The WoW addon “Mythic Dungeon Tools” for WoW got a paywall. Players reacted quickly and trolled the developer.
Many players can no longer imagine World of Warcraft without interface addons. Whether it’s boss mods, expansions for RP descriptions, or useful enhancements for selling in the auction house – addons are very useful and popular. But sometimes there is also drama surrounding the interface extensions.
What happened? The addon “Mythic Dungeon Tool” (MDT) was extremely popular in recent months. It allowed players to plan dungeons of high difficulty in advance and calculate an exact route to achieve 100% completion of a “Mythic+” dungeon and strive for maximum efficiency. However, when updating to the latest version, players noticed that some features of the addon no longer worked. Instead, there was a note that the missing features could be unlocked through payment.
MDT just went pay2use. Is this even legal with wow’s addon policy? from r/wow
Why was there a paywall? The author Nnoggie, whom players might know from the professional guild Echo, lost control slightly during a stream. During a raid, viewers repeatedly demanded that he update his addon. The viewers had a clear expectation that the addon would be brought up to date quickly. Nnoggie was already in a bad mood and reacted irritably. With rather harsh words, he explained that he would remove MDT from Curseforge (an addon database). Later he added that “he should pay to use the addon”.
You can see the excerpt (with some swear words) here: Link to the video on Streamable
That’s exactly what happened. The addon has some functions now hidden behind an additional download, such as the exact data of the trash mobs. So the addon is limited in its functions and requires the additional download, which is paid.
Community reacts quickly: Shortly after MDT integrated this paywall, another addon was released. It had exactly the same function as MDT but was called “Manbaby Dungeon Tools.” Manbaby refers to “giant baby” and is meant to mock the original author.
Even the RP addon TotalRP3 was trolled
Sometimes, however, there are disputes between individual creators of addons. For instance, the developer of addon A builds code into his addon that intentionally restricts and hinders the functionality of addon B. Just a few hours ago, this happened to the authors of the “TotalRP3” addon. They noticed that the creator of the addon Altoholic/Datastore had implemented code so that TotalRP3 no longer functions.
TotalRP3 is an addon for roleplayers that allows them to recognize other roleplayers immediately or to create additional descriptions and notes for their characters.
According to one of the creators of TotalRP3 (Solanya), corresponding code was found in the addons Altoholic and Datastore that is supposed to delete profiles in TotalRP3. This was confirmed by several sources. Shortly after this was made known on Twitter, the developer of Altoholic/Datastore released a new update and the code was gone from the lines.
Do addon authors need more rules? How to deal with such a case is probably not entirely clear. As a simple user of the addons, it is almost impossible to recognize when one addon intentionally adversely affects another. Generally, such behavior would presumably not please the addon databases either.
What do you think about this issue?
