Hello, friends.
We're launching Curse Premium today and I'm sure some are wondering about the effect that Premium will have on authors.
All authors will have complimentary premium. Yes, this could lead to gaming the system and creating fake projects for the sake of it, but we have a manual approval process, and we will investigate any reports of said gaming. Please, don't ruin it for the real authors. It will be one or two weeks before complimentary premium is provided for authors.
We are also launching our Author Rewards Program (ARP). 20% of the revenue generated from Curse Premium will go towards the ARP. Some of you may have heard about it, but I'll describe it now:
One of the main reasons Curse.com has become so successful is due to the addons it distributes. These addons obviously are created by the addon authors, our content producers. As a way to reward our content producers, we are launching the ARP. We will grant addon and library authors Reward Points (henceforth called points) based on said addon's popularity; for libraries, it will be based on the popularity of the addons using said library.
Points will start accumulating now that premium is launched, but the CurseForge author store will not be available to redeem from until details have been worked out, likely a month from now.
We aren't going to release the full details of the algorithms we use to calculate points, to help limit gaming the system, but the general idea is as such:
- Every day at 16:00 UTC, we start the point generation
- An addon (or library)'s score is generated with our algorithm.
- Score is then compared against all other addons, to calculate the percentage.
- We then multiply that percentage by the amount of points we're granting that day, and grant the result to the project.
- The points of the project are then subsequently divvied up based on the project manager's reward splits.
- Points can then be spent at the CurseForge store to redeem for various items, currently Amazon Gift Cards (we will expand our inventory in the future). Note: we will support some non-United States goods and more may be added on request.
There are some complications with all this, though:
- If you redeem more than 12000 points in a given year, we will need extra tax information from you. Since this will occur for only a handful of authors, we will work with you on a one-to-one basis.
- Due to tax issues and the like, there will be a new terms of service agreement that you will have to agree to in order to accrue points. Our lawyers are currently reviewing this and it should be ready soon.
- For non-United States authors, there may be extra tax issues related, which we should be able to work out on a one-to-one basis. Authors who have already opted-in will have to agree to the new terms of service in order to use the store.
We've already started granting points to authors. To see your points, go to http://www.CurseForge.com/home/ and check the bottom-left.
Update: Authors should now have free premium if you have a project with at least 1000 downloads. The 1000 number should hopefully limit gaming the system somewhat. If you have a legitimate addon, getting 1000 downloads should not be hard to do, especially with the number of users that use Curse.
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Posted May 1, 2009I would most probably get Premium, but not as long as PayPal refuses to proceed without a credit card linked to my account. I linked my bank account with PP and allowed PP to charge it as soon as I pay anything via PP and am not willing to get a credit card just for having one for my PP account.
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Posted Apr 30, 2009I love the Idea that now all the authors will get a piece of the action when it comes to donations instead of having to singly go through each and donate individually. The only problem I have with the package deal is that I can not use my Army Europe Mailing address. IE "APO" is the city and "AE" is the state. This is a American mailing adress to. But in all WOWACE you guys rock for addons. And as soon as I can get the package I will be sending money to ya all. And if there is any way the old wowace updater was so much nicer and cleaner of a updater. Suggestion, that one looked and worked better.
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Posted Apr 30, 2009@gremoire: If we gift more than $600 in a year, then tax issues arise. To be honest, I'm not the one handling all this, our accounting department is.
@kunda: You can download your own addons without flash or captchas here on curseforge, to allow for people to make scripts if they want. We can't allow that for all files, as if a scraper got a hold of your username and password, they could use that to get all the links, which we can't support.
@Daviesh: This is a bug I'm trying to fix, typically, you can just keep trying and it will work.
@dr_AllCOM3: The main reason we shut down WowMatrix was because of undue financial burden they placed on our servers and bandwidth. Also, many authors (including myself) did not want their addons hosted on WowMatrix, we accomplished that by making it too hard to scrape.
@Shevaresh: This is completely off-topic for this article. If you wish to discuss the Curse Client or the non-author aspects of Curse Premium, you may do so on curse.com.
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Posted Apr 30, 2009cknight:
What you aren't mentioning and may be forgetting or ignoring is that the free Curse Client is a steaming pile of donkey waste. From a UI face, WoWAceUpdater was passably ok, WoWMatrix was just about perfect - and Curse Client is awful. [Note that I do not approve of how WoWMatrix stole bandwidth, but their sense of UI actually was quite good]. I would be willing to pay WoWMatrix to use their client, if they were hosting the (current) files. Curse can go do unprintable things to themselves.
Edit: Eh, a bit offtopic I suppose. There is a connection though; cknight is singing the praises of Curse Premium, which is a paid service. My point is that I wouldn't use the paid service, and I wouldn't trust Curse to divvy up and pay using real accounting. (as opposed to "Hollywood Accounting", where a movie that nets $300 million dollars doesn't make a profit)
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Posted Apr 30, 2009dr_AllCOM3: If WoWMatrix actually hosted their own files and got authors' permission to distribute them, you might have an argument.
RLKirkland: Yeah, and they didn't host any of the files they were "providing", either.
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Posted Apr 30, 2009They raised an issue with the manner in which wowmatrix made money. wowmatrix made money with an updater that used another company's bandwith...
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Posted Apr 30, 2009first you whine about wowmatrix making money with their updater then you do the same...
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Posted Apr 30, 2009The 'reward split' page crashes if the project manager has less than 10% of the reward split. If you want all the rewards to go to the co-authors for whatever reason, you can't do it at the moment.
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Posted Apr 29, 2009As an author I want simply manually ( without a client ) download addons from the site I support ( with my addons ) without any kind of 3rd party authentication.
Please remove the recaptcha.net/whatever-authentication! Thanks.
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Posted Apr 29, 2009At least WowMatrix didn't ask me to pay to use the update all button :(
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Posted Apr 29, 2009Hi,
Just my 2 cents.
1. If you give me a gift card and then ask for my tax info, I will tell you NO. Gift Card <> Cash.
2. Have you cleared your Author Rewards Program (ARP) with Blizzard? As this might be out of line with the Blizzard Addon Policies.
Sad to say, but I think Curse/Wowace is going to lose some followers with this move.
Cheers Curse, Cheers WowAce, Hallo WowInterface
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Posted Apr 29, 2009@xbeeps: go to the addon, it lists the relationships on the details page. You can also go to a library and view its reverse relationships.
You can also ask authors to manually set up embedded libs without embedding by settings their default repository relationships.
@xDimka: the Curse Client is still available to you as a non-premium user. You'll find it's quite functional.
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Posted Apr 29, 2009fucking capitalists, I never give you money for crashing/bugged/self installed curseprofiler client, burn in hell
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Posted Apr 29, 2009Is there a way to check which addons are listed as using a certain library? For example LibHealComm-3.0 is included in Healbot, but i don't think it follows the regular embedding way, so "the system" probably does not know it. Similarly, X-Perl also supports LibHealComm-3.0 but it does not include it, it just checks if it is loaded and then starts using it if present.