About a week ago Blizzard has made an announcement about changing their addon policy. Most of the stuff was pretty much harmless – don’t interfere with gameplay, don’t obfuscate your code, don’t put offensive stuff in the addons… Things that are obvious and reasonable. And there comes the surprising bit – addons must be free of charge and they can’t include advertisements or in any form ask for donations.
I was very surprised when I read that. What the heck, people are seriously making addons that are not free? Does that kind of things even exists? I have never seen that, neither did any addon I ever used ask me for a donation. After a bit of searching I found some of the guilty ones. For example, QuestHelper was asking for donations and Carbonite had both free and premium versions, of which the free one was nagging the users with ads and stuff. By the way, does anyone have a screenshot of that? I’m curious, so if any of you have that, please send me a link or something.
Of course, the addon developers aren’t happy about the policy change. And I’ll be honest with you – below this sentence were a bunch of paragraphs about my surprise and some bashing… but after some more reading I’m not really sure anymore. I can understand why few of them are angry – they were basically making a living on their addons, while having invested a serious amount of time into them. That’s fine with me – a good work is to be rewarded (even if I personally do not use such addons), and I understand that without some kind of a donation reminder, not many people would take the time to go to the author’s website and donate there. But I also understand the reason for Blizzard to put the restriction there – even though all of these policies are is just a legal way to protect themselves, even if the threat would be minimal, and the thing that the Carbonite guys did was apparently breaking the line.
But enough about the addon authors, lets get to the interesting part – what about the players? First thing that comes to mind is that we will suffer greatly from this change. The 3.1 patch will come, but unlike with previous major patches, this time the developers won’t be working on making their addons compatible, so we will be left without them. Oh, imagine the horror that it would be if we would have to play with no addons!
Fortunately, this is not the case. Most of the addons will get updated anyway. The ones that will not? We will change them to some that will. The addons tend to get replaced over time anyway – I remember using KTM long time ago when I started raiding, and now pretty much nobody uses that, they all use Omen, and KTM is pretty much dead now since the pre-Wrath patch. So losing one mod is not really a big deal. Especially that the two most known mods that are going down are Quest Helper and Outfitter – both of which will be in a way replaced with Blizzard’s UI changes in the 3.1 patch.
Sure, the Equipment Manager that Blizzard created is in no way comparative to Outfitter – it’s just a list of sets that you can save and activate, it doesn’t change things automatically when you change forms or stances, and it also doesn’t give you a little button in Fubar or Titan Panel to change the sets in an easy way. You see, I’m not really bothered with that, as I never use the automatic features of Outfitter anyway. I tried to use it some time ago to automatically equip my Riding Crop when I was mounting up, but then 99% of the time I rode up to a mob, attacked it and killed it with the Riding Crop still sitting in my trinket slot. You just can’t help that if you go straight into combat from your mount, and it was annoying me in battlegrounds as well, so in the end I just disabled it. So if I’m using Outfitter just as a fancier version of Blizzard’s Equipment Manager, I won’t really notice the change if it stops being updated.
In fact, I will probably notice it even less – the current version works pretty well on the PTR, with the exception that the game version changed (and you have to check the “Load outdated addons” box in the client), and that’s very easy to fix. So I might just fix that myself and just continue using it. And I’m pretty much sure that someone will make a Fubar plugin that will allow to change the ingame sets with ease.
So in the end, I don’t really think we will suffer that much. Sure, some changes will have to be in order, but nothing more than a normal patch day has for us – the normal players. The developers are in a bit less of a luck, though… And we can’t really do anything about this. I know only one thing – stomping your feet and taking the toys away won’t do any good for anyone.
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