I tell ya, some people demand everything free and served to them by a throng of nude supermodels along with a complimentary foot, back, and e-peen massage. The public "outcry" on the Curse.com forums over their client going premium is simply ridiculous. If anyone bothered to pay attention, the Client was branded as a "Premium Preview" prior to it going live. Why didn't anyone attribute this to a beta service like I did? Well, I'd imagine a few people did. However, now the loudest are heard the most, and they're vicious.
Up above you can see the deal. Premium, for the most part, retains it's automated features, high-speed downloads, gets rid of ads, and you get an orange border for your curse.com avatar. Pricing? I paid a solid 30$ for the next year, quarterly/monthly/weekly gets more expensive. It's not so much the service that I find useful, I do like the automation, but they're giving 20% to addon writers just for using Curse. Kudos to that! This makes me feel much better about having 60+ addons yet not donating for any of them. Seriously a wad of cash there.
High speed downloads? None of these addons are incredibly large or anything. You're not going to wait 10 minutes for your latest version of Squared, or TokenMachine. I tried out the standard before I tossed money into it. Nothing changed THAT much to warrant a vicious public outcry. If you feel entitled to a fully featured free service you're in the wrong day and age. That was SOOO 2001. Bandwidth for 3 major MMO addons is expensive, net advertising has easily dropped 50%, and the Donate button was laughable. Money is required to keep websites alive.
Woo.
Free users can still use the client, albeit one add-on at a time, and it's no longer automatic. It DOES check to see which addons need to be updated, you manually need to click update on each one. You can still download using the Curse Client from the website, or download the raw addon to manually install them. This is not what the Premium client is for.
I guess what I'm getting at, is I see value in the Premium Client. It supports Curse as a whole, and GOOD developers as a whole. The automation has always made my life easy, and it's interchangeable between AoC and WoW along with WAR. Not that I would touch either of those two games. WAR is my love.
So if you use Curse, don't be a cheap bastard if you can help it. Save up 30$ and buy the premium. Support your addon creators and the host site.
