Is this the end for WoWMatrix?
In other news, Curse and WoWInterface have finally done what they’ve been threatening to do for ages, and blocked WoWMatrix from accessing any of their hosted files.
I use and love WoWMatrix. I love the “one click” updating of all my mods. I love that I don’t have to configure it in any way – it just works. It spotted all my installed mods, and needed no “fussing with”. I use it to search for new mods – after all, I’d rather have mods that update through WoWMatrix than not. There are only a very few mods that I update manually, and that’s because I don’t want to live without them, and they don’t update through WoWMatrix. It’s fair to say that I only internittantly check for updates of those mods.
So this morning I downloaded the Curse and WoWInterface updaters. I haven’t had much time to play with them yet, but my first impressions are that I will not find them as easy to use as WoWMatrix. And quite frankly, the fact that I will now have to use three different programs to update my UI mods, when up until yesterday I just used one, is a real inconvenience.
Both are limited by only providing updates for the Addons that they host. This means that there are a number of addons that they can’t identify when they initially scan your Addons folder, and both required some manual intervention from me to confirm which addons they should be able to update. To add to the confusion, there are some mods I have installed which are available on both sites, so I think I’ll need to go through and decide which site does the updates. To add even further to the confusion, the WoWInterface updater download page states that the product is no longer being updated, and a new one is being developed, and a quick search on the WoWInterface forums finds people being advised to use the Curse installer instead until the new one is ready, on the grounds that most mods on WoWI are also available on Curse! So why do I need both?
I think my best bet from here is to backup my existing addons, and remove them all. I’ll then use the Curse or WoWInterface updaters to re-install each one that I need. As there’s a new patch out I’ll drop down to the bare minimum that I need to survive for a short time, and gradually re-introduce the others. According to WoWMatrix I currently run 143 addons, so this might take some time! As long as I can get Clique working, I’ll be happy 
I am concerned that both Curse and WoWInterface are talking about introducing a “Premium” service to use their updaters. I don’t want to be forced to pay to use a service that is a less pleasant user experience than the free WoWMatrix. I have read the arguments on both sides, and I sympathise with Curse and WoWInterface, but at the end of the day I want an easy to use product that works without intervention, and only WoWMatrix has delivered that so far.
Why can’t Curse and WoWInterface come together to provide a rival to WoWMatrix that people will use because it is better, not because they feel forced to? Not to produce two products, both of which do less than half the job, but one single product that works as easily as WoWMatrix. That is the true spirit of competition.
I am prepared to pay for products and services that I find useful. I paid for the full Carbonite before Blizzard changed the rules on UI mod authors not being allowed to charge for premium content. I have sent donations to UI mod writers of those mods I find useful. I would pay for a single product to update all my WoW addons easily as well. But I wouldn’t pay for either the Curse updater or the WoWInterface updater in their current state.
I agree with you 100%. What I don’t understand, however, is if UI mod writers cannot charge for premium content,why should the mod sites be allowed to do it? I mean, come on, it’s basically the same bloody thing. I currently use the Curse updater with little problems other than Carbonite is now hosted on WOWInterface. I wouldn’t pay for it, though, that is outrageous.
I’m so with you, too. Sad Day. WOW Matrix was so much safer to use than the other two, as well. QQ
Hmmm… This may be somewhat disjointed (and run into several comments) because it’s Friday evening, but there are a lot of things I feel strongly about around this issue. I should admit at this point that I also used WoWMatrix for the same reasons as you – it was so convenient, and it worked nicely. However, my sympathies in this dispute lie entirely with Curse and WI.
Yes, WI and particularly Curse (since they absorbed the development talent behind WAU, which was a significantly nicer tool than the one they’re working on now) should be providing us with better tools than they have done so far, but they will never be in a position to provide us with a better alternative to WM, even if they had the inclination to do so.
The primary issue here is around bandwidth costs. Unless you’re working with commercial-level usage on a daily basis this is hard to grasp – we all have access to decent levels of online hosting with high or even unlimited download limits at little to no cost for personal use, but nobody’s offering to serve your files to large numbers of people simultaneously. It’s that genuine, concurrent bandwidth that’s expensive. I have no idea what Curse’s traffic levels are and can’t be bothered to try to estimate right now, but I do have some ideas of bandwidth costs – I had to justify £160k’s worth to our board for the last financial year, and it’ll be higher this year. Those costs to the hosting companies are very real, and they’re funded currently by advertising – you may be blocking all their ads, but someone’s still paying them to host them, and that’s the only reason we have central mod repositories available. Anyone who used to rely on wowace, and WAU, for mods should know what happens when there are costs without income to cover them.
The secondary issue, and arguably the more important one in my opinon, is about ownership of addons. The sole reason that neither Curse nor WI can provide all the mods you want is because the authors of those mods haven’t all given permission to both sites to host them. WM rode roughshod over all that. It provided links to everyone’s addons, regardless of the author’s opinions. I don’t like Curse and don’t use WI at all, but at least they act with some integrity.
I’ll reserve judgement on the premium services until I actually see them implemented. When WAU was canned and I first installed the (horrible 2.0) Curse client, they were claiming that my account would be premium for a month then revert to regular. Six months later it’s still premium and they’re now claiming it will be so until they launch their commercial premium service.
One final (for the moment!) point is a huge concern over safety. To believe that WM was safer to use than either Curse or WI’s clients is rampantly misguided. I have said it before (and been laughed at on our guild forum about it) but it is inherently foolish to run any WoW-related executable on any machine on which you have WoW installed. Authenticators largely mitigate this problem of course (if I were paranoid I would be suspicious of the existence of concealed-source software authenticators), but let’s assume for a moment that you’re not using one. The author of WM has past links to gold selling, his application _self-updates_, and it is run willingly by tens of thousands of WoW account-holders who have no commercial relationship with him. If anyone able to build a release were to incorporate malicious code into it, no-one would know until accounts had been compromised in significant numbers. It may be excessively suspicious to believe that that might happen, but it’s excessively naive to believe it couldn’t.
PS: I’m sorry Tini, I know I shouldn’t vent on your blog really :-/
PPS: Forgot to mention two things. The whole fuss over the timing of this was something of a red herring – 3.1 introduced very few UI changes, fewer than any major patch that I remember, so almost all 3.0 mods continued to work just fine. And of course WM will be working normally again in a week or two’s time – however much Curse and WI would love to stop them, it’s just not viable at all long-term.
> Peter – what a great rant, well done. And here is as good a place as any for it
I do thoroughly sympathise with the bandwidth costs issue, and I know it’s a real problem that Curse and WI need to solve. But they’ve gone about this in entirely the wrong way, IMHO.
And you’re right about the security aspects of all these updaters. I will never launch WoW from any of these applications, nor will I allow them to run whilst my WoW is running. And with Curse I had to find all the hidden tickboxes to stop it auto-running, and auto-uploading data about me :-\
I do have a couple of thoughts. First of all, WoWMatrix would actually enable a more distributed method of accessing Addons – rather than Curse having huge bandwidth costs for hosting thousands of addons, each addon author could host their own addons on much cheaper web hosting. WoWMatrix would know where to pick each addon up from, and thus the bandwidth is more distributed.
Also, I think Blizzard is taking a very dim view of people who try to profit out of WoW. We’ve seen their action against WoWGlider, and now their changes to prevent people charging for UI mods. I can’t believe an organisation the size of Curse aims to operate on a “break even” basis. If they do manage to keep WoWMatrix down, and then introduce their own “premium” service, how long until they attract Bliizard’s attention? And there are certainly ways Blizzard could take on Curse, if they wanted to.
The Curse updater is actually growing on me. I have another blog post brewing about it…