RurikNiall

Well, with the relevant perk they can cast soul trap, and they're probably good enough to kill most bandits or NPC's in case you're like me and like to soul trap your Dark Brotherhood victims and use their souls to enchant a trinket off their body but don't want to lug around a soul trapping weapon everywhere, otherwise they're not that useful in vanilla, no.

Kind of hard to do that when you're forced to use it to legally play your physical copy of Skyrim, just saying.

In lieu of all that has happened these past few days I feel compelled to say a few things. I know I'm not the most well known member of the community, at best some of you may know me as "that one guy the Unofficial Skyrim Patch mentions in their list of mods made obsolete by their patch." (It's an honour, no joke! I legitimately feel honoured to even be recognised by the team for something I threw together long ago before the official construction kit was released!) First of all, I wish to apologise, I don't say thank you enough to the modders that have given me hundreds of hours of joy, in fact I don't say it at all, I've always just downloaded the mods, and I often only post to report a glitch and, if possible, how to fix it after poking around in the CK to find the root. For this, I apologise. This, of course leads to the second thing I wish to say, three guesses what it is and the first two don't count. And this goes out to all modders everywhere, not just Skyrim or the Elder Scrolls, to the KotOR modders, New Vegas modders, Civilization modders, everyone. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you all for the joy you've given me over the years. Thank you for the giant DLC quality mods with new regions to explore, fully voiced dialogue, and well written quests. Thank you for the little mods that make my shrouded armour look a little bit nicer and let me have the Morrowind style beast race feet I've missed so much since Oblivion. Thank you for the bug fixes that, let's face it, Bethesda should be paying you for. Thank you for all the tweaks that make the UI more useful, the gameplay more balanced, and just generally improve my gameplay experience. Thank you for all your hard work, past, present, and future. And finally, thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings.

Frankly I doubt it'll really make that much difference one way or the other.

I feel sorry for the modders like Chesko, the likes of that guy from SkyUI not so much, but the ones who didn't lash out at the community get my sympathy. There's probably a lesson here about trying to turn something you love into a job, though.

Because it would encourage people to upload mods there instead of here? Paywall or not the workshop still sucks.

Yes you can. You can't legally circumvent Steam, at any rate.

There's always EA. :devil:

I don't get paid until the first, but I'll look through my load order and toss a few bucks at one or two of my must haves.

As a matter of fact I'm contemplating firing Skyrim up in celebration of this victory. That said I can kind of understand where some people might be coming from. I just bought the Elder Scrolls collection at Walmart a couple of months ago, and I felt particularly betrayed knowing that even as I handed my money over to Bethesda they were probably talking to Valve about doing this, and I decided I wouldn't even touch a Bethesda game until this matter was settled once and for all. Now that it has been settled, though, and we've won, I see no reason to continue boycotting the game nor Steam (thank God too, I don't have a PSP Vita so I need Steam to get my Hyperdimension Neptunia fix when the port for Re;Birth2 gets released) any longer.

I wouldn't without contacting the original author first, just out of courtesy.

At least this should be the last we'll see of it from Bethesda, they have a decent track record of actually listening when their fans tell them to stop being stupid, we didn't get any crappy horse armour DLC in Skyrim, and I'm sure there was probably something in Morrowind people shouted enough about to keep it out of Oblivion and Skyrim. Not sure what, mind you, I was too young to really pay much heed to such things back then, I just wanted to run around in my Megaman Zero armour killing monsters.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/208632365253244218 Brothers, sisters, we have won a hard fought victory this day. I thank everyone who yelled and screamed and fought like Hell to make this happen. :cool:

You answered your own question there, we can criticise Bethesda precisely because the way they set it up is so bloody horrible. The fact they lie to our faces about it doesn't help either, they're not doing it for us, they're not trying to encourage bigger and better mods, they just wanted to make a quick buck off the hard work of the community. If the split were at least 75/25 in the modders' favour and Valve didn't expect you to make $400 just to get what you're owed I'd wager there'd be a lot less outrage.

Nah, that'd be the second best result. The best result would be for the workshop to fold and for Bethesda to cut all ties with Valve so we won't be forced to use Steam to legally play our physical copies of their games.

Just because it is the norm for people creating content for existing IP's to get screwed over and paid a pittance while whatever corporation holds the rights to that IP takes the lion's share doesn't make it right. If you ask me it just highlights a larger problem that exists outside of this that needs to be corrected.

The thing of it is it's evident they're panicking. Remember when the Microsoft rep told Angry Joe "We can’t just flip a switch to turn off DRM. The console was built around it." and then a few days later they flipped the switch? The head of Valve trying to do damage control shows that they realise they've woken a sleeping beast, they may have expected backlash but they were confident it wouldn't impact their bottom line. This shows that their confidence has been shaken, which means this is the time when it's most important for us to not relent and make our displeasure known loudly and in numbers. We're hitting them right where it hurts them the most, in their wallets.

I edited my previous post to include a screenshot of the post in question, under the spoiler tag.

He's been trying (and failing) to do damage control on Reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_steam/ And here's a screenshot of him admitting they're positively bleeding money right now, for anyone who doesn't wish to or cannot find the post.

So the fat n'wah himself has admitted this PR nightmare is costing Valve more money than they're making off of it. This pleases me greatly. :laugh:

Business as usual for Valve, then.

I'd totally be willing to donate a dollar to anyone that makes a Sky UI replacement.

There's a lot more reasons for the backlash than simply "Mods should be free!" though. There's not many mods I would be willing to pay for, but any mod I do feel is worthy of it I'm certainly not going to be willing to purchase through the fustercluck that is the workshop because then I'm not paying the modder, I'm paying Valve and Bethesda for hours of hard work and effort put in by the person they're deliberately screwing over. Let's say, for example, Skywind. I'd be happy to pay $10 for Skywind, but not if the Skywind team only sees a quarter of that $10.

I'm sure there were people that bought horse armour back in the day as well, but Bethesda still listened because we shouted loud enough and they didn't try it again. Maybe this bollocks is here to stay, but that shouldn't stop us from rallying against it, because if we just bend over and take it then they'll definitely think this nonsense is kosher.

I fail to see how Valve and Bethesda being compensated for the work you and other modders have done while they have done nothing themselves to earn it can be viewed as a good thing, especially when the modders are being paid a pittance for their work while these corporations take the lion's share.