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Could just be the way I read it... but it seems like Blizzard wants to stop people from making money by selling addons...which in turn would effectively stop all subscription based services and most bot programs before they ever become widely distributed.This also allows people that develop addons for fun to continue to do so... if such an addon becomes popular enough Blizzard has easy access to the code and can incorporate it's functionality into the standard UI.Kalium
Curse doesn't charge to use the download client. There is some sort of improved version that does, but the core features are not affected.
I disagree with Connie's reasoning. Her suspicions seem to be flawed by her basic lack of understanding of the actual technical aspects of creating addons.1) If Blizz wants to lock out deviations then shutting down the LUA interpreter in the client is a lot simpler than the complicated and flawed process of hijacking other peoples' work.2) Blizz has access to the internal engine of the software, which has exposure to more and better data than any addon will get. Why deliberately cripple new features by writing them in LUA? Does not compute.3) LUA is an interpreted language. Interpreted languages have an inherent performance hit when compared to (most) compiled languages. It does not make sense that Blizz would choose to write new features in such as way as to be gimped out of the gate.4) Addons are forced to persist data using an inefficient addon database store. All direct disk access features of LUA are disabled in the Blizz interpreter - praise the Light. Using this gated data store is several orders of magnitude less efficient than direct access. You can experience an aspect of this yourself by obliterating your Auctioneer data store before logging in. At any rate, using native code would be far more efficient, and that can't be done in the LUA environment.Besides the obvious technical flaws in Connie's argument, everything else she says in this regard is guesswork - and based on flawed assumptions, at that.She might still be very right. Blizz has pulled some classic blunders in the past, and this would fall right into that sort of bucket.
I don't see it happening, because Blizzard would lose a LOT of people over it, but the day addons aren't allowed in their current form (free, open-source etc), is the day I quit WoW.
I just started using WoWMatrix (after getting a new PC. The old one had TitanUI on it for about a month or two.) and I really don't care if WoW will only use AddOns you have to buy from Blizzard. I just won't use AddOns. Been living without them for around 2-3 years of playing the game.
(This is in reply to Xantham9)Thanks for writing this so I dont have to but I agree with you 100%.Its a shame that these issues are now tied together as they will probably not get resolved in a manner that the public will profit from.Unfortunately IMHO I think that Connie is wrong about everything else including Blizzard's intentions when changing their ToU.I think their intentions are twofold:1) they dont like other people making money off of their work. Some people will agree that this is ok, others wont. Most will probably agree its their right to decide this.2)they want to level the playing field so to speak and make sure other people are not disadvantaged over someone else using a certain addon.The problem is of course as other people pointed out that this case and their ToU give them much broader rights under current laws than they should ever have available for offering this service.