Add-Ons Shutting Down Due To New Blizzard Policy
Posted by 
iTZKooPA on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - 81 Comments Tags: Addons, Addons, add-ons, blizzard policy, carbonite, eula, mods, outfitter, questhelper, rights, strike, tos
iTZKooPA on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - 81 Comments Tags: Addons, Addons, add-ons, blizzard policy, carbonite, eula, mods, outfitter, questhelper, rights, strike, tos 
Last Friday Blizzard put the kibosh on charging for any and all World of Warcraft add-ons. In an update to their World of Warcraft UI Add-On Development Policy, the company's lawyers added three points to tackle monetary gain by LUA creators. To sum up the associated points, developers can no longer charge for their add-ons, or premium content. Nor can they ask for donations or display advertisements inside the game client. The Add-On creators can still make ends meet through donations and ads via their website, but that may not cut it.It took a few days, but the weight of the changes have begun trickling down to us end users. According to Zorba, "Questhelper's dead." The author's decision to end QH's run after upcoming v1.0 is not due to Blizzard's addition of some of its functionality, but because donations via the webpage do not compare to the in-game nag. Outfitter has also been killed by the change. Blizzard is creating its own equipment manager to support its Dual Spec feature, so that won't hurt much.
It appears that there are three key things Blizzard had an issue with:
Blizzard doesn't want other people making money directly off their work.
Blizzard is trying to stop end users from getting harassed by advertisements, pop-ups and donations.
- Authors have few - and easily adjustable - rights because without WoW, their creations are worthless.
The last point, is probably the most troublesome. QuestHelper has been downloaded millions of times. If even a fraction of those people use the mod, that means Zorba is providing a service to more people than most MMORPGs can count as subscribers. With such a huge base, shouldn't an author have some rights? I am going to put my neck on the chopping block and say that they do, just not as much freedom as they previously did.
Since day one Blizzard has been playing with the add-on community. During the Molten Core days, add-ons were used as automated decursing utilities, and macros were far more powerful than they are now. Blizzard nerfed both because they felt that gameplay was being compromised, and as unfortunate as it is for the authors, that is what they did here. Blizzard saw add-ons like Carbonite - the mod that reportedly kicked this off - adversely affecting a users experience due to the ads. And if it wasn't the ad-based flavor, then they directly made money off Blizzard.
Blizzard has laid down the law and there is little we can do to stop them. Striking is a possibility, but could easily backfire on many authors by driving users to mods that serve the same purpose. A general strike would be required, and I just can't see that happening. The changes and incoming losses are just something that we will have to live with. These hardworking Add-On developers do deserve our money, but they are going to have to come up with more creative ways to shake it out of us. Although I believe I could easily live without any of my mods, I have and will continue to support the more complex ones (Auctioneer is the love of my life).
Unfortunately, I don't have a golden suggestion for the developers to keep the green coming. That being said, one way to guarantee more revenue for your work would be to host your own website, and attempt to create a community for the creations. This will drive traffic directly to you, your advertisers and your donation button, rather than allowing sites like Curse or ZAM to reap those benefits.
As personal as it may seem, Blizzard has removed an important part of your freedom, not your rights. You can still pour your heart and soul into the add-on. You can still make a living off it, you just have to do it by their new rules. It won't be easy, but don't be like the RIAA and demand that the old standard remain in place through hell or high-water. Come up with creative ways to draw income and attention to your creations. Give those casual users yet another reason to feel guilty about ignoring the donation button. Please, don't just throw your hands in the air and give up. You owe it to yourself, your contributors and the add-on to at least try some new techniques before walking away.
We will likely see more big name add-ons shutting down in the short term, so be prepared. Which mods could you not live without? I could manage to live without all of them, but my Auction House days would be far less profitable without my beloved Auctioneer.
Reader Comments (81)
it is amusing to me that there is so much crying about the loss of mods. i just yeasterday installed wrath, and in the wait for internet to be installed at the house, thought i would check out the long list of raiding mods id need to download. i am relieved that they will be fading and now instead of what mods do you have, it'll be 'how good are you really?' mods saved alot of time, but those dependent on them should rethink the aurgument. youre not mad about the oss of the mod. youre mad at the loss of time. to that i say 'fair enough' so as an aid to the lazy, borders books has a book on creating mods for WoW... or donate a buck or two ta the person that wrote youre mod for you. take responsibility for yourself and become a better gamer, or learn something new and code your own... either way, you'll be a better person for it.
ranshire
steamwheedle
70 troll hunter
Blizzard can control addons just as Apple does with the iPhone. Create a DL client, list approved free addons, and those that are chargeable, Blizz gets a percentage of the profits. Common goal for both the addon authors and Blizz, they get to make money where there is an opportunity to. Seems to work well with Apple, didn't they just report over 800 million application DL's just recently?
Quote:
"wows market look like the the real world market."
"look like" is a context clue to compare something before and after.
Which should really be "looks like" for proper grammer.
"The bear's spotted back makes it look like a cow."
The clues here tell us the bear looks similar to a cow because of his spotted back.
"Anthony looks like an idiot for bragging about is knowledge in the english language, because his is actually quite ignorant of it."
I really don't care if addons die out or not, especially things like auctioneer or questhelper. Honestly go to a site like thottbot and look up what you wanna sell, or look up that quest that's giving you problems. If you look at the quest text, that alone should be enough to figure out 90% of the quests. I got an 80 boe epic sword that I wanted to put in the AH. Looked up the avg buyout on thottbot, put it up for auction, and it sold in about a day and I was about 3000g richer. So there's proof you don't need an addon to make all the decisions for you :-P
I use addons such as QH and Grid for my character, and i can fully understand why Blizzard want to stop these from being used. Blizzard are trying to stop the game from becoming easier than it already is (sorta). QH is basically telling you where to go for your quests and really takes the fun out of hunting an area for a specific mob. Grid and QH i could and will live without as it makes the game too easy, but i only use it because its been made avablible, but i won't quit WoW just cause Blizzard is shutting down Addons.
"That being said, one way to guarantee more revenue for your work would be to host your own website, and attempt to create a community for the creations. This will drive traffic directly to you, your advertisers and your donation button, rather than allowing sites like Curse or ZAM to reap those benefits."
Or cause you to have a monthly bill as you have to pay for hosting and a yearly bill in a domain name.
Using QuestHelper does not automatically make the user a dunderhead. Myself, I use it while leveling my alts because it saves me time (which is a very valuable commodity). Now sure, I can live without QH since I didn't even start using it until way after patch 2.4 (and I'd been playing since 1.5-ish), but don't you be accusing me of QQ-ing because I want to keep it.
Looking back, I think we might be getting the wrong idea. I'm not sure if I'm seeing things correctly, but it seems like Blizzard isn't actually taking addons away. They're just changing the rules, and if I know anything about people, it's that they can easily adapt to new rules in the playing field. I imagine most addons will stay in, just take out the ads and other things Blizzard doesn't like. If an addon does shut down, it's because the people who make it don't care enough to change it, which means nine times out of ten it won't be any good.
I still want Blizz to bring the addons out, or at least find a way to majorly cut them down. I like that blizz is putting more and more elements from mods into the game, because this means that addons are just becoming memory dumps. As ranshire stated, this is bringing focus in the game back to "How good are you?" instead of "What mods do you have?" Here's hoping that one day the purists like me will be considered equal instead of looked down on for being "noobs" when what we're essentially doing is challenging ourselves to get the most out of the game, or trying to find out more about the history of it (I think the "Well Read" achievement was meant to educate us, not just have us rush from place to place right clicking books without reading them). Give me a history of Neltharion's corruption, and THEN you can say I'm a noob, but until then don't judge me on how I play. Ok, that tangent's done, let's go back to the discussion at hand (sorry for my rambling). Why see us as lesser beings because we pay more attention to the fight than to the wall of UI in front of it. The way some people's interfaces are set up, Blizz might as well have made it a text based game and not wasted time on graphics that people don't bother looking at. Also, just because people like me don't use addons doesn't mean we can't play. Just from the internet, I've memorized the strategies to fights I've never even seen before. My friend was only half joking when he said I could successfully lead a PuG into the Ruins OR the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj and get through easily. I may be rambling again, but my point is that we're not any worse than anyone else. At least not because of mods, although there are other factors to take into consideration.
--Felaryn
Wow, I really don't know how to do a short post. Thanks so much to anyone who actually bothered to read all of that.
That was probably saying too much, especially combined with the post I put up earlier. Sorry about that...
As long as there's not a click to cast functionality and a decent raid frame interface blizzard has no right to start changing stuff in the game.
Try and heal sometime with the raid interface blizzard suplies and using only macro's and keybinds. Your usuability drops by around 50%. I know this for a fact as one of our guild healer was using no addons at all. Without a change in gear but simply my suggested addons + config he doubled his total healing and lowered his overhealing by around 10%.
That big a change simply because the players healthbars are in an overview. And he didn't have to target + hit a cast button but rather just click a mousebutton once without even changing his focus. Thats to much to throw away. Blizzards party interface is horrendous to heal with, and the raid interface is even worse. Untill they at least show have something as fast and configurable as grid they should not go around and push mod / addons out of the game through new rules.
Sure that little nag that questhelper has is annoying but who really pays attention to it anyway? It only shows up when you log on, once. thats all.
Besides, putting donation buttons on your website won't cut it. 90 % of the downloads are done via platforms like curse.com. The donations for addons would simply not make it to their developers unless someone took specific action for it. And ppl are to lazy to go search for it as current numbers show.
Not allowing your addon to be downloaded via these platforms greatly reduces its availability. Again simply because ppl are to lazy to go out of their way to find an addon.
I used to use QH but its very mermory consuming and found something more simple and i feel is better and less buggy than QH. The addon is called Mobmap give it a shot.
I got lv 34 in a couple months, no addons, but i waste a lot of my time putting together a twink.(Twink's almost done :D) so basically, i could be lv 40+ if i spent all my time on my warlock, leveling it in 2 months of gameplay, no addons.
The only addons I actually care about is ArkInventory, because i hate the 5 different bags (and i don't use it for bank or gbank), and my graphical ui. I just like the different layout. it doesn't change the game, just makes it easier to use.
I tried Questhelper, and it is one of the buggiest mods ever. It crashed my game constantly, and I dumped it after a few days.
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