The key is you cannot charge money to access an addon, what more than likely is happening is their doing the same thing liquid or echo is. To where you buy a Patreon or discord access to gain more to the addon. It’s probably going to come down to rules lawyering, yet at the end of the day this addon really won’t matter much. Given anyone can access WCL, anyone can access the addon, and the premium features are simply the sprinkles on top, and will only matter to people that PuG raids constantly.
They still can without it. They just have to look you up on the site, unless you’ve restricted that as well for your own character. Which turns into you’ll have a much harder time getting into groups given PuGs use those metrics all the time to make a good guess on how you’ll perform in the run.
All addons should be banned.
I would also like my original interface back.
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Few things to note:
- The WCL addon’s “premium” features seem to just be server based. In other words, you get to upload your logs faster if you have a subscription to Warcraftlogs. This means that no functionality of the addon is locked behind a paywall, just a website-specific feature for a website-subscription.
- Blizzard do serve addon makers with cease and desist demands when addon makers try to sell their addons. The original Method Dungeon Tools used to be just available to the members of Method and then the addon maker allowed players who bought his addon to get access to it and its updates - he was served with a choice to remove the payment requirement or to be given a cease and desist.
So… yes, they do enforce their ToS when it is applicable. In WCL’s case, it isn’t applicable. It is the same thing as SimCraft where a subscription only gets you a faster simulation and a lot more options on the website. The addon itself is unaffected by your status as a subscriber or not.
There has been a loophole for addon creators that have been used since they added the “no paid addons”
As long as the addon is free AND DOES SOMETHING in the same vein as the paid version in its free state, it’s fine to charge for the rest of it.
It’s stupid and Blizzard really needs to clarify that premium/subscription versions of addons aren’t allowed. Donations should always be allowed, but not forced donations.
Carbonite was never banned by Blizzard. It still actually exists, even on Curse. However, after the creator decided to go off on people complaining about their predatory practices and essentially boiled down to the creator going “Lol, you’re poor, and you’re disrespectful for not wanting to pay me.”
People stopped using Carbonite. So it started to fade into obscurity. Then when better questing mods came out that were 100% free? It has barely anyone using it anymore. It’s that simple.
Like, I have no doubt if DBM or Big Wigs started charging money for advanced parts of their addon that people deem necessary, a good chunk of their users would just use the other one.
Charging for an addon isn’t allowed. Charging for modules of an addon, for some god forsaken reason, is allowed. However, when there’s so many WoW players, unless you have an AMAZING idea that not a single person can replicate - don’t try to get money by charging, you’ll be replaced. Do the best you can when you’re free to use, and people will donate - DBM survive(s)(d)? completely on donations for quite some time while the creator had a rough patch of life.
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Well that’s one analogy. However calling an addon is not going into the game, it’s calling a public interface from the outside. Maybe you could think of it as a travel agent getting paid to organize a trip to Disneyland and tossing in a few “E Tickets” or what ever has replaced them.
I say let the age of madness start. Its the logical end point to the path we all walk.
WCL should also auto-initiate a vote kick for bad players, auto-whisper everyone else in the group explaining the player is bad and should be kicked, then upon being kicked, WCL should auto-whisper the bad player telling them to quit WoW and then auto-ignore them.
Think of all the work this would save us.
Only the breakable ones will break. What is left will clear mythic through lfg
- Blizz doesn’t need to break APIs to ban things. They can just say if we detect that you used it, we will ban you. Whether they actually can detect it is irrelevant. What is relevant is the chilling effect such an announcement would make. Sure some would ignore it. But I suspect the vast majority would immediately uninstall. It’s no different to how blizz made up the rule about forcing advertising into its own chat channel. Sure some ignore that rule. But from what I’ve seen, the vast majority adhere to it for fear of the ban hammer.
All that being said, blizz does usually prefer to break the API so add-ons literally can’t function. But the point is that’s not their only recourse.
- This isn’t the first addon to have paid subs for themselves. The fact that TSM still hasn’t been banned leads me to believe that blizz doesn’t actually care about it. I suspect TSM continues to get away with by only making a few non-core functions paywalled. The vast majority of what TSM can do is still free.
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I agree with banning an addon that costs extra money to make it fully useful. I will not be upcharged in a game I already pay 10x more than other games to play.
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Didn’t they threaten to ban the MDT guy when he started charging for mob abilities?
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I think so
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Honestly this will be a good thing… ive been sleeping for so long this…this inspires me to become what I once was. Don’t see the negatives see it like this :
I honestly don’t remember whether they did or not. But I think the issue in MDTs case was that he was effectively paywalling the core reason why people used his addon. If he had done what TSM does and just added some nice to have functionality in addition to that and just paywalled that, then he probably would have gone undetected.
It also didn’t help that he acted like a royal douchebag (granted a lot of his user base are also douchebags) and chucked a hissy fit by retroactively paywalling his add-ons core functionality. That’s what really got him in the end since that immediately pissed off a lot of players. Things would have been very different for him if his addon was paywalled to begin with. So in essence, he used a classic bait and switch approach.
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Nobody likes failing but you have to fail to learn. Too bad there isn’t an addon that shows how well you learn and persists from your failures.
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The fact Blizzard acknowledged TSM was a major part of the auction house lag last year and STILL didn’t ban it is crazy.
Yes, just make your servers work overtime so people can continue doing what essentially equates to botting. (Note the word essentially)
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They should all be banned already. The visual customization isn’t worth the headaches they have caused.
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It moves tokens my man…if the servers burn so be it
Thank you for explaining that. 
I am so glad I do things with my guild.