crystal clear so there isn’t any confusion. It isn’t. Period.
Hehe…got’em boys.
Yeah, I said “in any capacity” which would extend to creative design to circumvent the policy. Which, to be clear, RestedXP’s design came after their policy, not the other way around. They built their addon the way they did to skirt the policy to which I am saying it really doesn’t since they are selling a service related to the addon.
And to be fair, there’s an argument to be made that addon developers should be allowed to charge for what they create. Notwithstanding the addon purge of Midnight, I think the reason Blizzard’s policy was created was because it’s bad business if addons are seen as required to play the game and after new players join they realize they have to buy all these third party plug-ins to get into which is why I think the policy was created.
It’s also why I don’t think Blizzard bothers to police this, because a leveling guide is very much so small potatoes. I think if the big ticket developers that really drove dungeon/raid design acted in the way RestedXP does Blizzard would have came out swinging at them for it.
Historically yes, and since midnight they still have a team dedicated for addons. None of this is relevant though as they have never sold anything; they just have people on salary that do that work for them and what they do isn’t initially released to the public. In the past I believe Liquid said they share their WA package after the race closed out.
Oh man I’m sure the guide came first and the addon came second, and not that they developed everything with the intention of people feeding it into the addon so that it can update your progress as you play. Man, I would loved to have been in the room when they came up with the revelation that they could put it in an addon in the game and start the work on turning their text guide into something the addon could read.
I’m also super sure there are tons of people using the guide on the second monitor instead of installing the addon. But hey, I’ll give you props here. This actually is an argument a lawyer would try to use so kudos.
This is, however, the most lawyer argument you’ve made for your case so far though and an argument I’d expect to see if this was some sort of legal case. You’d still have to get over the fact that it plugs into the addon though so it doesn’t do much if the determination is it’s a service, which is what a judge would be highly interested in defining.
Except I’m willing to acknowledge that someone sitting down and compiling a bunch of information to sell to someone is a service, ergo I see no loophole. Just a policy that isn’t being enforced.
And, again, I’ll reiterate that if this is fair game they might as well nuke this clause in their policy because nothing prevents other developers from finding a way to do similar things.
The definition you’re attempting to use service for would ban basically all addons. Just so we are clear on why the definition you’re using isn’t correct.
Interesting so you should be fairly familiar with how these legal terms are us….
Well never mind I guess you’re not. That’s why it’s called a loop hole. They may want X banned, but the way it’s worded people worked around it and made it so X isn’t banned.
It’s literally how people are selling gear in raids right now. You would think by the way they worded it they don’t want you to sell gear in raids, well there’s a loophole in there so people can sell gear in raids.
It’s the perfect argument because the thing that they are doing is literally not listed in things you can’t do. That’s 101 loophole legal stuff.
It’s not a service it’s just them selling some guides they made for the addon.
If you buy a cox router, and that router only works with cox internet, the internet you buy for the router is the “service” attached to the product. If you have an addon that filters out trade chat, but you have to enter a key a pay for in the addon to work every week, that’s a “service” you are paying for for the addon.
Here I’ll keep it simple for you. You are using the word “service” as anything you can pay for that works with the addon.
Ok just understand with that logic, DBM is banned, weakauras is banned, all UI addons are banned, any addon ever that has its own profiles/guides/scripts you can make yourself could be, has been, and will be sold to others so if you’re using that definition we just have no addons.
That’s how legal terms like that work.
If your banning restedxp because they happen to make guides they sell to users to use if they want to use them… then weakauras is too because weakauras have sold imports. Music addons are banned too because you buy music to put on there. DBM is banned too because you could make your own profiles and settings and sell them if you wanted.
Blizzard doesn’t see an issue with it because you do not need those guides for it to be a good addon. You can make your own routes and never purchase anything on the addon ever just like you would use weakauras
they buffed xp gain so much 1-60 in tbc that it’s not even required you overlevel every zone anyways. Just use questie and aim for killing mobs 1-2 levels lower than you, simple
Questies is nice. It shows worlds wide where stuff is at. I stick to simple plans. Always be yellow. Some pita 2+’s if no groups around leave till green later.
When a zone goes red (say tauren mills for latter parts of battle of hillsbad and that crap up north)…go find some yellow quest markers and take that nice walk and come back later.
Some view the walks not efficient. Its older wow….you are doing that at some point to complete flight master circuits anyway is how I look at it.
I actually have a different word I’d use to describe what an addon is, I just haven’t given it up to you since I’m waiting for you to figure out how you describe what a guide is if it isn’t a service.
However, I’ll humor you the argument anyways; none of those addon require payment so even if we are describing addons as services it wouldn’t matter.
Here’s the thing; if the rule simply stated that addons must be free of charge I would agree with you. It’d be a slam dunk case of following the letter of the law rather than the spirit and I assume Blizzard would update their policy to reflect it. That’s a loophole. Again, this all hinges on defining what a service is, of which you have determined it’s not and I have because I have no idea what else you would call it.
If you want a case of an actual loophole it’s just back to the whole multiboxing ban. They initially banned software setups as the way to gut multiboxing…and people laughed at them saying they would just switch to hardware setups because the language was so precise (that’s what helps make a loophole by the way). And I remember being there telling people that if hardware setups really did get popular because of this they’d update their policy to reflect it…and they did.
Here’s another funny example of a legal loophole (that’s true). Some old dude wanted to plant sunflowers in his front yard, but his HOA told him he couldn’t; so because he’s old and had nothing better to do he hired a lawyer to review the HOA covenants and his lawyer found that whoever wrote the document (shamefully) padded their time by being very descriptive with what they could and couldn’t plant. Sure enough…sunflowers were banned. You know what wasn’t banned? Corn. You know what he planted? Corn. You know what the HOA decided to make an exception on for that old dude? Sunflowers.
These are examples of loopholes. Saying you can’t charge for services related to an addon and getting into semantics of “Well what is a guide anyways??? Is it TRULY a service? Or is it just a thing? Isn’t a guide JUST a guide afterall? It’s not a SERVICE, it’s just a guide. Hehehehe what a loophole we found” isn’t finding a frigging loophole. I do get why people would want to think this, especially if they just glance at the rule, but it doesn’t actually hold water when you dissect it.
They explicitly banned GDKPs for the publicly stated rationale of it eroding traditional guild and social structure. Their public stance (at least) is not actually about them having a dislike for selling gear; GDKP just happens to utilize that system. They have further clarified in other statements after the fact that selling gear is completely fine. I’m sure if HR runs gained popularity to the same level as GDKP runs they’d step in, but given the design of HR runs I don’t think it’s very likely.
So. What. Is. It?
It’s not a service, it’s a ____. They are not providing a service, they are providing a __.
Fill. It. In. For. Me.
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to get at here. If you ask me when you sign up with an ISP the service you are buying from them is the internet. You need a router to get access to their internet and some require you to use theirs and others let you buy your own. So I mean yeah? Ok? I think we’re saying the same thing here?
Naw mate, that’s a subscription! It’s not a service!
This is how I feel like you are trying to argue with me on what guides are. “Guides aren’t a service they’re…they’re….well they’re just some guides!!”
Yeah, I think I agree with this. I don’t know why you think an addon that requires a key to use is a service, but a guide you buy to punch into the addon isn’t also a service.
Like if your addon example that filters trade chat had other base functionality to it would that key they sell you suddenly stop being a service then? Cause their addon is usable without their key? They’re not selling you a service now, they’re just selling you a key! It’s just some key you can use!
I already covered why this isn’t accurate, but I’ll expand on this below.
What…legal term did you use? Service? Service isn’t inherently a legal term. To make a term “legal” in the way I think you are trying to describe it means you have to define it in the document ahead of using it. Many legal documents will do this where they designate what terms mean so when you read it you can refer back to that part of the document.
Service is just a very broad term that can be argued to cover a lot of things. Which is why I’m happy to argue selling someone a guide is a service and why I am awaiting for you to describe it as something else.
Yeah, to be clear here (as I stated earlier) when I say RestedXP goes against Blizzard’s policy I am referring to the developer which Blizzard should be going after.
But since you have repeatedly pointed out anyone can make a guide for RestedXP I decided to go out and look on curseforge to see who is out there doing. Bluntly speaking, they have zero competition. Seems like there’s one guy who does small projects largely related to professions, and a few others who have thrown a couple of things out. There are a total of 24M RestedXP downloads…and the next highest is 124k downloads for a TBC launch guide for the horde. It continues to drop off steep after that for some pretty specific/niche guides so it’s suffice to say people are downloading the addon and purchasing (or pirating) the guide.
But, yes, someone could sell their own WAs, DBM, Elvui, etc profiles. Luxthos was famous for his Class WA packages that were free on his website, but it would be very hard to police literally everyone and anyone doing this so it’d be unrealistic to ban an addon simply because someone somewhere starts selling stuff for it. In this case though RestedXP is the designer of the addon and also sells the plugins for it.
Yeah, except people clearly aren’t doing that. 24M downloads on curseforge to less than 400k community made guides. Or are we now arguing that people are downloading it and just making their own stuff they never share? To be fair, I have no idea how easy or hard it is to make a guide in their addon, but I have a sneaking suspicion very few people have the appetite to do this. Most people can’t even make their a few weakauras for themselves, let alone a comprehensive guide.
Either way, doesn’t change the whole point that the guides are a service related to an addon. Like, this is what I mean by bad lawyering logic here. You keep trying to point out that the reason Blizzard doesn’t have a problem with this is because “It’s still a good addon because you don’t need those guides”
No, from my perspective, they said the thing wasn’t allowed. All other caveats to the scenario isn’t relevant. It doesn’t matter if you can make your own guide, use the free version up until a certain level, or that you can get a community member guide for free. They are selling a service related to an addon in the form of a guide; that’s the ballgame.
The only thing you and I are actually debating here is whether or not a guide is a service or something else. I have clearly defined a selling a guide you plug-in to their addon as a service they offer to users of their addon.
You have simply stated a guide is…just some guide they are selling.
While these debate threads are fun sometimes….RXP has been beaten to death in retail. Since as far back as my late legion start. And before forum-aggeddon wiped that out, it was beat to death well before then too.
Its allowed. Its been allowed.
Also it probably has as many “crackers” as the last “physical” version of adobe photoshop before they went sub/cloud based years ago.
Dudes ask how can it charge. I ask….who the hell didn’t crack this like 99.99999% of its users do lol.
You are thinking of the one that is a lot like RestedXP but then requires you to pay lots of real life money to unlock all the full features, yea that version of that addon which is a ripoff of rested XP…that one is banned.
Alright you went on a massive massive rant there that was basically all completely worthless. Your whole post can be broken down to one thing, you don’t understand definitions, you don’t understand how they are used, you don’t understand any of how terms of service works at all.
When I said “legal terms” I am referring to how companies choose their words specifically when making things like EULAs and Terms of Service like the one we are reading right now. If they are using the definition of service as the one you literally said you agree with, then all addons would be banned by the definition of the term. Period. End of discussion. We don’t need to hear your opinion on it because it would be.
It doesn’t matter if “oh but the scope of it isn’t even close…” doesn’t matter. That’s not how these terms and definitions work. You can disagree all you want you’ll just be choosing to be wrong and that’s ok
Alright I’m just going to keep this really simple for you because you don’t really seem to be getting any of this.
You are operating from the perspective of “this should be banned”. You are operating from the perspective, even though YOU KNOW blizzard knows about this addon. Even though YOU KNOW blizzard isn’t going to ban it. So you think you are understanding blizzards words better than they are and they are just choosing not to ban these addons. I want to be clear I said addonS because by your definition things like weakauras are gone too, because they also sell UI packs on their website.
You aren’t going to get anywhere with this. I can explain it to you like a dummy for hours, but the fact that you arrived at the conclusion you did yourself, leads me to believe you aren’t going to learn anything from this today.
For christ sake when discussing definitions, one of your arguments is “Well look they aren’t even making that many community guides” as if that has anything to do at all with this discussion LMAO.
But here I’lll explain it to you again. 400k guides is actually a TON. 90% of the people don’t even pay the guide itself. They get restedxp and they google “free restedxp guides” and then just hit download. The fact that the addon has 400k community made guides sort of proves my point that the addon itself is its completely stand alone thing that doesn’t need payment of the guides themselves.
Honestly we are just going to have to leave it here, you aren’t going to learn from this.
Just know theres a reason blizzard hasn’t banned it. Just think on that for a second.
The one and only reason it has not been banned is because blizzard considers it similar to a music player that can play music. I have said this many times. Just because you bought the music somewhere (RXP GUIDE) and the music player (RXP) can play it does not make the addon violate the tos. There is no paid version of the addon.
You have complete freedom to play whatever guide you want with the addon. Some people even make free music (nutri guides) you can download and use instead of buying the mainstream artists (rxp guide)
Yeah it’s really not hard to get. Banning the sale of guides literally bans all other forms of this as well. If you go on weakauras website right now you can see you can pay for UI packs on their websites. It’s the exact same thing. He’s really just stuck on the definition of service and putting his own made up definition on it when clearly blizzard is not using it this way.
I think Blizzard’s thought process in situations like this boils down to ‘Will it make us or cost us money?’ and ‘Can we monetize this if it doesn’t cost too much?’.
The word isn’t up to me to decide what it is. I can just say it’s a guide and that’s good enough. What im telling you is that it’s not a service, because if it was then everything would be banned.
I’m really not sure how you’re not getting this unless you’re just trolling.
Restedxp isn’t this fringe addon no one uses and is flying under the radar. Blizzard knows what it is. And is okay with it. So it’s not a service. Just like weakauras
…wow. I mean honestly I thought if I pressed you enough you’d eventually call it something like a good or a product and we could go from there, but man not being able to define it while simultaneously being confident to claim what it’s not is rich; comedy gold to be honest. I have to ask, do you not realize how ridiculous it sounds to do that? To be willing to die on the hill of knowing it’s not a thing, but then also claiming you’re not allowed to define it?
See, I’m willing to admit my stance on it being a service is subjective, but I am willing to expand and defend that stance through further debate. However, it’s difficult when my opponent can’t do the same thing so I never get to opportunity to expand.
As a famous person once said…I’m going to keep this really simple for you; you’ve lost all credibility. This debate is no longer worth my time, you are simply bad at debating and articulating your thoughts as upi don’t really understand what is your point is, you seemingly just want to argue. You started this thread off by stating you weren’t sure you agreed with it, but that you were were throwing your “lawyer lens” on to dissect their policy and reached the conclusion that what they did seemed sketchy, but ultimately seems like a loophole. Now here we are ~7 posts deep and now you are adamant that they don’t sell services, haven’t done anything wrong, and it’s all above board.
You don’t know what you’re arguing, you’re just arguing because you want to argue.
My guy, I get why you make this argument, but the fact of the matter is it’s RXP that makes the addon, that is the itunes of it, and then also sells like 99% of the music. That’s what I was attempting to highlight earlier to Allanua when I misspoke about there being “400k guides” when I meant there were 24M downloads of the addon versus 400k downloads of non-RXP guides on curseforge (over a pretty small handful of guides). People clearly aren’t using other people’s “music”. They download the addon and either buy their guide or pirate it.
The system is obviously set up in an effort to skirt the policy, my stance has simply been it does a piss-poor job of it because the guides they sell should clearly fall into the realm of a service. Yeah, we can all make our own guides if we want to, but man oh man is it not easier to fork over $25 bucks and have one given to us instead. Not sure how people don’t see that as a service (while simultaneously not knowing what else to call it).
And at the end of the day, whether we want to call this a loophole or not kind of sort of doesn’t matter. If what RXP does is considered above board by Blizzard all addon developers should go this route…which makes the rule pointless. Which is why I have said if they’re going to give RXP a free pass they might as well just remove the rule.
Yeah but when I go 50 deep it’s fun because they are making themselves look dumb. You’re doing it too but burying it in so much nonsense it’s not worth it.
You’re just wrong and you refuse to accept it, that’s alright. You can just stay there and wonder why the addon not breaking tos is still in the game.
I mean it’s not. A service would be like “Hey download this addon, it doesn’t really do anything but if you pay $15 a month we have a launcher that attaches to your addon folder to send over our data”.