Originally Posted by Bouvi
Same thing here. WM was STEALING bandwidth. WoWI and Curse turned it off.
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Without getting into any sort of technical discussion about how WM may or may not have worked and how much bandwidth it used, how was using it different
in principle than manually downloading add-ons from WoWI while running a browser ad blocker? Doing so consumes WoWI's bandwidth while denying them ad revenues. I'll bet many of the people celebrating WM's demise have AdBlock installed. I'll bet all of those that do don't or won't admit to their own raving hypocrisy.
Aside from that, I agree with some earlier poster that regardless of how evil WM was, WoWI and Curse have been extremely inconsiderate towards their non-author end users. In particular, Mac users are pretty much screwed. I just had the misfortune of installing the Mac curse client, which seems stuck in perpetual beta. After a forced sign-up for a curse account that I don't want and a half dozen cryptic error assertion alerts, I now have the displeasure of looking at a really ugly application that's slow, extremely cryptic to use and extremely un-Mac-like, and doesn't seem to notice about half of my add-ons (including many that I know are on Curse). WM was no paragon of good Mac UI, but it was simple, functional, fast, and had no strings attached. So if the curse client is the good way of doing things, then I'd rather be evil.
Beyond Mac-specific issues, there was a right way to go about cutting off WM, and WoWI/curse didn't do it:
1. Wait until WoWI/curse had clients
on all WoW platforms that were out of beta, fully functional, and relatively bug-free.
2. Wait until the current version of WoW had been stable and out for a while, so that there would be little need for end-users to update their add-ons while they transitioned off of WM to something else.
3. Once they decided to pull the plug on WM, they should have given at least two weeks of warning before doing so.
Instead of working to make users' transitions off of WM painless, WoW/curse decided to pull this stunt when it would be maximally inconvenient. All I can ask is, WTF were they thinking? I'm now educated on why WM is evil. That's great. I'm also really, really irritated at WoWI/curse, because they chose to make my life more inconvenient solely for the juvenile satisfaction of giving WM a big virtual middle finger. That's their right, I suppose, but I hope they understand that their EffU is pointed at all the casual users of WM, too. They could have accomplished their goal of cutting off WM and getting people to use their clients without nearly so much large-scale annoyance.