Trying to get some discussion going regarding addon author practises, their "morals" and what they do. Not interested in flames (I know you'll do it regardless :P).
Anyways, a recent popular addon, DBM has put a big, blatant gold seller add on their web-page. Now gold-selling by itself, I feel is meh. IMO if me as a player farms gold and wants to sell it, all the power to me. The issue comes in when companies get involved and use unscrupulous practises such as account stealing, hacking, exploiting, etc to get that gold. That's where it starts to hurt the users.
http://www.postimage.org/aV1hbbQJ-d1...0a99274166.jpg
Now we all know that the major release sites have had gold selling ads now and then. This is 99% on accident and they remove them ASAP. However with this one project, it was done on purpose:
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Well, we have very pragmatic reasons for this new ad: they generate more revenue* than other ads. We previously had these "buy fancy gold guide and get rich with the AH" banners, the new banner is up since Friday. It will stay for at least one month to see how it performs compared to other banners.
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http://deadlybossmods.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1487
We are a community, and we stand up for each other. Author rights mean nothing to them. WoWMatrix and how Curse and WoWI responded to them are just a big "QQ".
I considered writing a longer post about the "WoWMatrix issue" but I decided that it's simply not worth the effort.
Updating DBM with WoWMatrix still works fine as it downloads it directly from here and not from Curse or WoWInterface. It will always update DBM to the latest stable version nd never to the alpha build so if you want to use it in Ulduar you might want to consider to update it manually.
About 60% of all downloads from this site come from WoWMatrix users (about 400.000 of 660.000 downloads since the patch day) but this is perfectly fine, I don't consider it "stealing bandwidth" as Curse and WoWInterface do.
The whole post on Curse that I linked is basically a big "QQ we need more monies!!11" thing. But I must admit that Curse's stance to this is understandable as they are a company and they need to make money from something...if they also have 60% WoWMatrix users (I don't think that the rate is that high on curse overall, I'd guess 30-40%)...well, that still sucks.
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http://deadlybossmods.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1371
Plus the whole issue of how DBM got it's code/timers originally.
So TLDR: What do you feel about these issues? I know DBM has been singled out for examples in this post, because it has recently happened.
Update:
Apology by DBM issued:
The banner in question will be removed by June 15th (not earlier because it is already paid for until that date...(details are mentioned earlier, please read the whole thread before posting a flame Razz)).
I want to apologize for this banner, the advertised site is clearly against the ToS of the game and it was a bad idea to have such an ad on a quite big site like this one. It was never our intention to upset or annoy any of our users, we were just trying to get a little money (exactly $180) out of a project in which we invested thousands of hours of work. But we apparently chose the the wrong approach here Razz
But we are not doing it for the money in the end (well, developing free and open source software like DBM would be a very poorly paid job if you see it as a job and not as a hobby...), we just want to enhance your and our gaming experience in a great game we all love so much.
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http://deadlybossmods.com/forum/view...hp?p=4264#4264