Wowhead leaves chat
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Now there’s an idea. Pissing off enough angry nerds in the past has made worse things happen.
If addon authors were to simply publish their addons to GitHub, then Blizz doesn’t have to do anything related to your proposal. WoWUp already pulls from GitHub. The problem is that the popular authors make money by publishing on Curse and soon Overwolf will stop paying those authors unless they exclusively publish on Curse.
The API to create add-ons is provided as a community thing. Blizz wants nothing to do with paying any addon authors and it’s against the TOS for authors to pay-wall their addons (donations are fine but if you have to pay for access, that’s a no-no).
If Overwolf pays authors but WoWUp and Ajour will not, it’s pretty compeling for those authors to only publish on Curse if Overwolf flexes and says they will not pay unless they use Curse exclusively. Especially a large, complex, frequently-updated, and essential add-on like DBM, Details, etc. (at least for those players that are semi-serious about end-game content).
I don’t like Overwolf and their malware-bloated client, but I don’t get those complaining here that want “a valuable product that took a lot of effort to create” for free. Would those same complainers like to do their job for no pay? Seems unlikely unless you’re a trust-fund baby that could volunteer at something fun.
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Just saw this as well… If I’m reading the numbers correctly, he’s making about $15-16 dollars a day.
Sorting and curation is important. Good luck finding top say economy addons or bag addons or combat addons via github. Good luck sorting them for the top ones to find the most useful instead of dredging through heaps of abandoned, badly written, niche addons.
Good luck to new addon authors launching and getting people to find their new addon they put hard work into.
Let’s say you want an addon for something but don’t want to ask the community or want to survey the most popular stuff which may or may not be brought up if you do ask the community. That’s where a website like curseforge comes into play with the categories, the popularity sorts, the most recently updated sorts, etc.
You people keep on spitting this back at me as if it proves anything. I’m not asking why, I know why, I’m stating what should be done in my opinion which is a change and was unaware I needed permission. I know they don’t want anything to do with it. Hence why I made that long wall of text up there outlining my wishes anyways.
I’m not asking for them to take responsibility for addon content. Hosting does not equal endorsement under current laws. They want it to be someone else’s problem, I understand that but it is very much their problem as well.
Fact: Addons add value to WoW and retain players who otherwise might be frustrated by lackluster abilities in the base UI and leave. I know I probably would have quit earlier at several points now without certain addons and at this point probably the only thing keeping the remaining roleplay community on WoW is addons like TRP3 which is about the only advantage besides knowing the lore (a lingering big question mark given all the retcons and lore most people now ignore) over going over to FFXIV.
Fact: Addons allow devs to implement bare minimum on many systems which saves them time and money by off-loading the job to the community. To offer one stock system and in reply to player requests for choice tel them to pick an addon or make their own.
Fact: Blizzard devs routinely make unnecessary breaking changes to the API without consideration for players or addon devs. This seems ungrateful, taking the addon author’s work and time and efforts for granted. They don’t carefully group these changes together but spread them out over the year ensuring addon authors and players using them have to revisit and change things and download a new version respectively every 6-8 months.
If addons add so much value as to be indispensable to many people then it is on Blizzard to pay for their development or otherwise incentivize them. Why? Because this game cost triple A release costs per expac plus a subscription fee that totals out to $180 year and they are deriving free value.
It’s not players who receive cash inflows in their bank accounts via the work of addon authors. The ultimate beneficiary in financial terms is Blizzard. I’m not saying every little addon author needs a monthly check for $100 or is entitled to one. I’m saying things like DBM, DPS meters, raid tools are basically essential and free labor and even my proposed amount of money is much less than the salary plus benefits of a full-time dev to do the same work and that as a paid product Blizzard should pay for things needed to make it work and incentivize through free to them free subscriptions, bnet balance, etc lesser creative works that nevertheless add value to their product.
Fact: Many games have active, thriving free modding communities, many of them requiring work in reverse engineering parts of the games in question at times. Those people do it for free, addon development should not be an industry but a hobby and it’s on Blizzard if their frequent API changes that break things make maintaining a WoW addon significantly harder and more time consuming than maintaining addons for say Skyrim. If addons are not indispensable, if they’re merely a nicety and people could raid without them, sort their bank without them, easily find and complete achievements and collect transmogs, filter spam, etc and if they were merely things like bikini mods or some other useless stuff like that then you’d be closer to the mark.
Once upon a time I maintained a WoW addon. I didn’t do it for money. Didn’t get a cent though I probably could have if I’d have given curse my info, I valued my privacy more than whatever pittance they were going to offer me and it wasn’t something I did for money but because I enjoyed the addon, got utility out of it myself.
Go to github, look at open source projects. Many of them critical to commercial paid software and/or used by for-profit enterprises. Maintained by volunteer developers who don’t see a cent. Anyone who says people won’t develop for free doesn’t know anything about the software world. People develop what they’re passionate about with a few edge cases for stuff like DBM that really is a part-time job and deserving of compensation commensurate with that fact.
You’re the one insisting that addon authors should have to go to players to beg for money or insisting there should be two classes of players: those with daddy’s money to afford very expensive subscription-based addons that offer a clear advantage thanks to dedicated developers who view it as a job (aka whales), and the not so wiling to spend an additional subscription or several on addons for a product they’re already paying for. Addons can give a clear advantage to players which is why they need to be free. Otherwise you get the drums of war to ban all addons or many fun ones anyways.
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Literally billions.
I do hope Overwolf just stops with the stupid but I also know they want money(I will continue to refuse to download their program, even if I have to go back to manual updates again). Really I would not have likely half the addons I have if Blizzard made some simple check boxes of ‘no’ and ‘yes’ to things in their own interface/settings.
Examples:
No ‘floating talking head’ chat box that pops up during quests
No clean up bag button
No red ‘cannot use this ability now’ warning text on screen
Yes, use classic style action spell bars
Yes, instantly release spirit to graveyard when killed in a BG
If they just did that for those five things, it would be five addons I can remove from my list of addons and be happier playing the game.
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they look clean and simplistic, which is good.
you must have REALLY bad taste if you think “themed” uis are good looking.
It’s simple, if you don’t want to use overwolf, don’t use it. I for one will not be. So I will be using WoWUp or just download them manually every now and then.
Do I want to support the creators of the addons I use? Absolutely.
Do I want to support Overwolf? Not even a little bit.
So I will support them in another way if I have the means. i.e. Patreon/Twitch sub/Prime sub.
SO many ppl aren’t thinking abt this. defending overwolf because it’s a toggle? yeah, no one’s gonna purposely gimp themselves on overwolf giving them money.
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Here’s the end thing that NEEDS to happen. Blizzard needs to build their own addon repository and an app that works with them. They could create so many jobs doing it themselves, and they could even create an incentive program for addon authors. It would be a win-win for them and us.
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Never going to happen. They aren’t going to waste time and money on something that’s already being done for free.
And who is going to pay for said repo, the bandwidth it will consume, the staff to control/maintain it and the “incentive” program. Blizzard isn’t a charity, they aren’t going to assume the cost and responsibility for something that is already being done by a third party just because some of you dislike that third party.
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No thanks the Curseforge app works just fine for me and I’ll continue using it.
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OverWolf has never worked for me even on on a freshly formatted pc with just WOW and Overwolf …
Did you install both Overwolf and Curseforge?
Yeah, cause there is nothing like supporting garbage companies.
Can you explain why the company is bad? I use them for addons and I’ve never looked into it.
Overwolf destroyed my living room.
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I really don’t care it’s useful for what I need. I don’t like using Google or Microsoft products either and they’re way more intrusive but they are useful for what I need.