But, does WOW have some perceived control over all this, legal, TOS, copywrite, etc? I will watch how it plays out.

Phoe :
Blizzard has the same rules lined out in their War3 editor, that no one can ask for or receive money for maps created in the world editor.

Either you’ve misreported the rules for the WC3 editor or they aren’t the same rules. You can receive money for mods as long as you:

A: Make it available without a compulsory fee
B: Don’t have it ask for money ingame.

So you can still take money for modding as long as you let people have the mod for free if they like and you only ask for cash out of game.

Iconic :
@D-0ne
That’s called a “lease” or a “rental.”

Completely different that a software license agreement. You really don’t understand how one sided a software licensing agreement is do you? You actually compared it to a automotive lease agreement… BWAHAHAHA!

Your post is nonsense, and I’m not sure who it is that you’re trying to argue against.

The only thing that most people seem opposed to is the concept of not allowing people to charge for their own work and/or ask for donations within the addon that they wrote. Allowing people to profit from their work is an incentive for them to provide new addons, so taking away that incentive naturally is going to limit the kinds of projects that people are willing to commit to.

Blizzard is trying to cover its own butt, and that’s predictable corporate behavior. That doesn’t mean that it has no negative consequence for the players or the addon community.

Mark Asher :

Jeff :I don’t understand why Quest Helper guy is stopping.Can’t he just ask for donations when we download the latest version?

Yes, but he wants to be able to pop up a donation nag message in the game, or something like that. Maybe every time you complete a quest, Questhelper will ask you for money.
Basically, the modders who have been getting donations say they will get fewer donations if they can’t ask for money in-game. This is probably true.

Okay, I get that. But with something as popular as quest helper it certainly won’t kill all his income. Why the “I’m taking my ball and going home” reaction? Sure it must be nice to turn writing a mod into a full time job, but it can’t take all THAT much time to keep a mod up to date, can it?

Jeff :
I don’t understand why Quest Helper guy is stopping.
Can’t he just ask for donations when we download the latest version?

Yes, but he wants to be able to pop up a donation nag message in the game, or something like that. Maybe every time you complete a quest, Questhelper will ask you for money.

Basically, the modders who have been getting donations say they will get fewer donations if they can’t ask for money in-game. This is probably true.

Iconic :
“Why does the addon community’s “full potential” require some addons be limited to people who can and will pay for them?”
Basic economics. People have choices about how they spend their time. Making something people like has value to some, making something people like and will pay you do make more of has value to others. When you limit the ability to get paid, you limit the people who can or want to create those great products.

You did not, however, answer my question: Why is it necessary that some addons be limited to only people who can afford to pay for them in order for the addon community to reach its full potential?

There is no dearth of addons; quite the opposite, in fact. The community is thriving. People have created addons to do just about anything you can imagine. What, exactly, are we missing that we will magically get when we can only have addons if we pay for them? How will the game be better for all of us when we not only have to pay our fifteen bucks a month for WoW, but we have to pay for QH and Omen and DBM and FooBar and all the other addons we depend on? How will the game be more fair to everyone when some people can have good addons because they have another thirty or forty or fifty bucks a month to spend paying for them, and other people can’t afford the same level of WoW experience? How will the game be better when addon code is obfuscated, so that we can’t tell if it’s going to mail all our gold to I.G.E.? (I’ve seen something like that happen in another game) How will addon makers be better off if they can’t learn by studying other people’s addons? How will it be better if addon writers become adversaries instead of colleagues, jealously guarding their secrets to protect their profits? How will it be better for all of us if, when an addon is no longer maintained by someone who doesn’t find it worthwhile (or gets run over by a bus, for that matter), nobody can do what the QH crybaby did and pick it up and continue it?

Pay-to-play addons benefit a handful of people, and those people only: the ones who are selling them.

In the long run, turning addon writing into a business instead of part of the hobby will hurt the players, it will hurt the non-commercial addon makers, and it will hurt Blizzard, possibly to the point where they just get shed of the whole problem by getting rid of addons completely. That doesn’t sound like “full potential” to me.