[00:03] as this one, but honestly, it's quite scandalous. You see, add-ons have always in theory been dangerous. You are basically going to a third party, and >> [music] >> And more and more now, you're running
[00:16] things like companion applications, which can run code outside of World of Warcraft, as well. But we all just lump this under add-ons, and it means we've forgotten just how much trust we sometimes place in our add-on devs.
[00:28] Sometimes they abuse that trust. Sometimes abusing that trust smashes Sometimes abusing that trust smashes open a much bigger can of worms, such as the argument that the add-on developer knowingly created and distributed
[00:40] illegal malware. And all of this on an add-on that is extremely popular. In fact, a massively popular add-on that was so influential it changed World of Warcraft forever.
[00:52] Now, you've probably heard of it. It's called Gnome Sequencer Enhanced. [music] It is a sequencer, and that basically more or less means it's a highly advanced macro runner for doing things
[01:05] things, but the most common use had always been making one-button rotation macros possible. This would be great for maybe a lazy player, but far more importantly, it was fantastic for people with accessibility needs. And it's a
[01:20] alone, it's got 10 million downloads, and that puts it near the top 200 add-ons, somewhere in the realms of ConsolePort and Altoholic. Now, not everyone uses it, but obviously a sizable enough portion of players do.
[01:34] Though, that's probably fewer players now, given that Blizzard have added the one-button rotation themselves. As it turns out, you should remember that, because as this story develops, past the mere shock, very much turns into one of
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[03:20] off your entire first year on the annual plan. What sparked the story for us was that on July 16th, GSE got taken down from CurseForge [music] after it was reported for malware-like behavior. Basically,
[03:33] the add-on's companion app would scan your PC for a certain file. And if it found that file, it would flag your GSE account as being restricted, and then it would arm a routine to edit or delete things in that file. It would be armed
[03:46] and ready to go based on an order from GSE servers. Now, that kind of power and access is why a lot of devs ship companion apps at all. And often it's very useful because add-ons, of course, can't touch files
[03:58] outside of WoW except for their own settings. But here, it is very much not need to talk about the file I was looking for. >> It was called gripems.lua. Basically, it was a file made by another
[04:10] add-on that would be in WoW's saved variables folder. And if you had this other add-on installed, [music] GSE's app basically stood ready to strip out anything that you copied to that other add-on from GSE. That's shady, but there
[04:23] here. That order has never been fired off. So, it was armed and waiting, but at no point was the actual command to fire given. What that means then is no one can show a single deletion. But what is
[04:37] proven is that, well, there was a loaded gun pointed at the thing in your computer. The scanning and reporting literally runs today, and the deleting is just one server flag away. In simple terms, it is, "Hey, I caught you
[04:50] I'm going to try and stop that, and I need to access your phone so I can read all of your messages." It's a little bit like that. Comes off as jealous, and by most definitions, it also makes the companion app malware because that would
[05:04] be unauthorized modification of files, which is illegal under both America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the United Kingdom's Computer Misuse [music] Act. And the companion app is built to do exactly that. Now, this all seems a
[05:17] bit weird. How could another add-on spur GSE to seemingly go so insane? Well, there's a clue in that file name, EMS. The EMS stands for Enhanced Macro Sequencer. Basically, as it turns out, GSE was using dirty tactics to try and
[05:33] take down a competitor. That competitor is called Grip EMS. [music] It's a new months old, and it's got just over 10,000 downloads. Though, I imagine that number may go up. Now, what's happened is the leaders of the entire GSE
[05:47] community have put on a united front to stop this new add-on Grip from taking off. The Grip dev has been banned from the GSE discords [music] without cause they know who he is and they want him gone. And not in secret. This is a
[06:02] gone. And not in secret. This is a literal post from the GSE United server. Quite something. When his add-on was brought up, one of the leads said that it was, quote, all created by AI and that he doesn't even know how it works.
[06:15] That might be a valid argument, but not in the context of an obvious and aggressive campaign [music] against that that has led to malware being distributed, especially when GSE has got Claud tagged as a contributor.
[06:28] The thing is, those things are genuinely useful in the software engineering that. The thing that matters is trust with your users, and in this [music] case, the blatant hypocrisy. And it's not just that server. While Lazy Macros,
[06:41] the premier macro site, seems to be in on it. See, Satana, the developer of Grip, has proof that they hid his thread and banned his account. And now, by his suggest his add-on [music] as an alternative to GSE. So, this stuff had
[06:57] been going on, but it was going on quietly. But a month ago, well, things quietly. But a month ago, well, things got very loud. They got loud on Reddit. We saw direct public engagement thanks to a Reddit post, and it was absolutely
[07:11] brutal. People in the GSE community stepped in to defend GSE. But I think there was so much venom and a lot of landmines in the process. One of these mistakes was done by Scary
[07:25] of these mistakes was done by Scary Larry, who owns GSE United. He admitted tried to downplay them saying, quote, "Even [music] if the regular user had them, they would not use them." Which is
[07:37] a bit odd. Now, he then painted Grip's dev as a copycat using AI, quote, "Plagiarism [music] at its best." He then specifically took issue with the tools that were made to convert sequences from GSE to Grip, saying that,
[07:51] quote, "99% of the creators have been supporting GSE for longer than you have been alive." Lovely and authoritative there. And he accused Grip [music] of, quote, "Stealing them." Now, he ends his reply
[08:04] by saying that most of it is free, no one is entitled to their work, and the Grip Dev and his buddies are bound for being, quote, "Fucking thieves." It's quite the post, and buried underneath all of the venom
[08:18] There is a real grievance. A creator spent years building those sequence libraries, and of course, a conversion tool that just moves all of that work across in bulk could feel odds to those people. And that does deserve an honest
[08:31] answer and some [music] engagement. But the answer that they shipped was code designed to delete [music] the converted copies off your machine. That is not something that users would have known about or consented to. Now,
[08:45] details shortly, but if nothing else, Larry lost in the court of public that it was hidden, and it's obvious why. Regardless of the facts, it leads is aggressive [music] towards someone who has only ever seemed to shown up as
[08:58] a fair, reasonable competitor. Especially [music] when the competitor's response looks like this. Proof. Proof of how they're attacking is Adam directly, and proof that they are
[09:11] paywalling features. The implication here, if not the claim, is that there's been a cabal running the show this whole time, and that for the first time that cabal is a little bit scared.
[09:25] That the single button assistant within wow that Blizzard ships has probably eaten a huge portion of their potential user base, and that's maybe put them on the defensive. It's got them flinching. And that in that environment where
[09:38] they've been unopposed for years ruling over the entire enhanced macro scene, that they've had dominance. Dominance that they've enjoyed. And now they've resorted to posting tasteless slop, basic mob tactics, [music] and shipping
[09:53] literal malware to retain that dominance. And it only takes one glance dominance. And it only takes one glance at the competition to understand why. The GripyMS Curse Forge page is a quiet declaration of war. Here's what it
[10:05] reads, "Free means free. No paywalls. No Patreon tier. Nothing held back for a pro build. If a macro sequencer charges you for multi-window editing or extra key binds, this is the one that does not." Now, it is true the GSE has a
[10:19] [music] Patreon supporter version with extra quality of life features and Grips developer is waging war against that business model. He's basically saying, "Use my add-on because I won't charge you for things." And as basic as it is,
[10:31] to protect their empire because it's also their paycheck. Well, their paycheck and a few other people's besides because there's more than just GSE itself. You know the way a bunch of streamers have weak auras and UI strings
[10:46] behind paywalls? That kind of skirts [music] Blizzard's rules and paid add-on services. Well, GSE has actually got the exact same thing. And it's there because of genuine friction. Setting up enhanced macros is a very complicated affair and
[11:00] table whoever's willing to just go and make the best DPS rotations and then lock them behind their Patreon. [music] Because that is someone doing a bunch of engineering work and then selling it as a product. Now, the status quo is
[11:13] basically working for people and that means that someone new coming into the scene is perceived as a threat. A threat to their control and a threat to their wallets because if a converter tool will easily convert
[11:25] things, then well, it's it's going to break containment of Patreon pretty their control and a threat to their wallets. That's good. And sometimes I And that's because it's called competition. It's literally good. If you
[11:42] are an incumbent, if you're doing well for yourself, and you get threatened, that's often a good thing because it it it's competition. It may not be good for you literally right now, but it's good for your users. It's good for everyone
[11:54] [music] innovation and better offerings to people. Competition's coming for you. It comes for all of us, and that's good for humanity. And instead of reacting to the competition by competing better, well,
[12:08] leaders reached for bans and buried threads. The GSE dev reached even further, though, reaching into his users' machines, turning his app into what most definitions would actually call illegal malware.
[12:23] And that is not even to mention all the attempts to hide this. Because, yes, yet. So far, I've talked about the CurseForge takedown that got us onto this story and the big Reddit thread. But that was only
[12:36] the spark. You see, the inferno really started whenever Grips [music] dev, Satana, real name Jasper, brought every receipt that he could get his hands on. Enter this GitHub page. It contains exhaustive documentation [music] of
[12:51] GSE's attack on, and this bit is my choice of words, user freedom. Because something that you should have and that shouldn't be attacked. [music] It's a behemoth of a document, so I'll just give you the quick version of things.
[13:05] Though, before that, you may be asking if we can trust [music] this guy. race. And while it's not a full answer, he does actually answer this himself. But you can trust the code, and you can look at the code. You see, because GSE's
[13:19] app, all of the JavaScript within is actually exposed for the world to see. That means you can audit that sucker. Now, in the first release, the GSE dev really didn't seem to care to hide his work. Every 10 minutes, it would scan
[13:34] your files for grip EMS.lua. [music] If it found that, it would then report account as restricted, and then it would wait for World of Warcraft to close. Once World of Warcraft was closed, it would then [music] make a decision:
[13:47] delete all of GSE sequences inside grip's file, or just leave them be. obfuscate this functionality, first hiding the name that they were searching [music] for by encoding it, and then by removing it from the code entirely, and
[14:01] servers. [music] And what also didn't go away is the >> [music] >> and now there is a general engine that >> and now there is a general engine that lets GSE servers list, read, rewrite, or
[14:15] delete any add-on saved files [music] on your machine on command while World of Warcraft is closed. Now, every check so far has found that functionality dormant. But it is sitting on your PC if you have that installed.
[14:29] And what we first knew as a single-target weapon against one add-on has now become an any-target weapon that, as far as anyone can show, has thankfully still never been fired. But it's still malware, and it's still
[14:43] worrying. Now, that's not all the post covers. It then goes into excruciating detail about how GSE's add-on leads [music] people to the companion app, and about how it paywalls content. Basically, install the add-on through
[14:55] CurseForge, and it walks you through installing the companion via a direct link. And that is rather curious, because the CurseForge listing never mentions an external app being part of this. Now, obviously, hiding something
[15:09] like that is not really a great look. Now, on the paywall front, it's a bit interestingly [music] so. Though, where it gets spicy is that GSE have panic changed a lot of this stuff [music] since the scrutiny started
[15:22] and they may have hurt themselves. So, originally it worked like this. The Patreon build of the add-on was exactly the same, but it had a single flag that would activate a bunch of additional features. Now, the funny thing here is
[15:35] that because dot Lua files are just sitting there on your computer, you just open them up in, I don't know, Notepad ++ and edit the file yourself. And wasn't much of a paywall. There's no license key or anything like that, and
[15:48] that does make it hard to argue that it was really paywalling anything except for a tiny bit of convenience. But, I'd say far more importantly, knowledge. Because if you don't know that you can just change one little flag [music] in
[16:01] the add-on you've already got, then you will think it's a full paywall. And I'd about that. Anyway, when this all came out, they kind of panicked and they for them. They basically spun a bunch of the extra features into a separate
[16:14] here's where they're in a lot of trouble. That add-on module comes from the Patreon. And that explicitly [music] goes against Blizzard's rules, which are fully against paywalling any code. You cannot [music] paywall code. Now, you
[16:31] something like that, but the actual add-on code cannot be paywalled. And in doing that, they paywalled code, right? Well, actually, no, there's a catch. Because that code is actually available on their
[16:44] just download it and drop it in the folder. You don't need to be on their technically no code being withheld behind a paywall. It's just a matter of convenience. And according to the literal lines of
[16:58] Blizzard's policy, there is no problem with that. Although again, a judge might argue that needing to know where to go to get the thing that otherwise is on the Patreon, that that that would just be a paywall to most users because how
[17:14] can a user know what they don't know? And it's not like they just scream, you can go to our Patreon for the quality of life build, but don't bother Just drag the files in." Now, as for Blizzard's answer to all this, we do
[17:29] basically know where their standards [music] are. UI packs, TSM Premium, and even paid leveling guides like Zygor's or RestedXP have never been taken out by Blizzard. Now, the one they did actually take out was
[17:41] a- actually mine. But, it's really it's really quite element, but it had nothing to do with the actual add-on itself. It was development. What they got us for was actually not against their add-on
[17:55] policy. It was against their copyright policy because, basically, we were trying to like rewrite and voice act quests to sort of do a like backdoor revamp of World of Warcraft's old zones. I got to say, some of it was a banger,
[18:08] that is uh still better than some of Blizzard's current questing. [music] But, anyway, we weren't taken out for add-on policy stuff. We were taken out for copyright. On the add-on policy side, it is very
[18:20] clear that, as long as the code goes to the user for free, well, additional upcharges seem to be permitted. Like, Blizzard's actions do actually prove that. As long as the add-on code isn't literally paywalled, they will turn a
[18:36] blind eye. Now, to be honest, some of that probably is measured and healthy to keep the dev community like healthy and uh incentivized. But, obviously, along with some obvious shitty workarounds that feel like, you know,
[18:53] the words [music] of the law versus the spirit of the law, well, then it gets to aren't to do anything, one group who could would be CurseForge. It took a while, but they did take action. You see, CurseForge had been contacted by
[19:06] Jesper and another add-on dev, KK Thanks, who had been following the story out their blog post [music] for a more technical take once you're done watching this. It's a very fascinating read. Anyway, CurseForge nuked the page on
[19:19] July 16th. But, a few days later, here we are. CurseForge seems to have let them back on. The page looks much the same, but with one key change. There is now a disclaimer saying that extra features
[19:32] are available. Good to know. And that's it. No guidance or anything, just a link to the GitHub Wiki that does actually say anything about the quality of life module. If I was CurseForge, I would consider
[19:46] that to not be acceptable. It feels like malicious compliance, [music] especially because the companion app still reads all the files that it wants. And through all of this, at the time of recording, we have still not seen a
[19:59] public word from the GSE dev [music] himself. You might then be wondering, what next? Well, we can only wait and see. And if this story doesn't fizzle out, it might actually have some pretty brutal
[20:11] implications. I mean, CurseForge are allowing an add-on that links to malware on their site, and the paywall's convenience with a workaround that I would call almost offensively low effort. And if enough eyes land on GSE
[20:25] eyes will start to look at other examples of the same thing. Or maybe not. And as much [music] as the GSE companion app does literally match
[20:37] the definition of illegal malware, I bring that up because of the amount to anything, and [music] that is especially because no real damage was done. The loaded gun was never fired. Though, of course, trust was broken, and
[20:51] trust is a real thing that matters. As for you, then, if you're a GSE user, I would recommend moving away. Actually, definitely move away from the companion app. The people involved with this have shown their true colors, in my opinion,
[21:04] and in a way that means I would not be comfortable keeping software from them on my computer. And if any community starts to post AI art slot with slogans like one community, one goal, well, maybe you should think, "Hang on a
[21:17] second. Is this in service of me, like the people, or is this in service of of them, the people running the community and the people profiting off it?" Cuz stuff that sounds like that tends to be propaganda crafted to have
[21:32] an obvious effect. And you should be aware of that, and more things than just this. And you should be even more aware of it if it appeals to your personal preferences, worldview, biases, etc. Because that's how you can get co-opted
[21:46] into things. So, yeah. GSE community stuff looking really weird. GSE development stuff looking really weird. Personally, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with it. Now, if you want more technical details in this story,
[21:59] Thanks's post on the [music] topic. And if you want another video to watch, how about Ion Hazzikostas, as game director of WoW, hinting at archaeology in the of WoW, hinting at archaeology in the last titan?