Awful
oh bah, i didn't look at the date. i put together this beautiful essay, wasted a whole 15 minutes on this wonderful pontificating...
time to go get that "NEWB" tattoo for my forehead. i need to make sure they reverse the letters, or i won't be able to read it in the mirror as i am trimming nose hair.
----
this is awful, abandoning the whole open-source/community-based process for addons and their distribution. but i suppose it is "typical" of the MMO genre/business model. everything is viewed as a potential captive profit center.
how soon will we be able to buy gold, items, and premade characters from Blizzard (hyperbole, maybe... but consistent with the trends in the industry)? it begs the question.
given how often addons come and go, authors quit the game and abandon their work, or come into the game and take over other people's work... given how variable quality control and simple compatibility (with the WoW client and with other addons) can be from moment-to-moment... given how "informal", reactive, and downright apathetic Blizzard has always been about their "platform", its evolution, documentation, defect repair, lack of tooling, and support... given how ad-hoc that has always been... given the sheer volume, quality, and robust value in community-based support being delivered by sites like WoWInterface... and given that 99.999% of the people involved outside of Blizzard don't make (or expect) a penny from any of it... for Blizzard to muscle in as some sort of broker or middleman in this seems INCREDIBLY destructive to me.
seriously, how am i supposed to develop/test under these circumstances? PTR only? the PTR is down for weeks on end, crashes without warning on a daily basis, etc. is that going to change? how can i be responsive to my users, on live realms, when a defect or feature request emerges, if i can't test? if i have to test in some captive environment, i quit being able to leverage that to just play the game, i have to go purely test. are they going to charge some sort of monthly premium for a "developer's license"? for a COMPUTER GAME?
when you start charging people for this stuff, you have to provide REAL PLATFORM SUPPORT. this has implications far beyond an "in game store". i don't think Blizzard has a clue here (unless their intention is to destroy the addon community... and i think that is entirely plausible).
absolutely beyond belief.
i mean, how would it be in Sun Microsystems insisted on approving and distributing (for a fee) every Java open source/JCP prototype/product in existence? make the JVM a closed architecture only capable of operating on packages brokered through Sun? took the whole platform closed/proprietary, charged overhead for the whole thing, while at the same time taking no responsibility for comprehensive platform support, tooling, quality control, configuration management, community development, etc?
i think that would destroy the whole Java platform basically overnight. no-one would waste their time with it. 99% of the value of the platform, to the paying customer, is the value added by layered products (many of which are open source). kill that and the platform is useless.
yes, WoW is "just a computer game", not quite the same, but to some extent i think the effect will be the same.
i don't quite understand what Blizzard believes it is protecting itself from, or protecting us from, or how it is serving its customer base in any way/shape/form, here. i think our community has been incredibly successful, purely as an unfunded volunteer phenomenon. why would anyone capable of strategic thought even want to touch that, much less do this sort of thing?
i think its completely crazy for them to do this. mass insanity. complete disaster in the making.
|