I'm a Chinese player and I choose to make free models here! For lovely people who inspired me long ago by their talents! Shame on you for trying to bring NetEase’s junky business model to this open source community.
The funny thing is that we aren't really some absolutist OS community. Many people obfuscate their map's code, decline to allow others to fix bugs in our maps, etc etc.
More on topic though, something I read from this
blog rings really true:
"Do what you love and the money will follow" is an irresponsible lie, a denial of the deep opposition between money and love. The real rule is: "If you're doing what you love, you won't care if you never make a cent from it, because that's what love means -- but you still need money!"
And many of us DO need money. Some of us have been laid off more than once since the pandemic kicked in. I'm sure for the most part, we can agree that mtx to circumvent intentional inconveniences is scummy, but how different is it from needing to invest 10s, 100s of hours into a game before you can try the endgame content? Player accounts that get XP every time you play, for incentive to stick around and grind out a cool bonus?
To be clear, there is
obviously a distinction. But when the incentives become the core of what players are chasing after, real world money will inevitably find its way in. Buying leveled accounts/gold/whatever to circumvent time investment. A friend told me annis are selling for
$8000 on diablo 2 ressurected atm.
The crux of what I'm trying to say is that, I don't find it unreasonable to try to garner funding for the service you provide by creating and maintaining a WC3 map. The responsible action is to look at each instance of monetization and speak our truth about what we find distasteful about it, if anything.
Thanks for coming to my tedtalk.