The Curse "Premium" Client
Posted 04/30/09 at 4:19 AM by Binkenstein
I'm still not playing WoW (at least for the moment anyway), but something's bugging me. It's the [url=http://www.curse.com/Premium/Signup.aspx"new" Curse Client "Premium" subscription[/url]. Launched a few days ago, it takes some of those things that we'd taken for granted from an addon updater and bundles them into a subscription package, with some extra things added in.
The subscription package is understandable. They have to make ends meet, and addon downloads do go through a large amount of bandwidth. However, if you go and look at the site, you'll find there's not much information there. I can understand speed restrictions and ads, but the "other features" strike me as a little odd.
Firstly, the restriction of non-premium users to single downloads at a time is ok, but they've set it up to be manual downloads. This means that for every addon update, you will be selecting it and clicking download, waiting for the download/install to complete, and then doing it again for the next addon (or right click -> install if you so choose). This will make addon updates a fairly lengthly process, and only has the automatic extract function over a standard favourites list with manual download/install.
Then there's the other bonuses of the package. You get to "Support Curse" to develop "new features" and help them keep providing safe & secure addons. You get access to Premium-Only Beta Key giveaways, and support the addon author reqards program. The problem here is that the new features side of things is rather open ended, and any web-manager should be able to keep his files malware free anyway (so how does a subscription help with this?). The giveaways sound very much like "here's stuff we get paid to give away to promote stuff, and if you're a subscriber you will get them over normal users" setup (the "Get priority on all Curse beta key giveaways" wording suggests that). The Author Rewards program sounds like a good idea, but you can't actually find any information about it unless you do some hunting.
The other big "issue" I see is how this works with the new Blizzard policy on people charging for addons or other WoW related stuff. Have Curse checked with Blizzard whether they can do what they're doing, and what will be the Big Blue's response to this? Time will tell.
WoWInterface also have an updater in the works. The only difference between their Premium version is whether they will show ads or not, and I imagine that this one will be more popular than the Curse client for that fact only. How long until it is released is anybodies guess.
PS: One thought that I will throw out there is that if people are worried about bandwidth costs, maybe they should investigate some individual file updater + full reinstall rather than a complete package downloader. That way bandwidth use is reduced, and your cost overheads are too. As they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat.
The subscription package is understandable. They have to make ends meet, and addon downloads do go through a large amount of bandwidth. However, if you go and look at the site, you'll find there's not much information there. I can understand speed restrictions and ads, but the "other features" strike me as a little odd.
Firstly, the restriction of non-premium users to single downloads at a time is ok, but they've set it up to be manual downloads. This means that for every addon update, you will be selecting it and clicking download, waiting for the download/install to complete, and then doing it again for the next addon (or right click -> install if you so choose). This will make addon updates a fairly lengthly process, and only has the automatic extract function over a standard favourites list with manual download/install.
Then there's the other bonuses of the package. You get to "Support Curse" to develop "new features" and help them keep providing safe & secure addons. You get access to Premium-Only Beta Key giveaways, and support the addon author reqards program. The problem here is that the new features side of things is rather open ended, and any web-manager should be able to keep his files malware free anyway (so how does a subscription help with this?). The giveaways sound very much like "here's stuff we get paid to give away to promote stuff, and if you're a subscriber you will get them over normal users" setup (the "Get priority on all Curse beta key giveaways" wording suggests that). The Author Rewards program sounds like a good idea, but you can't actually find any information about it unless you do some hunting.
The other big "issue" I see is how this works with the new Blizzard policy on people charging for addons or other WoW related stuff. Have Curse checked with Blizzard whether they can do what they're doing, and what will be the Big Blue's response to this? Time will tell.
WoWInterface also have an updater in the works. The only difference between their Premium version is whether they will show ads or not, and I imagine that this one will be more popular than the Curse client for that fact only. How long until it is released is anybodies guess.
PS: One thought that I will throw out there is that if people are worried about bandwidth costs, maybe they should investigate some individual file updater + full reinstall rather than a complete package downloader. That way bandwidth use is reduced, and your cost overheads are too. As they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat.
Total Comments 3
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Even with the single addon install limitation its still saving time. I think you're nitpicking a little harshly on that aspect of the service. In less than half a minute the client tells me which addons of 30+ that it recognizes need updating and it takes maybe 2 minutes total to install updates for 3-4 for one at a time. It's still a decently fast and automated service compared to doing updates by hand.
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One of the best ways to reduce bandwidth costs would be for all addons to be automatically "un-embedded" or at least have the addon updater be aware of embedded addons.
The whole idea of embedding addons is to make it easier for users and anecdotally some bragging rights from the Ace team about them not having to have supporting addons (at least in the users POV) compared to Cosmos. Neither of those reasons apply with an automatic updater. |
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I agree about updating individual files. I'm surprised no one's come up with a subversion/mercurial/git-based updater.
As for embedded addons, these cause more harm than good when you only need >>one<< addon updated (for example, if you have a stable UI but need a newer Recount for sync), as often enough any library changes happen to break every other older addon. Thankfully, I haven't seen this problem for a while (since 3.0.8 really), but when all libraries could be automatically installed from a list of dependencies just as easily with an updater, there's hardly a point in keeping them embedded (at least for the version the updater pulls down). |
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