Sandbagged by Curse and WoWI

otakusensei — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:29:07 GMT

Oh and another note to folks making noise about addon update clients.

Get the hell off my lawn.

Back in the day you'd download a zip with some files in it and no readme and you'd be expected to figure it out yourself. If you are honestly griping about not having a program that handles all this transparently you need a history lesson. The current state of things is a wonderful occurrence and you should be grateful. The fact that ANYONE is willing to do this for you for free is a gift. The fact that there are several options is a miracle. If one of those options did so at the expense of a whole community, I would ask that you have the decency not to bitch and moan when you're forced to switch options following its demise.

I am consistently amazed by the WoW addon community in general. The fact that so many people add so much to this game, for free, is astounding. Despite a few attempts to cash in, by and large the whole enterprise is a wonderful example of humanity at it's best. As end users I hope that we can respect that while making sure that our input is in a spirit that does good for the community and benefits us all. After all, if we don't like someone the most constructive way to address it is to help fix it.

otakusensei — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:17:57 GMT

Perhaps they did pick the date. I, as a user of the Curse site and its downloads, am glad they did.

Do I want the bandwidth set aside for the service I use to be funneled away by some other service right when I need it most? Nope.

Thank you Curse for making every reasonable effort to ensure your service is working to the best of your ability on patch day. As someone who was here last time and had to wait three days for my updates that should mean something.

Now if we could just get Blizzard to maybe let us know more than a day in advance which Tuesday they are dropping content patches...

Dupp — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:02:47 GMT

Well done Curse. <not>

I'm a bit confused, I just don't see the "theft of bandwidth" if I download an update manually, or use another tool to do it whats the difference, its still bandwidth? I don't think WoWMatrix would use more or less of it to get me what I want, so where is the issue.

Developers are getting their addon's to their community of users, so whats their issue?

Oh yea, revenue, that's the issue, Curse are not getting the "views" of the adds they carry so they are out of pocket, really, geez, I use Firefox so I dont see their adds anyway, an when I log onto a site and select WoW portal, why am I bombarded with adds for other stuff I'm in no way interested in? Pass.

As for the Curse Client, well I used it before I found WoWMatrix, it was junk, it didnt update addons, it didnt find all the addons, and on two occasions I found key loggers downloaded by the client, so I ditched it and went to WoWMatrix, it did scan all downloads as they arrived at my PC, something Curse could well investigate themselves, or at least scal all the addons they support. If they do, well done, but I havent been able to find any information on the site either confirming that they do or dont attempt to protect thier community.

One other thing to consider, the high and mighty stance taken by Curse hasnt hurt anyone except the community they make money from, us, the users of the service, they don't write addons, they simply store and forward the hard work of authors, (thanks guys and gals we do love you :) they don't do anything but leach off the hard work of others, heck, sounds like the claims they made of WoWMatrix?

Anyway, my rant over, but just remember, its not Curse thats the attraction, its the dedicated work of hundreds of authors, and more power to them.

YOafter9 — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:36:34 GMT

Wow Maccormaic, how can you call yourself a "customer" of Curse. A customer "pays" for something of value. We are fortunate that in that we don't have to pay for the addons that Curse has so faithfully hosted here. We are "users" not "customers" and as such must go along with the changes that the host makes or feel free to find another alternative. I for one prefer to manually install my updates. I like to delete the old directories before installing. I've seen to many instances where just overwriting leaves old files there and old files can cause problems.

kelvar — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:21:31 GMT

I think Curse makes a fair point - you're (meaning WoWMatrix) using our (Curse) bandwidth while skipping our ads (which pays for our bandwidth) and pushing your own. In the simplest sense WoWMatrix is making money off of Curse's bandwidth and that's really not ok.

Yes, it was easy and it worked really well and I used it all the time, I had no idea how it worked or got its addons and I didn't really care. But, now I know.

I'm not sure what the myriad of things the Curse Client does poorly are, but granted I'm using the Mac client not the PC. To my GREAT surprise the Mac client is very simple, it found everything fine and updated it all no problem (well, one problem on the initial set up I mentioned below but easily fixed and none since). And, (also to my great surprise) I did have some addons that were grossly out of date and I had no idea. Maybe it's easier for me because I'm using the premium membership trial and I may well change my tune once that runs out, I don't know.

At this point I still have one solution and it still works very well. I guess if you want to drop most of your addons because of this you can, but why lessen your own gameplay, it only hurts yourself.

What's funny is no one has talked about the WoW Ace updater, I know some people swear by it but I don't care for it personally, at least not the Mac version.

sephtin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:56:14 GMT

I used to be a minimalist. Only the addons I needed, but WoWMatrix made it SO EASY!

Honestly.. I could CARE LESS about the fact that it downloaded and installed the addons.. the part that I think everyone is looking for, is SOMETHING that will ACCURATELY identify all addons, and give an EASY indication when they're out of date, in ONE place! Conveniently providing a link where to go to download them to install manually would be sufficient in my eyes.

I only wish... that instead of screwing with the version information on the page... that Curse/WoWI would have simply blocked or obfuscated direct downloads... and made it so WoWMatrix was still usable, even if only to follow the link to the page to download.

My BIGGEST problem with curse and WoWI, is they're more interested in us using their client that does a myriad of things (poorly), instead of the ONE SINGLE THING that I want an addon tool to do.. which is Update addons for ONE game (99% of users DON'T CARE about the other games)... not collect data, etc. JUST provide an indication that addons are out of date, easily, and accurately update them.

ONE solution has done that well... and now it's gone.

Personally.. I'll be going from over 100 addons down to the minimum I can... in my opinion, curse/wowi are screwing themselves for doing this without having a reasonable alternative available.

kelvar — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:07:05 GMT

Of course the change would come today - it makes good business sense. You say customers have a long memory for being backstabbed, but I don't think that's generally true.

Doing it today has the MOST impact when people are -desperate- for add-ons and will do anything, including (gasp) sign up for Curse - just like you did, just like I did.

I too run a Mac and WoW-Matrix was the height of convenience and reliability. It's even better for Curse because WoW Interface doesn't even have a working client and it's still in "Alpha" after months. So... good move Curse.

What will happen is people will sign up, get used to it, and use their product now because it's not worth the effort to switch again.

They made their move at the best possible time - it makes good business sense. So well played Curse... as for people who claim, oh yes I'll switch immediately on WoWMatrix (or whatever other product) because they're mad at Curse (keep in mind this may be many months away), I believe those folks would be in the minority. Most people will stay here because it's easier.

As for how well their Client works on Mac. It was fine for me save the Debug error that appeared when it tried to identify my add-ons the first time (it only identified one). I simply said No to Cancel but continued to show errors. I then went to the unidentified add-ons tab and pressed what looked like a download symbol and voila - all addons downloaded, installed and showed up correctly.

It's not WoWMatrix easy, but it's easy enough and the interface is slick and simple. If they can keep this up reasonably then this works well enough for me. I'm on the free premium membership - we'll see how annoying it is when my trial runs out.

maccormaic — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:47:08 GMT

Awesome! You can't edit a post once you've made it! Well, I'll just add to these comments, then, saying that I won't be able to do *diddley* until Blizz gets the servers up and running. And I can get patched. THEN I'll get the curse client, and proceed with testing.

maccormaic — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:56:59 GMT

Curse and WoWI both state that they tried to bring WM to the table, and I believe them. I can't think that WM would have believed it was in their interest to cooperate; things had gone on this way for quite some time. Curse just got fed up with it and dropped the hammer.

I do think the claim made by Curse that they didn't pick this day on purpose is suspicious, tho. They've been talking on the Blizz forums for a couple days that this looked to be Patch 3.1 day. *I* knew about it before I went to bed last night. Why didn't they?

Ravenandrose — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:43:00 GMT

I agree with you that the change came with little notice. I can't help but wonder if they even discussed the matter with the makers of WoWMatrix or if they decided to just do it. Perhaps they could have settled the matter in a court of law and gotten a nice cut of profits. Personally, I'm a bit happy with the new client, although it hasn't found Lightheaded yet.