Paid combat routines becoming a problem?

When the original honorbuddy popped up before HB 2.0 it spawned one of the greatest communities I had ever seen at the time with devs and script writers just going to college popping in and learning how to make plug ins and addons for HB it was one of the most helpful and positive communities I had ever seen.

Basically anyone who tried to profit off the free additions to Honorbuddy were for the most part removed(even FPS whom I loved his priest back in WOTLK/early Cata was given the boot when he started to turn his work from a past time to profit making).

But it now seems that it is the norm that all combat routines are now turning to pay mode. Sure I know its someone's time and investment that they deserve to be paid for it but it should not be a part of HB community. Its not advertised blatantly as it is against the forum's rules but when you have public releases tied in with the title of routine's now it is obvious that there is a paid version. All of these people who came from the owned core forums is starting to clutter us with crap paid for routines, and plugins. Please Team buddy I believe it is time to toughen the rules on such stuff before HB becomes the next PRQ.

 

I think their policy against discussing paid addons for Honorbuddy on the forums is as about as strong as it's going to get. I think any further restrictions would be difficult to implement without causing a lot of problems. If you have some plan for how they should toughen the rules, then suggest it rather than saying there's a problem without offering any solution.

I'm honestly for paid addons to an extent. For example, very often free routines are not kept updated, or have a relatively short lifespan. Of course this is not the case with all of them, some are well maintained. At the end of the days, the advantage of paid addons or donator benefits is financial support to allow and encourage a developer to support their project, and you can see how well that has worked out with routines like Leaves, Demonic, or any of Tuanha's routines. Of course, it would be a shame if you had to pay to find a working custom class or profile, but for the most part you don't with the way things are currently run. And if you do, it's not because there are is an abundance of paid-only content replacing free offerings, but rather that there weren't very many options to begin with.

 

I believe in you get what you pay for, doesn't matter if you like it or not but people are free to feel like their time is worth an actual monetary value.
Some people still release free combat routines with no paid version but for those that do why go crazy against them? They aren't actually advertising directly although I do get your implication that due to the name of certain CR's its implied that there is a paid/pro version.
Simply put just saying that all CR devs who offer a paid version should be banned is insane, it will just lead to those devs getting around the ban with an alt if they want or worst case scenario just giving up on letting people use their CR's.

You pay for HB not for what a 3rd party dev does in his time, don't like it? Don't pay.

 

Ok, lets take an example, take my plugin object gatherer, the zip file has been downloaded 5742 times (when I post this reply) and the SVN has been downloaded abit over 20k times.
Now guess how much donations I have gained for that one.........
The correct answer is ZERO, I haven't recieved a single donation for a plugin that have such a big userbase.
Do I complain about it, well most of the time I don't, I started to give out all my work for free and for that I have recieved a total of like $150 (one was $100) and those donations where all from custom work where ppl asked me to make something specific.
I've spent endless hours coding and helping other coders on these forums so if I charge for one of my products then took me months to develop it is my right to do so. ATM I can't release it on this site so I have to release the product on a other site.

Complaining that ppl spend hours upon hours and want something in return for it is just plain stupied.
And talking about CC's I still haven't made a single one but Singular is a free one and it has allways worked perfectly for the needs I've had.

But yes, I released my first products for free so I could make a name for myself, so that ppl know that I release quality products (well, I actually need to update my free products here now as they where coded a long time ago).

But if we developers wouldn't be able to charge for our work you would never get any amazing products, you would get a few good ones, but not the amazing ones.

Well, that's just my rambling on this matter.

 

You are right to an extent. I did state that if a person wants to charge for their routine they can but they are circumventing a rule of advertising pay for addons/routines with the off key title dubbed public or free edition. An easy rule would be to just have a routine to post on the forums without any subtle wording in the title. The issue is the community went from a open source share and edit routine as long as you gave proper credit and asked to pay to use my routine. And about classes that no longer become supported for the longest people would pick up the project and continue with older routines until the mentality of the community changed to mimic that of mmowned.

 

Paid routines and plugins are only a problem for selfish and or poor people.

 

In my opinion I feel like it's going to stay this way until at LEAST a few weeks after WoD's release. Judging on the alpha patch notes they are going back to the "easier and less complex to play" route with less spells and abilities to cycle through. With that being said, it'll be a lot easier to make Combat Routines just like it was back in WotlK. Right now the game's difficulty is actually a lot higher than it was a year or two ago when combat routines and many other scripts was open sourced. What I'm trying to say is, with the complexity of WoW being reduced by Blizzard in WoD the time required to make routines will also be reduced making it almost impossible to sell a "better" combat routine.

The combat routine scene right now is a lot different than it used to be. It used to be all about simple automation, but now it's about making the routines just right to yield more damage/heals using more abilities/spells.

 

The problem with adding further restrictions is that developers offering paid content will find ways around them. If you block this wording you talk about then they'll use a different strategy to maintain awareness regarding their paid content. And if you keep adding rules to prevent any sort of user awareness regarding paid versions of projects, eventually they won't be able to make any money and will likely leave the community.

You talk about people picking up projects and maintaining routines that the original developers abandoned. Anyone can still do this if they wished, and the community has not been replaced by ownedcore, it has only grown with users from that site.

 

One rule in life, you usually get what you pay for. If you pay zip, then expect to get zip. I see no problems with paid routines and such, the good ones sell and the bad ones get panned. Simple capitalism.

 

I think its a give and take or (Warning: Management Wording!) a win-to-win Situation.
People developing Addons or Routines bring an added value to our product. If they release a free version here I have no problem if they release a paid version with more features or better support somewhere else.
In fact if it was my decision I would fully allow selling stuff here offering a shop for Community Devs but thats not wanted from our company leaders.
Writing routines and addons is a lot of work and I am always a friend of paying for this. I have bought some addons/routines which I do not use at all only to support the Developer and show that I appreciate his work.

I think the rules are very strict at the moment and should not become even more strict.
Use Singular for free if you want or another free CR. If you have the time and knowledge write your own.
If you are really happy with a free edition and want to show support, or need extra features, go an buy the routine if there is a paid version.

 

Paid stuff is a problem. Yes.

Well, the real problem is that the moderators do not enforce the no-advertising rule - there is SO much indirectly advertising for paid stuff here, you wouldn't believe me. Instead of ripping out the root, sometimes people get told as an answer to their advertising posts "don't do that, *waves finger*". Problem is the extend it already took. So many people are disillusioned that there is only good paid stuff that the good free stuff gets not the attention it should be, and that demotivates SO FUCKING MUCH, you - too - wouldn't believe me if you have not felt it. And once that point is reached, people privatize their work and sell it.

Again - paid stuff is cancer, and it's spreading.

 

I am only using HB for paid routines to be honest.

 

What's bad about the paid vs. free is when you make a "Donation" and then weeks later they stop supporting there work. There was a warrior routine that you could make a donation to get a more supported version. Now its not even on the forums anymore. This is what I see as the problem with Paid versions. There is no recourse to the consumer if the product dose not work as intended or if the developer just stops supporting there work.

 

I'll post my perspective, since I'm one of the developers who provides paid content.

I started developing for Honorbuddy when PureRotation came out. Warlocks were in a dire situation, Singular wasn't (and isn't) designed for end game raiding, and I've only ever trusted Honorbuddy - so PQR wasn't an option for me. PureRotation came out shortly after MoP was released (back in September 2012), and while a lot of the work was a huge learning curve, I was spending significant amounts of time developing it - i.e. 5-8 hours a day, most days of the week. I think I received something like $20-30 for my work in PR over the 6-8 months I was working on the project.

After a few months, I got bored of the same PvE instances, so decided to do some PvP too. PR was heavily PvE focused, and so I started work on Demonic. The project was shelved multiple times, but eventually came to fruition. I was tracking how many hours I was working on it, after a couple of month's I was approaching nearly a thousand hours, at which point I stopped keeping track ). Skip forward to July and I decided to release it publicly, but as other paid content was available at this time, and I wanted a new PC (but couldn't afford one), I decided to start selling it as well. It's 9 months on (and nearly 15,000 lines of code later) since I released Demonic, and I still spend something like 5-8 hours a day, 7 days a week working on my stuff (although a big part of it is customer support), and I have more than just Demonic now.

If Demonic didn't have a paid version, it wouldn't still be here, Portal, Insanity and BGFarmer definitely wouldn't be here. Money is great motivation, as it would be for anyone. I do actually enjoy working on the projects, so it's not just about the money, but I wouldn't be busting my balls putting in significant amounts of time (and causing countless arguments with the missus for being on the computer ) if there wasn't the financial reward. I'm pretty sure the same applies to all paid content developers.

Lots of people are against paid stuff (I was too for a long time), but if the community wants top quality stuff, then the developers need the support. Remember, there's always free alternatives which will suffice for most people (Singular, YourRaidingBuddy, PureRotation, Oracle, KingWoW, FuryUnleashed, Superbad etc).

Hopefully this won't be censored, I try to avoid talking about paid stuff because of the forum rules, but figured this thread was appropriate.

 

I agree with Millz.

I have always supported, helped and created free content.
Now I'm on my way to make my very first own paid content.
I don't have the same reason as most developers, who have created paid content.
I suffered in 2013 testical cancer, which was cured to an extend. End of 2013 I was diagnosed a brain tumor, which was removed in January.

So here I stand without a job, without the ability to even drive my own car to get myself some grocery's.

I don't have much money to live with, so I figured it's time to make a step forward and get into creating paid content.
I still love creating content for Honorbuddy and wouldn't it be for HB, I wouldn't even play WoW anymore.

This is my story behind. I don't need blessings or hugs, I'm well at this point but still handicapped.

Anyway, this discussion will go nowhere. You want free stuff, so make the effort to earn it. When I recieved bug reports, they were incomplete, bad written and lacked an appropriate log file. I spend countless hours debugging and trying to replicate errors, which were just the result of layer8 problems.

So far,

greetz

Weischbier

 

It's only an issue for people who can't spend 20 dollars on something they already spend alot of time on..
i play on my warlock 5-10 hours a day, so paying a person like Millz for a product that is good wasn't really a question.
I look at paid stuff like this;
Free stuff = Ford Fiesta
Paid stuff = Ferrari Enzo

You can drive the Fiesta just fine, but if you had the money you'd probably drive the Enzo


Go Go Go Team Millz!

 

The way i see it, is we wouldn't have half of these routines if it was for paid stuff. You're tagged as a community developer, so you out of anyone should understand the effort put into some of this work. At the end of the day these are products people make, and it is none of our business if they decide to sell it, don't like them selling it? Dont buy it. And no, i am yet to find a PVP routine that performs as well as the paid ones.

 

I can see why so many of our developers have decided to leave this community. I can also see why so many people are saying this community is going downhill. Sure, you initially paid for Honorbuddy, but when you bought it it didn't come with a contract saying that every plugin, every routine, every bot base, and everything else developed will be free to you. That's not how the deal goes. What you get free with Honorbuddy is anything that originally ships with it. There are many, many third party developers that put a few hours into a plugin, and there are developers that put hundreds of hours into a complex routine. These people don't work for Honorbuddy, they don't get paid by Bossland, or his company, so if these third party developers decide to make a paid version of their product, then I'm going to suppot them. Currently I already own every single one of TuanHA's paid routines, I own all three of Millz's paid routines, I even own the dead Dunatank's Warrior routine. I also own many good FREE routines as well. I don't, however, own any paid plugins or bot bases, yet.

There are far too many newcomers to Honorbuddy that want to complain that they're not getting everything for free. They complain that the free things aren't as good as they want them to be, and then scoff, piss, moan, and complain when someone suggests that they get one of the paid routines. I can understand the kids complaining, but only because maybe they don't want to spend their allowance, or milk money, or paper route money on the bot's routine, plugins, and bot bases. But, really, like most have said, "If you don't like the fact that you have to pay for it, then don't buy it and use the free versions."

I have no idea where I was going with this, but I see the complaining about "paid <routines, plugins, bot bases>" that it's getting ridiculous. Either man/woman up, get off your wallet, and support the developer, or just use the free stuff and stop complaining. It's clear and apparent that things are going to continue the way they are, so there's really no reason or sense in complaining about it.

 

I do not understand what is with all of defenses against people who think they should be paid for their work when I never said that you should not be. Nor do I expect or deserve a bunch of free hand outs from addons and free bot routines. On the contrary back when before it became more the norm for having paid work done on these forums each bot had many upon many releases from a multitude of devs and up and coming profile maker/routine scripters and more.

That has changed which is my real gripe. It is now turning into a I put in my sweat and blood for this project and work so I expect pay mentality that has totally changed the community that was behind honor buddy. The logic that the game is more complex from wotlk is false because back then druid cat dps was literally a 13 button bloated rotation that has yet to be met in terms of complexity. Shamwow/WTF priest/Whirlwind warrior routine were highly professional created routines but were free and I would easily say were on par with today's routines which mainly have taken alot of success/fail logic tree builds from previous routines. If not were for the previous free routines made then our current quote crop of paid for routines would most likely not exsist.

And yes I do own all of Millz's and Tuan's paid for routines. I have no problem paying for high quality and I quite enjoy their routines and would gladly support them continuing further. Its just feels like this forum is turning into a owned esque community setting which saddens me.

 

I wasn't a fan of paid routines until I broke down and bought one and realized just how much work the developers put into them. I have everything from millz/tuanha/mirabis and they're amazing. Not to mention the constant updates and excellent support system. Its probably not for everyone, but you can't beat their profiles for end game.