With the mid-May release of patch 3.1.2. Blizzard have finally released the long promised Equipment Manager functionality that many have been looking forward to. It offers a basic mechanism through which WoW players can ‘save’ sets of equipment (ie: armor and weapons) and create a button for each which they can then place on an action-bar. Clicking on this button then equips all the equipment saved under that set. With the option to buy an additional talent-spec for any level 40 or greater character, the liklihood that a player might wish to frequently switch equipment is now greater than ever and thus many players will be looking for a simple and easy way to do just that.

The question to be answered therefore is whether the new Equipment Manager is a good option or whether players should still be going to the established third-party addons such as ItemRack, Wardrobe, Closet Gnome and so on for their equipment swapping needs. Well, let’s find out.

Using the Equipment Manager:

Before you can use the default Equipment Manager supplied by Blizzard you must first enable it by pressing ‘Esc’ until the in-game menu appears and then selecting the Interface option. At the bottom of the first pane of options you’ll see a tick-box that you’ll need to tick marked “Use Equipment Manager.” Simply click the tick-box and then click the “Okay” button.

With the Equipment Manager enabled, if you now open your character pane (default: press ‘c’) you’ll be able to see a new button appears at the top-right corner of the main pane. This is your Equipment Manager button.

If you click on this button, it opens the very simple Equipment Manager window with 10 empty slots that you will be able to use to save equipment sets to. To create an equipment set simply drag the equipment you want to save to your character frame from your bags or bank slots until you have a set worth saving. Then, simply click on the save button and another small window will appear from which you can select an icon and type in a short name to identify the equipment set. For those already familiar with the ‘macro’ interface within the game, this is consistent with that.

After you have saved a couple of equipment sets, you will then have a couple of icons in your Equipment Manager window that are ready to be used. You can click on the icons within the Equipment Manager window to select them and if you have all the equipment defined in the set available, it will be equipped.

In order to make better use of the equipment sets however, simply drag the icons from the Equipment Manager window onto a convenient spot on your actionbars. Then, whenever you need to swap your equipment, it’s just a convenient mouse-click or key-press away.

And should you ever forget what each equipment set contains, simply mouse-over the button and the tooltip describes the contents of the set.

In a nutshell, that is the limit of the functionality provided by the default Equipment Manager built into the game. It works, it does a simple job in a simple manner and should give good mileage for those with basic needs. So, why then would you want or need to use one of the ‘old’ equipment swapping addons? It’s time to find out more.

Using the ItemRack addon:

Since ItemRack is an addon, you’ll need to download and install it first. We’ll assume you know how to do this already and even if you don’t, we’re sure you can find out how quite easily. All we’ll remind you to do is to check that WoW is going to try to load the addon for the character you are playing via the Addons page. This page is available by clicking on the “Addons” button that appears at the bottom left corner of the character selection screen.

All you need to do is to ensure that there is a tick next to the addon you want to load. In this case, that means ItemRack, ItemRack Options and, for my preference, the plugin for the FuBar menu-bar addon called ItemRackFu.

The first sign that ItemRack is working and available can be seen if you open your character pane (press ‘c’) and then hover the mouse over one of the armor items. You should see a little icon-menu appear showing all the possible items you have that fit in that armor slot. If you’re away from your bank, it just shows the items you have in your normal bags. If you are at the bank, it’ll show all items, be they in your bags or your bank – note, you must have the bank window open though.

However, the normal way to intereact with ItemRack is via its dedicated options window. You may have a mini-map icon for ItemRack that you can click on to make the options window appear but the default way otherwise is to type “/itemrack opt” in the chat window.

The ItemRack options window has four tabs (Queue, Events, Sets, Config) and the main one you will use most often is the ‘Sets’ tab. If it’s not already selected, click on the ‘Sets’ tab to select it and you’ll then see a layout similar to the default character pane. Hovering over a slot allows you to see icon-menus of appropriate gear as before. In this way, you can select ‘sets’ of equipment.

To save a set, simply type a name into the box, pick an icon from the area in the middle of the tab-pane and then click the ‘Save’ button. Job done.

To switch between the equipment sets that you save in ItemRack, you can either click on the minimap button if you have one (it’s the default behaviour) to see a small icon-menu of your available sets. Clicking an icon selects and equips that set, where the equipment is available.

However, prefering a clean icon-free minimap, I prefer to use the plugin for the FuBar menu system called ItemRackFu. This creates a small icon/name on FuBar and when you click on it, you see the same icon-menu of saved sets and again you simply click an icon to choose the corresponding set. It can then display the name of the currently equipped set making it easy to see at a glance what gear you are using. Handy for characters that swap gear like its going out of fashion. Good tanks do this a lot. Trust me, they love equipment swapping addons!

And once again, in case you forget what equipment a given set contains, simply mouse-over its menu icon and look for the tooltip. It’ll list the set’s contents in full.

Thus, we can see at this point that the ItemRack addon provides all the same functions that the default Equipment Manager does, more or less. (Or alternatively, we could say that the opposite way around as well.) What then are the advantages of using addons like ItemRack?

First of all, flexibility. If you create an equipment set and save it using the default Equipment Manager, you will not be able to edit the set’s contents should you for example win a new piece you want to insert into the set. Therefore, you have to essentially recreate a set from scratch whenever you just want to edit one item. It’s not the end of the world since it’s quite easy to do but it is not quite as convenient.

Another popular advantage of an addon like ItemRack is to configure it to switch equipment sets when certain events occur. For example, the addon can automatically equip your casual gear when you enter a city or a PVP set of gear whenever you enter a battleground. Perhaps you play a hybrid class like a druid and would like it to equip a feral DPS set whenever you enter cat-form but a resto-healing set whenever you enter tree-form. ItemRack can do all this easily and flawlessly.

So, which should you use?

The answer to this question is reasonably easy to answer. If, after having read the above, you believe you will not need any more functionality than the default Blizzard provided Equipment Manager supplies, then make life easy on yourself and just use that. It’s one less addon to worry about, to keep up-to-date come patch-day and it really does work quite acceptably well.

If however you would want more functionality than the default Equipment Manager supplies, you’ll have to explore the various alternative addons that all do far more. It’s worth trying a few out because they each do the same effective job in slightly different ways and in the same way that “you say toh-may-toe and I say toh-mah-toe”, each is perfectly valid in its peculiarities and you’ll probably find you like one more than the other “just because.” Don’t be afraid to experiment, it’s worth it to get the UI of your dreams. But remember not to admit publicly that you dream of the perfect UI. It’s not considered ‘healthy’ in normal circles. Bah! Humbug!

Blizzard have indicated that the functionality that the default Equipment Manager provides now is pretty much all that it will ever provide. It doesn’t provide any automated functions but that’s fine. Blizzard’s stance has long been to provide a working basic type of functionality and then to supplement that with an API (it’s a programmer’s term meaning Application Programming Interface) which other addon developers can use to hook into the same functionality. These addon developers can then write addons that use Blizzard’s own equipment swapping routines and add additional features, such as automated switching when changing zones, entering raid or battleground instances, when switching ‘forms’ (bear, cat, berserker-stance, etc) and so on. In fact, Blizzard’s position seems to be “it’s the community’s responsibility to write the addons that provide the additional functions they want.”

So, in the short term if you want more functionality than Blizzard’s own Equipment Manager provides then look to the existing established equipment swapping addons such as ItemRack. However, in the longer term, you can expect a whole host of new addons to appear on the scene that integrate with Blizzard’s equipment-swapping API to give the best of both worlds. The future’s bright, and I just auto-equipped my shades.

-B-

When the game first launched to an eager public the only “official” way to find other players to group with was to make use of the built-in “LookingForGroup” chat channel, otherwise known as the ‘LFG’ channel. If you had this channel switched on in your chat-window then you’d normally see a fairly constant stream of terse messages of the form “LFG – SM Cath – Lvl 30 Lock” or “LF2M – UBRS – Tank,DPS”.

These messages were simply an efficient short-hand language that described what the player was looking for. In the above examples the respective translations would be:

“Looking For (a) Group (to join), (that is going to the) Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, (I am a ) Level 30 Warlock”

…and…

“(We are) looking for 2 more (players to join a party going to) UBRS, (we need a) Tank (and a) DPS”

As you can see, it’s fairly simple to understand although there is no readily available help text to guide new players on what all the various abbreviations are. However, a new player could simply type their requests more fully until they learned the short-hand versions and the system still worked.

There was one single major drawback to the ‘LFG’ channel however and it was one that ultimately caused its demise, as far as the original form of its existence as described here was concerned. It was the only truly global chat channel available in the game. This was irresistable to those players that liked to settle themselves in a capital city somewhere and advertise their various wares and services, reaching as wide an audience as they could for the least amount of effort.

Thus, the ‘LFG’ channel became a secondary ‘trade’ channel and although it was generally considered to be “bad form” to post adverts for goods and services in the LFG channel, there was always a sufficient number of people playing the game to ensure that there were always one or two people online for whom posting an ‘LFG’ advert was perfectly acceptable behavior.

On top of that, there were also those players that found much amusement in spamming messages into the LFG channel revealing the latest Chuck Norris joke they’d just heard or abusing somebody they’d encountered in-game who’d earned their ire. The joys of a global spam-heavy LFG channel were legion and significant numbers of players disabled the channel in their chat windows as a result.

The debate on how to fix the problem with the LFG channel was argued endlessly on WoW’s official forums and probably every other major discussion site concerned with the game’s community. Nobody really found the basic function of the channel to be the fault, it was simply that the level of spam in the channel was drowning out the genuine LFG messages that did get posted.

And then one day an addon called “Group Finder by Moncai” was born. And lo did the world rejoice, for they saw that this addon was a good thing, and they sang and they danced and they smiled. What was this amazing addon? Let’s take a look…

“Group Finder by Moncai” was quite a simple addon at face value but it’s simple facade betrayed a fairly decent level of hidden sophistication behind the scenes. Offering a single window as shown in the screenshot below, it provided a list view of categories for which people were posting genuine messages in the LFG channel.

The vast majority of these ‘categories’ were simply the names of the game’s various instances from Deadmines through to UBRS, Scholomance, Stratholme and occasionally even the raid instances of the time; Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. Next to each category appeared a list of any players that had recently been seen posting ‘LFG’ or ‘LFM’ messages in the LFG channel. Clicking on any of the names showed a description of the message the player had posted in the lower frame of the window.

In essence, all this addon was doing was monitoring the LFG channel and parsing all the posts made in it. If a message was spam it was discarded and if it was a proper ‘LFG’ message then the addon attempted to understand what the player was looking for and then categorise the message appropriately.

Since the addon had built-in ‘knowledge’ about all the game’s existing instances, this meant that most messages were categorised as one might expect. Thus, as you can see in the screenshot, a list would form that would allow you to quickly see what instances/zones/quests were in need of more people and if anything took your fancy, you could delve deeper with a simple click of the mouse.

The joy of all this was that you could now switch off the LookingForGroup channel in your chat window thus cleansing the window of the large amount of now unneccesary text and whenever you were curious about what was going on you could sneak a peek at the addon’s window and if anything looked appealing, a quick whisper to the player or players involved and you would be off and running towards something fun.

And that in a nutshell was the main reason why the original LFG system was essentially better than the version of it that exists today and why this addon made it work nearly as well as it possibly could. The ubiquitous status of the LFG channel meant that is was always possible to ‘surf’ the channel, watching the calls for help going by and when inspiration struck, it was a moment’s effort to jump in.

The other reason that this addon worked as well as it did was that it simply extended the usefulness of the LFG channel. It did not matter to you when using the addon if you were the only person on the server with the addon – it was still the same basic LFG chat channel that you were interacting with. Only now, you had a clear view of what people were looking for and saw none of the spam that made having the channel switched on annoying.

A mere couple of months after this addon reached the height of its functionality, Blizzard finally changed the LFG system to what it currently is today. There have been a few revisions of the system since the overhaul but what you see today is roughly what you saw on the first day following the overhaul. Now, if you want to find help in the game, you open the new ‘LFG’ window (press “I” in-game typically) and then click buttons and tick boxes to indicate your preferences about what you are looking for.

All this sounds like a good idea and in theory it is a good idea. After all, if there was nothing wrong with the original system then addons would have not been able to offer improvements to the degree that they did. However, in implementing their solution, Blizzard chose to incorporate a number of restrictions that removed functionality from the LFG system, thereby making it harder to find help. In short order…

• The LFG chat channel is disabled by default for everyone.
• Access to the LFG channel is only possible by using the GUI tool.
• The LFG GUI tool is limited by “level appropriate” restrictions.

The consequence of these changes meant that it was no longer possible to simply “surf” the channel, watching casually what activities people were looking for assistance with whilst getting on with other pursuits in-game. Similarly, it was also no longer possible by default to choose to run a dungeon instance that was deemed lower than your level because the GUI tool only offered options “appropriate” to your level. As a level 60 player, this meant Dire Maul was fine but Deadmines was not. And that’s when LFG stopped working.

Today, you can seek help via the GUI tool and maybe if you’re playing during a fairly busy period on a well populated server then you might just get lucky and find enough people to do whatever it is that you want to do. Strangely though, once you have entered some options via the GUI tool, Blizzard then switches the LFG chat channel back on. The first question one might ask is “why?” because if the tool was doing the job it was meant to do, the channel would not be necessary.

Regardless, if your level-60 self wanted to run a lower-level instance or gain help with a particular quest in Tanaris, you would first have to open the GUI tool and select any option available simply to gain access to the LFG chat channel into which you could begin typing your requests once more. Except now, the number of people able to see your request had dropped exponentially – being now limited to only those people who were already looking for help with something else for which they’d already made a selection from level-appropriate options provided by the tool. And since your LFG chat request was not supported by the GUI tool, only those actively watching the LFG chat channel would be viewing. From a pre-tool audience of “almost everybody” your potential audience was now “almost nobody.”

And that, to cut a long story short, is the state of affairs that remains with respect to the current in-game LFG system today. It barely works and then, only for the most mainstream and common types of LFG needs. It’s clunky, unsophisticated and is very limited in the options it presents. It’s a bad piece of design and a bad piece of work.

It seems somewhat rare to say that about a feature of the game. Blizzard’s default user-interface for the game is relatively simplistic and many people, myself included, find it inadequate for playing the game at the level-cap end of the spectrum where raiding or ratings-based PVP are the order of the average day.

However, that’s exactly where Blizzard made a perfectly smart decision in leaving the game open to the development of addons. I can build the user-interface to my own preferences and needs via addons and that’s great. There’s a basic interface provided for free for the new player and the option to go “fully customised” via addons once we’ve learned how to play the game.

The LFG system though precludes an addon from being able to remedy the poor design of the default Blizzard GUI tool. Thus casual surfing of “LFG requests” is not really possible and the token effort one can make to gain access to the LFG chat channel by lying to the GUI tool simply compounds the issue further.

There does not appear to be any indication from Blizzard that they feel the LFG system they now have is not working adequately and although they have tweaked the GUI tool a couple of times, the basic limitations described above are still the cause of its lack of usability. Until Blizzard undoes these limitations, the LFG system they provide will continue to provide poor service to the player community seeking other players for whatever part of the game they want to play.

In recognition of this, today’s “Remember When…” is therefore dedicated to the memory of the brief period of time when LFG really worked. And for that happy memory, we send a grateful nod and a respectful salute to Moncai, the developer of the addon that Blizzard should have used as the inspiration for their GUI tool!

-B-

For several months a disagreement has been brewing between the people behind the popular WoWMatrix addon updater and the people operating several of the major addon-websites, specifically WoWInterface and Curse/WoWAce. This disagreement came to a more prominent position in the past couple of weeks when WoWMatrix was blocked from being able to access the addon websites thus meaning its users could no longer update their addons in the easy manner to which they had become accustomed.

All this has meant a heated discussion has been spawned in which much mud is being slung about and much of that mud is sticking to the alliance of addon-website owners, leaving WoWMatrix to initially appear to be the victim holding the moral high-ground. Strangely though, almost none of the reporting on this issue has presented a balanced view of the many factors involved in this matter and thus perhaps it is time to attempt to redress the balance somewhat. Let’s begin at the beginning…

Addon updaters have a fairly mature history at this point in time. One of the earliest true successes in this field was the well known and well liked WoW Ace Updater (WAU) program that was born around the time of the release of WoW’s “The Burning Crusade” (TBC) expansion. It was a product tied closely to the WoWAce website, a website that specialised in being a repository for ‘ACE’ based addons – that is, WoW addons written using special software components known as the Ace framework – essentially a toolkit for writing high quality, consistent addons.

WAU was a huge success and in fact, a success that its authors had never intended it to be. Designed really to be a convenience tool for those using Ace based addons, it quickly became so popular that many WoW players elected to build custom user-interfaces for the game using only Ace based addons. This meant that they could then update all their addons simply by running WAU and hitting an “update all” button. Before this was possible, updating addons was a manual task, requiring a player to visit the download page for each addon they had installed, looking for any new releases. This was borderline acceptable at the best of times and at the worst of times (read: patchdays) it was a nightmare of horrendous frustration.

Thus, in very little time, the user-base of WAU increased exponentially and drove up the bandwidth usage of the WoWAce website which was hosting all the addons at a similarly exponential rate. Where updating addons had previously had a significant personal time-cost, it was now so easy and convenient that many of WAU’s users would think nothing of running the client to update all their addons every day, or even multiple times per day. The cost of this increased bandwidth was staggering to put it mildly.

In order to try and offset the expense of this bandwith, the WoWAce developers and admins attempted various strategies ranging from asking for donations to inserting an advertising banner into the WAU client. None of these schemes worked well enough to meet the costs of the bandwidth and so other means were continually being sought.

During the same time-period, WoWMatrix was launched and offered several features that the WAU program appeared to lack, principally the ability to update addons held on multiple addon websites where the WAU program could only update addons held on the WoWAce website. This was attractive to many people simply because there are many great addons not based on the Ace framework that is the defining facet of the WoWAce website.

Eventually, the WoWAce site managers managed to make a deal with the managers of the Curse website through which Curse would meet the cost of the WoWAce bandwidth. This was enough to keep the WoWAce website up and running and to enable WAU to continue operating but the admins behind WoWAce explained early on that it was simply a stop-gap solution and that a proper solution needed to be found if WoWAce was not to be shut-down as a repository of addons in the longer term.

At this fairly early time in the history of this dispute, the practices that WoWMatrix has been soundly villified for over time were beginning to be recognised. Primarily, most addon websites show advertising on their websites so that when a player visits their site to find and download an addon, they have a chance to see the advertising and that potentially generates revenue for the website. WoWMatrix fostered an approach of scraping the addon websites to gather the details of the addons being offered and then propagated that information through its client.

In essence therefore, when a user elected to install an addon using WoWMatrix, WoWMatrix simply grabbed the addon from the hosting website and then installed it on behalf of the user. This behaviour was not appreciated or liked by the owners of the addon sites hosting the addons because it was costing them bandwidth to supply the downloads and yet the WoWMatrix users were never visiting their website and were thus, never generating any potential advertising revenue to offset those bandwidth costs. WoWMatrix meanwhile was running its own advertising within its client and was thereby generating revenue off of the bandwidth it was using.

Worse was to come though when WoWMatrix began updating their client to alter the addons before installing them onto user’s computers. Some addons contained links that would be shown in-game to users inviting satisfied users the opportunity to donate small sums to the addon’s author to help the author continue to support and develop the addon. WoWMatrix began modifying some of these addons to alter the links shown to users such that any donations made did not go to the addon’s authors. Guess where those donations went instead?

WoWMatrix also edited addon “headers” to give the impression that the version being installed was more up-to-date than it actually was. This often seemed to occur when WoWMatrix could not find a working source for an addon and presumably gave its users a false impression of the level of success WoWMatrix was having updating their addons.

Whilst all this was occurring, those users that noticed this behaviour did not remain quiet and much evidence to support all of the above information is freely available from multiple sources on the web. The WoWMatrix team remained firmly silent and did not respond to its detractors – a policy that is generally the same today.

In late Spring of 2008, the WoWAce team announced that due to the fact that it had not been possible to find alternative forms of sustainable funding, they had instead reached a new agreement with the owners of the Curse website. Regarded as an effective “buyout” of WoWAce by Curse, the stated outcome was that the authors of the WAU program would begin working on a similar type of client for Curse whilst simultanously making adjustments to integrate the WoWAce site more tightly with Curse’s website.

Once the core of this work had been completed, it was announced, the intention was to turn off the ability for users to download Ace addons from WoWAce and instead they would be directed to a corresponding download page on the Curse website. The WAU program would be both discontinued and disabled and users wishing to continue having “automatic updating” would need to transition over to using the Curse Client instead.

The timeframe for all this to happen was roughly stated as “July/August 2008″ and in actual reality, it took a fair while longer until all the pieces were in place. Thus, users of WAU got to persist in using WAU for several additional months before it was finally switched off in September 2008. When this happened, many users did indeed encounter difficulties because the embryonic Curse Client had many faults which created problems for its users. However, the range of addons available from the Curse website was far wider than “just Ace based addons” therefore the transitioning users did gain this improved functionality for their troubles.

Shortly after the switchover the WoWAce people who were now essentially working for Curse also announced that they were planning to launch a premium service based around the full functionality of the Curse Client once it was fully developed as the means by which the bandwidth costs of updating addons would be fully met. Meanwhile, the various “perceived crimes” of the WoWMatrix client continued unabated and its operators remained tightlipped and silent.

It took several months of continued development before the Curse Client reached a point at which its users could consider it to be “working as intended” but throughout the development time, its authors interacted frequently with its users via the WoWAce forums, providing insight and feedback that kept the Curse Client users informed about the progress of the development.

All of the above is essentially the backstory of the events that have led up to the recent culmination of this ongoing disagreement between WoWMatrix and the owners of several popular addon websites. After pursuing numerous other avenues, the owners of Curse and WoWInterface finally bit the bullet in recent weeks and enacted measures on their respective websites that effectively blocked WoWMatrix from being able to download addons from their sites.

This has meant that the many players that use WoWMatrix have suddenly found themselves unable to automatically update their addons and in concert with this fact, the release of Patch 3.1 and its subsequent 3.1.x mini-patches has meant that players have been stuck with outdated addons. At the same time, Curse has reached the point where its Curse Client addon updater is now mature enough that they can finally launch their premium service as a means of generating revenue. The coincidence of these two events, although not even slightly surprising to those that have followed this matter closely, has been seen by the many other people that have not been following this matter as a crude business practice on the behalf of Curse.

The natural irritation and frustration of the denied users of WoWMatrix has led to the slinging of all kinds of insults and false claims against Curse and its Curse Client which have been broadly repeated ad-infinitum by the wider WoW reporting community (read: blogs and bloggers and podcasters) without any proper research being done to gain the facts that balance the story. Even today, all of the above information is still available via the WoWAce forum threads that have been running in several cases for several years.

It often appears the the name “Curse” is being used as a noun for “untrustworthy” which in this affair simply cannot be justified. Barbs levelled against Curse and its Curse Client include but have not been limited to the following claims:

• Curse cannot be trusted, WoWMatrix is much more trustworthy.
• The Curse Client is full of Keyloggers.
• The Curse Client is buggy and does not work.

Given that the Curse Client is being developed in a fairly open manner by Kaeltan who is not only “the father of WoWAce” but also a respected developer of numerous popular WoW addons himself and the fact that he is responding regularly to posts made in the WoWAce forums on many topics including the development of the Curse Client, claiming that Curse cannot be trusted is to claim that Kaeltan cannot be trusted and on prior experience and knowledge, that claim just does not ring true.

However, the complete lack of any kind of response, interaction or feedback from the team that produce WoWMatrix (see – we can’t even tell you who these people are!) is far more grounds for supporting a counter claim that WoWMatrix are untrustworthy. Furthermore, given that WoWMatrix has indulged in practices that are clearly against the better interests of the addon community itself, such claims become quite laughable.

Equally, claiming that the Curse Client contains keyloggers is also highly suspect. With such an openness in the WoWAce community between many very experienced and knowledgeable developers, a keylogger in the client would be found and announced with almost zero lead time. There are simply too many critical eyes on the Curse Client project to keep it honest in all respects. Again, compare and contrast this with WoWMatrix.

Finally, it can fully be agreed that the initial versions of the Curse Client were buggy and had errors that made using it highly annoying. However, all of these issues can be seen to be reported and documented on the WoWAce forums and there are responses to most of them from Kaeltan and others demonstrating what progress was being made to address them. As a result, the current version of the Curse Client works exactly as it should and is a very solid and polished product as a result.

It is also tightly integrated with the Curse website therefore if one browses the Curse website and sees and addon that looks interesting, it is a matter of clicking a single “Install via Curse Client” button on the addon’s webpage and the Curse Client does all the heavy lifting.

WoWMatrix recently made a “public ‘FAQ’ announcement” in which it appeared to repell many of the arguments that had been made by Curse, WoWAce, WoWInterface and others about its prior practices. However, the community response to this announcement has generally appeared to have been rather cool, as a great many of the claims made by WoWMatrix have been rebutted successfully.

Thus it is that at this point in the story, we approach the end of the tale. Now blocked from directly accessing many of the hosting addon websites, it appears that WoWMatrix is attempting to keep its head above water by hosting addons for itself and is inviting authors to upload their addons to the site. How successful this proves to be remains to be seen. But what should be clear and apparent after reading the above, no matter how annoyed or irritated one might be as a WoWMatrix user that no longer has such an easy life, the claims made thus far against Curse/WoWAce/WoWInterface/et-al have held little to no truth and instead simply reflect the poor understanding and research of those claimants.

-B-

–
This post was based upon an original comment made in response to a post made at “The Instance! World of Warcraft Podcast” blog.

Image Gallery for this article:

[Show as slideshow]