Hopefully post #42 answered some of the questions in regards to my plugins in particular.
I also wanted to mention that this is my job. This is what I use to pay my light bill, my cable bill, buy food, pay for my car insurance etc. My only job is Redguides, and my plugins. When someone implies repeatedly they aren't happy that there is an expectation to pay for one of the resources, especially someone who's bought other ones, knows it's an alpha and will go to paid etc. It would be the same as me saying you should just go work for free at whatever job it is you do in RL that you use to put food on your table. So yeah, it grinds my gears and I'm going to defend my position, even though I shouldn't have to.
When I first came to redguides it was my intention that everything would be just given to people. I still have a lot of free resources. None of which I plan to put a price tag on. Due to demand I've put a lot of my attention on my plugins and have encouraged others to take over my macros so that they too might get into coding. When requested I certainly look into issues and track down bugs in mq2 itself, or plugins available to RG users, as does Sic.
Anyone that has messaged me about my plugin should know that I take care to try and respond to everyone who messages, and Sic probably gets 5x as many messages about the plugins as I do, and he certainly makes sure to assist everyone. I know as much because we spend the majority of our days/nights in voice chat with each other discussing one thing or another about whatever class we happen to be working on at the moment. So even though it was never actually factored into the price, the continued support of those plugins means that I feel obligated to respond to everyone, because they have bought a product, and if they need help with it they should get it.
The idea of a subscription model has been floated, the infrastructure isn't present currently on the website and since everything I've been developing is pretty new I'm not yet ready to consider a bundle or price decrease at this time. The oldest plugin being MQ2Berzerker has been out barely a year. Considerations for these things are being made however and I'm playing it by ear at the moment.
In reference to the launcher not showing that cleric was going to a paid resources. In the future I'll try to remember to specifically request that it makes it to the patch notes. My plugins have their own patch notes and Redbot just copy's and pastes those notes to their respective plugins. I tend to have a large amount of patch notes and we wanted to avoid flooding the VV patch notes with paid plugin notes for that reason. In the image at the bottom of this post is the file I use to track changes. They don't even fit on screen in a normal full window, and would be quite cumbersome in the RG patch notes and would possibly flood out notes for anything else that might be relevant for the resources freely available for users. For my class plugins I recommend following the ones you've bought, or are interested in, specifically if another one makes it to a free alpha state so that you can be notified about changes. But I see where you are coming from, and a mental note has been made.
Is this the trend moving forward, meaning will everything start to be paid? Not to my knowledge. As sic mentioned there have been additions to the VV plugin/macro list that aren't paid resource more so in quantity than there have been paid resources that have been released. Dewey was generous enough to agree to my request to add MQ2Autoclaim here and I made adjustments to it. Sic maintains MQ2Status, MQ2TSTrophy, and there is a mess of random macros. KA is provided by RG so it's the intention that it be part of redguides free for users with level 2. To my knowledge that won't ever change. To the specifics of what we can expect moving forward is ultimately up to individual developers to decide if they are looking to charge for their products. I'm sure that depends on things such as time to develop, complexity, and if the specific user has a need to be funded at all. In regards to me specifically (Can't speak for anyone else), my class plugins in particular were always going to be a paid resource. I try to be clear about that to the best of my ability. I have nothing else that I intend to be paid for beyond the class plugins at this time, I don't think it's necessary.
Denethor went through great lengths to develop the explorer macro rising to a request that I myself turned down due to the immense amount of work it would be to develop I never actually used the macro and bought it specifically because I understood how much work it was. We have MQ2EQWire, MQ2SlotColors, my plugins, more recently Denethor's EpicReq.mac, and at one point we had a RazNuke that was a paid macro but has since changed to free due to lack of author responses. I believe these are the paid resource available on RG atm. Then of course you have other who've had their own macros available for sell that haven't been listed as resources such as William12 macros and I'm sure there are others out there I'm just not aware of. But I don't see this as being a change in direction for resources moving forward so much as Redbot has made the process of publicly listing a product for sale easy, and more visible, instead of us needing to deal in private messages for transactions.
This is my perspective. Sorry for the book. :-)
(example of patch notes length in raw format)
