Of course I read the discussion, and if someone signs up to deliver software free of charge, it’s arrogant to compel users to use bloatware that monetizes the free software.
This is no different than the countless FOSS developers, who know exactly what they’re getting into when they decide to make FOSS software and deploy it with licensing that essentially allows users to do anything they want with it, who get super-upset because their FOSS software development isn’t paying their rent and is being used by users in a way the developer isn’t happy with.
If someone dives into such a market with the intent of making money, they’re doing it wrong.
And it still is free of charge. Do me a favor, show me a single charge from Overwolf for any mod download. Nevermind, it is clear we have a different opinion on this and that is fine. At this point we are just arguing to argue and I have more interesting things to do.
Hey, sorry if I came off as entitled… that’s my bad. The whole situation is rather frustrating and I swear in an earlier revision of my post I said that I create these addons and hope that enough people in the WoW community will choose to support me, but I can’t find it now. ‘hope’ being the key word. If you think that my choice to try to build addons for a living is anything less than a desperate attempt to make a living during a time that disability has all but halted my ability to find gainful and consistent employment which will work around my disability in a profession that I’ve been in for 30 years, think again. I have to swallow yet another bite of my personal pride every time I have to bring this up, but when I don’t, I get harassed by trolls are all too eager to throw the ‘get a job (you worthless scum)’ commentary at me. Some will still do it anyway. Watch it happen again in this very thread.
I stand by Overwolf, not because of how they operated in the past, but because their reasons do not appear to be nefarious and they have shown me to be eager to own up to it and to constantly improve and do better.
I do not stand by WowUp, not because of how I feel about Overwolf, but because of how I’ve seen for myself how they operate. It is unfortunate that many from the WoW community chose them without understanding the situation fully.
I have had good interactions with the folks at Wago.io and was pretty close to bringing my addons over to them, as in within a day, when they released the news about their deal with WowUp. The only reason I didn’t offer my addons to Wago.io from the very start is simply because I see how some folks like to hold grudges and witch hunt and Wago is owned by Method who had some controversy of their own. I decided to hold back and see if the WoW community accepted them as an addon provider before attaching my name to it. I may still bring my addons to Wago if they are able to give me the choice as to whether they will appear on WowUp or not. I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to deal with WowUp based on how they have blatantly disregarded the position that their practices have put addon developers in to which they only stopped once they were locked out of doing so. This is despite that if I just rode the bandwagon with everyone else, it might/probably would helpful for finding more supporters.
All of this, everything I say, has been discussed and stated numerous times over the years in front of a live audience where I stream what I’m working on.
It’s pretty reasonable for addon developers to ask for support in their projects. How is this different than any open source project? Most of the Internet would not exist if not for these kinds of projects and those who support them. If any of us ever sounds ‘entitled’, trust me, you’re just catching us after a bad time of getting beat up by some rude people. What we’re entitled to is to simply not get harassed and told to get a job. It’s not as if we’re panhandling to get money for providing nothing of value. We’re just trying to build stuff and we’re trying to not do it all alone.
Except for when I’m dealing with (too much) harassment, I have gone out of my way to be nice to just about everyone I’ve encountered in the game… and even some of those who weren’t nice to me to begin with or even at all. My life is out there. I’m live on stream almost every day to share this experience. Please don’t judge me if you don’t know me. I don’t respond out of ego or anger. I respond because that hurts and I know that I don’t deserve it!
Not financially, no. It’s unreasonable to EXPECT people to financially support addons. It’s a nicety, a tip. That’s what the donations are supposed to be for because of the nature of it and how Blizzard says you’re not allowed to tie payment to addons. It even states you’re not supposed to have any ‘premium’ features for addons, but so far there are addons out there that do just that and Blizzard hasn’t taken them down so.
Not really I’ve been manually updating mine all of Shadowlands. I got them all bookmarked and then once a week I open the bookmarks and check for updates.
The 31st, but approximately what time, and as you observed it from which timezone? Are we talking within a short time past midnight? Hover over the event - there’s a time there. It’s probably not about the calendar not syncing so much as it’s the calendar displays in the region’s base server operation’s timezone which is 10:00am Pacific (US) time. Anywhere East of New Zealand would translate to midnight or later on the next calendar day. You may be experiencing the difference between viewing server time on the calendar as opposed to local time. This doesn’t mean that my addon wasn’t active at the right time, but that could be explained if you just didn’t know to log back in at the right time or didn’t hit /reload.
If your addon isn’t popping up when the event is actually active (and it’s not), then it’s not a reloading or login issue. See here for a list of complaints about none of the calendar events being correct on the OCE servers, which is going to impact your addon when it relies on that same calendar:
I was born mostly blind and I still did a degree and got a job with no access to personal transport and the constant risk of almost being run over while catching public transport to uni and work. In addition to that job, I established myself in freelance just in case employment went south. Think very carefully when you pull the disability card here, because you’ll find that it doesn’t sail as well as you think it does when there’s so many other disabled people who struggle to make things work without so much of a whisper. (Not that I advocate suffering in silence, but that doesn’t change the fact that many people don’t talk about their disability while still working jobs where even leaving the house is a major operation. It doesn’t mean that we don’t exist and don’t have different views to each other.)
It’s different because you’re making what’s effectively a fan work of Blizzard’s IP. You don’t own the IP to the game, which means you have no entitlement to any sort of revenue that isn’t a spontaneous tip under Blizzard’s unilateral ruleset for creating addons. Again, you agreed to these rules when you made your addon. You want money? Make an original work. There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from making a standalone, fantasy themed, paper textured calendar app that just so happens to have dates preloaded for WoW events in local and accurate timezones (etc), but you cannot expect to profiteer in a substantial manner from addons themselves when Blizzard itself is limiting access to solicitations. Blizzard doesn’t care if you monetise a completely different application that just so happens to cover in game event dates, but they clearly don’t want people milking addons directly. It’s not in the spirit of the TOS and it’s not what anyone subbed to the game signed up for in the first place.
Nintendo slaps down fan projects all the time and if Blizzard’s lawyers weren’t so lazy, they could do the exact same thing to every other addon touting premium improvements against TOS. They could change the TOS entirely and forbid any and all solicitations regardless of platform. They could pull a WC3R TOS which just about killed all of the custom maps and there’s nothing you can do about it if you want that map editor.
You sound entitled because you want to make a living from a fan work, which isn’t permitted by any company as a default. Consider yourself lucky that Blizzard even allows out of game advertisements, because Disney sure as hell doesn’t with fan works. They go to non-English speaking countries and sue the hell out of little family owned bakers for IP infringement.
You’re being judged because you have other options to do a similar type of work, without Blizzard breathing down your throat and without the TOS being in issue (or the impending Microsoft takeover which might also blow up the addon TOS next June). With the acquisition alone you should be floating other options, instead of blaming “trolls” for telling you to seek more sustainable employment. Work for yourself if you have to, but don’t rely on Blizzard’s good will for anything. Blizzard has no good will for anyone and Microsoft will have even less if the bean counters work out that in house addons make them more money than your efforts.
With all due respect, end-users don’t care about whatever happens behind the scenes if it doesn’t affect them. Example: Nike and Apple sweatshops in China.
From my stance, WoWUP is a simple “open this, click update, close it” operation that doesn’t intrude upon my own property from what I can see.
With that said, like many others with a level head, I’m open to listening to the other side on this. So, to bluntly ask:
Why exactly do you dislike WoWUp? What is it that you see that we don’t?
There are two datacenters. One in LA and one in Chicago. Some of the WoW servers, like Whisperwind and Dentarg (the two connected realms I’m on) are serviced by the Chicago datacenter. My in-game clock shows two hours ahead of my actual system time as a result. I’m wondering if some of the problems players have stated they have seen/are seeing is due to the two disparate datacenters and their associated time displacements.
For reference, the reason my in-game clock is two hours ahead of my system time is because I’m on the west coast (PST/PDT) and my servers are serviced by the Chicago datacenter, which is in the Central (CST/CDT) time zone.
The Overwolf client only needs to be open during addon management. Once that’s done you close it before you start the game. Same thing for the Battle.net launcher - set that to close automatically when launching a Blizzard game and/or in the case of WoW, launch the game client directly to avoid the bloat of the Battle.net app and its fake update issues.
Overwolf has those overlay processes that need to be killed too. I would say someone should make a script to handle that, but I would bet that if said script became popular Overwolf would start shifting around the names of their processes to break it.
I wish there were a way to easily run programs with a penchant for staying past their welcome and/or touching parts of the filesystem they shouldn’t in a little bubble. VMs can serve that purpose but they’re cumbersome.
VMs also come with their own issues with permissions when you’re dealing with apps that require specific permissions. This is especially true in macOS, though thankfully that version of the client doesn’t have overlays AFAIK, it just gives a warning (for me) that OSes prior to 10.15 aren’t supported, presumably due to which version of XCode they use to compile the app.
Yeah it’s the Windows version that’s really troublesome.
Veering off-topic a bit, but this definitely isn’t an Xcode limitation. I’m running latest Xcode on my Mac and on my macOS projects I can target all the way back to 10.9 without issue. Targets even further back are possible with some toolchain hackery last I knew. Not supporting versions prior to 10.15 is an intentional choice on the part of Overwolf.
One that is enabled by DEFAULT in the settings options. Well it has been a while, maybe it is no longer on by default but it takes just a second to toggle if it not.
Blizzard needs to hire some of these devs for their own UI team, because right now, the UI is woefully behind in features players are looking for.
Add-ons are great, but it’s well past time that more functionality and flexibility was embedded into the game itself.
The most popular add-ons provide the following:
Flexible/movable elements, as well as ability to theme or hide superfluous art
Dungeon and raid event timers and notifications
Performance metrics
Quality-of-life improvements, such as multiple map pinpoints, better pet management, and better presentation of information
Now, it can be argued that perhaps some of these, such as meters, should always be a domain of add-ons and not included by Blizzard. I won’t argue this point. I do suggest, however, that the default UI should be doing a lot better for supporting basic customization and improving day-to-day quality of life for players.
Here are some more specific suggestions I have regarding each of the aforementioned points:
Simply unlock the existing bars and unit frames and let us move things around, as well as hide the default art. That essentially replaces what popular add-ons like Dominos do.
The default UI has improved on dungeon and raid notifications over the last several years, however, Blizzard either needs to lean all-in on this or disallow highly sophisticated boss timers (DBM and BigWigs) altogether. This arms race of more complex encounters to deal with more sophisticated boss mods is getting really old.
Meters are something that honestly I don’t care if Blizzard ever adds into the game directly. I think add-ons are completely appropriate for this, as it’s a non-core game function that you can take or leave and doesn’t otherwise impact quality of life.
Now, as for actual quality-of-life improvements, here are some ideas:
1.) Blizzard started doing something with map waypoints in Shadowlands, and then dropped it. TomTom is vastly superior to the in-game map pin. You can set many waypoints by simply copying and pasting from wowhead. Blizzard simply needs to follow this.
2.) There are some things that the default UI just plain doesn’t show, such as battle pet breeds. This could easily be remedied with an extra line of text here and there.
3.) There are many places where players would love quick access to certain information (TitanPanel). It would be nice to be able to show our latency alongside our FPS, along with a selection of monitored currencies and/or reputations.
4.) This is a bonus item, but the overall look of the UI needs some love. Those gryphon/gargoyle things need to go or be updated or something. I get that there’s a certain look which Warcraft has, and that’s fine, keep with that. Note how the new character creation screens sport updated button textures? This needs to be UI-wide.
A good example of this done right is the new AH UI. It’s clean, not gaudy, and fits the Warcraft theme. The rest of the UI should follow suit with subtle, dark themes, sporting higher resolution textures.
Lastly, and I couldn’t let any set of UI recommendations go without saying this: As a caster main of 17 years… please… please make the cast bar pretty. Blizzard’s biggest strength is in its art team. There are some incredible UI effects and bars for special events in the game. Any one of those would make a vastly better cast bar than we’ve got. Can you imagine an ability or class-themed cast bar? How cool would that be?
Okay, that’s all I have. Sorry for the length, folks, but as many are very passionate about add-ons, I’m passionate about the core UI and for all its faults, I want to see it continue to evolve and incorporate the most popular features so we don’t have as many issues with add-ons in the first place.
I understand that this is difficult to grasp without some knowledge about how these systems work that addon developers are privy to, so let me explain.
WoWUp decided that instead of inviting addon developers to participate in building their addon distribution service by publishing our addons there, they would just point their application to the Curseforge servers and let Curseforge foot the bill for every download that the WoWUp client performed.
The reason WoWUp did it this way is so that they could dodge some of the legal ramifications they may have faced if they copied the data and addon from the Curseforge servers to their own. They also dodged having to actually pay for the cost of serving these files to their users. While it may be questionable as to whether how WoWUp was using the Curseforge API is illegal or vulnerable to litigation, their choice of going this route is unethical to say the least.
The damage caused by WoWUp encouraging players to use their app instead of the Curseforge app reduced the amount of ad placements that Overwolf would have been able to use to raise additional funding, not only to cover their costs associated with serving the files, but to provide additional funding to us, the addon developers.
The amount of money that most WoW addon developers receive from Overwolf is not very significant, but for a few it does help pay a bill or two every month. How much Overwolf can generate and how much that translates to for addon developers is irrelevant when compared to the general disregard that WoWUp has shown for addon developers by making their choices.
WoWUp may claim that they encouraged addon authors who did not want to see Curseforge’s infrastructure being used like this could put their addons on GitHub where WoWUp is also able to retrieve them. Unfortunately, this concept puts many addon developers again in an awkward position. If you’re earning x% of the total ad revenue because your downloads represent x% of the total downloads, having WoWUp pull your addons from GitHub instead then reduces your share on Curseforge. WoWUp’s downloads counted the same as Curseforge client downloads as WoWUp was designed to act like the Curseforge client. Copying our addons to GitHub would only work if every addon developer agreed in unison to do that so that all of our Curseforge shares would stay in the approximate same proportion to each others’.
Again, the dollar amount that this may have effected individual addon developers by might not have been much, but the idea that WoWUp collects about $1000 a month through Patreon in order to conduct business in such a way that undoubtedly reduces the Curseforge pool from ad revenue by many times that $1000, taking that away from the WoW community… it disgusts me. If WoWUp had just asked us up front, I’m sure a lot of the leading addon developers would have given them a shot and wherever the cards may lay would be fine. I consider how WoWUp conducted themselves as not to be fair and competitive, but to be more akin to thievery.
If those who choose to use WoWUp were not aware of this, I wonder how they feel about trusting WoWUp with their PCs and why they could trust them more than they’d trust Overwolf. At least in Overwolf’s case, they’ve owned up to past business decisions that some of their users didn’t like. They’ve changed their business model to accommodate. They’ve found ways to better police bad actors among their content creators (addon/mod authors) who would choose to publish malicious or intrusive mods that popup ads at inappropriate times. They’ve made it easier to opt out of many analytics that they are collecting and even prominently reveal through their installation wizard how to do it.
I understand that you didn’t ask me how I felt about Overwolf, but at the end of the day when given two choices of where you can find the majority of WoW addons, I chose to trust the small business founded by some folks who have shown willingness to adapt and change in order to do the best thing for the customer and for addon developers rather than to trust the individual who wrote an app and has conducted themselves in an untrustworthy manner consistently through this.
WoWUp had the opportunity to cooperate with Overwolf more than a year ago whereas if WowUp were willing to show the ads… just the ads… so that Addon Developers could still get some revenue and so that Overwolf had something to work with to pay for the cost of the downloads that WoWUp would generate… they’d probably still be able to access Curseforge and most if not all addon developers would have never realized how WoWUp started, or, at the very least, would have forgiven WoWUp if Overwolf was willing to.
It’s ironic that now WoWUp is willing to display ads for someone else in order to access their addon library. I really wish Wago the best in their venture, but if publishing my addon to Wago means that it is going to end up on WoWUp, it just doesn’t sit well with me. The whole situation based around the decisions of one app author has created a circus that affects all WoW players, some of us who are addon authors (we are you, you are us).
I understand why players would have concern and be reluctant to give Overwolf a chance based on all of the old stuff that people have dug up and rehashed about them without telling the whole story. Many folks are non-technical and simply do not understand the risks or lack of risks and all that they really hear are things that put them on alert that they do not understand. If I were told to ‘look out for such and such’ and I did not have the ability or time to deeply research it for myself, I might avoid ‘such and such’ just to be safe too. For those of us who either were unaware of any controversy or who just chose to give Overwolf a chance anyway… well, we’re still here. Everything is fine. Our computer did not get eaten by the furious cookie monster.
Agree with this entire post. I would also say that if addons are to continue to be integral to the WoW experience, that Blizzard should start hosting addons themselves and add an in-game extension browser, installer, and updater. The bones are already there with the Shop UI, which can even load webpages thanks to integrated Chromium; just dress it up a little differently and you’ve got an addon browser.
