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Unfortunately having just posted an update about the Lunar Festival and recommended the Tour Guide plug-in, various rumours were flying about the sudden withdrawal of the TourGuide mod from curse and wowinterface. What had happened, where had it gone, would it be coming back again? Nothing was posted on the author's web site and it had also disappeared off the listing there.
Luckily WoW Pro has the details - TourGuide has been bought by a levelling guide maker and so won't be available for free any more. The author's web site now has a couple of posts here and here explaining what has happened. For now, only purchasers of the levelling guide will get access to TourGuide, although anyone with it already installed can continue to use it.
It's hard for me to get worked up about this though - the mod was free software and thus the author can do what he wants with it. If he wants to take an opportunity to make some money from his hard work, good luck to him. We didn't have any guarantee he would continue to maintain it, or just dump it like so many other mods, or withdraw it. In that way, its quite nice the author has made sure those of us still using TourGuide can continue to do so. Also there is no monopoly on TourGuide-like mods or anything preventing anyone from coding a different one (apart from a lot of hard work of course).
WoW Pro did have a levelling mod before they switched to TourGuide and it seems they are planning on developing a new mod, or resurrecting their old one. Good luck to them. Given that new mods spring up to fill gaps in the WoW community, I hope authors have an incentive to develop their own TourGuide-like mod, now that the defacto one is no longer around.
For now, anyone with TourGuide installed can continue to use it, although I don't think anyone will be publishing guides for it any more (free or otherwise), so it's use will become limited once Cataclysm hits. I will probably leave my Hallow's End guide up, but there is little incentive to develop it further. Farewell TourGuide!
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5 comments:
That won't last long. Selling mods is against the TOS now.
@ Anonymous...
They are not selling a mod, they are selling a leveling guide, that includes a free download of a mod.
But also, it is not against ToS to sell a mod, it is against ToS to solicit payment or donations from within the game via the mod interface. there is nothing preventing you from selling the download of the mod itself.
Also I like to use QuestHelper. I find it really effective for leveling and quest completion.
Skraps, selling a mod definitely is against the ToS now, check them yourself.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/ui.html
1) Add-ons must be free of charge.
All add-ons must be distributed free of charge. Developers may not create "premium" versions of add-ons with additional for-pay features, charge money to download an add-on, charge for services related to the add-on, or otherwise require some form of monetary compensation to download or access an add-on.
Interestingly the guide site who bought TourGuide claims that "this means that TourGuide will remain free for public download and will, most likely, be improved". Now I cannot find a download link on their site to get this free version of TourGuide at the moment.
In their forums their admin says "Right now TourGuide cannot be downloaded. We are finalizing our plans for TourGuide and should have more information, and some exciting news, very soon". They also posted later that they were going to make it available for download "soon" so at some point it will become available for free download again.
On the selling a mod thing, they claim they are not selling the levelling mod but the actual guides... which I guess are plugins to the mod and they would claim not actually a mod, more some lua data. Whether that holds up is I guess for Blizzard to decide if they are interested in persuing it. I would say you seem to have to register to get their mod and trial guide for "free".
WoW-Pro has their version out now. I have always found it to be much better than QH.
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