Originally Posted by Zordral
You managed to wield the 'stick' pretty well and you timed it just right so it would generate the most attention. If that was your goal, congrats.
But what about the 'carrot'? Have you left your customers with a legitimate equivalent service? If you want to change your customers' behavior you have to give folks a good, positive, reason to change not just a punishment for doing otherwise. Look at this way, if WM was not something folks wanted would the bandwidth being used even be an issue?
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, it looks like you are punishing people for picking an interface that better suits their needs. It is unfortunate that the better mouse trap in this case invalidates your business model. Perhaps you need to re-think your revenue streams or enter into a partnership.
Were other alternatives investigated other than alienating a large number of your customers? I don't want to see WI or Curse go away but obviously there is a better way to do things.
I sincerely hope that WI and Curse can adapt and keep on going. But what happens if the WM site does start to host their own content and provide hosting facilities for addon authors? Just something to think about.
-Z
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The flaw in this argument is that the affected people are
NOT their customers. Nobody being impacted is a WI or Curse customer. They're WowMatrix customers (if they can really be called that).
If WM doesn't want their users negatively impacted by these sorts of things, maybe they should host downloads themselves. Problem solved.
Of course they don't do that, since it would cost them money. Having someone else pay the costs so WM can make a profit is a pretty good business model for WM, not so much for everybody else.
I find it pretty sad how many people actually think what WM does is acceptable because the client is good. The fact is WM actually provides half of the necessary service (the client). The other half they're ripping off, and if the backend providers decide to take measures to prevent it, WM users only have one legitimate group to complain at: WM staff for failing to provide a working backend themselves.