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…

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 :-/