Curse, when you chose a Monday to post your comments in the WoW forums, giving notice that you were cutting off WoWMatrix from accessing your site, you were using poor judgement. Your post hit the wire just 15 hours before the scheduled maintenance (nightmare) that was Patch 3.1. You've said you didn't know it was going to be patch day, and didn't purposely choose that particular day to break the addo updating routine of a lot of WoW users. But the patch was coming, and we all knew it was going to hit soon. And we all knew it was going to be a Tuesday.

And we all know that Tuesday follows Monday.

You gave insufficient warning to us to allow us to do a measured, properly tested migration away from WM. Everyone just had to jump. I didn't appreciate that, and I know a lot of other people didn't either.

Add to this the fact that a great many of us were using WM because we run Macs, and your Mac client was by your own admission, a dismal failure. That's assuming it ran at all, given that it wouldn't run on PPC or pre-10.5 versions of OSX. You've asked that people look at your reasoning for what you're doing, to defend your actions. By now, I'm fairly sure that (agree or not), you've also looked at the perspective reflected by my comments here. I'm hoping that you recognize where you could have handled this better.

Having said all this, I wanted to let you know that I've been continuing to test WM, trying to understand why, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the mere fact that I launched WM caused a pile of my addons to be marked as "dirty" by the Curse Client. You've said it was because WM was rewriting parts of the affected addons' code. I had confirmed that there were changes being made, but my code-fu is pretty weak, so I didn't understand what the changes were.

Over on WoWI's forums, and on the Blizz forums, there are smarter people than me who looked into it, and *did* understand. Their words can be found at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16474160156&;sid=1&pageNo=15 and http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22697. Basically, WM was monkeying with the addon code to cause the addons to not throw errors, even though they were out of date. They were also modifying the copyright in certain situations, changing them from the author's intent.

That alone is reason to abandon WM (the site and the service) to its richly deserved demise. I really wish you'd have been able to show us what the linked messages above did. Had you been able to do so when you pulled the plug, I might have been much more forgiving of the timing and method you used.

As for the client software itself, WM still has some things to teach, and I've already posted my opinions on that. Hopefully, someone at Curse had a chance to read it.

So, your timing: work on that. Your client: keep working on that. Your defense of your actions against WM: drop that. No longer necessary. Anyone who can read the messages above who doesn't get it, can't be reasoned with anyway.

Dear Curse:

One of the features that I really, really liked about WoWMatrix was its simplicity. The application, while not the prettiest in the world, executed easily, required no installation at all, found the addons easily and updated all of them with a single click. It did not support any other game, did not stay resident in the process table, did not collect any information from my system to send back to the mothership. It performed its function reliably and quickly, and did so across all game platforms.

Your client, by contrast, is larger and requires installation. This is apparently due to the fact that the client supports several games, rather than just WoW. The extra weight in the application comes with no value to me or other former WM users.

It is not a cross-platform application, as it runs only on Windows, and on Macs with specific versions of the operating system and only on particular hardware. Depsite assurances from Curse that this will change Real Soon Now(tm), the fact is that this client, as well as all of its previous versions, have suffered from the same platform limitations, and there has been no movement discernable to the userbase toward a solution. I don't need to tell you how long that's been, nor do I need to remind you how patience wears thin.

Unlike WM, your client requires a login, which is an inconvenience, and to those of us who like to keep track of precisely where we've placed personal information, it's an added and mostly unnecessary burden... albeit a small one, admittedly.

The biggest disappointment is the planned removal of the 1-click updating feature. Your statements, both on the site and in the application itself, inform us that we're eventually going to have to start paying you for this feature. Unlike the higher-speed and more-exclusive access that the premium account is also planned to provide, the 1-click updating does not cost Curse anything. Its removal is strictly and completely a tool to goad users into coughing up cash for a premium account, users who might be perfectly content to wait a few extra minutes for their updates. I'd like to ask that you leave the feature as part of the standard-access client.

As for a direction for future development, I'd like to ask you to reconsider your position of not making available a WoW-only "thinner" client with the basic featureset the client currently has (1-click updating, auto-scanning for installed addons, search/installation of new addons), as well as the most-asked for improvement: true cross-platform capability. Such a client would go a long way in providing good service for your users.

So on Patch Day, we who were using WoWMatrix for updates got nailed by a collective action undertaken by Curse and WoWInterface. It's already been explained to death, argued to death, protested to death. Why it was done has been offered as a defense of how it was done, and that logic has been challenged, and it too was argued to death.

There does come a point when you have to acknowledge the fact that there will forever be differences of perspective on these kinds of things. Curse was not wrong for shutting off WM. WM was not wrong for providing superior service, which they did. The users were not wrong in being royally pissed off about being caught in the fight between the two. From these perspectives, each party was in the right.

Curse completely mishandled the act of shutting WM off; I've already said how a week's notice would have been sufficient for WM users to find alternatives, but Curse decided 15 hours was plenty. WM was using the same technique of providing its service that web developers used to do, when they linked graphics hosted on other sites into their own pages, using resources from the target server that the target couldn't recover. That was wrong of WM, period. The users (myself included) failed to either do due diligence to determine that we were supporting a proper business entity, or failed to care about where we were getting our "free stuff". From these perspectives, everyone was in the wrong.

I refuse to contribute another word to the hair-splitters on both sides who want to convince anyone that they were more right than wrong.

Regardless, it is time to quit. WM is dead, for all intents and purposes, and we are left with survivors. I choose to deal with Curse, as they have shown the most inclination to do what is necessary to serve their customers, and that term includes those they might like to get money from someday -- like me, for instance. I choose not to support WoWI, not because of their actions, but because of their reactions; their responses to posters in their forums has been snide in the extreme, and their sneer is practically audible through the written word. There is no excuse for that, particularly in people who want to offer a premium service. Their customers also include people they might like to get money from someday, and right now, they are poisoning their own well.

It's time to quit this. Everyone who works on WoW, whether on an addon site or not... get back to work. The rest of you, yeah, you can continue spewing, even though it's wasted effort. I'd like to suggest that you probably have better things to do with your time.

I have to say, it is puzzling in the extreme to me that, for a few days now, Curse and WoWI have been blocking access to addon updates by WowMatrix, and WM has not so much as posted a comment on their website acknowledging it. Odd.

Since I'm now a regular at Curse's Mac Support forum, I noticed that the posts were conspicuously devoid of any Curse employees' responses to the recent influx of user posts. Since pulling the plug on WoWMatrix just before patch 3.1 hit, a lot of us former WM users were... well, corraled into the Curse Client. That's not an unfair representation, no matter how Curse feels about it. Anyway, I noticed that other than Kaelten's comment about how the Mac client was "in flux" (http://www.curse.com/forums/t/84591.aspx), there hadn't been a client-related response from Team Orange (I just coined that term, and I'm going to start using it, along with "orange posters") for about a month. But in the process of posting my "Rush Test" findings to the Blizzard forums, I noticed one of many threads where the battle between the WM supporters and the Curse/WoWI supporters was being waged. In that thread, I find Kaelten posting... uselessly... answering posts from outraged WM users. So I post in the same thread (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16416942233&;sid=1&pageNo=9) pointing out the absence of decent support in the Mac forum, and asking Kaelten if this was the best use of his time.

Twenty minutes after my post hit the Blizzard threads, 2 Curse employees start posting multiple responses in the Mac support forum. Now in all fairness, this could have been coincidence, and Kaelten might be slumming in the Blizz forums on his own personal time. Regardless, we're getting some attention in there, and I am grateful for it.

As I said I would yesterday in comments made on Curse's site, I did a bit of "emergency maintenance" of my own by giving the Curse Client for Mac beta a trial-by-fire after Curse and WoWI abruptly killed WoWMatrix. For the record, I am still angry with Curse over the fact that they did not have the common courtesy to issue an advance warning that they were going to block the access. They didn't have to say how they were going to do it, thus preserving the effectiveness of the action, but to hit us with this issue without warning on the same day as patch 3.1 was a very low blow. And my memory is long indeed.

I also said yesterday that I would be posting my findings in several places. This exact post will be cross-posted at Curse.com in the same thread as my previous comments, in a blog hosted at that same site, and in Blizzard's forums.

A few items to consider: First, I use an auto-updater for addons because I am responsible for maintenance on multiple Mac laptops used to play WoW, and have neither the time nor the inclination to maintain that environment by hand. Second, all of the Macs I work with are running OS 10.5+ on Intel processors, which is critical considering that the client doesn't work with any Macs that aren't. So if you're running 10.4 or earlier, or running on PPC, you are out of luck. I direct you to www.curse.com to voice your opinion on this. The number of addons on any given machine I updated was less than 40. Your experience might be different if you're updating 100+ addons, and I know some of you are. And finally, you should be aware that Curse has stated that it is their intention to make it so that *only* the curse client can be used to auto-update addons pulled from their site, so WoWMatrix was only target #1. 

Downloading the client was simple and took less than a minute on a standard ADSL link. This was prior to the realms going live, however, and I am aware that Curse's network link became saturated with traffic later in the evening, rendering the site unusable by most. The file saves as a .dmg file.

Opening that file is a double-click away, which causes a virtual drive to appear on the desktop, called Curse Client. This is expected behavior from any .dmg file. The drive opens to a fairly large window showing a "Curse Client" application, an "Applications" folder, and an arrow depicted the former going into the latter. A degree in rocket science isn't required to figure out what they want you to do. Installation went without a hitch.

I did one step for my own convenience: I created an alias for the application, and dragged that alias to my desktop, to make it easier to launch the application.

During the initial launch, a dialog box displays asking how often the application should check for updates to itself. The *longest* amount of time is 3 hours, which is frankly ridiculous. A daily option, at least, should be available. Also, a pair of check boxes allows you to cause the app to fire up on the machine's startup (which I made sure was unchecked), and another to cause the app to automatically login to Curse when the app was launched (which I allowed to remain checked). After dealing with those settings, which are the only settings available in the client's preferences, a dialog box displays to inform us that the client will be running in "premium mode" at first. This means that we will be able to cause the update of all addons with a single click. But at some point in the future, this will be restricted to the premium paid service only, and we'll be clicking twice to update each out-of-date addon from then on. That's irritating, particularly to those of us who had access to an update-all feature for free until Tuesday morning, and I would hope that Curse gets the hint that their target demographic would not be kindly disposed to this.

At this point, we finally get to the point of having the client on in the first place; please note that the amount of time it's taken to get to this point is less than 3 minutes, assuming decent download speed. The client scans your addon folder looking for stuff that might need updating. It separates them into 3 general categories that display on 2 separate tabs: Known and Unknown. On the known tab are, well, known addons - ones that the client recognizes as addons that are a) hosted on curse.com and b) have file/directory structures that match patterns Curse knows are "good". More on that later; stay tuned. On the unknown tab, there are 2 classes of addons. There are the ones that the client isn't sure of, but has a guess as to what package they belong to, which is displayed to the right of the addon name. During my tests, the client never attempted to offer a guess that was wrong. It also always offered a guess on addons that were hosted on Curse. In short, the guessing was 100% accurate during my tests. A single click accepted the guesses, and fired off the updater for those addons, which reinstalled them using the Curse-approved versions. I want to emphasize that the client never lost any of my data, my settings or configurations, or back-revved an addon to an earlier version. The final category of addons were the true unknowns, which invariably meant it was an addon not hosted on Curse, and wouldn't be updated by the client anyway. The two examples that come to mind are Lightheaded and Doublewide, which are hosted on WoWI... and they aren't offering *any* autoupdater, Mac or otherwise. Helpful, they are.

So, bottom line: the client installs as advertised, works as expected, and provided the site isn't traffic capped, it works fairly smoothly, providing an acceptable auto-updater. At least until Curse breaks it by deciding you need to pay them money to avoid all the clicking.

Now for the downsides. Let me dispense with one that several Mac users have brought up, and that Curse acknowledges is an issue: the client is ugly. Curse blames that on the fact that they are using wxWidget for the development toolkit, and that they "are looking into" a different one that would provide a slicker look. Here's my take on this point: **I couldn't care less.** WoWMatrix didn't look like a Mac app, either, and no one was crying over that. So to Curse, I'd like to suggest you pretty much ignore that one. If moving to a better toolkit allows you to bring the feature-set of the client in line with what you're offering the Windows users, then I'm all for it. On the other hand, if you're doing it so you can make the toolbar look all "chrome"... screw it. Spend your time on something meaningful, like making sure it doesn't crash.

A very real problem with the client may sound like an aesthetic issue, but it's not. The control icons are a problem in that they are not intuitive. Until the user learns what the icons mean by mousing over them a few times, their function is a mystery. That should *never* happen, given all the research that's been done over the years on proper UI development. Just as a hint, the "Uninstall addon" button should probably use a big red X, rather than the red-filled circle with a white line from left to right across it. Look at other applications, and you'll see what I mean.

The client also has one behavior that is just plain bad, and I blame the programmer(s), who should have known better. If the client detects an addon whose files or directory structure have been written to since it last updated that addon (except in cases where you manually add the files; I don't know why that would be an exception), then the client puts a black triangle with an exclamation point in it next to the addon, and refuses to do anything else with it. Mouseover on the icon gives no result, and the client's documentation doesn't mention it. Neither does anything on Curse's site, as of this writing. Kaelten (one of Curse's people) offered an explanation in a non-support thread that the icon indicated the client had marked the addon as "dirty" and stopped processing on it to avoid overwriting potentially valid changes. That would be an important thing to know, since when I clicked on the addon itself to get information about it, the client crashed. This issue was already reported in Curse's actual support forum, so I'm hopeful they'll get it fixed. In the meantime, a user discovered a workaround... apparently with no help from Curse... and wrote it up at  http://www.curse.com/forums/t/88521.aspx. After some testing, I determined that what caused my initially-flawless update to be marked "dirty" was that between the first update and the second, I ran WoWMatrix, which scanned my addon directory. I did not initiate an update, but apparently that was all it took for the Curse Client to flip out. Was the problem with Curse, or was it WoWMatrix? I don't know, and haven't had time to look into more fully.

And that's it. If you need an updater, and you run a Mac, you can get the Curse Client, and it will work well for whatever Curse hosts. If we need more... and we do... I guess we're on our own.

It's done shaking out: a total of 8 addons simply won't be handled by the Curse client, due to the fact that the addons aren't hosted on Curse, and likely won't be. They are over at WoWI, which means I'll be updating some of my addons by hand, an inconvenience considering I have to update multiple machines. But since the Curse client is incapable of handling this situation, and WoWI is incapable of producing a client at all, apparently, I am stuck with this. It could be worse, of course; I do not maintain 100+ addon libraries on each machine.

Patch 3.1 appears... dare I say it?... stable, at this time. I was able to get into the first post-patch Wintergrasp on the server Suramar. We won that one. Unfortunately, it looks like the instance servers are buggy, since our attempt to go into the Vault failed. We had the 25-man raid, but the instance not only refused to let us all in, the few that did got stuck in there, and eventually disconnected. We'll try again another time.

The Curse client on Mac has some substandard features, but seriously, they are of limited scope. The data upload feature isn't even in there, yet, for no good reason I've read about. If there is one, Curse is keeping it a secret. The major problem is the control icons. They are not done right. "Right" in this case means that they are intuitive; a user can easily determine what each one is for. And that isn't the case here. Overall, tho, the application looks fine. In fact, it looks alot like WoWMatrix. A lot like it, in fact. I'm sure Curse has an excellent explanation for that.

Big problem this evening: the Curse network was saturated to the point of being unusable. This on the heels of several remarks made by Curse staff about how much less traffic they were dealing with, now that they killed off WM. Spoke too soon, I'd say.

Well, it's late, and we'll work with this more in the morning.

As of this writing, the realms are still down, and an increasingly desperate tone is seen in the language being used in the updates we get from Blizzard. At 5pm PDT, they gave us another message telling us they'd have an update in an hour, but the language was different from the 3 prior to it (those 3 were identical except for the time of the next update). In this latest one, they tell us that they ran into problems during the testing, and that they're "doing their best" to have the realms playable in 2-3 hours. For those counting, that means the east coasters won't be able to play at all today, since it will be 11pm before Blizz admits defeat again. I might be able to play yet today, as I'm in Central time. But we'll see.

The patch hadn't finished downloading, but that was probably due to the number of available connections to the bittorrent cloud that my firewall will allow. Since my firewall NATs (most do), inbound connections are difficult to handle. When an outside source sends traffic to my firewall's public IP on port, say... 6999, to which of the three internal machines does that get sent? If I don't set up static inbound NAT, the answer is: none of them. Unfortunately, to permit bittorrent to move at top speed, that's what you'd have to do. And for various security reasons, I don't wanna. So how to get 3 machines updated soon?

Simple, and it's a suggestion that Blizzard makes: let one machine download the patch, then use local filesharing to copy it to the other machines. Which I did. So all three machines are patched to 3.1.

So I next turn my gaze to the addon situation, since WoWMatrix is down for the count. I said I'd be pulling it to my own machine to try it out, and I meant that. So I send my Firefox to Curse.com, and click on "Client", and there's a link for the 3.0 beta for Macs. I emphasize that, becuase we Mac users are always getting the short end of the stick when it comes to software for this game. Yeah, yeah, QQ moar. Shut up.

The application downloaded in seconds, installed cleanly, and recognized most of my addons. I updated them, and all seemed well.

The realms just went live, so I'm going to test the end results. More later.

Today, patch 3.1 comes out with Ulduar, dual-specs, a host of changes (improvements or otherwise), and I sit at work waiting for the chance to head home and give it a try. My system downloaded the patch days ago, and with any luck, I won't be too hosed by some of the issues being reported.

Instead, I will be hosed by the fact that, since I run a Mac and use WoWMatrix to keep my addons up-to-date, I will be unable to do any updating thanks to Curse and WoWInterface deciding to drop a block into place preventing my updater from working. For reasons they have failed... repeatedly... to provide, they did not make any prior announcement that they were going to do this. That failure prevented me from doing anything approaching reasonable software deployment practices on my end. I am simply being asked to install a piece of software and roll it out to several machines (I'm responsible for more than just my own) and pray that Curse's QA is up to it. Had Curse given me a week's notice, I could have done the pilot implementation on my own machine, and been able to render a meaningful decision as to whether to roll it out or not.

But no. "Stopping the theft of bandwidth"... which is a term of questionable reality... was so important that this decidedly piss-poor PR performance on their part was considered acceptable.

So here's where I go from here. I head home from work, I install the patch. Then I install the curse client, v3.0 Mac beta, and test it. Thoroughly. Then I'm going to do 3 things.

1. Post my findings in the thread Curse has so self-righteously titled Curse and WoWInterface working together to help protect our authors and other site-users, as I said I would.
2. Post the same findings in whatever passes for a support forum here at Curse. Hopefully, they'll actually respond.
3. Post the same findings in a post at Blizzard's forums. Along with any responses I get.

I don't think it's a secret that I am not happy with Curse right now. Regardless of how I feel about their situation, their method of handling this was ham-handed and punished a pile of people who are now their customers. And customers have incredibly long memories when they feel like they got backstabbed.

But I need some form of automated updating tool, and since WoWI doesn't even have the decency to provide a solution to replace the one they've gleefully killed (Curse's response to all this has been head-and-shoulders more professional than WoWI's), I want to wark with Curse to get their application up to standard.

So, yeah, I'll be working with them. It's going to be a rocky start, thanks to Curse, tho.