Mythic Dungeon Tools Addon now behind paywall

I think the author was trying to give themselves the gift of money for Christmas!

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Mad he doesn’t have the sponsors he did and has to make a living playing wow somehow?

Idk spitballing here.

It’s loose indeed, but the eula says you can’t charge for add-ons, not guides. Neither of these uses blizz data for the guides they offer. The actual add-on portion of zygor that uses blizzard api Isn’t what the charge you for, for example. I’m not arguing your moral dilemma here, it’s just why blizz isn’t going to have any intervention.

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Technically, they’re charging for functionality.

I am sticking with them not going after She got because it’s not worth their time or money, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were to change their add-on policy at a later date because of this.

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I haven’t read what’s going on, so I could be entirely wrong, but it sounds like they are charging for trash abilities which isn’t found in the blizz api.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/ui-add-on-development-policy/24534

Not the EULA … but at the top of the UI Add-On forum is policy… there is a post blue that clearly states:

“1) Add-ons must be free of charge.
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.”

Of course, it’s up to Blizzard how they wish to interpret and enforce this. It’s an easy argument to make that a data service is monetized in the addon.

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Someone forgot about Oqueue that had a donation button. Surely Blizz will investigate and check it out if there is a ToS violation

I don’t use the addon, I’m not mad at all. :laughing:

I’m not mad either, I’m amused at the fit he’s throwing.

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I don’t know nnoggie nor do I watch his stream. I don’t take the gossip about streamers in this forum as anything but with a grain of salt. Hopefully, it’s just a little bit of smoke and no fire here.

I do support some folks behind wow-related services I use via patreon: dbm, raider.io, and raid bots. The idea of supporting a developer’s work is a good thing, especially when you want to the work to continue. Personally, I’m not sure that paywall’ing is the right thing to do here but it’s also not my decision to make.

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How what? Charging for an addon is against the TOS. They could just ban him…

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I mean, it’s fire, his GM posted that he was going through some things and they were going to try and help him any way they could.

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There is nothing they can do, as the addon is still free just the extra data isn’t. That isn’t against the rules. If you really want to teach him a lesson, support someone who is making a new version that will include the data for free.

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It literally is:

  1. Add-ons must be free of charge.
    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.

Considering that what you’d be paying for was the only reason people used the addon, I’m not sure how it can be argued that this isn’t at least a “premium” version.

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Also a donation button that que had and this pay for extra features are 2 different things. Donations is, If your feeling generous, while method is literally charging you for a feature of the add on. Against tos or eula or whatever

I guess that depends upon if Blizzard considers the data part of the addon. You am betting nothing about the addon actually changes between the standard and premium, just the premium comes with some kind of dat file to load the mob info.

Can you do that? Mob data is data that belongs to Blizzard. Selling that data in any way seems like taking Blizzard’s content, and then profiting from it.

edit
By this I mean that location information is encoded in Blizzard’s files. If you blackbox the location data, you’re not replicating a system, but discovering source information directly. When doing software development and copying something from another developer, you don’t get into trouble for replicating a system, so long as you don’t touch the source or replicate the source. The location data would be replicating the data itself, and it’s impossible to tell if you read the data directly, or blackboxed it. You can get into more than a TOS violation for doing that.

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That data was already included in the addon prior to his recent update. He removed it, in order to put it behind a paywall. And it was the only reason the addon worked. Without it, you can’t plan routes since no mobs are shown on the map, thus you can’t see the %forces count for the packs you’ve chosen.

Which was why I was initially confused when I heard about this, because I still had the older version installed that contained that functionality.

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Always wondered how TSM got away with their sub fee.

I don’t know the specifics of that. But as long as they keep their fees related to their own website, they’re probably safe.