Carbonite crosses line, reams everyone with infinidick

[Gobbeldygook]

Blizzard has a new add-on policy.  Short version: Don't mess with our shit, don't tease the MPAA's inbred videogame rating lovechild, and don't you DARE try to make money off of your addons.

Unlike some policy changes, this one has a very definite cause: Carbonite.  For those unfamiliar with it, Carbonite is either a stripped-down free quest addon OR a full suite of addons that costs a small monthly fee.  Last week, the developer issued a new version, Carbonite Ads, which is the full version with in-game popup ads.  There have been for-pay addons for a very long time, but not many.  There were a set of proprietary raid frames that eventually went free, WoW Econ, and various leveling guides.  All of them managed to not cross a very simple line:

Do not run ads in WoW.

It will be a cold day in hell before Blizzard allows gold spam or ads for their competitors in game, even if the user requested them.

[Hindenburg]

Ahm, it's optional?

[apocrypha]

Ahm, it's optional?

ALL addons are optional.

[Drubear]

There are other impacts - Mundocani (the author of Outfitter http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5467-Outfitter.html and GroupCalendar) and ZorbaTHut (QuestHelper http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=9896&so=&page=2#info - who claimed he actually tries to live on QH donations) are also throwing in the towel because of the no-ads policy.

First two are going to be missed (kinda) but their functionality has been whittled away by Bliz updates to the client. QH and Carbo are competitors and if you're feeling tinfoil-hattish you might contrive this as a scheme by Carbo to get banned and put QH out of biz. (QH doesn't have a "pro" version.)

[Hindenburg]

ALL addons are optional.

Yes, I meant the Ad Carbonite. Nothing in the text implies that they discontinued the ad-free lite version , hence the question.

[Drubear]

The new policy is here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/ui.html

IANAL but like to pretend I'm one on da interwebs. Isn't this policy basically constraining >>me<< from using an addon like this? Can Bliz go after the addon author that >>I<< choose to use? Or is this basically Glider2 and protecting their IP/revenue stream by not (just?) banning me for using the addon but going after the author for collusion to interfere with their revenue stream?

I originally thought they were just after annoying ingame ads, but now it looks like there is no contractual revenue allowed, only donations. I wonder if addon authors can just "allow" for an "optional" recurring "donation" that comes with a "free gift" (cf my latest donation to NPR Chicago and the "free" CD I got with it.)

It's hit /. so it must be Real News.

[bhodi]

This sucks the big one. I use Questhelper every day. Here's what zorba (he's a goon, if you didn't know) says:

Bad news, everyone. Questhelper's dead.

Blizzard just posted their new UI Add-On Development Policy at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/ui.html. The important part is that I'm no longer allowed to ask for donations in-client. I know how much I got before I added the in-client reminder - it doesn't pay a significant fraction of the bills. And, as much as I like you guys, good intentions don't pay for my apartment.

So that's it. I'm going to be finishing up and releasing v1.0, and I'll keep posting incremental database improvements every month or two. I do plan to keep QH functional, at least through the end of Wrath, and probably further. I've got one or two features in mind that I want to do for my own sake - a few achievements, mostly - but besides that (and the v1.0 release) that's pretty much all there's going to be.

I would like to say: thanks to everyone who donated in the past. I enjoyed working on this quite a bit, and I always enjoyed seeing another donation come in - not just because of the money, but because it meant that people wanted to use QH and wanted to keep it going.

Let Blizzard know if you don't like it, and if I can get an exception, I'll start everything right back up again

Thanks for the words, everyone I'm not going to be responding individually (to keep this from turning into an endless stream of "hey I liked QH, sucks what happened" "thanks, yeah it sucks") but, as ridiculously cheesy as it sounds, it is very good to know that people appreciate my work.

It's only in game, so why not have the addon sites put your addon up only if you have a donate button on the page?

edit: Please don't take this as me bitching about it going away and telling you off. Just asking if you can work around the rules to get the same result.

No offense taken

The answer is yes, but no. Yes, I am allowed to keep donation buttons up, and I will. No, it won't be anywhere near enough. It's hard to get real numbers, but my donations did something on the order of quintuple when I put up the ingame request. I can't live off 1/5 of what I was making before, and there's no real way to increase that - people won't remember to donate without me reminding them, and people won't even think to do so without me asking them.

Why not just keep the donate button in the addon and continue with business as usual? They can't realistically go after you for distributing a Lua program that happens to run on their implementation, so unless they do some sort of in-game scan for donation buttons, what does it matter?

This police seems completely unenforceable to me.

edit: I guess you might get fucked like the Glider guys. Though that was more of a DMCA thing that wouldn't apply here, right? Seems iffy either way.

I'm pretty sure that the whole "lawsuit" thing is a complete red herring. They don't have any right to sue for people releasing UI mods.

They can, however, simply ban specific UI mods from the game. There's an unused baddons.xcf file in the game, so clearly they've been thinking about this for a while, but they don't even need an automated way - they just need for GMs to scan addon lists once in a while and probate people using "nonconformant" addons.

I wouldn't get sued, but I'd have no users either.

[apocrypha]

Yes, I meant the Ad Carbonite. Nothing in the text implies that they discontinued the ad-free lite version , hence the question.

Sorry, misunderstood!

The problem for people like Zorba is that there'll be another addon to replace QH. If he gives up the project the someone else will take it up or make something similar. Gives the mod authors very little leverage to use to try and convince Blizz to change this policy or make exceptions of any kind.

Competition always drives things down to the lowest common denominator and that is "free" then that's what the market will bear 

[bhodi]

You would think, except that there was nothing really like it in what, 2.5 years prior to him releasing it. At some point it becomes complicated enough that no one can do it for free - mostly due to the fact things have to be kept constantly up-to-date.

[March]

Blizzard has a new add-on policy.  Short version: Don't mess with our shit, don't tease the MPAA's inbred videogame rating lovechild, and don't you DARE try to make money off of your addons.

Unlike some policy changes, this one has a very definite cause: Carbonite.  For those unfamiliar with it, Carbonite is either a stripped-down free quest addon OR a full suite of addons that costs a small monthly fee.  Last week, the developer issued a new version, Carbonite Ads, which is the full version with in-game popup ads.  There have been for-pay addons for a very long time, but not many.  There were a set of proprietary raid frames that eventually went free, WoW Econ, and various leveling guides.  All of them managed to not cross a very simple line:

Do not run ads in WoW.

It will be a cold day in hell before Blizzard allows gold spam or ads for their competitors in game, even if the user requested them.

Sorry, I'm trying to re-orient my moral outrage compass, can you point me in the direction of the outrage?

[Paelos]

People are pissed because Blizzard is "breaking" addons that let people EZ-MODE level alts by letting you bypass wowhead or looking at actual quest text. Note, they aren't saying you can't use them, they are saying that you can't make cash off it in their domain, which the authors don't want to do.

If you don't have alts or you don't care about using quest helping addons, this effects you none.

[Rasix]

I'm about 4 levels on my shaman from really ever giving a shit again and with 2 shots through the content I should have this stuff memorized. 

I just really don't care though. 

[caladein]

As for addons that replicate QuestHelper/Carbonite... I've been using TourGuide for months.  It's awesome-fantastic if you're Alliance, and slightly less so as Horde (not much Northrend stuff at this point).

Plus, it works with TomTom and Lightheaded which I've used for as long as they've been out.

As to the actual policy change, I know a handful of Ace/Rock that have a Donate section in their configurations (Parrot for example has a button that brings up a chat-box with a link) but don't do any sort of in-game requests besides that.  I wonder if those will need to be stripped out?

[Gobbeldygook]

Sorry, I'm trying to re-orient my moral outrage compass, can you point me in the direction of the outrage?

The outrage is that the new policy hurts good people.  There are several developers that live off of donations.  They are able to do so because they created a good thing and have continued to support it.  Now they probably wont be able to live off of donations.

---

I'm revising my theory.  I still think Carbonite is the proximate cause, but not because of the ads.  Blizzard's policy on addon development has been simple: If you can do it, have fun - except for cross faction communication.  They acknowledged that cross-faction communication addons are pretty trivial to write and they probably can't stop them.  It's the one thing you are not allowed to do that the Lua code does allow.  With that in mind, let's go back in time to the Suggested Addon's thread.

If you play on a PVP server, try out the pay to play version of Carbonite. It's like cheating.

edit: I guess I'll say why I think it's cheating.

You know all those dots you see on the free version of carbonite? Those are other people running the free version of carbonite. If you run the full version of carbonite, you'll connect to their servers (or whatever, I'm not sure how it works really) and it mines data from the people running the free version.

So I can fly into a zone and I'll start getting red dots appearing on the zone map that tell me an enemies name and a timer counting down to the last time someone came within loading distance of this guy. It pulls data from people on your server also running carbonite, but it's limited to just the zone that you are in in regards to the 'enemy populating' feature.

Also, if an enemy is near me, and his graphics are loaded on my client (but i'm not necessarily looking at him) his name will appear on a "Punks" list and i can click that to target him. If he is close enough to target, it'll tell me his class on that punks list. Then I can send my pet at him, and follow my pet to figure out exactly where he is.

If Carbonite also mined data from carbonite users not from your faction and gave you their locations on your map, they indisputably broke the ONE RULE.  Until the ad-supported version came out, this feature was not widely known because very few people are willing to pay for an addon.  They knew this shit was out of line because look at their list of Map features.  They don't mention the hostile player tracking at all, despite that being a killer app.  Now the ad-supported version comes out and everyone, including Blizzard, finds out about this secret feature.

[Merusk]

Sorry, I'm trying to re-orient my moral outrage compass, can you point me in the direction of the outrage?

The outrage is that the new policy hurts good people.  There are several developers that live off of donations.  They are able to do so because they created a good thing and have continued to support it.  Now they probably wont be able to live off of donations.

How is this any different than if Blizzard shut-down their servers tomorrow?  Never expect money when you're tying yourself to another person's product. Think of them as a small business owner who had one client and just lost that client. Do you feel bad for them, too, or do you call them a lousy business person?  With as infrequent as WoW patches are, if they're living off the income from a single add-on they could have been doing other work. I feel no sympathy.

I feel even less, realizing if they were living off the income I doubt they were reporting it fully to the IRS. 

[pxib]

I feel no sympathy.

The outrage isn't moral, although it may be phrased as such. People are upset that their favorite add-ons may not be updated for patches and they'll have learn how to play the game without them. Fewer people will work their asses off innovating and keeping their code current when they cannot expect to be reliably paid to do so.

[Hayduke]

Sorry, I'm trying to re-orient my moral outrage compass, can you point me in the direction of the outrage?

The outrage is that the new policy hurts good people.  There are several developers that live off of donations.  They are able to do so because they created a good thing and have continued to support it.  Now they probably wont be able to live off of donations.

A lot of good people also make their living off of RMT.  But it's not Blizzard's job to keep people employed.  And if they see something that goes against the spirit of the game it's their prerogative to put a stop to it.

[Gobbeldygook]

A lot of good people also make their living off of RMT.  But it's not Blizzard's job to keep people employed.  And if they see something that goes against the spirit of the game it's their prerogative to put a stop to it.

How is releasing free addons and asking for donations to support you in a non-nagging manner 'against the spirit of the game'?

[Khaldun]

I'm ok with this policy. I think it's a pretty clear line: you do this because you want to, you hope that if you put up a tip jar where the DL's take place, it will happen. You do it, if you're thinking about money, as a loss-leader, the same way people do blogs or a lot of other online things. You're putting up your shingle, saying, "Look, I know how to do good things, I have ideas, hire me as a programmer or a designer or a consultant". Or you just love the game or like to tinker.

The moment you're flashing ads or reminders up in-game, in-client, I really do think you've crossed a line. If that's ok, why shouldn't I write an add-on that advertises my restaurant or small business or consultancy? I made the add-on, don't I have the right to be compensated? etc. This is a slippery slope where the sliding is already well visible.

[Paelos]

That's the way I see it as well. Not really the slippery slope part, but the pandering in-game stuff. They can't stop people from donating to you, but they can stop you from running ads, donation or otherwise, in their game. Businesses frequently let others advertise for donations in their space, and others frequently don't.

[Lum]

ALL addons are optional.

Yes, I meant the Ad Carbonite. Nothing in the text implies that they discontinued the ad-free lite version , hence the question.

Through an amazing coincidence, the free version of Carbonite no longer works.

Through a not quite as amazing coincidence, Carbonite pulled down all its free-user downloads (adware or otherwise) this weekend.

[Koyasha]

Hopefully this policy will be selectively enforced.  That is to say, if an addon author puts a non-intrusive donation link somewhere in their addon, Blizzard won't give a damn, but if they start putting it on the main UI of the addon or popping up donation requests/ads or anything ridiculous like that, they'll shut it down.

I suspect (and hope) it will be done that way, and they won't bother the guy that has an 'about' page that includes a donation link or a 'donate' button/menu option somewhere.  Of my addons right now one that is like this is DurabilityFu.  It has a donate option at the bottom of its right-click menu.  Completely inobtrusive, and I doubt Blizzard will seriously crack down on ones like that.

[Jeff Kelly]

I can fully understand the policy. I mean in-game ad pop-ups by third party add-ons? Which company would want something like that.

Not only because of the power-levelling and gold spam. Just imagine the first 'find another horny person in your vicinity' ad popping up on the computer of a twelve-year old, that's a potential lawsuit waiting to happen.

[Paelos]

I can fully understand the policy. I mean in-game ad pop-ups by third party add-ons? Which company would want something like that.

Not only because of the power-levelling and gold spam. Just imagine the first 'find another horny person in your vicinity' ad popping up on the computer of a twelve-year old, that's a potential lawsuit waiting to happen.

I didn't even think about that part. The fact that there would be ads in a game I was running would be enough for me to shut it down. The fact that they were the type of sleazy internet ads we usually see would just be icing.

[Numtini]

I can understand no in game ads or even no paid mods, but I'm disappointed that they aren't allowing voluntary no in game nag donations. That seems a bit silly--donations are trivial--and it also seems more than a little ungracious considering the game is almost unplayable without mods. (Well minus the fact that most if not all of their interface improvements have been taken directly from mods.)

I can't imagine playing WoW without questhelper. Actually I can imagine it, I have a flock of characters that never got above 35 because I could only tolerate so much tab to a webpage then put a tack on my map with the quest location and would play for a month and then quit. Maybe that puts me in the category of people who want to bypass content, I don't know. But I wanted to get up to a level I could group or raid at and QH made it pleasant and simple. I use eq2maps which has quest locations on it as well.

[Khaldun]

I play a very vanilla version of WoW: Gatherer, Auctioneer, Omen, Recount, and at times different raid frames none of which make me totally happy. So I guess I don't feel this that much because it doesn't change my own experience of the game. I don't do Questhelper or Carbonite and I don't feel them to be at all necessary to levelling up alts, etcetera. Maybe because I have a limited number of alts and stick mostly to one main, I suppose. But I understand what Blizzard's thinking here, and it's part of the careful stewardship (and yes, overly smothering at times) control they maintain over WoW.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I can understand no in game ads or even no paid mods, but I'm disappointed that they aren't allowing voluntary no in game nag donations. That seems a bit silly--donations are trivial--and it also seems more than a little ungracious considering the game is almost unplayable without mods. (Well minus the fact that most if not all of their interface improvements have been taken directly from mods.)

I can't imagine playing WoW without questhelper. Actually I can imagine it, I have a flock of characters that never got above 35 because I could only tolerate so much tab to a webpage then put a tack on my map with the quest location and would play for a month and then quit. Maybe that puts me in the category of people who want to bypass content, I don't know. But I wanted to get up to a level I could group or raid at and QH made it pleasant and simple. I use eq2maps which has quest locations on it as well.

Imagine a mod that when you started it up had a big window that said [donate now][no thanks] everytime you started wow. I seriously doubt wow is going to crackdown hard on hobs that put little unobtrusive links in their options menus.  This part is more than likely just pre-emptive now that they've said no to paid mods and in-game ads.

While I appreciate some mobs like questhelper etc part of me(the asshole part) just wonders how these people survived in older games since just reading the wow quest text literally spoonfeeds you what to do/where to go already.

[Merusk]

I can imagine playing without QH, because QH is shit and oft-broken.  I tried it for WOTLK and it was so often wrong it was hilarious.  Then tack-on the quests that are deliberatly designed to break QH's handholding and it gets even more amusing.  (The Hodir quest where you have to collect 5 ice cores before gathering the shards is one example.)

You still have to read the quest text to do the quest. QH does little beyond automating OLDworld content for folks.  Great, but I've got that shit memorized by now, and it wasn't that hard to begin with. (Just time consuming with so many more run here, run there bits.)

I can do without Omen these days, but DKs don't seem to generate a ton of damage-based threat.  The only mods I truly can't live without are Auctioneer and Outfitter.  After 3.1 I won't even need one of those two.

For some the UI may be "unplayable" but that's your opinion.  Mine is you're so weaned on mods you won't even try playing without them.

[Selby]

Eh, the only add-on I use is Gatherer.  Don't use anything else and I've never really felt a need to.  Paying for mods never appealed to me, and having one pop up any kind of random ad of the sleazy internet variety would make me never use that add-on again, no matter how helpful.

[Rasix]

For some the UI may be "unplayable" but that's your opinion.  Mine is you're so weaned on mods you won't even try playing without them.

I'd try, I'd just do poorly.    There's so much shit to watch while playing my DK. I have my UI set up to have a lot of material at eye level and in colors/sizes that I can actually see.  Hopping on to PTR to test some new specs, I ended up copying over most of my UI even if half of the shit didn't end up working.   

It was really be nice if Blizzard would just incorporate some of the more basic button bar and unit frame addon functionality into the base UI.  Hire some of these damn people get a real UI team working on this stuff.

Actually, with too much addon breakage, I could just go back to playing my shaman.  As annoying as it was, there was less to track and I played half of my time with it with my only mod being the CTMod raid functions.

[Hindenburg]

Went through wotlk in 48 hours using carbonite lite. Had to read... two, maybe three...  5, tops... quests. Had a grand time. Yes, the mod is pretty much mandatory for a (i'm willing to bet) large parcel of the population.

Let's increase the arrogance, yes?

For some the UI may be "unplayable" but that's your opinion.  Mine is you're so weaned on mods you won't even try playing without them.

For some having to keyboard turn may be "unplayable" but that's your opinion. Mine is you're so weaned on mouses you won't even try playing without them.
For some being punched in the dick may be "unplayable", but that's your opinion. Mine is you're such a pussy that you won't even try playing like a proper man.

Now can we please drop the pseudo-hardcore train of thought? Seriously.

[K9]

The only add-ons I would really miss are Grid and Unit Frames. The standard WoW unit and raid frames are really very poor.

I've never used a quest-helper addon, having wowhead on a laptop works just as well.

[Jeff Kelly]

Questhelpers are great when you just want to powerlevel a character. I resubbed a few weeks ago and started a priest on a new realm to play with some friends, QH really helped with getting through the old content in a reasonable amount of time.

Other than that I'd not miss them.

[Paelos]

The only two addons that would make my game so frustratingly unplayable that I would quit if they banned them would be:

Outfitter - Manually changing sets as a warrior when you are carrying around a minimum of two, well it just sucks. I'd imagine druids would flip out as well.
Omen - Fights are designed around it's use. If you are a healer it's irrevelent, but otherwise it's mandatory.

As for the rest I use, I could do without them. Recount, DBM, Atlas/loot, they are all just addons I keep for information rather than MUST HAVE!!!

[Nonentity]

I can't even imagine trying to tank without Omen - you'd have to rely on the little built-in floating percentages thing that Blizzard has going.

And ditto on Outfitter/Itemrack/Closetgnome - they're adding a built-in one though, so that's another mod I can uninstall.

I just hope that they have an interface for binding buttons to it, as I use a weapon swap macro.