ok so heres my thoughts... curse, ace, and wowinterface all bitched and complained about wow matrix (free) to get them shut down so more people had to come this way so they could do what they are doing now and charge us to use theirs.... WTF. they knew they wouldnt be able to keep people with their system so they bitched, moaned, and complained about matrix (again FREE) to shut em down, they got the authors, and many more people involved in what i see to be the biggest scandle in wow add ons atm. i mean get real guys open your eyes and look at what happened and whats going on its a bunch of crap....

again this is my opinion and point of view... furthermore isnt it against wow policy to charge for anything pertaining to their game? just a question. you figure it out for yourself thnx and good luck all

and dont get me wrong curse is great at what they do, but why should they get away with something that in this manor, and be allowed to charge us for something like this.

Thank you for your feedback, however...It is not against the World of Warcraft policy; we are charging for your convenience. We are not charging for your add-ons; it's not like you have to pay to get a certain add-on. 

I think, and this is just my view here. That charging for a extra service is fine, provided there isn't monoply, and the blocking of WoWMatrix access (as pointed out, a service that provides for free what the curse client is charging for; auto updating) is a play for a monoply over it.

Because, if you have a wide market, charging for extra means that it is competly free choice, the curse client is far more polished then the WoWMatrix client, so there are people whom would pay a small amount to get this extra. However, if you force people to use a stripped down version of what they could get for free in order to make them pay to retain a simliar level of service then you've crossed a ethical line.

Currently, there isn't as I understand it any legal block from Activision over doing this, as its all 3rd party. However, being 3rd party I feel there should be restrictions, so a clause in so much that no one site may restrict access (directly, or in-directly though coertion of authors) for clients to host addons so they may run a 3rd party software. However, authors should have the option to only allow one or more 3rd party software access to their product as well.

@Irshuugo

They aren't "forcing" you to do anything.

You can still download and update addons with the free client

You can still download and update your addons manually off the curse site.

The "free version" has actually been a preview of the full premium service since Sept. As i understand it there has been a notice up about it in the client since September. There were no free features been taken away. You just never had the free version before. IMHO should of just had the free version from September so people weren't confused when the prem. service come out.

You've gotta understand that Curse and Wowinterface have tried to work with wowmatrix for ages and ages. They first appeared on the radar on Oct. 2007. If they had tried to work with the community then Curse , WOWI and other addon sites would of been right there with them , helping them along. Fact of the matter is they haven't . They've burnt a lot of bridges with several addon authors since then. They as a website offer nothing to an addon author in the way of tools,forums and support. I could post all night about the many bad things they have done but needless to say certain addon authors will never host their addons there. They completely ignored any messages and requests for contact from the admins of wow interface. Every protection both sites tried to put in place wowmatrix found a way around.

Thing is you gotta step away from Curse doing this to drive people to their client. It was never about the clients. It was about Survival. Wowmatrix and the extra scrapping traffic was like a gangerous limb. It was costing them thousands of dollars worth of un reimbursed via advertsing bandwidth. So instead of having both sites melt down in a puddle of goo on patch day , they chose to cut off the gangerous limb. The timing while unfortunate was not about driving numbers to using an addon client. IMHO you don't need one.