Too many threads have already been stared regarding how horrible curse premium is and how appalled and distraught that curse would actually charge money for something. So here is my thread to highlight the finer aspects of curse premium and what it does in a positive fashion for the add-on and modding community as a whole.

20% of revenues will be awarded to mod authors who apply for the author reward program. Assuming a moderate amount of subscribers, this very well could be the single largest amount ever awarded to some mod authors. This will in-turn attract more mod authors to the website and in turn will increase the amount of add-ons one can find on curse.

Some people will argue "only the most popular add-on authors will receive payments" which I fully believe is a good thing, else every tom and dick with a little experience would write a press this button to open your mailbox add-on just to "steal" money from the hardest working authors who have spent countless hours developing and maintaining the add-on's you love. I'm also a firm believer in the power of capitalism. by throwing a monetary value into producing a quality add-on you will actually see the quality of many many add-on increase substantially.

For this reason I believe there should be a "donate all" button on curse that would distribute 100% of donations among mod authors. This move would, if anything, would attract more mod authors to curse and increase the quality of the mods available. Working also to allow the masses to donate to more than one author at a time.

I'm happy and proud to be a premium member, the gold around my name signifies that I have supported mod authors, which is more than most of the whiners on this board can say.

Great Job Curse

Thanks for the positive feedback, orbweaver82!

It's nice to see all you 'gold frames' hanging around =)

I must agree with orbweaver82.

Just wanted to give my thumbs up to this post and do a /cheer Curse.com keep up the good work.

I agree that curse premium is a good thing.

Listing Update All as a premium feature, unfortunately, intentionally inconveniences people. I'm amazed that the current premium package can be supported in this state. Thank you for the numerous downloads, but please don't expect to rest on yor laurels. A quality application and site is coldly turning away a portion of it's fanbase over a trivial single click. I can't support that package. Others probably feel the same way. It would be spectacular if there were a premium subscription that we could get behind. Unfortunately, that minor 1% of the package has infuriated otherwise content users. It hardly seems worth witholding.

Curse premium *can* be a good thing, however, it's execution reaks of "Couldn't give 2 snots about our users".

Ripping away features that were once free until you cough up some cash is not exactly a good business practice.   Crippling the client, which was once brilliantly designed to make addon management mindless, to the point where I might as well just go through my bookmarks list instead of using the client at all is not good software design.  Charge for a product, but give me an incentive to buy it.  Stripping out features in hopes that I will pony up some cash to get them back is a pretty terrible way of doing it.  Trust in a product/company is important to be successful and it's hard to trust curse after pulling a stunt like this.

There are features you can add to make a $30 annual fee worth it.  Ad-free browsing, priority downloading and contributions to the authors would have sold me, however, I will not be purchasing the product.  I can't support a product that inconvinences it's user unless you buy a premium account, strickly on principal.  ArkInRev put it quite well.

Bandwidth costs are hurting right now I'd imagine, especially with loss in add revenue.  However, there are solutions to ease the cost of bandwidth.

Although it'd take some development time, server load could probably be reduced significantly with a torrent-style download manager.  When an add-on updates automatically or when you choose to download/install with the curse client, instead of having the client grab it from a the server, have it grab it from another client.  Addons, in general, are quite small, which makes a solution like this ideal.  Your cliental will be the ones that reduce bandwidth costs while the features of the client could stay in tact.

ArkInRev and Kautzman,

I understand your frustation.We did consider keeping the update all for everyone but the reality is the convertion would have been very low, and the advertisement nearly useless, here is why:

-Have a look at this http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/01/the-online-ad-recession-is-officially-here-first-quarterly-decline-in-revenues/

-If we allow everyone to one click upgrade, you open the client, click and close it. People won't care about the ads, and won't click them. In a difficult economy advertisers are asking even more about campains results. Ads not performing means no business for us.

The only thing we are going to be adjusting based on feedbacks is download speed, and maybe ability to queue some actions.

Please let us know your thought on what would be great to have outside the oen click upgrade.

Best regards

Hubert

Queuing upgrades is an acceptable response.

These addon updates don't even need to be fast. You can hang on to the screen with ads longer than with teh premium.

Forcing users to keep the client open is just that: forcing. Edit: This is exactly what I mean by intentionally irritating. Forcing is a willful action taken by one party making the other's response compulsory. You could add an additional 10 seconds or even 20 seconds of mandatory ad display betweeen queued addons. Sites often place ads before redirecting or playing a video. Why should the free client be any different? At least the user is not intentionally inconvenienced.

Instead of delaying the queue time of the download, you are prefering to turn clients entirely away which is even more adverse to ad sales.

At least with this response, there is some hope of redemption in queued addins.

Also: If you want more ad presence, add a completion splash screen with 50 ads in it. It is not inconvenient to download, and your ads are still out there.

For most users there are a few choices:

- Don't use the manager

- Script the downloads (which is where I am leaning)

- Go elsewhere

- Muddle through the one clicks

- Go premium

Given those 5 basic responses, most users are going to avoid the ads altogether.

Actually... Flash an ad up in the lower corner with the progress bar. I really don't care how many ads are displayed and where, as long as using the manager is not intentionally irritating.

In the current state. I have updated 0 mods, and looked at 0 ads. With update all, I would have seen one. With the alternative suggestions I've offered, I would have seen many many more.

I fully understand the need for revenue. Irritating clients is the last thing that should be done. Removing the irritation of multiple clicks would likely convert more folks to premium. Your automatic update becomes an attractive feature just for the sake of removing ads.

Lastly: Thank you for the first well constructed response I've seen.

One more after thought rather than a post edit:

While on the Premium trial, I only visited curse.com rarely to look for new addons. Consequently, updates like the launch of the officail premium release did not reach me very well. Making news posts more prominent in the client would have been helpful, and may have led to somewhat less dissent among the fans.

Hi Ark,

I agree that we could have done a better job notifying our Client users beforehand of this major change - and we will strive to do so going forward.

Thanks,

Whalen

MagusX,

I appreciate the reassurance that communication will improve.

It is, however the workaround to the intentional inconveniencing which needs to be addressed. I see no reason why non-premium downloads can not be littered with ads on the progress bar, queued with ads in between, or have numerous ads on a spalsh screen when downloads complete.

Paying to have the ads removed is reason enough for me to be a paid member.

Television networks don't make you click "next" between commercials. They get what they get.

There are also plenty of folks out there, including myself, capable of scripting simple update macros. Either way, you have no assurance that there is a person at the keyboard. Look at all of the WoW players who continually went AFK in battlegrounds under Blizzard's nose: Do you not think clicking update is just as simple?

With no assurance that users are at the keys, your approach needs to target the user more effectvely. Ads need to be placed where the user needs to look. Progress bars, next to the update all button, and at the completion dialog that lets them close the manager and get in to the game.

On principle alone, I will neither use the updater, or provide a simple sendkeys script for it.

I like the premium offering without the update all. And I'd love to purchase it. However: any purchase made in this condition implies that I find its current state acceptable, which I do not.

Lastly: I was thinking briefly about the ad recession. Would the move to premium accounts not also reduce the number of viewed ads and therefore the revenue generated from them? There certainly are a lot of folks ensuring their longevity by offering premium services instead of solely relying on ads, and in every one of those packages, ad removal is one of the benefits. There seems to be a disonnect in the logic correlating the decline in ads to the need for premium service offerings. While one does not ensure the removal of the other, I would make the assumption that the correlation is inverse. More premium means less ads, and more ads means less premium. It would seem to me that any ad removal only exacerbates the referenced recession. Of course, the final point on the subject. If people don't have money to click on and support the ads, how are they expected to afford premium services?

Curse Premium IS a good thing.  I'll be getting it eventually even if nothing changes (once I have the spare cash... I'm moving soon, so that's not really an option for a while), but I would love to see download cues - and some of ArkInRev's suggestions - implemented.

I also want to second the motion of having a "Donate to All" or "Donate to Author's Reward Program" button both on the site itself and in the Client (both the Free and Premium clients).  I know that addon authors give their stuff away for free, and that a lot of them do it just because they enjoy doing it... but it would be nice to have a concrete way of saying "thank you!" besides just... you know... saying "thank you".  A button to press that would distribute 100% of a donation across the whole of the Author Rewards Program would be really neat.

Just my two copper's worth.  Your milage may vary. 

<EDIT:  Minor gramatical concerns, because that kind of thing matters to me... >

Cursed Client should be DONATE only.  Subscription for such a small utilitiy is halarious.  I can not believe anyone would pay it!

I would even go as far as to say, 1 time payment of 5 bucks.  But that is still rediculouse.

I don't really care about losing update-all, because it saves what? 3 seconds of time? wow-wee.

But imo, when you add a premium service to an already active service, you should add new features to the premium, not steal them from the regular and "punish" regular users. Yes, you've added new "features" a plenty, but they're all a joke.

No ads? I, like many people, have Firefox + Adlbock Plus, so I've been experiencing this for a while now.

The money to the authors thing is nice, but I'd rather give my money directly to an author i think deserves it than pay a couple bucks a month and hope that author gets a few of my cents.

And why are you touting giving curse money as a feature? I "get" to keep you running? Yay? That's insulting my intelligence...

As for the beta key thing, unless you've got Curse-exclusive beta-access this is somethign I can get elsewhere for free.

And do premium users REALLY get faster download speeds, or did you just throttle the speeds of regular users? Last I checked I usually don't spend mroe than a few seconds downloading an addon. So this isn't really something entirely worth paying for.

I am all for a premium version of Curse, but come on. Make it worth paying for. Add some REAL features. You're not losing me because I don't know anything else and I'm lazy. But you WILL lose people over this. Which is a shame, cuz I love this place (I know I don't ever post here, but I love the addons and the service mostly)

edit- Please do not turn the continually-delayed Character Profile feature into a premium feature. That would be beyond ridiculous.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by net

-If we allow everyone to one click upgrade, you open the client, click and close it. People won't care about the ads, and won't click them. In a difficult economy advertisers are asking even more about campains results. Ads not performing means no business for us.

There is going to be a sizable number of people who have used the Curse Client before Premium went live who will intentionally NOT click the advertisements just out of spite. I understand that this updater is nothing but a convienence, but intentionally crippling a service that was put forth to make updating addons a convience makes zero sense in my eyes.

Charge for Curse Premium by all means, and I'm sure that there will be some people who subscribe to it, but making payment to update more than one addon at once through a piece of software that is a memory hog which is CONSTANTLY running in the background...well that's just bad form.

im going to start donating simply because this site has made addons so much easier and pleasnt to deal with... double click and its done... that in itself is worth it.  just got here for the first time and got a few dozen addons.. its great.

pngguy, donation links in the client are already in the works.

  Quote:

You could try displaying ads during the "Update all" on the free version. For every three addons being updated, show an "intermission ad" for a few seconds (and of course this is disabled in the Premium) and then continue the updating. It is a bit of a nuisance, but I think more users would deal with that then clicking each addon.

That sounds perfect to me. Beef up the premium features and give normal users back their most beloved feature. That would definitley help us feel less "screwed over".

Constructive feedback is a very good thing, keep them coming! Negative feedback, not so much. Thank you for these posts, and hopefully more will be forthcoming.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Kautzman

Bandwidth costs are hurting right now I'd imagine, especially with loss in add revenue.  However, there are solutions to ease the cost of bandwidth.

Although it'd take some development time, server load could probably be reduced significantly with a torrent-style download manager.  When an add-on updates automatically or when you choose to download/install with the curse client, instead of having the client grab it from a the server, have it grab it from another client.  Addons, in general, are quite small, which makes a solution like this ideal.  Your cliental will be the ones that reduce bandwidth costs while the features of the client could stay in tact.

To me it seems you lack the knowledge on how such a torrent system works. In order for a torrent like system to work, there is the need of 3 things:

1. Files big enough

2. Enough seeds (Uploaders)

3. Enough peers (Downloaders)

Problem 1: Addons files are to small. They can be downloaded within seconds. In order to seed them, the client would need to be stay opened.

Problem 2: An uploading client casues lag. Lag in PvP, Questing or Raiding is annoying and reduce your playing experience greately. Most people with broadband have low upload bandwidth so even small and slow uploads have great impact. Also the synchronizing of the files you have and its status cause some good amount of traffic too.

Problem 3: Closing the client kills the seed. No seeds = incomplete files = downloads which cant be finished.

Problem 4: Because the files are so small, number of peers will be very low

Problem 5: The files get updated very frequently (depends on mod). This means certain seeds will be dead very quickly.

All of this won't be a solution. Not yet, not ever.

If you want to save bandwidth, the only ways are: Only download the changes. Since all addons are LUA files, which are basically text files, it's very easy to send the changes only. This is how SVN works. Originally it is a software to manage source code. It allows you to merge two different versions of a source file or to patch someones else changes in your code. I.e. if you have a lua file which is 100 kb in size, and only 2 lines where added (~150 bytes) the patch file may be only 350-400 bytes in size. this saves 99 kb of download bandwidth, which is 99% saving.

If this would be applied, the bandwidth could be reduced by ~70%, because users only need to download the addon once and then only the updates, until they uninstall and reinstall the addon again.

Another big advantage of this is, the client could also offer addon rollbacks to any old version! The curent client doesn't allows this. Funny thing, back in wowace times i had already all of this without any updater from wowace, curse or whatever. Only by using my tortoiseSVN client to connect to the wowace SVN server. Sad that curse did a step backwards by taking down/over wowace and removing this great opportunity for everyone

@lamhir, you did correctly identify many of the problems with p2p solutions for addon distribution.  And yes binary or even just file based diffing would probably be the best way to handle this. 

I'm not against implementing this in the future, however, I think many people will agree that first we need a rock solid client using existing stable techknowledgies rather than an untested experimental system like that. 

The fun thing is, that there was already a text based diffing before the times curse took over wowace, as everything was hosted there on the SVN. Basically all that's necessary would be to take a SVN library and build it into the client and use the SVN for updating. As said somewhere else, that's how I've kept my addons updated while wowace was "independent" and worked perfectly for years.

SVN hosting is very very very server intensive for that.  WowAce basically did that first.  

How about this, instead of auto updates and single click notify me ever hour or 2 when there are updates avaliable

  Quote:

Curse Premium is a Good Thing

post #2

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Kautzman

Curse premium *can* be a good thing, however, it's execution reaks of "Couldn't give 2 snots about our users".

Ripping away features that were once free until you cough up some cash is not exactly a good business practice.   Crippling the client, which was once brilliantly designed to make addon management mindless, to the point where I might as well just go through my bookmarks list instead of using the client at all is not good software design.  Charge for a product, but give me an incentive to buy it.  Stripping out features in hopes that I will pony up some cash to get them back is a pretty terrible way of doing it.  Trust in a product/company is important to be successful and it's hard to trust curse after pulling a stunt like this.

 

There are features you can add to make a $30 annual fee worth it.  Ad-free browsing, priority downloading and contributions to the authors would have sold me, however, I will not be purchasing the product.  I can't support a product that inconvinences it's user unless you buy a premium account, strickly on principal.  ArkInRev put it quite well.

Bandwidth costs are hurting right now I'd imagine, especially with loss in add revenue.  However, there are solutions to ease the cost of bandwidth.

Although it'd take some development time, server load could probably be reduced significantly with a torrent-style download manager.  When an add-on updates automatically or when you choose to download/install with the curse client, instead of having the client grab it from a the server, have it grab it from another client.  Addons, in general, are quite small, which makes a solution like this ideal.  Your cliental will be the ones that reduce bandwidth costs while the features of the client could stay in tact.

Right now, I can't even use the curse client.  If it is open, the "install via curse client" button on the site doesn't work.  That seems to defeat the advertisement purpose when I'm too busy opening and closing the program to pay attention. 

The price is far too steep.

Thing is, I totally get that Curse needs to work out a way to make ends meet, sure enough. But thirty bucks per year? That is too high a percentage of the price I pay for playing the GAME, and holding features of the updater ransom to that amount makes me less, not MORE likely to buy it. I am sad to say I'd never click an ad anyway, so that's not really much of a point, either.

If subscription was... say... a dollar a month, it'd be different. I would think "hmm, that's peanuts, I'll happily pay that, no problem," and I'd have bought in before I'd even thought about it. I'm sad to be the one to break this to you, but ad-free browsing is already here, wether you want it to be or not. Faster downloads? Why? I can appreciate that it's a heavy task to keep it on your end, but on MY end, the volume of these downloads is TINY. Beta key giveaways? Beta keys are inherently free, in fact, playing a beta is a service to the developer of the game. Premium Curse client? Yea I'd like it. Addon writer support? Only thing on the list that makes me even consider it.

Basically, MY theory is, you'd have earned more if the subscription was a dollar due to FAR larger amount of people going "whatever, sure, it's a tiny fraction of what WoW costs me anyway". Granted, some cheap bastards would still be on the forums calling you the great western Satan, but that's par for the course of doing for-profit business.

I have no problem with you doing for-profit business, but until you change your approach I for one will do my best to NOT bring you any profits, as I strongly object to the way you DO your business. I will, however, be leeching your "free" services and strive to not click any ads. Heck, when things in my life calm down a bit, I might even go back to updating my addon... it might bring you a LITTLE traffic, at least :-P