RurikNiall

So I've got a couple of small, like, really small, like probably less than 10 kb mods that I was thinking about uploading, one that edits a minor NPC that MMUE edits the flags and facegen on and one to add recipes for armouring and possibly improve the enchantments on the vault suits available in the game, which I wanted to include a FOOK compatible version with the tweaks made to the suits by FOOK implemented, but I'm unsure what the etiquette for such things are. Should one ask permission for things like that, or is it acceptable to just go ahead with it when one is just using tweaks to vanilla content in the GECK and not including things like meshes, textures, sounds, etc. from other mods?

I don't think the why of it is really important to it, whether they listen to our complaints because they care about us or because they care about our money the end result is the same.

If the mod author's goal is to get into the game industry then absolutely I believe they should be rewarded in such a manner. If they don't then as I mentioned they could opt for a cash reward. You also missed the parts where I mentioned different tiers for mods of varying degrees of intricacy and specifically mentioned the idea of there being runners up. Furthermore who said anything about helping only one person? If the mod was a team effort then the entire team gets rewarded, and there's absolutely nothing that says Bethesda can't pull an American Idol and offer the runner up a position as well if they feel they deserve it.

See, now that brings up something I think would be a far better incentive. Instead of selling mods I'd love to see Bethesda hold a yearly mod contest, runner up gets some shiny, clinky gold, while the winner gets offered a job by Bethesda or, if they don't want it they can opt for cash as well. Maybe have different tiers with different prizes, it just wouldn't be fair pitting a sword, albeit a really nice sword, against Skywind or Falskaar.

Sounds like business as usual for the workshop, then.

Do you have No Script installed? Only thing I can think of.

Any projectile will trigger them, I think. Maybe clutter too. I usually use Arniel's Convection since it costs like nothing to cast.

See, maybe I'm being naive, but I actually have more faith in Bethesda. They may not be the best at QA, but they have shown that they actually listen when their fans shout at them, they could have easily cranked out more horse armour for Skyrim but they didn't. I'll grant you Hearthfire was could be argued to be only a few steps above horse armour since it's stuff the modding community could and had already done, but it did add actual content to the game and it's stuff the console players wouldn't have access to, plus I have a lot of fun role playing with it so it's okay in my book. Point is I think Bethesda won't be trying this stunt again. Valve, on the other hand, I don't doubt at all they'll try this with other games, maybe one whose community I participate in maybe not, we'll burn that bridge when Valve tries to cross it, though.

Never said that, I simply don't buy into this idea that paid mods would give incentive to produce better mods when all the evidence I've seen tells me otherwise, game expansions are nearly extinct these days because it's more profitable for game companies to sell you a couple of OP guns for $2 than it is for them to create an expansion pack and people still pay for those guns, the only modding community I've ever been a part of that has had paid mods long before this mess those mods are of lower quality than the mods offered for free by the community, the bulk of the mods chosen by Valve and Bethesda to showcase their new system were microtransaction swords, none of these things give me even the slightest reason to believe paid mods will lead to this golden age that Valve and Bethesda tried to convince us it would.

Because the market has done such a great job of sorting things like that out in the past, how do you think we ended up with microtransactions being an industry standard?

Yeah, that sounds about right. The Sims modding community is a bit of an anomaly, I've never seen any other modding community quite as toxic as theirs. As for quoting, there should be two buttons in the bottom right of each post, multiquote and quote.

The trouble is that's not how these trial periods work on the internet. The way they work is they get your billing info, if after 15 days you haven't contacted them to cancel they automatically bill you. You don't get an e-mail reminder about it or anything, they could on people either not knowing how it works and thinking they have the full fifteen days when in actuality they have fourteen and the fifteenth is the deadline to contact them, or people simply forgetting that they need to cancel until they get charged for it.

But the fact remains that it would be far more profitable to throw together a bunch of swords that take you a couple of hours each that you can sell for $.50 - $1 than it would be to make something that takes months to create and requires you to get help from other people to provide models, textures, voice acting, scripting, or whatever skills you lack and who you would have to split the profits with.

I'm quite partial to Moonpath to Elsweyr, khajiit, sky pirates, killing Thalmor, what more could one want?

According to Hoth he's been getting more donations as well ever since he announced his mods would always be free. This whole debacle seems to have really raised awareness about donating and endorsing.

Well, one of my first thoughts is these past few years? I don't know how long the Nexus has been around, but Elder Scrolls modding, and modding in general, has existed for more than a few years. As for paid mods, I notice people always bring up the idea that it would lead to higher quality mods. I don't buy it. I don't buy it at all. Anyone here familiar with the Sims community? They've had paid mods for years, illegally I might add, but EA doesn't bother enforcing their own EULA. The mods offered by paysites, such as the infamous TSR (The Sims Resource) are, in fact, of much lower quality than the ones offered for free on other sites. They're buggier, their meshes and textures are of lower quality. And when Valve and Bethesda decided to launch their blatant cash grab I saw the same exact quality displayed by their release mods where the bulk of them were low quality assets ripped from other games and shoved into the creation kit. Do I think modders deserve to get paid? Some of them, when Skywind gets released I'd gladly throw money at them. I'd toss a few bucks towards Moonpath to Elsweyr too, but I don't believe in the slightest that paying for mods will lead to better quality mods. The best mods, in fact the best works in general come from labours of love, not money, if money were enough to lead to better products EA would be the most legendary game makers of all time.

This gives me the distinct impression you've enjoyed the "hospitality" of the Sims mod scene.

Valve and Bethesda got greedy, the community came down on them like the fist of an angry god, a few modders that fell for their scam got caught in the crossfire, Valve and Bethesda surrendered.

Well, myself, I would think it should depend a lot on the mod itself and your opinion of it, I don't think it's unfair at all to say some mods really are objectively worth more than others. Skywind has had doubtless hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of hard work and love poured into it by everyone involved, it's certainly worth more than the dinky Shrouded Cowl fix I threw together in an hour or so years ago, for example.

Babette, definitely Babette. Oh, and as for followers, Cicero in vanilla, and Serana in Dawnguard.

It's an idealistic thing to say, and it would be wonderful if possible, but to be honest it's not. As individuals we can police ourselves, I did my best to keep my anger directed at the real guilty parties in this debacle, Valve and Bethesda, not at the modders, and that's all one can really do. We can't very well police each other, we can't control what others say on Steam or Reddit, or other sites, we can't prevent the louder and more hotblooded among us from lashing out at the people who supported paid modding any more than they could prevent their own from lashing out at us. All one can do is to present their case in as calm a manner as possible to their opposite number and ignore the ones lashing out at them with strawman arguments and insults.

I don't know about them getting that much in donations, but while I do agree with the idea of donating to the smaller modders, I just checked some of the smaller mods in my loadout that are some of my favourites despite their small scale, Digitigrade Khajiit, Dwarven Rifles, Deadly Serious Shrouded Armour, even Moonpath to Elsweyr which is one of the larger mods I use, but they all lack donation options. Did give some long overdue endorsements while I was at each page, though.

To be perfectly honest, not really. I think the current balance of mods like Falskaar and Moonpath to Elsweyr versus assorted smaller mods is fine, I don't know about anyone else but even if there were hundreds of high quality quest mods I'd probably only have one or two in my load order at any given time. The only reason this ever became an issue at all was because of Valve and Bethesda's cashgrab scheme and their weak justification that it would encourage higher quality mods, despite the fact that out of all the mods they could have chosen for their launch to prove this idea to us the bulk of them were cheat weapons based on other games and cheat armours most of which lacked either male or female models, not exactly the most compelling case for paid modding producing higher quality mods when the best they could muster at release are cheat armour and weapon mods that we have by the dozens already.

Or at least the art of knowing who actually deserves your anger, in this case Valve and Bethesda, not the modders.

You know, the most annoying part is how Bethesda and Valve tried to justify taking 75% because "it's the norm." Being the norm doesn't make it moral. It's the norm for waitresses to get paid less than minimum wage and have to rely on tips to scrape by, doesn't make their boss less of a scumbag for doing it.