MobMap development blog

MobMap v3.20 just went live! This is probably the patch with the most changelog entries in the history of this addon, and even though most of them are rather minor bug fixes and improvements of already-known features, there are some goodies in the bag :)

I have probably spent most time on the quest tracker, which has - after a bit of a rough start - become one of the most beloved features MobMap has to offer. But there is always room for improvements, even if it sometimes takes time (and listening to your users) to find that room.

In v3.20, the quest tracker has first of all undergone some minor enhancements, such as the type of a quest now being indicated in the quest title, or the number of other players (and their names in the tooltip) being shown in the tracker, just like in the Blizzard quest log, and some more minor tweaks. But there have also been major feature additions, one of them being a new "intelligent sorting" mechanism which always attempts to sort the quests in the quest log such that quests with objectives near your current position are at the top, while those for which you first have to travel a while are listed at the bottom. The objectives of quests are internally sorted the same way, of course, always showing you the nearest one first.

The other big change also related to the quest tracker is a new distance calculation method - well, I probably have to explain that one a little bit further. The position of a quest target (which is used for the distance display in the tracker, the new sorting, and shown as waypoint when you click on the question mark next to an objective) has been based on a precalculated position, calculated and stored in the MobMap database while it is created on the server. That works well for single targets at a fixed position, but not so well for targets which are spread out over a large area, like a bunch of mobs populating a whole valley. In such cases, the position has been assumed to be the center of the area, that is the center of all dots on the map, which is of course close, but not really correct (and sometimes even plain wrong, if there's a "hole" in the middle of the area where there are no mobs of a specific type). Especially in such cases, the new dynamic distance/position calculation is a big improvement: it uses the position data stored in MobMap - the same data that generates the dots on the map when you click on the question mark - to find the position on the border of such an area that is closest to your current position, and uses that for distance calculation and waypoint display. Since this calculated target position is updated as you walk, you'll always see the quickest path directly to your target area, not the quickest path to the middle of that area in hope that the stuff you're searching is even there.

Both of these new "features", the sorting by distance and dynamic distance calculation, can of course be deactivated - if you really want to :o) I have found them to be very useful when questing, as they provide you with even better and more accurate information about quest target locations and distances, while still leaving you the choice of what to do next.

But hey, I said "most changelog entries", so there's way more than these two bullet points I've just presented - for the rest, I encourage you to take a look at the full changelog for v3.20 following right after this paragraph. One thing left to say before though: if you encounter any new bugs in 3.20, please leave me a message here in the comments with detailed description and a stack trace, if possible! I'd like this version to be stable and reality-tested before I ready it for the upcoming WoW Patch 3.1.

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- changed: DATABASE FORMAT CHANGE! You will need to get an updated database copy!
- fixed: Token costs are now correctly displayed in the merchant tab
- fixed: The 'Suppress World Map' option setting of the MobMap quest tracker is now saved correctly between sessions
- added: The names of group members which are on a specific quest are now listed in the quest tracker quest tooltips, as well as the total number of group members on a quest which is shown directly in the quest title
- added: The type of a quest is now indicated by a letter in the quest title next to the quest level ("r"=Raid, "g"=Group, "d"=Daily, "p"=PvP)
- added: Shift-clicking a quest in the quest tracker now links the quest in chat
- fixed: Quests with all objectives completed are now correctly colored in the quest tracker
- changed: The color of completed quests in the tracker has been changed from light green to blue to make finished quests more distinguishable from quests below your level
- added: Quest tracker does now also show distance/position of objects where quests can be turned in
- added: Dynamic quest tracker distance calculation if mobs/items/... are spread out over a large area - distance is based on shortest path to the area now instead of a fixed position in the middle of the area. Automatically created TomTom waypoints are also being updated so that they always show the shortest path to the target area.
- added: Intelligent sorting of quest targets by distance has been added (can be disabled in the quest tracker options if you don't want the feature)
- fixed: World Map dots created from coords in quest comments are now displayed on the minimap, too
- fixed: When displaying dots in multiple zones at once, these dots are now displayed on the minimap as well
- changed: The minimap handling has been improved. This lowers the resource consumption and allows the minimap dots to extend to the full minimap size (instead of being displayed only on a part of the minimap around the center)
- added: Configurable background color for the quest tracker

A lot of people like the convenience that comes with automatic addon updater tools like the WoWAceUpdater (R.I.P.) or the popular Wowmatrix. But very, very few people actually know about the mechanics behind those updaters and the implications for addon hosting sites and - most important - addon developers, without which you wouldn't even have anything to update. That's why I want to explain some things first.

The addon development and distribution "business" is largely financed by enthusiasm, donations and advertising revenue. Most addon developers are hobbyists which don't get paid to create and update their tools, but they do it because they love to program, to solve problems in an elegant way and to enhance the experience when playing WoW. Many write addons primarily for themselves, but since there are 12 million WoW players, they see the possibility to give their addon to other players, so their playing experience can be equally enhanced :). Others like the popularity they gain by creating and maintaining an addon which other players find useful. But regardless of the motivation, they choose to offer their addon to other players. But because they don't have any income, they unfortunately have no money to pay for the bandwith required for distribution to thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands of players (except if they choose to invest not only time, but also money into their addon to buy hosting space themselves).

That's where the addon distribution sites - WoWInterface, ui.worldofwar.net, Curse, you name it... - come into play. They are offering two things: a place for players to find many different addons without having to search for them on the whole world wide web, and hosting services for addon developers. This costs money - serious money; if you have ever rented whole servers and paid for larger amounts of bandwidth, you know that both come with a price tag - and since those sites usually belong to commercial companies and are ultimately intended to generate revenue for their owners, they are trying to cover those costs by placing ads on their sites. Those ads are seen by users downloading addons, and the site owners get money for displaying them. A simple concept that benefits all the parties involved.

Some addon authors also host their addons themselves, by renting webspace and paying for their traffic. But in many cases such private addon websites aren't big enough to generate noticeable revenue by selling ad space, or maybe the author does want to keep his website clean. In order to cover the costs for webspace and traffic, the authors often choose a different path: they accept donations from users, create a PayPal account and put a donation link on their sites which is shown when a user downloads the addon, in hope that some users find their addon useful enough to justify a little tip for the developer. This is for example the way I chose with MobMap in the past: I had to rent a whole dedicated server machine (because I have to do some serious data processing on the server to generate the MobMap databases and integrate data uploaded by users) and multiple shared machines as download mirrors to support the day-to-day stuff and the load spikes when new content is released in WoW. To cover those costs, I placed a donation request onto my download page, to make sure every MobMap user sees at least one time in her/his life that I accept donations and has the chance to donate a small amount of money. And thanks to a lot of very supportive people (THANK YOU!!!!) this proved to be a successful model: After some time, I was able to cover all my costs through donations, and sometimes there even was one Euro or two left in the pot at the end of the month, though I never got any serious money out of donations like the QuestHelper maintainer, who claims that he was making a full income on donations. This small compensation for the huge amounts of time involved with creating and maintaining an addon (in my case it amounts to a four-figure-number-of-hours, with more hours waiting in the future; just calculate yourself how much that kind of time would be worth if I got paid the regular hourly rates of an IT professional for it) is also what motivates addon authors using addon distribution sites - which therefore don't have any traffic or hosting expenses - to place donation links on their addons' download page, and it is an absolutely righteous move. Everyone sees the donation option, anyone who wants can freely choose to donate something, and if an addon is useful to at least a small number of people, there always tend to be some guys loving it so much that they consider it worthy enough to donate.

Now we add automatic addon updaters to the picture. These tools try to make it more convenient for players to update or install addons by checking their versions, downloading updates and installing them automatically for all addons a player is using. By doing that, the tools partially remove the addon distribution sites or privately-hosted addon websites from the picture: The player does not have to visit those sites anymore, so he does see neither the advertisements nor the donation requests (and since placing ads or donation requests in-game is explicitly forbidden now, there's no alternative to placing that stuff on the download sites). But the updater tools still have to download the addon files from some place, which generates costs for traffic and hosting, usually paid by the same distribution site or private website owner whose sites the player doesn't visit anymore! From those peoples' viewpoint, the automatic addon updaters kill the income while still creating the costs.

If such an updater tool was created by the distribution site itself from which it downloads addons, that is of course not a problem, since the updater might for example show advertisements for the site owner which cover the bandwidth and hosting costs, and it also doesn't steal any bandwidth but has its traffic paid by the same guy who created the tool. If the updater tool comes from a different party though, there is a problem. This third party essentially profits (for example by creating ad revenue from ads in their tool) and uses bandwidth and hosting services to download its updates, while leaving most of the costs to other people: the distribution site owner or addon author. They, in turn, get cut off from their income sources, be it ad revenue or donations, because the player does neither see the ads nor the donation links when downloading. Every human being with an intact sense for justice can see that this is unfair. Now we have hit the problem!

But it's not the only problem, there are even more. Let's go away from the monetary stuff for a moment and enter the realm of legalese - well, at least a little ;-) don't worry, IANAL. By creating an addon, which is essentially a computer program written in a programming language, his creator has automatically gained copyright over his creation - that is a judicial fact in pretty much every single country that honors intellectual property. Because of this, he has the right to choose the distribution ways he wants to use to hand his creation (or, to be exact, copies of his creation) to other players. Legally, nobody is allowed to (re)distribute an addon to many other people which he hasn't written himself, except if he acquired the necessary permission from the author.

But wait - isn't this exactly what the aforementioned addon distribution sites do? Nope, it's not: all of those sites work such that they only distribute addons which have been uploaded by the author himself to the site. The author essentially grants the distribution site a license to distribute his addon - either explicitly by accepting some legalspeak during the upload procedure or implicitly by just uploading the addon to that site which is dedicated to addon distribution, which is a clear indication that he wants the addon to be distributed. So they are legitimately allowed to offer his addon for download on their website and on their updater tool, if they have one. If the author doesn't want that, he just doesn't submit his addon to the site, or if he has already submitted it, just deletes it. He is in perfect control over the distribution paths to the masses, exactly as it should be to conform to the law.

And this finally brings us to Wowmatrix, a specific and very popular addon updater tool, created by people who probably have never hosted a single addon they're offering themselves and have never asked a single addon author for permission to offer her/his creation on their platform (at least I haven't heard of any such case). They even combine both problems which makes their tool superproblematic (what a linguistic creation ;-)). And they create revenue by doing this, since they display ads in their tool and on their website. Revenue that's generated by ripping addon distribution sites and addon authors alike from their incomes by ad revenue or donations. They also ignore the authors' right to choose the distribution paths, because they just take any addon they like and offer it in their tool. Is that okay? I don't think so - I think Wowmatrix is peeing on exactly those guys who make their "business model" possible in the first place, the addon authors and distribution sites. The tool is essentially a parasite: it feeds itself from stuff (addons, bandwidth) belonging to other people. That is why I have always avoided Wowmatrix, updating addons I've got installed "the old-fashioned way" (which, by the way, is hardly more time-consuming if you follow the good old "don't touch a running system" paradigm and only update addons when there's a reason to: either a new feature you need, an incompatibility after a patch or a fix for a bug that bugs you) even though it is of course convenient to update addons with just one click. I can understand that many users are drawn to this tool because of the comfort it offers, but I hope I made it clear that this comfort has a price tag which is being paid by addon developers losing donations, losing some of their rights, and addon distribution sites losing income they need to pay their hosting and personnel bills. It is up to every user to decide whether he or she wants to take an active role in that rip-off for the personal advantage of a few minutes of saved time.


Now that I've explained the situation (no, this wasn't the actual story ;-)), I can finally come to the reason behind this post: I have forced Wowmatrix to pull MobMap from their list of supported addons. And "forced" is the correct word in this case - but I'll come to that part later. First I'd like to lay out the reasons that drove me to this decision.

MobMap is being distributed either via its website as a manual download or via its own updater program. It needs an own updater tool because that tool has to be able to preprocess and upload collected data from the users' computers. That data is, as you probably know, the main source of information for the MobMap database; without it, MobMap would be just an empty database browser - pretty useless. And in addition to that, the MobMap updater allows to separately update the local MobMap database copy, even when there's no update of the main addon - this is very important, because I only release updates to the main addon when there are any changes in the addon itself, while there usually are multiple new database releases created per day. So if you want easy updates for MobMap and its database, I suggest you to install the updater; it's a small tool, doesn't consume much resources and can be configured either to always run in the background and automatically update stuff or to be run manually whenever you decide that you want to have an update (or want to upload data).

However, I respect those people who don't want to install that tool, for whatever reason. And then there's the Mac users of course, for which I unfortunately cannot offer a similar tool at the moment (and I'm sorry for that, but that's just how it is atm). That is why there have always been manual downloads on the MobMap website: you can just get a zip archive with the addon and database, extract that into your WoW directory (just like any other addon) and you're set. But I noticed that more and more "manual downloads" were not at all "manually": they came from Wowmatrix, whose creators have added MobMap to their addon list and were thus offering MobMap for updates and installations themselves (albeit of course without the possibility to upload collected data or to update the database while there isn't a new MobMap addon version). I counted those downloads for some time and came to a decision: this had to be stopped. Not only am I cut off of donations and ripped off of my legal rights (just like described above), but also MobMap depends entirely on user contribution, which takes place through users uploading data via the MobMapUpdater (I know, there's of course some people who use the manual upload way on the website, but those are - unfortunately - very few, and then there's the fact that the manual upload doesn't contain the same amounts of data as the MobMapUpdater uploads because of limitations of the WoW UI environment). The overwhelming part of those users updating via Wowmatrix were thus essentially "worthless" to MobMap.

So I tried to contact Wowmatrix through their "contact us" form on their website (they have no email address anywhere, I couldn't even find a real address of the company behind the tool on their site - which made me smirk, because usually people tend to hide those infos if they know that the things they do aren't exactly legal ;-) ). I explained politely, but in clear words who I am, why I don't consider it's right what they're doing and what I want: a removal of MobMap from Wowmatrix. Because I've heard several times from other developers who tried the same thing that the Wowmatrix guys tend to be stubborn when it comes to such requests, I decided to block their download requests on my servers, so they had to make a decision fast. And well, they did: I didn't receive any written answer, but two days later, they adjusted their tool to circumvent my (at that point very simple) download blocking mechanism! Not exactly the reaction I hoped for, but a reaction which perfectly fits into the whole picture. They probably thought they could just sit it out.

I responded by improving my server-side filters and by writing another message, this time putting some more pressure onto them: since it would be very difficult and expensive to pursue a legal case against their actions (remember: I don't even know the real address of that company), which is probably why they don't hesitate from violating copyright law in thousands of cases, I thought loudly (read: dropped some hints in the message) about using weak points in their download tool to make having MobMap in their supported addons list very painful for them. I got very creative thinking about such methods, like artificially slowing downloads from their tool down so much that their update cycles would literally take ages to complete if you were using it to update MobMap in a batch update run (as far as I can see, they are using a single thread to do those updates which makes this "attack" very possible), or like just sending garbage to their tool instead of the real zip file - there's lots of possibilities, since in the end, they are leeching their download from my servers, which opens up a nice attack path for me. Of course I didn't implement any of this - and I didn't really want to have to go that far, because in the end, the Wowmatrix users would at least take collateral damage, which has never been one of my goals. I just wanted the Wowmatrix guys to realize that I would not just give up, that I would play the cat-and-mouse-game with them if they really wanted to play it, that I am definitely at least as creative as they are when it comes to "cyber-warfare" and that it might be a good reaction to finally pull MobMap from their addon list just as I politely requested in the first mail, and just as they have to do anyway because they have never asked for the right to distribute it!

And well - suddenly they were cooperative. MobMap vanished from their list of supported addons within minutes, and even though I never got a response on any of my messages I consider this enough of a victory. It's just sad that I first had to get loud enough until they were giving up on playing "dead man".


So, to end this "chapter", I am a little bit sorry for those people who have gotten used to get MobMap updates via Wowmatrix, especially for the Mac users. I know that it may have been comfortable, but that doesn't change that it just hadn't been right, and there are alternative ways for each of you if you still want to continue using the addon. I am also discontent with the current situation of addon updaters, as you could read in the first part of this blog entry, and I hope that one day there might be an updater tool which doesn't make the same mistakes as the current ones. Maybe one which hosts its own download servers, offers addon authors free distribution of their addons - and only supports addons from authors which have explicitly opted in. The system owner might even share a significant part of his advertising revenue with the authors in order to incentivize authors to submit their addons for distribution, and in addition the donation process could be streamlined such that every author could easily place a request/link for donations next to the description of his addon in the download tool. The Curse updater tool seemed to tend into this direction when I last checked, but I remember the program as being pretty clumsy and bug-ridden (again: when I last checked, which was a while ago), so there definitely is still a lot of room for improvements - and for ultimately getting addon authors, distributors and users in a symbiotic relationship from which everyone profits.


Oh yeah, there was another thing, and I promise to keep that one short: expect a new MobMap release relatively soon :o) It's currently in the final testing stages and contains a whole lot of bugfixes and improvements, essentially it is full of polishing of already-known features.