Hello everybody,
We’re proud to announce and present the new Curse: a new website platform, a new client, and a new subscription program. All three have been designed to provide excellent services for players.
Curse Re-launch
We’ve spent the past several months re-coding our website platform to make Curse more functional and stable. Most of the work has been under the hood though; we haven’t redesigned too many pages. It’s akin to a mechanic changing the drive train in a car – the car will run much better than before, but it still generally looks the same.
The site is currently in beta at http://beta.curse.com. We invite you to spend some time and try out the new site and its features. You can login using your normal Curse ID. The following is a list of the changes you will see:
- New Platform – The new Curse was created using a proven community platform: Community Server. This is the same platform used by a number of top Fortune 500 companies, and we’ve modified it to fit the needs of the Curse.com community.
- Site focus – The new Curse is built on the key services we provide: addons, databases, community, and statistics. Therefore, the new site focuses on a select group of popular games.
- Homepage – The homepage has been optimized with highlighting our services and more emphasis on popular news.
- Addons – We’ve evolved our addons section. Categories can now be game-specific, and it’s easier to browse search results.
- Community – We’ve launched with new forums, blogs, and profiles. Find other players and stay connected!
- Images - Our images section has been simplified, yet still able to effectively categorize images. The interface is much cleaner as well.
Please post bugs, suggestions, and feedback in our beta forums: http://beta.curse.com/forums/4991.aspx
New Curse Client
We’ve evolved our Curse Client! The new client is now a fully-fledged addon manager. Find, install, and manage your addons with ease. Additionally, we’ve enhanced character profiling. View your characters and their statistics on our database sites. The client is currently in release candidate phase, and can be downloaded at http://www.wardb.com/client.aspx
Curse Premium
Our brand-new product is our subscription service, called Curse Premium. Curse Premium is designed as an enhancement of the user experience at Curse. The important thing to note is that we are not taking away existing Curse.com features and locking them to premium subscribers. Curse users can continue to download addons, read news, use the Curse Client, and participate in the community like before. In fact, the Premium program has allowed us to upgrade the experience at Curse for ALL users. And best of all, Curse Premium supports the addon author community, encouraging authors to release great addons that benefit you.
What exactly is Curse Premium then? It is a program designed to manage your addons with ease and get you into games faster than ever. Curse Premium will enable you to automatically keep your addons up-to-date without any interaction from you. Whenever an addon is updated, the Curse Client will install the updated version right away. What this means is that when you are ready to start playing your favorite game, you can jump right in knowing everything will be up and running. Additionally, Curse Premium users will have special access to Curse.com. Curse Premium users can browse the website and use the client without any commercial advertisements. They also get a unique avatar frame, and can participate in Premium-only forums and contests.
We will discuss Premium and the Curse Author Rewards Program in further detail within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, please head over to the new Curse.com and take a look!
