Addons free from now on, per Blizzard: KeyClone okay?

[Caspian]

Section 1 of the new policy is simply anti-competitive and well beyond the scope of what any company has power to dictate. It will hurt the community in the long run - fuck it's already hurt the community as members such as Cogwheel have already pulled up camp and left.

There is actually a very large precedence for exactly this, actually taken even a step further. Microsoft would sell Windows to a computer manufacturer to install on the computers they built and sold to the end users. As a computer manufacturer you could also purchase access to Windows APIs and developer kits. You could then make improvements to Windows as you saw fit. However, you were REQUIRED to provide those changes back to Microsoft at no cost. You were also not allowed to charge your customers extra for those improvements you made. In early versions of Windows, large portions of the core technology were not written by Microsoft at all. They were written by engineers at places like Compaq and HP who had to give them to Microsoft, who then gave them to their competitors like Dell and Gateway that did not have internal development teams.

So using Microsoft as an example for anything related to fair business practices or as a way licenses software is not really the best example.

Would it be considered an Advertisement to put a link to the developer's website for "the latest news updates" about their addon? Then put a big ass donation button on that page.

[BW~Merlin]

Would it be considered an Advertisement to put a link to the developer's website for "the latest news updates" about their addon? Then put a big ass donation button on that page.

I would think not as the policy says no goods or donation ads in game nothing about checking out the dev site for news, update and support. And yes you can have as many flashy ads on your website as you like.

[Caspian]

Would it be considered an Advertisement to put a link to the developer's website for "the latest news updates" about their addon? Then put a big ass donation button on that page.

I would think not as the policy says no goods or donation ads in game nothing about checking out the dev site for news, update and support. And yes you can have as many flashy ads on your website as you like.

Well there we go, we just found a work around.

[wolpak]

This reminds me of the video game crash of 83 and Nintendo. Atari allowed anyone to develop any game on their system and the garbage out there destroyed Atari (for various reasons). Nintendo came in, put the clamps on and said, you can only sell Nintendo lisenced games. If it doen't have our stamp of approval, then TS.

I think the best solution is to do what Nintendo did. Blizzard should require that all add-ons have the Blizzard approval or they cannot be used in game and they should offer them all on a Blizzard website. There you can access free addons or pay ones. Blizzard takes like 1 dollar out and the rest goes to the game developer. That way Blizzard has full control over the add-ons, the developers get their cut and the end users don't get screwed by messing around with broken add-ons and they can pay for the premium ones.

I have as much of a problem with big companies squeezing every last penny out as much as the next guy, but they do own the software and if it didn't exist, then add-ons wouldn't exist for it either. They should have absolute right to determine what add-ons are usable and not.

[Suvega]

God I love the duplicity in this thread. People spout ZOMG OPEN-SOURCE FTW every day on these forums.

Once people pretty much mandate an open-source type methodolgy (Kinda, I mean the end effect is pretty much the same, free to everyone, non-obfuscated code, with the extension of not allowing people to charge for support or spam for donations). People go bat-shit crazy.

The addon market was interesting, albeit hard to impossible to enforce. (Carbonite probably could be easily cracked, the code is all in plaintext).

Blizzard owns a game, and has licensing rights for people to supply 3rd party additions to the game. It is their right, no matter what you asshats say, to dictate the licensing rights.

They made a stand that they want people to only have to pay for the game, and if anyone wants to go out of their way in their spare time to make an addon go ahead. People should NOT try to make a business off of addons.

[zanthor]

God I love the duplicity in this thread. People spout ZOMG OPEN-SOURCE FTW every day on these forums.

I don't see the duplicity, I for one support both OS and Commercial software - both have their place in the world and both drive the other to be better. An OS project will die if it sucks and a solid Commercial application exists - and a commercial app would go out of business if it didn't race to stay one ahead of the OS competition.

(Carbonite probably could be easily cracked, the code is all in plaintext).

Yes it is all plain text - and it's all quite well obfuscated.

[Caspian]

(Carbonite probably could be easily cracked, the code is all in plaintext).

That was the issue, it is not in plain text. It is complied LUA with some extra stuff done to it. None of the standard decompilers could decompile it, I know I tried.

[zanthor]

(Carbonite probably could be easily cracked, the code is all in plaintext).

That was the issue, it is not in plain text. It is complied LUA with some extra stuff done to it. None of the standard decompilers could decompile it, I know I tried.

Not compiled - that is why no decompilers could touch it. [Edit: sounded insulting, wasn't meaning to be.] The entire thing was a string rolled into an xor function that garbaged it up quite nicely, the code for said xor function is at the end of the horrendous block of text...

Once you get past that you have obfuscated functions like fornextforwtf() and forfor() and shit like that.

Such as...

t={} 
s,u,x=strbyte,strchar,bit.bxor 
for n=1,(#z-1)/8 do 
local a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i=s(z,n*8-7,n*8+1)
t[n]=u(x(a,b),x(b,c),x(c,d),x(d,e),x(e,f),x(f,g),x(g,h),x(h,i))
end

[Suvega]

Anyways off that lil tangent... Requoting myself to emphasize the important bit...

Blizzard owns a game, and has licensing rights for people to supply 3rd party additions to the game. It is their right, no matter what you asshats say, to dictate the licensing rights.

They made a stand that they want people to only have to pay for the game, and if anyone wants to go out of their way in their spare time to make an addon go ahead. People should NOT try to make a business off of addons.

Just because the method for creating the 3rd party additions is using a public language (LUA), doesn't mean that it isn't a licensed 3rd party addition to a proprietary game.
Guess what, C / C++ / Java / Etc are all public domain languages, but that doesn't mean anything against the legal implications of licensing.

[Caspian]

Not taken as being insulting, no worries . Now I have to dig more.

t={} s,u,x=strbyte,strchar,bit.bxor for n=1,(#z-1)/8 do local a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i=s(z,n*8-7,n*8+1)t[n]=u(x(a,b),x(b,c),x(c,d),x(d,e),x(e,f),x(f,g)
,x(g,h),x(h,i))end loadstring(table.concat(t))()z='

was just about the only things I pulled out with a unix strings

let me take a peek now, thanks