vs.
I have sort of taken a bit of a break over the last week, so sorry for the lack of posts and responses to comments.
Over the last week two of my posts have received a lot of attention:
- My April fools patch notes: it appears people really want a healing tree for Mages, and
- My PSA about WoWMatrix
Sorry to ruin your day on both counts.
Anyway my take on the WoWMatrix blockage.
I have been playing for a long time and using mods for about the same period of time.
For the majority of that time I manually updated my addons. I toyed with early versions of the Curse Client and became reliant on the now defunct WoWAce updater. Moved onto the Curse Client and later used WoWMatrix to fill the gaps.
In reality I have found them all lacking in someway or another.
Note, I am a Windows PC user, so haven’t experienced the Mac issues.
How do I feel about this blockage?
I am OK with it, although I do feel a bit sorry for Mac users.
As I explained to a mate over the weekend, if someone tapped into my monthly net usage and prevented me using my PC on the net, I would be pretty pissed, or turning it around…
If I was “stealing” someone else’s net bandwidth and usage and they finally got around to locking their wireless router, I would just have to live with the alternatives, even if that meant paying for it.
Fundamentally this is what WoWMatrix has been doing, without compensation to the bandwidth providers and after repeated requests to come to some arrangement.
Back to my bandwidth metaphor:
- If I offered payment to my neighbor and they locked me out, I would be pissed.
- Likewise if they requested it, and I declined, I couldn’t blame them for locking me out.
Now I do think it’s pretty poor that Curse and WoWInterface don’t have as complete a solution as WoWMatrix did, both in range of good clients and also in Mod coverage.
I hope they fix both.
- The client is well within their means to fix, and hopefully they are working on this while I write.
- The mod coverage unfortunately comes down to the mod authors themselves, in that they will need to include their addons on both sites. I note for instance that while Carbonite is listed on Curse, it is now just a link to their website.
What am I doing?
Using the CurseClient for my initial update (note I had to do a reinstall all to refresh a lot of addons).
Then using WoWMatrix as a list for me to check individually all the other mods not hosted at Curse by going to thier websites.
I note that WoWMatrix is offering to replace a lot of my up to date mode with a lot of older versions – so be warned! This isn’t anything new, I often got false positives, so I am sort of glad than I am using WoWMatrix manually now.
Painful?
Sure, but still better than going through my addon directory then searching the web for the addon.
So in conclusion…
- Curse & WoWInterface: get your acts together and build better interfaces!
- Mod Authors: please make sure your mod is properly represented at both of these sites.
It is a shame that more often than not things come down to cash, but such is life.
Gnomer and Out!
This work is licensed under a
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http://gnomeaggedon.net/2009/04/21/wowmatrix-curseclient-and-the-addon-dilemna/
My mage has a little self healing tree…
Gylphed Innvocation – Heals me as well as returns mana
The Herbalist little heal
and the Racial Draeni heal.
Between that – I can do as much healing while leveling as my Shadow Priest would do.
My Healing tree goes by the name of TreeHugger Dave…
mind you he heals me about as much as I do under normal circumstances….
Hopefully he isn’t reading this comment….
I’m still a bit nervous of what the curse client might be doing (or what info it might be gathering) in my system as well as updating addons. It’s ok apart from that, but … not sure yet.
@Spinks: tell you what is really making me nervous lately….
WoWhead… I can’t even flick by the site without the Party Poker popup coming up….
Dear WoWhead… not a good way to instill confidence!
Yet, another thing I didn’t like about WOWhead, the advertisements. I don’t mind advertising in fact; I do it on a few of my websites. I have ten total there are ways to filter out undesirable ads I know since I use them on my sites, and yes you can still do very well doing that and your visitors, I believe, will appreciate your website even more.
I use addons for a variety of programs, so WOW is not the only one. There are many small businesses that recognize Windows and MAC users by releasing both products simultaneously and more important releasing a quality product for each OS. Yes, I’ve tried addons where it was obvious that the Mac equivalent was an afterthought naturally those programs are deleted and not used again and I do write about them.
I’ve chatted with quite a few developers both Mac and Windows. I always follow up by email to let them know what I like about the product. At times, they don’t hear that enough just the griefing. Sometimes I follow up them with ideas I would like to see within a future. Occasionally some of the suggestions have been implemented in updates.
I’m a business owner and a writer. I write for a few places in print as well as online. One of the topics I write about is technology, mainly Mac technology.
I had the same problem, was happily using wow matrix for some time, couldn’t get it to update questhelper, switched to the curse client, everything is happy and working now.
Hey, I just started using the “Add to Favorites” feature at Curse (the client terrifies me), and I just got an email letting me know that Deadly Boss Mods has updated.
That’s a good compromise for me. I don’t have to watch them like a hawk for updates, but I don’t have to trust some tweaky client program to grab the right things for me. And I still get to read the change logs and comments on the page.
Possible win?