Corwynn Maelstrom

Why is it that it's "begging" for money if your addon mentions making a donation? Who actually reads websites? I'd be willing to bet most people use an installer for their mods that bypasses the websites entirely! The only chance the author has to contact many people is when they are USING THE PRODUCT the author has created . . . i.e. IN GAME.

So during the use of the author's product it's somehow weird that they would solicit donations? How odd. (Not.)

Instead of setting up guidelines for what "acceptable use" is for donation requests, they just banned them. That's a load of crap. :)

I said if you think people don't deserve the right to request compensation you can not use addons. If you want to create or maintain something and expect nothing for it that's your right. That doesn't mean that everyone else needs to subscribe to your theories regarding what is acceptable and what is not. In the end it's their time, not yours, and they have a right to believe it's more valuable than "free" . . .

Personally I maintain an addon that was abandoned for WAR. I don't ask for anything because I don't see the amount of time I have spent bugfixing it to be of any consequence. However if I did put in a large amount of time at anything like this I would not by shy about seeking some measure of compensation. If you don't think something is worth money you don't have to pay for it. It's why plenty of people *don't* give money to Blizzard (or any other MMO company for that matter) every month.

I won't analogize. But I will say this: there are so many unpleasant comparisons that can be made about how Blizzard is (and has been for a long time) strong-arming that I can almost guarantee you that when the wheel turns there's going to be some serious backlash.

Anyone who thinks that people should gladly give their time to create mods should be forced to play without mods.

Seriously. Anyone who think that mod creators should just shut up and make mods and not expect anything in return should just uninstall every mod they use and play WoW (or whatever other game they play) in a vanilla version.

Or write your own mods for your personal use. That's also ok. Then you can say people should not ask for anything.

Of course when it takes you a week to make a grid clone that's really ugly and buggy, do not complain to anyone.

Mmmmkay? :)

I think that Blizzard should be thanking those who have worked to make WoW what it is today. Without a great deal of effort on the part of many people I have no doubt that WoW would have not been as successful (no, I'm not saying they'd only have a million subs, duh) as it has been. I agree that the UI at release WAS horrid, and as for "what game was better" EverQuest II launched *before* WoW and had a better UI. In addition, the API is far more restricted, so you never had people running decursive mods! EVE Online has a perfectly suitable UI that *doesn't even need mods* because it's got everything you need. THAT is synergy in game design and user interface!

I wrote up my full thoughts a couple days ago:

http://corwynn-maelstrom.com/2009/03/23/blizzard-just-says-no-four-years-later/

In short, yes, there should be more games that offer something outside of the status-quo single class experience.

I've been enjoying a bit of RoM over the past few days and part of the reason is that I've been subjected to so many class-based games that a bit of something different is just refreshing.

My full thoughts here: http://corwynn-maelstrom.com/2009/03/22/dual-classing-yes-or-no/