[carboniteaddon]

Could 2 programmers quit their full time game programming jobs and work on an addon 40-60 hours a week for 9 months and live off of donations? I'm certain they couldn't. We have spent a large amount of money developing this addon and think it is only fair that we get paid. Sure we could of stayed at our jobs and worked on this on the weekends and it would have 25% of the features it has now.

How many addons get abandoned in their lifetime? I've been playing WOW for 3 years now and have had several addons go belly up on me or switch authors. They have no major incentive to continue work after they get bored. They have no obligation to the user. Questhelper was already abandoned 2 months after it was first released and picked up by a different person.

You can say it is crippled. The same way Visual Studio Express, Kerio Personal Firewall, AntiVir Personal Edition or many other software items are crippled. I use Kerio and AntiVir for free and they work great, but want more features in Visual Studio, so I pay for it.

I use Auctioneer and switched to their "Advanced" version a few months back. It is a great addon, but like most things, I like some of what they changed and disliked other changes. I could contact them and say "do it my way", but I don't. I'm nobody to them and they don't owe me anything. I bet if they all quit their jobs and did nothing else, it would be done faster and even cooler.

Bottom line is people are paying us to write an addon, so we care and are obligated. We spend more time working on the addons than most if not all other addon authors. In the last 5 weeks I've personally posted 251 times in our forums, answered dozens of email and posts on other forums. We listen to our customers as reading our forums will show. I have 21 items on my todo list, most of which were requested by customers. We have released a total of 9 updates to our 2 addons in the last 5 weeks and will continue to do so. Our price is very affordable. Don't eat out for lunch one time and you would have the money for 6 months of Carbonite updates, tons of features and support. Look at the price of leveling guides or gold selling. You could buy years of Carbonite updates for what they charge. If you don't want to pay, then use Carbonite Quest. It works well and we have many improvements planned for it in the future.

To quote a great book "A worker is worth his wages".

This is my personal opinion and is not an "official" CBC response.

Thx,
faatal