Drama in Aceland - the post I won’t write

Following the changes brought by patch 2.2 I’ve had to spend some time on the wowace forums, to understand what had changed and why it did. And let me tell you, there’s enough underlying drama in there for the time being to give AFK Gamer stuff to write about.

After reading thread after thread in there, I’ve been pondering writing a snarky comment over the whole situation. I probably won’t write that post though.

The bare facts, as far as I understood them:

• The Ace team is unsatisfied with Ace2 in its current form, as it suffers from creeping featurism (read: overbloat if you don’t know the hacker’s jargon)
• When discussing the way forward, most of the Ace team started on discussing Ace3. Currently, there’s nothing useable coded on that yet.
• One of the Ace community’s most prolific coders, ckKnight (author of FuBar, Cartographer, PitBull and the recently-reviewed Parrot, as well as several key Ace libraries) didn’t agree with the design philosophy behind Ace3, so he started working on his own framework independently
• Not restrained by the inertia inherent to Design Comitees, he was able to release working betas of his framwork, now christened Rock, one week before patch 2.2, with all of his addons now using the new framework
• At that point, Drama (which had probably been brewing for some time on dev chats) broke out on the Ace forums, in the midst of various posts from users trying to understand what happened to their addons.
• And as usual, you get all the key components: The Ace3 devs who are pissed off Ckknight sniping around with snide comments, Ckknight defending himself, and their respective supporters and fanbois duking it out together. You have some devs who sort of retaliate by forking Ckknight addons and dubbing them FuBarAce and CartAce (completely betraying the spirit and philosophy they had been trying to hold for the past year or so but hiding behind the GPL), people protesting that, Ace forum admins threatening to ban posters for excessive drama… if they happen to be on the other side of the fence, while their own camp gets a free pass and they themselves indulge in mud-slinging (yes, Mikk, that means you). You get the users who update with WAU or WUU and have issues complaining that they don’t like change, veterans telling them not to use auto-updaters or if they do, to quit complaining. And of course, the initial Rock config which wasn’t really that good immediately generated a thousand antis writing off Rock as junk and adding support to aforementionned forking of Ckk’s addons (RockConfig is a lot better these days BTW), and established FuBar plugins breaking with the new FubarAce already, and finger-pointing going back and forth.

This is normally the point in the post I won’t write where I’d write some paragraph essentially telling everyone to grow the hell up and drawing parallels with Jeff Kaplan (if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that wouldn’t have been flattering). But there’s little point in doing that.

Matter of fact, the way things are going, there probably won’t be a reconciliation between Ckk and the Ace3 gang. They will probably part ways (and servers) in a couple of weeks. You will get, again, a long time period where a ton of people will root for Ace because of the brand and perhaps a smaller, similar following created around Rock. The ace forks of FuBar and Cartographer will start becoming incompatible with Ckk’s own versions. Rock’s adoption as a framework will depend, in essence, on its usage by other devs, and that, in turn, will depend on two factors: Rock’s inherent qualities and Ace3’s own progress and quality.

Rock has two things going for it, the first one is that it’s out and in a working condition. The second one Ckk’s reputation as someone who has been churning out high-quality add-ons for a long time (yes, I actually am a fanboy). There’s also a third element helping Rock, which is that libraries under the Ace3 standard should be framework independent.

For us, the end-users, this should all matter little. Neither Ace3 nor Rock should, at least with the current intentions, become as bloated and cluttered as Ace2 is, so running both in parallel won’t really add much load (I have all of Ckk’s stuff running right now, and in PerformanceFu, Rock doesn’t even register among the top 10 while Ace is the biggest memory hog). If the libraries are indeed going to evolve into framework-independent elements, there won’t be any needless duplicate code running except the core framework functions. Cartographer, PitBull, Parrot and CowTip are simply too good addons to pass up, especially for an ill-placed worship of the Ace brand.

FuBar is a different matter, however, as it serves as the configuration placeholder for much of the other Ace add-ons. Forking it into FuBarAce wasn’t just petty, it’s also a good way to speed up the split between Rock and Ace. It’s spiteful, it’s childish, and justifying it by hiding behind the GPL is about as elegant as some of Microsoft’s most infamous tactics. From the forums it’s crystal clear it has been done only in the spirit of drama and nothing else.

To wrap it all up, for us the common users:

• Frameworks do not matter. If you like Ckk’s addons, no reason to try and replace them by inferior stuff
• If you’re not using autoupdaters like WAU or WUU, don’t update to files.wowace.com versions yet, the “old” look and feel config options should be back into Rock shortly
• Don’t jump into the wowace forum drama
• Do not support the ace forks of FuBar or Cartographer, you’ll give justification to the mean-spirited few who did it and will contribute to creating two sets of incompatible addons, which will cause endless trouble in a couple of weeks from now.

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