So WoWInterface & the Curse sites have blocked WoWMatrix. Today. On patch day. Do they seriously want hundreds of thousands of angry people with torches and pitchforks at their doorstep? They claim that they are in the "right" because WoWMatrix is "stealing" from them. They say you should use their own respective craptacular addon update clients. The problem is that for all the well intentioned efforts of WOWI and Curse, they are simply too busy/incompetent/unfocussed enough to provide a decent client experience. Add to this their need to try to restrict everyone to one site only and you have a model that flies directly in the face of what is ideal for users.

Obviously, we can't have what is ideal for users (free everything + one click updating + cross site addon support). So while the site maintainers can claim they're all eager to make users happy, that isn't their end goal, it's to make sure they have a functional business model. Hmmm....who does this sound like? Oh yeah, I know...THE RIAA!

There's nothing wrong with that. The part that annoys me is their unwillingness to let someone else do the work to make the users happy. There is a significant community out there that can write very functional and user-friendly updaters that work cross platform. Why not punt off the hard work of writing a non-retarded updater to them?

There was an ace updater back in the day. It worked flawlessly with the ace repo, and was quite pleasant to use. The author wanted to make it work with Curse, and when he spoke to the Curse guys, the response was 'go away, it's our client or nothing, we don't want one click updating, we want to force everyone to click through ads'. Now, that makes sense from a business perspective, but let's not pretend it's in the best interest of users.

Given the lack of resources/skill/willingness to develop useful clients, wouldn't it be better if the site maintainers instead focussed on their piece of the puzzle, the sites themselves? Why not for example allow for a web API to query, download, and update addons? Why not allow such a service for premium customers only? That way I can write an updater and ask them for their curse credentials or API key, and I can tell users that my addon is only useful if they pay up to Curse/WOWI/whoever. I can evolve it at my own rate, as can any number of developers, and we'd all stop being held hostage by the woefully inadequate, highly dysfunctional, and rarely updated Curse client.

I have no interest in 'stealing' from anyone. However, I will also happily steal if you won't give me a good alternative, and I'm sorry but right now the website and curse clients are very far from 'good alternatives'. I would happily download music before from newsgroups/bittorrent/napster/kazaa, nowadays I check itunes first because I'm happy to support the industry and the application that Just Works. The same applies to wow addons.

I for one will be cheering for WoWMatrix to work around whatever measures Curse/WOWI put in place. In turn, I stronly urge that WoWI & Curse find another method to make money rather than trying to protect their business model - at the expense of their users. Until that happens, a big F*** You to WoW Interface & Curse and a huge shout out to WoW Matrix to quickly circumvent whatever blocking they have put in place.