The Buddy Store...Worst Idea the Buddy Team has ever had?

[ryftobuddy]

Thank you for the link, Vamp. I removed that section of my post.

Please also keep in mind that telling people to just develop on their own is an asinine argument. This thread wasn't created to say that third party development is a bad idea, I've tried to convey that throughout my posts. It was created to state how I feel about the store and to voice concerns I've thought of since I found out about the store. It was also created to get others opinions on the matter.

 

[vamp]

I can see why you read my post as suggesting people to develop on their own, but it wasn't my intention. I was more suggesting that we should cross that bridge if or when we get to it, so to speak, by discussing current affairs rather than hypothesised ones such as outdated profiles - perhaps the buddy team already have their own solution to this already.

I don't want to you to think that I disagree with you completely - I do not - in fact I think the buddy team may even be viewed as slightly skewing people in favour of the store. With the update many if not all profiles were broken. When updated, there would be great incentive to host these new updated profiles on the store. This, even though theory, could lead to people speculating the buddy devs intentionally caused dissatisfaction with their product over generating products (a claim the majority have already made against Blizzard, I'm sure.)

All in all, I'm saying that while I do disagree that the buddy store is the "worst idea" possible, I do agree that it can in fact be an extremely slippery slope, but I think it's very important to remember that no one here is entitled to the products that the developers create apart from Honorbuddy itself - that's why I somewhat thought your anger at the pricing was misplaced.

 

[ryftobuddy]

I'm not so much mad at the pricing, it more leaves me shaking my head that someone would feel that their plugin is worth 2-3 times what the actual bot sells for itself.

Bossland pointed out that he doesn't see a lot of sales at some of the price points that have been presented. I completely agree with him. Although some people may see the benefit of a 50 euro bot base, I don't see a lot of sells at that.

Some posts and threads have already been started that point out one of the major shortcomings in the store already: A feedback/testimonials system should definitely be put in place ASAP. I don't think I would even spend .99 on a profile if I couldn't fist see what other people think of the profile.

 

[ryftobuddy]

Another question...

Has a policy been put in place that protects developer's profiles? What's preventing someone from taking a developer's code, slightly changing it and selling at half the price of the original creator?

 

[Hopp]

Why would someone take HIS time and knowledge to create something for FREE which is later on used to make REAL money?
Why would a developer do that and not getting anything in return? To benefit comunity? Give me a break, ppl were and are selling private profiles
since forever and making a buddy shop is only a step into user-friendly direction ... if myself needs an app / plugin ... whatever i can simply browse
a high rated profile in buddy shop ... buy it and i will be 100% its safe ... up-to date and really owerall its an awesome idea and to bad they haven't implemented it
from the start.

I am just amazed that there isnt a monthly sub to bosslands product ... how are they making a living off one time / life time licenses is beyond me.


ps

Another question...

Has a policy been put in place that protects developer's profiles? What's preventing someone from taking a developer's code, slightly changing it and selling at half the price of the original creator?

Why are you concerned about this? Are you a dev? You plan to release something in buddyshop? - reading your posts i am guessing its a no because you are for F2P model so anything you will make will be free
for community even tho you sink 100 hours of your time into project + countless hours of support and bug fixing.

 

[Gentoo]

Although some people may see the benefit of a 50 euro bot base, I don't see a lot of sells at that.

Ohhh, i bet they will sell 10 or so..

Of course, if it was $10 bucks, they could sell a thousand..

 

[Croga]

I think the Buddy Store will be the death of the HB community.....

Why would I, now, develop something for free if it's so easy to make money off of it?
Why, then, would I share my knowledge of HB coding with the community if I could keep it for myself and thus make more money off of it?
How, then, is anyone ever going to start programming for HB if there's no one to help him with it?

In the end, this will kill the community. No one will help anyone out anymore, no one will offer their stuff for free and thus no one will use HB anymore. Take a gun, point it at your foot, pull trigger.

Next to that; I've found that a lot of the stuff that was for sale outside the Buddy Store was of pisspoor quality. I'm going to assume that there'll be a lot of that in the Buddy Store as well with all the complaints and claims that come from that. And they will not be directed at the one putting it up for sale since he's not an important party. All the flack will be pointed straight at the buddy team....

No, this was, is and will be a bad idea.

THEN you start to look at the prices.... The reason the Android, iOS, OSX, Windows app stores work is because stuff on it costs NOTHING. I'm not paying $40 for a routine.. Heck, I'm not paying $40 for ANYTHING. A bot base for $50? Completely ridiculous. Some people just have a very inflated sense of their value. And anything that goes wrong with something like that, any bug, any issue, believe me, the flack is going to come in tenfold!

Okay, rant almost over, just one more. To demonstrate the folly and the community-killerness of this store:
Back in the Cata days, there were a couple of profiles to run daily quests. Each profile did one set of dailies. One profile for the island, one profile for fishing, one for cooking, etc.
I took all those profiles and combined them into one smooth experience. Set your toon, click buddy, start profile, come back 3 hours later they're all done. And it was a huge success!
Now say I'd like to put that in the store..... can I? I mean; the total work is my work but it contains a lot of work from a lot of different people. Who's going to get the money?
And with that risk in mind, no one will even build the first set of profiles. They're not interesting enough to sell and the risk of someone else monetizing them makes sure they won't put them up for free.
Death of the community, right there.

 

[Tony]

Another question...

Has a policy been put in place that protects developer's profiles? What's preventing someone from taking a developer's code, slightly changing it and selling at half the price of the original creator?

wont happen,i can tell you

 

[Tony]

Buddy Store is here to prevent scam and protect users

Keep in mind that it was requested by users and 3rd party developers

for those who dont like the idea,we respect your opinion but no one will force to use the store

you can keep using your bots as always

 

[Hawker]

Interesting thread. ryftobuddy is concerned that plugins which were sold on third party websites are now sold on the buddy website. He is also concerned that we created a risk that no-one ever shares a profile or a plugin again.

We share that concern but we also have to listen to users who complained about having to go all over the Internet to buy botbases, combat routines and the like. Our usage statistic show that over 10% of our users have done this. The Buddy Store is designed to meet the needs of these users.

Making profiles and coding routines is rewarding and releasing them for free is a great way to get any bugs ironed out. I expect that we will continue to see people do this as part of the botting community. The buddy team will continue to put out free products and if a user wants to buy something extra we hope the store gives them a safe place to do so. Before making a judgement on whether or not this has been a good decision, we need to see how the launch of WoD is supported by the community so its best suspend judgement for 6 months.

 

[Kavol]

How does that benefit the community as a whole? How can you guarantee that people are going to actually get this project? Weischeiber has disappeared a couple times on users and stopped supporting projects.

Weischbier replied to someone with similar concerns to yours in his CR thread.

Reasonable concern, but everyone who offers a product had to sign an agreement which involves a minimum support time of either 18 months or up until a new expansion.

https://www.thebuddyforum.com/honor...necrophilia-support-thread-3.html#post1605394

 

[Trixiap]

Problem is, that Buddy store can make HB unusable for ordinary ppl (ppl how know how to program can make their own stuff if they really don´t want pay). Your bot is not free, but basically it is just framework that is able to run other´s work (profiles, plugins, botbase etc.). When buddy store will be full and free forum will be mostly empty, ordinary user will be very angry, when he found that bot can´t do anything without more money and products from Buddy store.

Also as i said in previous msg, thing that most concerning me is quality of product on store. I am not against TuanHA CC and other really good project that are well supported and updated. I am against crap non random profiles that mostly result in your ban, plugins that do one or two things that are not even usefull etc. I am just afraid of buddy store full of paid crap.

Make some rules and enforce quality of paid products

Also how is handled product, that is derived from work of others (when their work is free here on forum) and creator want to put it on Buddy store. Money will go to creator of this new product/something will go to original dev/product like that are not allowed to be on Buddy store?

Reasonable concern, but everyone who offers a product had to sign an agreement which involves a minimum support time of either 18 months or up until a new expansion.

That is more terrifying, because new expansion is here in 3 months...

 

[DaSoul]

There's a 3 simple reasons why I hate that they're now allowing devs to sell their CR/Plugins/Bots:

1. Paid to play is simply evil. I hate companies that try to monetize items that never should've been paid items in the first place.
2. The buddy team was created as an open community. The Buddy team enforced it as such for years.
3. This sets a dangerous precedence moving forward. If the Buddy team is accepting even 1% of the profits from the sales of these items, they are partially responsible for everything produced and posted on their site.

1. Why on earth should a private non-hb-team related person, spend their free time for nothing? Why? If a developer decides or thinks HIS spent time is worth something, why shouldn't he be allowed to charge for it? You don't have to buy a premium cc or profile. You can a) do it on your own b) use what is available and has always been. You don't need to buy anything to be able to use honorbuddy's features. (Arena isn't officially supported.)

2. Yes they did but where is the problem now? Don't you think this community has grown through all those no called community devs? For a lot of cc's there are even awesome free versions. You just paid for the bot, nothing more, nothing less. Where would we stand if nobody would sacrifice their own time, to support and contribute to the community? Years in the past!

3. If you buy a chainsaw on amazon and cut off your foot or whatever can you blame amazon? NO. Same here, if they offer the shop as a platform and you buy something from a 3rd party you have a purchase agreement between you and this 3rd party developer.

I think it is great and i hope this encourages more people with skills to create new and awesome stuff.

Also from an economic viewpoint, you can't say the bot costs XX so why does a cc cost XX more.
The user base of the bot itself is thousand times bigger, than the user base of a paid custom class.

I own demonic and i can only recommend it and if i switch my class i don't hesistate buying a new one as they simply improve the bot a lot. I also think it is a good price. Come on, ~20€ for a lifetime premium cc is nothing and you get updates all the time.

You go out drink some cocktails and already spent multiple times that amount...seriously.

 

[bossland]

Problem is, that Buddy store can make HB unusable for ordinary ppl (ppl how know how to program can make their own stuff if they really don´t want pay). Your bot is not free, but basically it is just framework that is able to run other´s work (profiles, plugins, botbase etc.). When buddy store will be full and free forum will be mostly empty, ordinary user will be very angry, when he found that bot can´t do anything without more money and products from Buddy store.

Since when can Honorbuddy do nothing? From what i believe, we do offer nearly everything. It is like with the computer you want to buy, a computer that is 15 % faster costs twice the price. I dissalow your idea that Honorbuddy is a shell and to make it work you need to pay for everything else.

 

[Trixiap]

It was badly described..

I wanted to say, that specific task like skilling profession, miling, disenchanting etc. are provided by community devs, not by HB itself. Yes HB team developed bot for almost every situation in game, but some bots need profiles that are not shipped with HB.
For example - skining/LW, mill/dis, achievement hunting, dailies, rare hunt etc.

It is not problem now, but can be in future when ppl will have very easy way how to monetize every small profil/plugin, they will not (probably) release it to community like today

I know that there are some rules what can be on store, but I didn´t found it on forum
Edit: I found it https://www.thebuddyforum.com/thebuddystore/174199-project-store.html

I hope that it will work like described in linked topic (quality control etc), because then Buddy Store is good tool

 

[xtreme3881]

Brodie was never FREE or it wasn't for sometime. Yes, he had a free version but had a premium version for AT LEAST 12 months.

 

[ryftobuddy]

So the Buddy team is requiring a dev to agree to support a product for 18 months, or up until the next expansion...How on earth do you plan to enforce that?

If I'm a dev in the US, I sell 1,000 of my plugins and then abandon the project after I'm paid by the Buddy team. What are you going to do? Sue the dev? Good luck with that with you being in Germany and me being in the US. (This is a purely a hypothetical situation)

My biggest fear right now was mentioned by another user earlier in the thread. This basically gives no developer a reason to produce anything but a paid project. That open community sense goes completely out the window. Thus, the paid to play sense of things.

Allnei does make an excellent point, Bossland. You guys may have created some awesome botbases, but you've failed at creating usable profiles for those botbases. Professionbuddy and Gatherbuddy are prime examples of this. You may have created a few basic profiles, but you haven't created or tweaked them since their creation. With professionbuddy, not all professions were ever implemented and users have had to rely on third party devs for those profiles.

Is that a bad thing? No, not at all, I'm happy that there's people that create said profiles, I've even created a couple myself for personal use. But your product does become a pay to play product when you release half the functions and then rely on third party devs to fill those functions in. This is the same thing with a lot of online games. Sure, you can play the first 2 levels of this awesome game, but if you want the 20 other levels, you're going to have to pay for them.

 

[Giwin]

So the Buddy team is requiring a dev to agree to support a product for 18 months, or up until the next expansion...How on earth do you plan to enforce that?

a percentage would be kept of their profits and would be given to them at the end of the 18 months contract, otherwise that money could be used for... something else. (this isn't actually happening, just a suggestion from me)

 

[paxxx]

I think the Buddy Store will be the death of the HB community.....

Why would I, now, develop something for free if it's so easy to make money off of it?
Why, then, would I share my knowledge of HB coding with the community if I could keep it for myself and thus make more money off of it?
How, then, is anyone ever going to start programming for HB if there's no one to help him with it?

In the end, this will kill the community. No one will help anyone out anymore, no one will offer their stuff for free and thus no one will use HB anymore. Take a gun, point it at your foot, pull trigger.

Next to that; I've found that a lot of the stuff that was for sale outside the Buddy Store was of pisspoor quality. I'm going to assume that there'll be a lot of that in the Buddy Store as well with all the complaints and claims that come from that. And they will not be directed at the one putting it up for sale since he's not an important party. All the flack will be pointed straight at the buddy team....

No, this was, is and will be a bad idea.

THEN you start to look at the prices.... The reason the Android, iOS, OSX, Windows app stores work is because stuff on it costs NOTHING. I'm not paying $40 for a routine.. Heck, I'm not paying $40 for ANYTHING. A bot base for $50? Completely ridiculous. Some people just have a very inflated sense of their value. And anything that goes wrong with something like that, any bug, any issue, believe me, the flack is going to come in tenfold!

Okay, rant almost over, just one more. To demonstrate the folly and the community-killerness of this store:
Back in the Cata days, there were a couple of profiles to run daily quests. Each profile did one set of dailies. One profile for the island, one profile for fishing, one for cooking, etc.
I took all those profiles and combined them into one smooth experience. Set your toon, click buddy, start profile, come back 3 hours later they're all done. And it was a huge success!
Now say I'd like to put that in the store..... can I? I mean; the total work is my work but it contains a lot of work from a lot of different people. Who's going to get the money?
And with that risk in mind, no one will even build the first set of profiles. They're not interesting enough to sell and the risk of someone else monetizing them makes sure they won't put them up for free.
Death of the community, right there.

Fully signed. Nothing more to say.

 

[laria]

people sold profiles in the past and people gave their profiles away for free in the past. Those with an altruistic motive won't become greedy all of a sudden.