Hi,

I appreciate all the effort that people at curse.com give so that I can better enjoy my gaming experience!!!  Also, the time and effort of those that create the addons.  However, signing up to pay for membership I cannot do at this time due to the very poor quality of the current curse client.  I have been in the software business for a fairly long time and configuration management is a critical part of the business.  It is often difficult to pull off well.  Currently, there are so many errors, I only use the client for the most basic of functions and I totally check everything it does to ensure I have the latest copies of the addons I use.  There seems promise for the new one, but the track record is not a good one.  As a very small example, I receive emails when items on my favorites list are updated.  It is very inaccurate, I simply delete them when I receive them and check the favorites list myself every day and sometimes just check on those addons I particularly care about.  Or, I get emails from other addon sites and then go to curse.com to download them.  Sometimes I wonder why I don't change to another site.  The total list of issues I have is too long for a thread of this type.....

The emails and Curse Client are not related, as the CC does not send any emails. However, there is a known issue about emails, and Curse is working on a fix. But said issue has nothing whatsoever to do with the Client.

What errors? You didn't specify, and mine works just fine. And perhaps you noticed that I don't work for Curse by the icon on the left not having a big "Curse" on it plus the lack of orange.

Switching sites is your perogative, and won't impact much one way or the other. I myself switch between Curse and WowInterface, depending on what addons I'm after, and whether an addon is hosted or updated on one site or the other. As for your "total list of issues" being too long, maybe you do have valid issues that need to be addressed, but since you don't list any of them, I can only assume you don't want any of them addressed.

If that changes, and you do, in fact, want help, then I'm sure both us users and the Curse staff will be happy to assist you in any way we can.

I appreciate your response!

I am aware that the email sent for updates is not made by the curse client that sits on my computer, it just happens to be the latest thing that I found annoying.  I chose it as the level of errors it seems to have is symptomatic of what I think of curse.com as a whole.  In the past year, I have seen issues I have had submitted by others without anything seemingly done about them thus my reluctantance to spend my time dealing with them.

I would not have included my list of errors in my thread but started a separate thread per issue as it is the proper way to deal with them, that is why I said it was inappropriate.

With a new client with us now, it seems moot to continue discussing something I cannot even run any more.

I want to again mention that I really appreciate the time and effort of those people that are producing curse.com and the addons as I get to use it for free.  In the overall scheme of things, this is just about a game after all.  Last night I discovered a 'bug' with World of Warcraft itself.  If you turn in daily quests close to the time the daily limit is reset, they may get counted for today and for tomorrow, reducing how many overall one can do.  I put in a ticket and was told this was normal.  I submitted another ticket indicating that it seemed wrong for them to count the quest turn in for two separate days and I was told it always worked this way, it is known behavior and if I thought it should be changed to put in a suggestion like a new feature request.  I was told that one should turn in quests by the end of the calendar day (asuming they meant realm time) and that a script is run roughly an hour before the reset time (4am PDT on my realm) and any turned in after that may experience this problem, thus one should avoid doing it.  If my bank did something like this I would move to another bank, I have no intention of discontining my play time with WoW.  I know this now and even if it might cause one to question their accuracy and limits daily quest turn in to 23 hours if one is maxing every day, it doesn't really matter - if my bank lost some of my money, well that is a different situation.  Having designed and written enterprise level software systems that were required to be very accurate about buisness metrics, it confuses me that they would have this kind of issue and the process they seemed to indicate they are using, but how people solve problems can often be not what one would expect.

I only mentioned about another site as one might wonder if I think what I do of curse, why would I still be using it. In general I like curse.com and feel it offers more than other sites.  I have no significant personal experience with others although one of my brothers feels one of them does not have curse's woes so he uses that.  We both have long careers in software.

Again, thanks for your response and offer to help!  I also really like the community of people that play WoW (well, most of them) and still consider myself not much more than a neophyte after a year of playing....

I'd like to once again apologize, personally, for the email fiasco.  We obviously never intended for our email feature to annoy our users.  Due to the timing of another project, we weren't able to get this resolved quickly, so the emailer has bene disabled - though I'm aware a staggering number of mails were sent out before it was addressed.

When we reimplement this, you can expect the following features:

1. The service will be opt in, not opt-out.
2. You will be able to choose between a digest or immediate notification, based most likely on the number of addons you have tagged.
3. The feature to actually work as expected

When it launches, it will probably be rather silent and I will get volunteers on the forums to help us test this, as the load between our test systems and the live site is quite different.

So once again, we're sorry for the unnecessary emails that were sent, and I'll be posting in a couple weeks when the system has been re-engineered.

Thank you for the appology!  It is very nice to see you guys adding nice features for us :-).

I haven't looked much into test loading for web development myself yet, but it would be cool if you could be able to somewhat approximate it somehow.

I have added new posts for problems I had with the new client.  They are similar in nature to problems I had with the old client.  As a user, it leaves me very unsettled when things do not seem to work right.  That there is different info for the same versions or it is hard to see cetain info, that adds to things once a problem seems to be there.

It is very nice you are trying to manage beta code now as developers can be a very long time to make beta code released code - it is a 'must have' feature in my opinion.  Also, when WotLK released, lots of addons were labeled beta when they were the only possible working version, the 'released' code was non-functional so calling it a stable released version became a misnomer and the old client wouldn't manage it at all.  Of course, from the perspective of the WoW version it is correct and that is kept and displayed properly.  But for me, it all became a manual affair for a lot of addons for awhile after WofLK released, very happy with this in the new client!!!

This thread really is about, 'if you want me to pay for premium service, deliver me premium value!'  I use the client because it is easier than manually downloading and installing all the zip files.  It should require me less effort than it does and I shouldn't have to think about what's what all the time.....

My only problem with this new "premium" service feature... why? ... I mean you were doing great with the whole bit of allowing addons to update as necessary when an update is found ... so now, once the premium service is implemented, you'll be actually limiting the original service for those that don't have the money to pay for the premium service... The current updater (well, prior now that you're giving a premium service preview) automatically checked for updates to addons every day. Now I can understand if you were to add ads to the free client users, but to take away the one feature that was the only deciding factor of me actually using the CC? that's just ... why? ... I understand the need for you wanting to get as much money as you can out of your site and it's features... but again ...

You had a good service before ... and now you're requiring people to pay to use the service back the way it was originally working at anyway... degredation of services must be the new norm for the internet...

sorry, had to rant... taking away features that were the deciding factor for using a service ...

Greed != Desire to not loose money.

Stuffit = Uncompression utility that ships with OSX.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Mytee

WHY ! WHY ! WHY !

Oh I get it it GREED The new norm for the net !!!!!!!!!!!!

My answer to your Premium Service = Stuffit !!!!!!!!!!

I will find a new addon service (and there will be one)

Good luck CYA

lol what a small world Mytee. Avulsion here :).

I do not have a problem with people being compensated for their efforts, esp. since I am involved in developing intellectual property myself.  In fact if I know someone has a vested interest in a thing, I usually trust it more which is why I started this thread in the first place - I want this to work well!

The new client now seems to be better than the old, but to be honest, I opened some tickets at the start of using it that were completely ignored so I am not really paying that much attention at the moment.

I reported that the daily quest count on WoW was bugged.  On my server, the reset time has been changed from 4am to 3am and it is accurate now.  It was not until 3.1 was live, it is nice to see improvements.  I want to change my schedule so I'm not running into it all the time, but I still have a rush to get as many done as I can before reset (13g * 25 / day, are you kidding me, who wouldn't try to fit that in?)....

From personal experience writing similar software, being very accurate is a non-trivial problem.  It doesn't seem like it should be, but it is.  We evolved something like in accounting where you can get to the same computed values through 2 different methods.  In this way we could find bugs in the code automatically, well not find it but know it's there.  Configuration management code is very similar which is really what this is.  Curse is managing a complex problem, my hat is off to them, they do it well.  To pay for it, I would like it to be prefect where it really counts and that is keeping the right piece of code in place all the time, which I am still not convinced is happening!

Personally I would rather pay each individual for there use of there programes, not give it to someone else jsut because they have one programe with Most of the addons together. I say most because I have not been able to get more then half of the addons i use for WoW from the curse site, where as Wowmatrix had them all.

Im sorry I will not  become a premium member and if that means I will no longer get my updates or anymore usefull addons so be it, I will manually download from the Orginal developers. Whom should be getting most of the profits from curse for their designs.

Isn't the premium subscription infringing on some of WoW's new UI policy?  Kinda seems like it's partly go against #1, but I could be readin it all wrong.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by redmagex2

Isn't the premium subscription infringing on some of WoW's new UI policy?  Kinda seems like it's partly go against #1, but I could be readin it all wrong.

 

1) Add-ons must be free of charge. All add-ons must be distributed free of charge. Developers may not create "premium" versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on.

Hmmm That does look like we are paying even though it is not legal anymore... (The overstroked part does not apply)

I would love to see some Curse official message on this...

I guess it could be understood as the addons are freely available and therefore Curse Client does not apply to that regulation, but the part of "charge for services related to the add-on" sounds hard to get away from... The premium Curse Client does not do anything more than add automatic download though does it ?

The role the Curse client plays, is about automatic download, but it has a little more funcationality.  It allows a fork in the code, it does cataloging and offers a list of other possible addons.  It also links to the addons and maintains local copies of addon descriptions and change logs.

They also upload your character profile to WoWDB.com when you exit the game and it looks like they are managing their profiler as well.

The way I read those rules, Curse has no option to charge - it seems crystal clear.  Lawyers get paid a lot money to muddy the waters, but this is not a legal thing, WoW has made their feelings clear, if they do not stop Curse from charging, they open the gates to all kinds of things they are trying to deal with - once there is one hole in the dam, that's where all the water goes though.  I see they have no choice but to stop Curse or allow chaos about charging or give up the effort to stop charging altogether.  The extact wording is not as important as WoW can change it anytime.  We all operate at Blizzard's discretion in this area.

I laugh at some of this stuff.  At times it seems like "them" (Curse or Blizzard or ???) doesn't get significant parts of their demographic.  I have run my own software company, had lawyers working for me, designed and written complex systems, I even worked at Microsoft for awhile and I am sure many people have similar backgrounds.  The responses are like to the general public, or maybe even the kids that are playing, don't they get that there are a lot of us that have a clue?  Not to run them down too much, but at times, it does feel this way.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by redmagex2

Isn't the premium subscription infringing on some of WoW's new UI policy?  Kinda seems like it's partly go against #1, but I could be readin it all wrong.

 

World of Warcraft User Interface Add-On Development Policy With the continuing popularity of World of Warcraft user interface add-ons (referred to hereafter as "add-ons") created by the community of players, Blizzard Entertainment has formalized design and distribution guidelines for add-ons. These guidelines have been put in place to ensure the integrity of World of Warcraft and to help promote an enjoyable gaming environment for all of our players - failure to abide by them may result in measures up to and including taking formal legal action. 1) Add-ons must be free of charge. All add-ons must be distributed free of charge. Developers may not create "premium" versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on.

I bolded the revelent parts. Addons are free of charge, to the best of my browsing the internet abilities, on every site I've seen, including, but not limited to: Curse.com, WowInterface.com, SpartanUI.com, Carboniteaddon.com, Auctioneeraddon.com ... so we are good there. Not charging money to access the addons, and not charging after the new Curse Client becomes available. That takes care of the first two bolded statements.

The key word in the last statement is "require," meaning, force people to pay or donate (which, if you are forcing donates, then that isn't donation, that's charging money) to access addons. Curse.com, when the new client launches, will NOT require anyone to pay for and use the Premium version. There will still exist a free version, and anybody will still be able to download addons manually, also a free service.

So no, Curse is not violating Blizzard's new policy in any way, shape, or form.

It is completely up to Blizzard how they want to take this.  Quibbling over semantics seems silly.  Allowing anyone to charge anywhere in the distribution chain is the issue.  If they allow curse to do this, others (or curse) will continue to push to see how far they can take this.  There are so many addons in use now by the typical player that a manual download situation is not an effective alternative (with the old CC, that's almost what it was for me) and someone suggesting it is seems to be obfuscating the issue.  But, again, it is up to Blizzard.  Dancing around words doesn't matter, do they want some charging in the distribution chain of addons or not?

  Quote:

Originally Posted by myrroddin

  Quote:

Originally Posted by redmagex2

Isn't the premium subscription infringing on some of WoW's new UI policy?  Kinda seems like it's partly go against #1, but I could be readin it all wrong.

 

World of Warcraft User Interface Add-On Development Policy With the continuing popularity of World of Warcraft user interface add-ons (referred to hereafter as "add-ons") created by the community of players, Blizzard Entertainment has formalized design and distribution guidelines for add-ons. These guidelines have been put in place to ensure the integrity of World of Warcraft and to help promote an enjoyable gaming environment for all of our players - failure to abide by them may result in measures up to and including taking formal legal action. 1) Add-ons must be free of charge. All add-ons must be distributed free of charge. Developers may not create "premium" versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on.

I bolded the revelent parts. Addons are free of charge, to the best of my browsing the internet abilities, on every site I've seen, including, but not limited to: Curse.com, WowInterface.com, SpartanUI.com, Carboniteaddon.com, Auctioneeraddon.com ... so we are good there. Not charging money to access the addons, and not charging after the new Curse Client becomes available. That takes care of the first two bolded statements.

The key word in the last statement is "require," meaning, force people to pay or donate (which, if you are forcing donates, then that isn't donation, that's charging money) to access addons. Curse.com, when the new client launches, will NOT require anyone to pay for and use the Premium version. There will still exist a free version, and anybody will still be able to download addons manually, also a free service.

So no, Curse is not violating Blizzard's new policy in any way, shape, or form.

It seems odd to bold only some parts of the text and outright ignore the others.  If I take the last sentence and change the bolding ...

Developers may not create "premium" versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on. 

I'm not saying that it's clear cut, I'm saying it's clearly open to interpretation and as was just pointed out, it will be Blizzard's interpretation that matters.

When I first read these guidelines it seemed to me that Blizzard is doing what they should to stay in control of their product as they state, "These guidelines have been put in place to ensure the integrity of World of Warcraft and to help promote an enjoyable gaming environment for all of our players..."  I understand there was a point in time that one of the single largest reasons for Microsoft Windows instability was 3rd party drivers.  They had to get control of that situation to improve their product and how their user's experienced their product.  World of Warcraft is a Blizzard product and it is setup to launch an industry around it for 3rd parties to profit by.  If it's a win-win, it's all good.  The Apple II did very well by this and the PC with the Windows operating system has lived this way - people seem to prefer the Mac for it's simplicy and consistency which does not really allow 3rd parties.

I had a ticket recently where a Blizzard tech refused to help until all addons were removed as well as saved variables, etc.  How much time and energy and aggrivation for their users for such things, esp. non-technical ones?  So, now there is a problem with interactions either between WoW & an addon or multiple addons or ???  What versions am I running and how did they get on my machine?  Who does the work to figure it out?  I am not going to spend the time, I avoided that part of the game for awhile - don't see the problem now.  Blizzard obviously does not want to incur cost here either - it can be a large cost for them if they are not careful.

It is in Blizzard's interests to ensure they remain in control of their product and how their users experience it.  It seems they realize this and are taking steps to ensure they are.

The policy in general doesn't apply to the Client.  The Client is a tool, not an addon.  It is not written in the context of a UI Development policy.  We are not now, nor ever charging people to access addons.  We're simply offering a premium service (much as many other sites do, including other addon sites) to remove ads, and provide priority bandwidth as well as extra features to some of our offerings. 

The Update all feature is an extension of the priority bandwidth feature, and believe me, doesn't even begin to touch the full range of features we have planned.

You left a vital part that I believe applies to curse, the "charge for services related to the add-on".

  Quote:

Originally Posted by myrroddin

  Quote:

Originally Posted by redmagex2

Isn't the premium subscription infringing on some of WoW's new UI policy?  Kinda seems like it's partly go against #1, but I could be readin it all wrong.

 

World of Warcraft User Interface Add-On Development Policy With the continuing popularity of World of Warcraft user interface add-ons (referred to hereafter as "add-ons") created by the community of players, Blizzard Entertainment has formalized design and distribution guidelines for add-ons. These guidelines have been put in place to ensure the integrity of World of Warcraft and to help promote an enjoyable gaming environment for all of our players - failure to abide by them may result in measures up to and including taking formal legal action. 1) Add-ons must be free of charge. All add-ons must be distributed free of charge. Developers may not create "premium" versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on.

I bolded the revelent parts. Addons are free of charge, to the best of my browsing the internet abilities, on every site I've seen, including, but not limited to: Curse.com, WowInterface.com, SpartanUI.com, Carboniteaddon.com, Auctioneeraddon.com ... so we are good there. Not charging money to access the addons, and not charging after the new Curse Client becomes available. That takes care of the first two bolded statements.

The key word in the last statement is "require," meaning, force people to pay or donate (which, if you are forcing donates, then that isn't donation, that's charging money) to access addons. Curse.com, when the new client launches, will NOT require anyone to pay for and use the Premium version. There will still exist a free version, and anybody will still be able to download addons manually, also a free service.

So no, Curse is not violating Blizzard's new policy in any way, shape, or form.

1) Add-ons must be free of charge.
All add-ons must be distributed free of charge. Developers may not create "premium" versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on.

Seems to me that curse is walking on a thin line on this matter. Saying You are not violating Blizz policies in any way, is like saying the driver of a bankrobbery isn't guilty of any crime, as he was only driving the getaway vehicle.

This has been asked, answered and reanswered by Curse. Locked.

The policy in general doesn't apply to the Client.  The Client is a tool, not an addon.  It is not written in the context of a UI Development policy.  We are not now, nor ever charging people to access addons.  We're simply offering a premium service (much as many other sites do, including other addon sites) to remove ads, and provide priority bandwidth as well as extra features to some of our offerings. 

The Update all feature is an extension of the priority bandwidth feature, and believe me, doesn't even begin to touch the full range of features we have planned.