[Zyonin]

I acutally have to laugh at those who whine and moan that their guildies can't/won't update their AddOns if they don't have WoWMatrix. Why? Because I am known as the mod guru in my guild and I have persuaded my entire guild (A guild of about 400 odd players that range from clueless to total geeks), to NOT use WM. Instead most use either the Curse Client or they manually update. I have assisted in this effort by providing stable links to the AddOns we use on our forums. Those links only goto the AddOn's download page so my guildies will see the site's adverts (WoWI and Curse are one of a handful of site whom I allow to show adverts) and the donation button. I don't deep link directly to the file itself. I have in the past on really bad patch days, thrown together a quick AddOn pack and hosted it on Curse. Once the patch day had blown over, I would remove the mod pack as most of my guild mates had download it or did their own manual download. I did all the support on those mods in those AddOn packs, however I don't create AddOn packs anymore as both Curse and WoWI have put the infrastructure in place to handle Patch Day. Instead now I focus on actual UIs with quite a bit of custom code.

It's really not difficult to get a guild to update their mods without WM. If a guild member can't update without WM then that just speaks of pure laziness on the part of the player. My guild can't use the excuse of too busy to update as we are all working adults yet we still get our AddOn updates done without the use of WM and still have to time make another Sarth 3d run.

Authors have a number of incentives to control where their AddOns are distributed. These include things like centralized bug tracking systems (either via comments on Curse/WoWI or the ticket system used on CurseForge/WoWAce. Other incentives include easy donation pages and eventually on Curse, Author Rewards. As an artist and author myself, I want to control where my works are distributed from. WM and alternate download sites beyond the ones I have authorized do not benefit me in any way and in fact hurt me as I can't keep track of what is going with my work. Sure my one WoW AddOn is pretty old (it no longer works with WoW), however I am thinking of the future as I do have some projects in the works.