Question about getting banned for an Add-on

Community General Discussion
1

Hey there!

Sorry to post about a question that has probably been asked a couple more times over the years, but I’m really paranoid and I have found conflicting answers about that.

So, as the title says, can I get banned for getting and using add-ons? Obviously, I mean those that do not conflict with the in-game rules. I am thinking about downloading Gathermate 2 for classic Wotlk. The first place I found it on is CurseForge. Is this a good place? Is it considered safe? Which is regarded as being the safest method of downloading/installing these?

From my understanding this one should be ok as it doesn’t automate the gameplay, but I’m still not sure. I’ve read the Anti-Hacking agreement and it touches several points. One of them is game automation, which should be all right here, but the other two say they disallow addons that :

" 1. allows users to modify or ‘hack’ a Blizzard game’s user interface, environment, and/or experience in any way not expressly allowed by Blizzard in the EULA;
2. intercepts, mines or otherwise collects information from or through Blizzard games."

I’m not sure, could this be the case with Gathermate? Does it collects information for the game to be able to save the location of the herbs/mining nodes?

Thanks!

1 Like
2

Most people use curseforge.

I don’t know your specific addon, but if it has a lot of downloads it should be good.

I also felt similar to you btw when starting. Addons feel like cheating, but they are allowed/encouraged (sadly). Here are the rules:

3

Using Gathermate is entirely ok, this doesn’t automate your gameplay and only records where you previously harvested nodes or the past history of harvested nodes from other players.

Caveat: This doesn’t mean the addon won’t change to something illegal later on, just that the current version is fine as is.

Most addons with high downloads are legitimate on Curseforge. Do read the description carefully and beware of potential risks such as previous script exploits with WeakAuaras.

4

You won’t get banned for using Gathermate.
I have been using it for years and I have never had an issue.

5

The thing about the rules set up by game companies in general is that they are always vague so that they can mostly do whatever they want at their discretion.

In general anything that is hosted in places like curseforge, is “legal”.

If an addon ends up doing too much it is not supposed to, they generally change the game to remove that functionality instead of banning people.
Just like they removed the customizable friendly player bars from instances because some addon/ weak aura was showing in 3D which players should stack together for a mythic boss in Legion

The bans are generally reserved for botting.

6

Addons have to rely on blizzards in-game commands. So it simply won’t work any more if blizzard wills it.

Unless it somehow reads the games memory, which shouldn’t be possible for a normal addon.

7

If you’re wishing for a light touch way of doing this then you can download and install Add Ons manually (I do, got sich of the other systems always changing).

I have a text file in my folder:
Games\World of Warcraft_retail_\Interface

This file has the URLs to the Add Ons I use (not very many) such as:
www . curseforge . com/wow/addons/can-i-mog-it
or
www . curseforge . com/wow/addons/map-coords

I go to these URLs and click the Download option which will save a ZIP file to your Downloads folder. I open this ZIP file and copy the contents into the folder:
Games\World of Warcraft_retail_\Interface\AddOns

As you don’t need to do this very often it’s not much of a hassle.

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