Originally Posted by lilsparky
oh, i'm not blaming anybody or anything. $75k a month in bandwidth costs kind of underscores the issue -- they wouldn't be doing that unless they anticipated making well over $75k a month. what's a guess at how much they make in a year? a million bucks? more? less?
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Don't forgot these other costs to figure in
There's not only bandwidth to consider but also the fee they pay their data centre, hardware upgrade costs,people's salaries etc etc etc.
You also need to factor in all the websites Curse runs - the wow addon side isn't the only one they are running.
I think from the chat I linked you they predicted they would do about 3GB / hour. The actual on patch day was higher than that.
So I don't think Curse are exactly rolling in cash that some people like to conclude. If they did then they would of been able to bring that Premium idea of theirs out a lot sooner (I first heard of it in April last year I think).
Originally Posted by lilsparky
the quickest way to ruin a friendship is to throw money into the equation. the more you throw in, the quicker the friendship ends. maybe curse and zam are hands-off enough to not let it affect the folks actually running the sites, i dunno. but business is business. why would curse opt to be nice instead of opting to make more money?
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I'm sorry man but I really don't agree. You can have friendships in rival businesses where the quality of the friendship itself isn't effected by the money that's thrown in. I've heard and seen cases of people working in rival businessess still having active friendships despite being direct rivals. I've never come across this "I can no longer be friends with this guy because the company he works for beat mine for market share and advertising so we are now losing money against the company he works for" attitude you speak of.
Originally Posted by lilsparky
divide and conquer. it's a standard technique. if wowi didn't block wowmatrix, then wowmatrix survives -- heck, maybe wowmatrix and wowi comes to some sort of agreement over bandwidth costs. it's better for curse to make the "sure kill" and see how things pan out later.
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Sometimes you have to take actions for the good of the community. Both Curse and Wowinterface come to the agreement to do this simultaneously. Otherwise wowmatrix would of just directed the traffic would of normally been spit between both sites to one of those sites. It's much better to share the work then to have one site bear the incoming bandwidth for both sites.
Things is. For there to be any sort of "agreement" over bandwidth costs wowmatrix would have to of talked to the people at wow interface.Caireen and a few other admins have said multiple times that Wow matrix never contacted them at all.
Also Caireen's also said they had no choice. It was either do this or there would be no wowinterface.com as she says here :
Originally Posted by Cairenn
Why would we not have a choice? Because other sites were going to be implementing theirs today, whether we did or not. If we didn't go ahead with ours today as well, we wouldn't be running at all today. They (WowMatrix) would have jumped from splitting their scraping of both sites to scraping only one site, our site, since they couldn't access the other one. We'd be down today, completely and totally, no one would be able to get to our site at all. How does that help anyone?
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Originally Posted by lilsparky
i know the service isn't mandatory -- that's probably against blizzard's recent addon policy and would be a bad move by curse even if it wasn't. and in truth, the author rewards program isn't so much money that people would be really swayed to host there instead of here, but i have to imagine the formula for the rewards must include d/l count and visits. authors who are already there would be serving their own interests by removing their addons from other sites (to increase their curse traffic) or even hosting older addons elsewhere so people would be exposed to the addon but still need to go to curse to d/l it.
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Blizzard's recent addon policy covers authors making addons.
Curse is not an addon author. An updater program is not an addon.
Also they checked with Blizzard before they released it. Blizzard were okay with it - the "not charging for services related to addons" is to do with charging to download the addon. You can still download addons free through this service so it's not covered by the addon policy.
If you're interested of the details of the Curse Rewards program there's plenty of posts on wowace.com to read through. Tells you exactly how it's going to work and how much is gonna be given out.
Lastly I'm not sure which addon community you've been a part of but I just don't see "greedy" authors suddenly deciding to take advantage of this program to make money off it by fudging the system.
Addon authors usaully only remove addons from sites to make providing support easier on them. They publish to multiple sites to share the load around - if one site is down you can get it from the other sites.
It's counterproductive to upload older versions on other sites as that's more work for them that they could be using to provide support for their addons. The only way they could get outdated versions would be if wowmatrix hosted older versions covered under a license that gives them free distribution. At the end of the day distributing older versions of an addon you are currently maintaining is a bit like shooting yourself in the foot - you know you're going to get support tickets for those older versions which means more work for you as an addon author
. And addon support is enough of a nightmare as it is !
Besides I don't think Ckknight, Kaelten and the other Curse admins would stand for an addon author fudging the system. They would just kick the author off the Curse Rewards program and delete their addons off Curse.