Interesting Change in WoW ToS
 

Section 13f now has this condition:

So, what do you think this means? And what impact do you foresee it having on the modding community?

(Remember, keep the discussion civil)

I think the biggest thing is that this is a CYA move on their part in case there is need to do so.

Perhaps against mods they feel are against the spirit of the game that they cannot disable without crippling the default ui as well.

Response by Slouken to the thread on the Blizzard forum:

I think a list of unapproved mods would be much better. For example I'd hate to get banned because the mods I use aren't on the list, yet they do nothing wrong.

/agreed :-P

Sometimes I wish blizzard would try to work with the mod community a little bit more than they do. But hell sometimes it seems they have a hard time working withe ach other. as their own code suggests at time.

Yeah, white listing is a bad idea. If Blizzard is to do something of this nature, black listing would be the perfered method.

And apparently this was just broadcast server-wide in-game:

This has been in the ToS since May
 

As I have said on the WoW forums as well, this has actually been in the ToS since May. You can view the complete ToS, together with the date signature of WoW_TOU_enNA_20050505 in the top right corner, at

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.htm

therefore the in-game messages are totally unrelated to this. Also, Blizzard hasn't abided by section 10 of the ToS which states:

"Blizzard Entertainment reserves the right, at its sole and absolute discretion, to change [...] the terms and conditions of this Agreement at any time [...], effective upon prior notice as follows: Blizzard Entertainment will post notification of any such changes to World of Warcraft on the World of Warcraft website and will post any revised Terms of Use in this location [...]"

Where "this location" refers to the ToS page above. What this means is that Blizzard should have given notice of the changes to the ToS in a prominent, visible way on the main World of Warcraft web page. Since they haven't done so, it can be argued that any changes to the ToS since the original version are void.

It is doubtful that this is a move on their part to "Prevent 3rd-party addons" as much as to prevent "unapproved addons". When I say unapproved, I mean addons that could and might circumvent account security, provide unbalanced gameplay, or any of the other various things Blizzard is obviously actively trying to prevent.

I wouldn't get upset or worry that they may be taking away our ability to make addons or anything. The in-game broadcast was most likely a preventative measure as they were probably getting a high escalation in support calls due to addons that were not updated yet for the recent patch (and there are several changes that could make that a problem)