Calamachus

The 2017 Skyrim and SMIM, plus aMidianborn and TCM, Immersive Armors. Improved College of Winterhold, Improved Closed Face Helms, Realistic Water Two, all good choices. I'm also using Hunterborn, Total Follower Overhaul and a variety of mods. Big ones that are not currently working are Frostfall and Ordinator. Anything that changes the number of perks in the skill tree doesn't work. I've heard there's a way to fix that but I couldn't get it to work. iNeed I haven't installed but I've heard does work. I just got the Vive Pro which gives me 2880 x 1600. I played it on the regular vive before I got the Pro. It was worth it for Skyrim alone.

Props on the decision to move forward instead of iterate legacy code for another decade. Change is scary - people get used to stuff and they want it to never change, just get perpetually better. Technology doesn't work that way though and it's important to know when to take that step. I look forward to the new manager, at this point juggling both NMM and MO to get Skyrim just the way I like and not still run is such a hassle I don't even bother with new mods, even if I see ones I like. A big part of that is Skyrims limitations I know but a single, refined, unified tool? Gimmie.

I'm just curious how that will be handled and policed. As a segment of the modding + Skyrim fandom community has decided to depart the community to become professional paid content providers this is going to be more of an issue. I have no interest in being sold content or pitched samples on the Nexus. While I'm confident that the Nexus will (as always) make a smart choice about how to handle an issue confronting this slice of the community I'd like to see it addressed fast and early so we don't have a shitstorm of modders feeling like 'well it was fine before why isn't it now' when their scaled down mod sample (or even better, their scaled down mod sample *with in game popup adds* ) is now being treated like the advertisement for their paid content that it is. Seriously, the more I think about this the more I want a 'pay for early access' option. That creates a reasonable two-way basis for what is effectively a donate-to-support system. Donate a buck or two and get early access to updates and such. Have it good for a set timeframe then chip in again if you want to keep the early updates. This would let me continue to support in a mutually agreed upon manner modders who are creating content I want to support and is getting actively maintained. A donation system is unreliable and inherently unbalanced. How much is fair? Why this guy and not another? Do I donate and the modder quits tomorrow? My donation isn't tied to anything measurable or identifiable for it to be properly seen in the context of why I'm donating. A donation of $1.00 doesn't seem like much at all while paying $1.00 for 60 days early access that's good for the next 3/6/9 months of updates certainly does. I agree, absolutely, that the prior system of expressing support (both in thanks and remuneration) for modders failed. Just went through it; of the 102 mods I had installed I hadn't even endorsed 18 of them because I'm an asshole. That's the bare minimum, the bare absolute minmum that should be done and there are plenty of them I'd love to pitch some money at to support but, what, a $1.00 donation? What if nobody else donates and the guy looks at his donations and sees $1.00 for the last year? The solution is not treating mods like products to be sold. There is never going to be a point where me giving Bethesda $0.65 cents and Valve $0.10 for the opportunity to give $0.25 to support a modder is going to sit well with me. I'm also not keen on 'buying mods'. I don't hold mods to the same standards I hold a professional product to nor should I. If my cell phone quits working I expect to be able to call someone and have that fixed, right now. I'm paying for a product and I expect it to be supported. A modder is a fellow enthusiast like myself; a fan, we share a passion. He/she has the time, skills and energy to create something and share it with me and the community and that's f*#@ing amazing, I love it, it motivates me to enjoy our shared interest even more and I want to express my appreciation for that to them. That is a completely, totally different feeling, experience and relationship than the one I have with the guy who sells me a coffee on the way to work. Those two need to not be mixed. I need better tools to express the former without it ever being anything like the later.

How do we get this to the Powers that Be? Someone wants to advertise their product on the Nexus they can pay like anyone else. I should also be able to block advert/demo mods. I don't come to the Nexus to get sold something or have to wade through sales pitches.

Going to happen if it hasn't already. How is that going to be handled? If you can get a scaled down 'free' version of a mod on Nexus that also points someone towards the full 'paid' version on the Workshop, isn't that effectively just advertising? Shouldn't they be charged like an advertiser? This is an issue that's going to come up and should probably be addressed ahead of time. For what it's worth I'm strongly in favor of a 'pay to get early access' version. You pay a buck or two and you get the updates 30/60/90 days early. I've always had issues with a donation based system; you feel like an asshole donating less than $5 but by the same token not everything is worth $5. You want to support people but donations are an iffy way to do that. Subscribing to a mod for a buck or two for 'early access' is a simple, easy and convenient way for me to show support and give money to modders without be being in the position of deciding if I want to buy this product from a merchant. It's an entirely different context and relationship and an easier, more organic version of what a 'donate' button is intended to do. Demo/scaled down/'freebie' versions of mods or even smaller, alternate mods that are free which then direct people to go buy the paid mods, that however is an issue. It's advertising and should be treated as such. That's someone selling a product, no different than any add at the top of the screen.

Ugh. Not trying to convince you of anything but I won't say I'm sad to hear it. I'd still recommend bringing some of these ideas up to the Nexus folks - how to deal with mods that seem like adverts to paid mods. Also the idea of a fee for early access to mods instead of a 'donate' option.

Nexus doesn't want to profit from your mods; that creates a market environment and not a community environment. Nexus is a community, not a marketplace. It's where we gather to share content and ideas and such about a game we're all passionate about. I don't come here to shop or do business. Same reason I come home from work and play games; I'm not at work, I'm not doing business. I don't like be sold to all the time especially not about things I do for fun and absolutely not when I'm trying to engage with other enthusiasts in my hobby. Valve has already made it absolutely clear that the community needs to police itself. Read the FAQ. If you want to keep people from selling stolen stuff you have to go find them and catch them and report them. At which point the people who stole the content keep it, the thief keeps whatever money they made but the content is taken down. They may (or may not) get that account banned. You get nothing, absolutely nothing at all in any way. Nothing gets refunded to anyone. The best you get is that if in catching the thief you have to buy and download the mod to confirm it. If it's less than 24 hours from when you bought it you get the price of that mod refunded to you as credit to your steam wallet. That's it, that's all. Valve does not, will not and has confirmed they are not involved in policing content. They don't even confirm the mods work. You buy a mod, you have 24 hours to get a steam wallet refund. If someone files a DCMA takedown notice they honor it. If the person who got served can prove it's not legit they leave it up. Donations.... a donation system sucks. I agree completely. The problem is that the people who don't donate are not going to pay either. I actually like the idea of a 'paid early access'. The content is up for 30/60 days for a buck or two, after which time it goes to the Nexus for free. I'd buy in on that. You can think of it as 'donations get you early access on content updates'. This avoids the position of saying 'I'm a professional and deserve paid for all access to my content' and instead says 'I put a lot of time into this, if you really like it you can pay me a little money to get early access to it when it gets updated'. That also avoids the problem of the Nexus being viewed as a free advertising site for having your mod to point people to your paid work. I'd recommend to anyone looking at this to try that first. See if a 'pay for early access' approach is sufficiently profitable and productive. If not you can always then move into a pay-only model. Edited to add - It also preseves the value of rewarding high-quality content and regular updates. It motivates the modder to keep updating and improving the mod and rewards them for doing so.

Please don't feel attacked or challenged. You're just in the position of being the first ship on the water so to speak. The concern is people creating 'demo mods' on the Nexus to get free advertising for their paid mod on the Workshop. Is that a good thing, is it something the Nexus wants. What does and doesn't qualify, what is and isn't fair where that's concerned. Again, this comes back to what I said elsewhere - by charging for your product you become a merchant more so than a member of the community. Money is a sticky subject and, as they say, 'business is business'. At what point does it stop becoming a mod you're sharing on the Nexus and instead an advertisment to drive sales on your paid site? I would encourage you to reach out to the Nexus folks and see where they want those lines. At that point you need to ask yourself how you want to handle the free mod. You're monetizing your work now and as such it's not unreasonable to view what you do in that light. How do you best leverage the stuff you provide to free to maximize what you want to earn profit from. How does the Nexus want to position itself relative to the Workshop - do they want to host advert mods? Do they want to support scaled down free versions that help redirect people to the paid versions? Is that actually a 'bad thing'? If so, why? One of the problems with being an early adopter on a business model is you're going to be involved in answering those questions. I encourage you to be proactive in reaching out to the Nexus folks and being an active and honest part of that discussion. You've been very honest and up front about what you're doing and why and that's awesome, much appreciated. I don't see any of the other mod authors here doing so. I hope you'll put the work into helping sort that out sooner rather than later. I definitely understand your point. It is not like I am abandoning the nexus. All of my mods will remain on the nexus. Just one of them will have a free version and premium version. I do agree about the whole merchant comparison. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Just because I become a merchant and modder doesn't mean I won't still regularly interact with the community. I appreciate everything the Skyrim Nexus has done for the modding community. I really wish Bethesda would buy the Skyrim Nexus and allow us to sell mods on the Nexus instead. Everyone is free to voice their opinion. I honestly just think some of the backlash is amusing. People need to stop acting like they are entitled to free mods. Publishing large works for free has always been a generosity modders have performed. Please remember though that there is a difference, a huge gulf, between an amature enthusiast and a professional. Again, if you believe you create professional grade work shouldn't you work in the profession? The backlash isn't against someone like you who's decided to take the plunge and try to monetize their work, to stop being a modder and start being a professional developer in the same way a fanfic writer may try and shift to being a professional author. The problem is that Valve/Bethesda just threw every single modder in the community into that pool. Every free mod now has to be protected from being stolen and resold. The reality is that nobody is going to look at your mods now and say 'how cool/good/fun/interesting is that mod' and instead now has to say 'how much money is that worth?' The difference is huge. It's the end of the modding community as it is and has been. To take your work as an example; the free mods, why are they inferior? Why is their time not worth money but another one is? How many dollars per hour of content is a fair wage to pay you as a modder? If I can get something almost exactly like your mod for free somewhere else why should I pay you? Content stolen from a modder, a free contributor to the community is a crime against the community. Stealing from a business is seen by some people (I'm not one of them) as a virtue. 'Sticking it to the man'. I would not want anything sold on the Nexus - I'd stop coming here. At that point it wouldn't be a gathering place for enthusiasts but something like the Home Shopping Network with free samples. If Bethesda wants to sell me content (which is what the Workshop is, don't be mistaken about that) they should hire people to make content for them and then sell it to me. Requiring you to try and sell me your creations directly while providing you absolutely no protection nor support is pretty crappy. The lack of appreciation some modders have felt is a problem we all bare responsibility for. It's unfortunate and certainly helped contribute to the problem but at this point what you're talking about is the end of modding as a community thing, a shared thing where amature modders share their content with the community and instead we have a totally unprotected/supported market where everyone is competing for the same sales dollars and it's more profitable to try to grab a quick buck with minimum viable products and stolen content than the real work involved. You're never going to properly monetize the time you've put into a quality product; you're going to see people who did 1/10th your work get as much or more money and wonder why you busted your ass. It's no longer about creating something awesome and instead about the cash value of your work. If you're going to do that, do it for a wage. Get a job with a gaming company. Trying to shoehorn that into a hobby just introduces problems to the whole community IMO. Again though, please reach out to the Nexus folks. If there's going to be people using the Nexus to sell their goods it needs sorted sooner rather than later so that the community doesn't get even more disrupted over that.

Please don't feel attacked or challenged. You're just in the position of being the first ship on the water so to speak. The concern is people creating 'demo mods' on the Nexus to get free advertising for their paid mod on the Workshop. Is that a good thing, is it something the Nexus wants. What does and doesn't qualify, what is and isn't fair where that's concerned. Again, this comes back to what I said elsewhere - by charging for your product you become a merchant more so than a member of the community. Money is a sticky subject and, as they say, 'business is business'. At what point does it stop becoming a mod you're sharing on the Nexus and instead an advertisment to drive sales on your paid site? I would encourage you to reach out to the Nexus folks and see where they want those lines. At that point you need to ask yourself how you want to handle the free mod. You're monetizing your work now and as such it's not unreasonable to view what you do in that light. How do you best leverage the stuff you provide to free to maximize what you want to earn profit from. How does the Nexus want to position itself relative to the Workshop - do they want to host advert mods? Do they want to support scaled down free versions that help redirect people to the paid versions? Is that actually a 'bad thing'? If so, why? One of the problems with being an early adopter on a business model is you're going to be involved in answering those questions. I encourage you to be proactive in reaching out to the Nexus folks and being an active and honest part of that discussion. You've been very honest and up front about what you're doing and why and that's awesome, much appreciated. I don't see any of the other mod authors here doing so. I hope you'll put the work into helping sort that out sooner rather than later.

Please be careful with stuff like this. This problem is about Bethesda/Valve trying to coerce modders into guilting/shaming/compelling the gaming community to give Bethesda/Valve more money in return for community created content. The last thing we want, at all, is any modder to feel like their work and effort is unappreciated or they are not welcome. We screwed up, badly, with someone who already caught hell on the Workshop (name left out to avoid getting this thread closed) and we need to stop that. What someone chooses to do with their creations is up to them. I would say that if someone feels they deserve remuneration, paid cash money, for their time and effort they should do so professionally either part time or full time and seek a job in said field. When they decide to stop being a peer in a community and instead be a merchant wanting to sell us a product they should expect to be treated like we treat the phone company or cable company or guy at Best Buy wanting to sell me a TV. That in mind... I would say that the Nexus should not allow content that redirects or points someone to a paid mod location. Essentially that's advertising and should be treated like anyone else wanting to put an add on the Nexus.

Everyone needs to hold up a second before making lists. This is dividing the community badly enough as it is. At no point should anyone be upset at the modders involved. The problem is that this is the modders getting screwed and thrown under the bus by Bethesda and Valve. The moment you go from being a modder to selling your mod on the Workshop you cease being a peer in an enthusiast in a gaming community to being a merchant selling a product. If you feel you are a professional who deserves remuneration for your work (and I'm not speaking to anyone specifically but anyone thinking along this line) then I strongly encourage you to seek a partitime/full time job being paid professionally for your efforts and investment. However when you say 'this is something I created, I deserve paid for it' then you're exactly like the phone company or cable company or the guy selling me a TV in Best Buy. You are a merchant and I'm a consumer, evaluating the cash value of the goods you want to sell me. That functionally destroys the gaming community as it is. It's now business people and consumers and every modder, free or paid, is a business rival. Even the people who make (or made) free mods now have to be careful about their goods being stolen and sold for money. You don't introduce the sordid topic of coin into a social community and expect it not to change completely. This whole concept has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with compensating modders for their work. This is Bethesda and Valve wanting modders to guilt/shame/compel the rest of the community into giving Bethesda/Valve more money. If Bethesda thinks your work is worth money they can hire you, pay you to create it then sell it to me as DLC. That isn't what's happening. They are throwing modders into the role of being merchants selling goods with no professional support. There is no support or protection in the Workshop. If someone takes all of, say, Bob Modders work and sells it all he has to do is NOT put pictures of the stolen content in this mod desc when it's up for the 7 day 'review' period. After which someone would have to buy it, pay the thief for it, recognize the stolen content, then contact Bob who would then have to pay the thief for it, identify it and file a DCMA takedown notice. The thief will have cash in their bank and face 0 consequences. Nobody gets a refund save people in their 24 hour refund period - at which point they get Steam Store Credit as a refund. The thief can do this again tomorrow with a new account. Best option is to circle the wagons on Nexus and similar sites and be absolutely welcoming and understanding of the decisions any modder makes regarding their content. This system is designed to f*#@ them and burn the existing modding community to leverage the modders into extracting more money for Bethesda/Valve out of Skyrim. We certainly deserve plenty of blame for any modder who feels unappreciated or under-valued for their contributions but saying that every effort by everyone on any subject is due remuneration is a cruel thing to do. Should every fanfic author charge money for their work? If JK Rowling came out saying every Harry Potter fanfic author should charge and curses on those freeloading fans reading free fanfic... oh, and all those fanfic authors should make sure they get paid for everything they do and kick 65% of that up to her plus 10% for her publisher, or she'll sue them. It's toxic. It's not, however, something to blame modders for.

I'll weigh in a bit though I'm generally more a lurker than a poster on this forum. It's not so much the game as art aspect as it is delivering on promises. I absolutely understand that part of the business is promising the moon and obviously not being able to deliver it. However, when you promise 'a player directed experience' and then deliver pretty much the exact opposite at the climax, well, you get Mass Effect 3. Let me put it this way: Suppose you paid money to see an art exhibit advertising 'the greatest masters of the Renaissance' and you go inside and instead you get.... some high school shop class representations of famous Cellini sculptures done in papier-mache. Skyrim has aspects of being an incredible game and I certainly enjoyed it but clearly, clearly it was made for XBox360 and then the PC/PS3 crowd got scraps from the table. Compared to other Xbox360 games it's great - for the PC though it's not hard to see what was given up, what was left out and how much was simply ignored. It's about being treated like a second class consumer and it starts to get old. For example, this whole bit with the Xbox exclusivity for 30 days and associated delays. At this point I'm not really planning to get Dragonborn. I might at some point if there's nothing else around I want to play and it's on sale on Steam but the manner in which it was handled, all the cross-platform stuff, has just left me disaffected. Apathetic is perhaps a better term. Player made mods have given me more content at a higher quality than the expansions have and that's a hard thing swallow when you're giving someone your money. Finally, there's the newcomers. Star Citizen is a great example. It's being made for the PC and the graphics make Skyrim look like a childs crayon drawing. The engagement with the community, the sense of value and appreciation for being given money in return for making something they want to make. That's powerful. I compare that with the 'ignoreignoreignore *vague statement* ignoreignoreignore *excuse* ignoreignoreignore *press release*' approach that major developers seem to have now and it stings a bit more. I think it's fair to say that everyone here loves what Skryim has the potential for and seems to want to be. We love the general principle of what the finished product represents, a huge step up from other modern examples of the genre. We just see the compromises that were made in terms of cross-platform support that clearly and blatantly favors the Xbox360 and the willingness to just blatantly ignore issues, bugs, problems, delays because... well... they can because we have no choice but to take it. If something is important to you, you handle it. You make it a priority. I get business, I understand it very well. I'm in the business business you could say, fixing relationships between businesses and their clients. The model that EA/Bethesda/pretty much everyone elses uses is exclusive content authority. You don't have to worry so much about customer service if your customers don't really have choices in what service they use. If they want X, they have to buy it from you. Also everyone else in the industry uses largely the same model. EA is the worst. Absolutely the worst in my opinion. I get the profitability involved in this model, I do. The 'art' card was played on Mass Effect 3 by the way as an excuse. In the same way you catch someone trolling on a forum, you call them on it and they say 'I meant to do that/come across that way because (insert shallow excuse here)'. Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 were not sold as 'incredible artistic experiences'. They were marketed as games where players had control over the story, how it began and ended. Then, at the climax, they dropped in a deus ex machina and just left it hanging. It was a poor choice and people flipped. The 'artistic integrity' card was played by EA as an excuse. As to Steam, it's an example of compromise. The problem with compromise is that you compromise between 'average' and 'lowest common denominator' enough times and your point of compromise ends up pretty far down the scale. Skyrim wasn't a compromise between 'bleeding edge PC performance and experience' and 'Xbox360' (not that I'm dissing the xbox. It's not a PC but it's the standard for the console industry, its inexpensive and easy to get into, etc) but a compromise between 'average PC at the time development started' and 'entry level Xbox360 casual gamer experience'. Steam is a compromise of convenience. Skyrim made a lot of them. Mods are what really make Skyrim a rich, worthwhile PC game and not a casual console game. More content and less than perfect patches from the developer are not changing that.

I run 71 mods and have my graphics all maxed out save for anisotropic filtering which I've turned off in Skyrim and turned on in my graphics driver. I've got an Athalon 2 x4 620 2.6ghz and 8gb of ram. My video card is a GTX560 and I am on 64 bit Win7. I'm far from running a killer system but it runs smooth as can be for me, I have all the HD texture files I can find on the nexus pretty much. There are some tweaking guides out there for altering your ini to maximize graphics and performance, those I've read and followed. I don't run ATTK as I don't have any lag issues. Brief flicks of lag in a couple places (the approach to Whiterun for example) but it's less than a seconds worth. Ram, graphics card, windows version are the only things I can see that would be majorly significant. I know it runs smoothly though because, well, like I said. Mine does great.

GTX 560 Ti, running 306.23 and I'll crash about every 12-16 hours, that's it. I run almost 80 mods and all the highest res graphics mods I can find. No real issues. I've tried updating the drivers a couple of times and each time noticed issues before rolling back. I've had no issues with 1.8 patch, I use SKSE. Just updated to new SKSE version. In fact the game is a bit more stable for me if anything.

Was updating some mods and realized that I had quite a few I've downloaded, enjoyed but not endorsed! You know you're guilty of it too, time to pony up! It's not enough that you got her liquored up and took her home you have to tell her she's pretty or you're a bad person. We all know how it goes. You hit the Nexus and there's a flood of new mods you want to try. You download a few, get playing, get distracted, next thing you know it's the 4th update and you haven't endorsed! Time to roll down the list and make sure you're giving credit where it's due. Mods are a cheap date. Also keep in mind how useful endorsements are to helping other players, especially new players, find those mods that are going to kick their experience up a notch. I'm also curious about how much time people have spent playing Skyrim and how many mods they use. Oh Steam, why must you make me see this figure? Why? It's been 1 full year, how much time have you spent in Skyrim in the last year? Remember - there are 8760 hours in a year. Approximately 2920 are spent sleeping which leaves 5,840 hours since Skyrim was released. How many of those have you spent playing? Also, how many mods do you use? 783 hours played. According to BOSS I have 108 mods, 76 are active. I had 18 that I hadn't endorsed.

I had no real interest in vampires or werewolves and so put off getting Dawnguard. When I finally did get it, it blew me away. There is a lot more content then just the main plot line. The equipment it adds is amazing and the plotline itself can be played joining the Dawnguard which itself includes some excellent NPCs. It also adds some unrelated plots and quests - one of which has become my absolute favorite. The 'Lost to the Ages' quest line. No spoilers but it was the most immersive plot in Skyrim for me. Made me look at the rest of the game and think 'why didn't they do everything else like that?' The main plot itself takes you through some incredible locations and there is a particular dragon fight (got to think that's no spoiler) that once again raises the bar for expectations. Puts all the vanilla dragon battles to shame. I play on the PC and have noticed no bugs or issues but admittedly I installed the unofficial dawnguard patch right after I installed dawnguard. I recommend it, two thumbs up, regardless of someones interest of vampires or werewolves. I've started but not completed the game from the pro-vampire stance and have yet to go through the werewolf perk tree in any way. What it does the most is make me incredibly excited for the next DLC. Dawnguard added a lot of rich content and I'm hoping the Dragonborn DLC will do more of the same.

I love NMM. My wife plays Sims 3 and has some custom content and mods, which are nothing but drama to get, install, often fix yourself and then try to use - and none of them come close to half the stuff you can do in Skyrim thanks to NMM and associated tools. I went to the Nexus, showed her the mods, downloaded some that she thought were cool with the NMM, then launched BOSS and TES5EDIT to make it all perfect. Took less than 5 minutes and everything worked perfectly. Tell me any game anywhere else I can do that with. I play X3AP with some mods - it's like shopping at a garage sale, then having to take it home to the shop to break apart into components that you then use to create a new product - and it's considered an easy one. NMM isn't perfect but it makes getting, downloading and updating mods about as simple as keeping Java up to date. not sure what else I could want.

It's a long list to me. The best way to address it is probably to sum up a lot of what others have said, just with some caveats - The idea that it was 'rushed'. No game or product is ever finished. If the things we see traces of in Skyrim were finished there would have been other things being worked on that were not. At some point you have to draw a line. I don't think Skyrim (at least for the PC, where I play it) was 'rushed'. The core of the game worked and gave me no issues. Where TES games since Morrowind have really shown is in the idea of creating a world, engine and environment about which players can play but more importantly mod new things in. The lists of things that were in Oblivion and Morrowind - almost all of these things are mentioned as MODS that were out for Morrowind and Oblivion. Taken as a stock game Skyrim adds tons. It out-performs a fully modded (and I had 250+ mods) Oblivion in terns of environment and functionality. So they moved the mark forward, then let us mod on top of that. That's amazing. I'm still let down by the lack of attributes and skills but that's clearly a personal preference thing. At this point with ACE and the dozen or so mods of that sort I play with I'm pretty contented. I'm pushing 800 hours of play time in Skyrim. 767 as of right now and I'm about to start a weekend with some new mods. ME2 got 22 hours out of me. The 4 Assassins Creed games I've played total maybe 80 hours, so 10 times the enjoyment I've gotten from 4 Ubisoft titles put together. The game itself is amazing - it's a phenomenal foundation. The support for modding allows it to become epic. That is what is important to me - the ability to take something that's enjoyable for 20-40 hours and pimp it into something that will probably see 1,000 hours of my life consumed in playing dress up and RAWR KILLZ IT! Oh Steam, why must you show me the hours I've played? Why must you make me see that? Why?!?

625 hours myself. Mods help but about a month ago I just burned out. I haven't bought Dawnguard and find it just doesn't appeal to me. Admittedly I could walk away from Skyrim and never ever play it again, having gotten more than a dime an hour worth of entertainment out of it. It's, literally, almost 10 times the amount of entertainment I got out of mass effect 2. Yet Oblivion and Morrowind sucked me in for around a thousand hours or more each. I expect new mods that will put attributes and spell creation back in will throw me back into the game as will more character depth related mods, plus all the fluff and candy stuff that always shows up. Both those games had years to grow a mod portfolio that made them that engrossing. The story of Morrowind is incredible and I genuinely could care less for that much voice acting but the graphics and interface just put me off of it in the end. Sometimes you just need to step away for a while. I caught Just Cause 2 for about $3 on Steam the other day. I'm about 61 hours into it and getting a bit bored with it. A few hundred hours into X3 - Albion Prelude thanks to the incomparable XRM mod. Darkness 2 is on sale for $12.50 and it just came out six months ago and Borderlands 2 comes out in a few days. Feel free to take a step back and play something else. When you come back to it there will be new mods and perhaps some interesting DLC.

WARNING. SORTA-SPOILERS AHEAD. How about a different approach? What if the Dragonborn is something akin to Pelenial Whitestrake. This grand spiritual hero that the Gods, or more likely Lorkhan/Shor, sends to 'take care of business'. What if all the characters (save possibly Cyrus) are reincarnations of the same entity? Lets look at it in more detail. Each time you start out a blank slate, escaping from prison in some form or fashion. I could write a few pages on the significance of that relative to Lorkhan but only other ES lore geeks would get it. Each time you show up out of nowhere with a sort of divine mandate to accomplish this single world-changing event. You're never the King - you never stay around. Kingmaker, yes. Yet you never stay, never have kids, never die of old age. You have no family, no history, no existence beyond accomplishing a very specific event. This event also just happens to be what the Nine, or at least Lorkhan, would really like to see happen in the world. Then you just fade from history. The Dragonborn isn't a person - he/she is a tool of the Gods. More directly he seems to be a tool of Shor. He's also Nerevar, possibly even an aspect of Tiber Septim. He's probably the hero sent to save the Empire on two other occasions, once by dealing with the Imperial Simulacrum and the other was the temporary restoration of Numidium. Each of these incarnations achieves a goal of protecting humanity and the world. Even the events of Morrowind effectively protected humanity from a larger menace. Each of these individuals accomplishes this amazing, world-saving act of heroism yet none of them stay around and cash in? Have kids? Settle down? They all just disappear, fading in and out of history just long enough to accomplish their mission. Think about it.

I don't mind Steam. I don't like it, I don't like that it's required and I dislike it for a number of the same reasons I don't use Facebook. However I'm willing to put up with it because A) I have no choice and B) it is good for the indie game community. That part A is the critical one. If I want to play Skryim I have two choices - pirate it (which I would never do) or use Steam. That's it. Those are my choices. Saying that it's my choice to use Steam is a misnomer, it's my choice to play Skyrim and not be the sort of POS who pirates games. I do have a choice - I can be punished for being ethical (which forcing me to use a 3rd party is doing) or I can be an unethical jerk, or I can not get the game at all. That's the frustration with Steam for many people. They are a business and one that makes their money by forcing people to use their service willing or otherwise. I've never had a serious problem with Steam but I've known a couple of people who have and it's absolutely miserable. The idea of adding a 3rd party between me and the company I want to buy a product from and giving that 3rd party the ability to block me from using the product I paid for is one that is inherently prone to trouble. I'm still 600+ hours into Skyrim but I've never gotten and never will get a mod through the Workshop. I've got a few dozen, all through the Nexus. I can't agree with the OP, but whatever floats his boat. Like I said at the start though, I don't mind Steam. Just understand that their business model is based on controlling your access to and use of the games you buy from other businesses. They are not there to help you. Any benefit that you get from using Steam is there absolutely to make you more compliant to being forced to use their service. It's not some altruistic drive that Valve has because they just like to do nice stuff for people.

Yeah, you follow them into town, meet their families, get supplies and support and pointed towards the main quest with some interesting conversation options with the Jarl. I'm just curious how many other plot twists I've never seen based on how I play are out there?

@sukeban The Empire was a product of the Nords originally, Tiber Septim was Talos and used cunning tactics, ruthless politics and an ancient Dwemer version of SDF1 called Numedium to conquer every other province. The Imperials more or less rule the empire because they had the organizational skills to do it, not because they conquered it. The Empire was in concept a united force and did well at it. The original line of Kings traces their lineage back to Talos of Atmora. After his death the next emperor was Ocato, an Altmer and a political moderate. The presence of an Imperial on the throne with the Mede line is a recent thing. As to nationalism I admit I don't agree. The Legions of the Empire were never conscripts that I can find a reference to. The Nords served willingly and effectively in the war both against the Aldmeri Dominion and through out the Empires history. A division of the empire into smaller provinces each with their own military reduces the total collective force - this is why larger nations (comprised of smaller states in some form or another) field larger armies - you have a larger unified base for food and resource production which allows you to support more people in your army as you need less total people growing food, baking bread and crafting goods. It also allows for better coordination as instead of several armies of varying training, skill and focus you have a single large, powerful and coherent force. The actual core of the problem IS nationalism. Instead of the Imperials and the Nords focusing on the good of the Empire and defeating the Aldmeri Dominion, each has started identifying themselves separately instead of as a greater whole. Each province focused on what was in their own best interests right now instead of what's in the best interests of the whole. The fanatics in the Aldmeri Dominion took advantage of this weakness and attacked. The problem though can be traced back to the Imperials focusing on who gets to wear the pointy hat and what was best for Cyrodiil, not what was best for the Empire. This however represents a tiny, recent little slice of this history of the Empire. When everyone stays focused on the good of the larger whole instead of their own back yard things tend to work out. Hence why Ulfrics power-grab is so self-destructive, just like the Empire (at this point it's better to say Cyrodiils) willingness to sacrifice unity for a shot at vengeance.

So after who knows how many playthroughs I started using the Live Another Life alternate start mod. Awesome idea by the way, all due props to its creator. One thing that came of it was my getting to Whiterun before I'd ever been to Riverwood. For the first time I got the quest to get the Dragonstone of Bleak Falls Barrow from Farengar before I'd ever actually gotten it. Before I always pick up it as my 'getting warmed up and geared' adventuring before I get to Whiterun. Amazingly, when I came back to Whiterun to deliver it, who do I find there? Delphine. She's there, with Farengar, discussing dragons and all manner of cool plot stuff. A surprising amount of content that I'd never seen in like the previous 20 characters. It was a complete shock. Anyone else find any interesting niches of stuff on a completely different playthrough? Unexpected plot twists and characters?

Funny how this topic tends to generate both a lot of trolling and a lot of genuinely intelligent discussion. "Rebel" is just a concise term for 'tool of the would-be regime'. The Stormcloaks as an organization seem to be made up people with a genuine complaint. Their religion is not only being oppressed but is being violently oppressed by a foreign power with the complicit permission of the government that as members of the Empire they should expect to protect them. There is little doubt that they existed with these same complaints well before Ulfric came along. Ulfric however has taken advantage of the situation to move his own agenda forward. There is also little reason to believe that Ulfric has a sincere attachment to the cause. It doesn't seem unreasonable that if the tactically insignificant but socially flamable caveat in the White Gold Concordat about Talos Worship hadn't been there he would have rallied people around fighting the Forsworn, or helping the Redguards, or even just nationalism. Ulfric wasn't right to kill the High King because his justification was just a lust for personal power. This was just a convenient excuse. The Stormcloaks are an example of a reasonable objection being used as a tool by a charismatic and amoral bastard to further his own ends, which makes the whole movement and its success or failure sullied. It's an incredibly realistic situation all in all and while I can't say I find the civil war an enjoyable part of Skyrim to RP through again and again (I've got over 600 hours into Skyrim but have only played the civil war once for each side) I admit I appreciate what it does for the overall story. It just seems like there are some reasonable 3rd options (Dragonborn decides to be Talos 2.0 anyone) that would be enjoyable to include. The Empires failure is not about the Aldmeri Dominion it's a failure to care. It's that they don't take the Stormcloaks seriously or really care about the civil war at all. Tullius nearly wins with just the troops he has and points out that the Empire has more forces, possibly enough to shut the whole thing down quickly but just doesn't care enough to send them. It's not that they don't care about killing the AD. It's that it's ALL they care about. Their feudal obligations to the Nords as members of the Empire just don't matter now. They did once, clearly, but it feels a lot like the sacking of the Imperial City changed that. The Imperial City hadn't been sacked in a long time. For all the Nord talk about Talos and their ancient history, the Imperial City hadn't been actually sacked since about 3,000 years before Tiber Septim was even born. That was when humans took it from the Ayleids. You can see where a lot is made of just what a social impact the sacking of the Imperial City had on the Imperials. The White Gold Concordat doesn't strike me as being about surrender, it struck me as being about buying time to gear up for revenge. The inevitable war with the AD seems to consume the Imperials, everything else is secondary. At its core its an idea that is actually pretty Nord. Bloody revenge for an insult that can never been forgiven. It's not that they don't see what's going on in Skyrim. They seem to see very well; they know Ulfric is a power-hungry usurper who's playing on the WGC to carry him to power in Skyrim. Tullius seems to see all of this. He just doesn't care. It's not that the Empire doesn't care about the Aldmeri Dominion, quite the opposite. The problem is that it's all they care about. Like a general planning an all or nothing campaign they seem willing to sacrifice individuals and short-term losses in the hopes of a long term victory. The loss Hammerfell turned into a poison pill for the elves and it wouldn't surprise me if Cyrodiil was doing everything it could to make Vallenwood, Blackmarsh and Elswyr as much trouble for the AD as Skyrim is for the Empire. These are places that can be won back in time, at least in theory. Again, a terribly realistic and believable scenario. A government and culture that go an almost irreparable wound to their pride that they're willing to do just about anything to pay back. Caught up with their own need for vengeance and likely a bit of self-pity (so what if you can't worship your god locally; we got sacked and pillaged for a whole freaking year! Cry me a river snowback) they don't have a lot of empathy for anyone else. A good storyline for the sake of the story itself. Just not quite as enjoyable to RP given your inability to wright any of the obvious wrongs. Then again, if you could fix what was wrong it wouldn't be much of a story, would it?