WowAceUpdater goes the way of the dodo
At noon today, Kaelten of WowAce fame posted a thread on the WowAce forums discussing the future of their massively popular project. There's quite a bit of nitty gritty coder lingo that you don't really need to know unless you're involved in WowAce, but there's other important information for us normal folk, too.
First, a few obvious things are pointed out. One, WowAce became big. Really, really big, and I imagine much bigger than they had ever imagined. The way WowAce is set up doesn't work so well with that much of a load and that many mods and packages being developed. Additionally, the amount of bandwidth they used monthly is absolutely enormous.
To quote: "As it currently stands files.wowace.com pushes out an incredible amount of addon updates. In an average month we're talking about more than thirty terabytes of data! In a busy month clearing sixty is no problem, and I don't even want to talk about what happens on major patch days."
As you can imagine, you sort of need a little funding to keep up with that. Their relationship with Curse has allowed some help with hosting, but the WowAceUpdater and the like still need a little financial backing. As we know from before, ad-based revenue did not really work out for them for various reasons, one of which is probably the shaky security concerns WoW has had combined with the old flash exploit targetting flash-based ads, I imagine. Because of this, Kaelten's primary note of his post is that WowAce will be using CurseForge's software and the WowAceUpdater will be no more, with Curse's client taking its place. For the fine details, head on over to Kaelten's thread. This is a little frightening for the people that rely on the WAU, but Kaelten is directly involved with the CurseForge project, so this will actually allow him to contribute more to WowAce, as he points out.
[ Thanks, Kompost! ]
