tjobbins

Is this time mod-related, like making a custom house as a mod? If it's vanilla, am I missing something re house-decoration: I thought you could only buy pre-prepared sets of items from the steward, rather than being able to do much customisation/layout oneself? Or was it the time to make the money to buy everything and then find suitable bits of armour/weapons to put on the racks, mannequins etc? Assuming I've not missed a way to decorate a house, I did think that hundreds more hours of game time could be generated if it were possible to have more control over decorations, i.e. some sort of in-game house building/designing. It'd be cool if you could buy tables and chairs and rugs and paintings/wall-hangings from vendors, and choose floorings and colours and the rest. But I guess being able to do so in the CK is not too different (plus don't want to turn it into The Sims.. :) )

Oh my god, that is incredible! At first I was going to double check you'd not typo'd an extra zero on there, but am sure you've not three times! 2000 hours is the usual rough estimate for the number of working hours in a year for a full time employee :biggrin: I have to ask, how did that break down? What did you spend most of all that time actually doing? I can certainly imagine a few hundred hours. I've played Skyrim for 150 hours so far, and I'm not that far through the questlines. I've only been to Markath once, and haven't been to Dawnstar at all. On the main questline I have one quest left in Act 1 still; I'm Arch-Mage at the college, and I'm about half way through with the Thieves Guild and the Civil War (on the Stormcloak side.) And that's all the quests I've done. I don't know what that is in % terms, but I'm guessing no more than a third, especially as I've done well under a third in side/mini-quests. (In fact now I look at the Quests summary on the Elder Scrolls Wikia, I'm wondering if it's more like a mere 15-20% I've done so far. That's crazy, now I'm asking myself what I actually do for hundreds of hours :) ) Skyrim is my first TES game and now I've realised how much there is to do, I'm blown away. There's enough different kinds of content to keep me going continously for very long periods, and each content type has goals I want to achieve and projects I want to complete. I might spend a few hours hunting mammoths to fill my grand soul gems - diverting here and there to check out some new hut I just saw on the radar, or to find another giant/mammoth camp between respawns of existing ones - so that I can build up enough to enchant a whole set of new, better smithing gear, so that I can forge and improve a new set of slightly better weapons, which I then need to enchant as well (more soul gems). In doing all that I collect a whole bunch of new loot, some of which I can sell immediately, and others that I first want to improve and then enchant (more souls gems, more mammoth trips.) Then I go on a big sales trip, hawking all my gear around at the best possible prices - perhaps stopping off at my quarters in the College of Winterhold to brew a new batch of Fortify Barter potions, plus some high value potions to sell; but perhaps before I do that I want to make some better alchemy gear, oops out of soul gems best go mammoth hunting and/or buy some! When I'm finally done with all that - or just bored of it for now - I might actually do a couple of quests and put my new gear to good use. Or I might just wander the wilderness, discovering new places to clear and the odd mini side-quest to investigate. When I'm really tired or just want to relax, I might sit and read some books, or take a Scenic Carriages ride. And then if I finally do decide to shut down the game, there's hundreds of mods to read about and consider, and then trying them out and getting yet more new content or another mechanic to consider. So maybe I've answered my own question about how you played 2000-3000 hours on the earlier games! :) By doing those sort of things I suppose, and starting many new games with different characters/styles/approaches. But the question still stands, in terms of how that time broke down, because now I'm curious to know what you feel is lacking from Skyrim that means you won't spend that time in Skyrim where you did in earlier games? This is definitely something I want to do. When playing a game I'm really into, I like to imagine all the ways I'd make it better, or perfect, if I were heading the project and if I had unlimited budget/time. I've always thought it'd be awesome to have an RPG with an "ultra realistic" setting with the option to disable or limit save-reload cycles and then realistic modelling of life and death. You would play so differently.So I was excited to see all the "Realistic Needs" type mods for Skyrim, which can implement most of this. At the same time, or maybe separately, I want to play a similar scenario: realistic followers. So I'd play with UFO mod set-up so that followers can die, and also using a realistic carry-weight mod. So you have to take care of your followers else once dead, they're gone forever, likely along with lots of expensive gear (or give them crap gear, but then they'll be more vulnerable. Trade-offs/decisions like this are the makings of a great challenge :) ) So if a follower died, I wouldn't reload, and although I could go recruit another one (or would already have others with me, using UFO's follower-limit increase), I'd want to take care of them. Actually that scenario would be even cooler combined with mods that makes the followers more unique and individual and useful, beyond being another sword and another pair of hands. For example, one or two followers who heal you; one who is super strong and can carry loads of loot; one who can turn undead up to a very high level (but sucks against the living.) And so on. So that there'd be a reason to care about an individual follower rather than any one of them being dispensable and replaceable. And so that really tough challenges could be solved by the right combination of NPCs and their skills. The more I think about it, the cooler that sounds actually - proper tactical battles, strategised by picking the right set of followers for the task! Definitely a great idea for a mod I reckon.

There's an archive of old builds: http://skse.silverlock.org/download/archive/

Thanks myrmaad, I'd appreciate that - it'd be nice to be able to go into chat again. But I just wanted to say that that wasn't my object in posting here: I didn't post my essay to get the ban lifted - I'd have posted back in the banned thread for that. I certainly don't want it to seem like I'm just whining over my circumstances or trying to escalate to the top to get a gripe resolved. I wasn't going to post about it again at all, but then I saw this thread and it seemed relevant to this topic, and (I hope) potentially of interest coming from something of a new, and outside perspective. Actually I see now that it was your comment in the banned thread that I referenced in my post in this thread, when I said "a mod said that if you apologise.. unbans can follow". I thought yours was exactly the right sort of mod response: polite, reasonable, and open to further discussion. Exactly the sort of response I'd have hoped to have received. I'd actually already done everything you suggested, but I think that you weren't responding to me anyway - my post was several up by that point, and several days old, so I think your reply was to one of the newer unban requests posted after mine; my replies were probably buried by then, and I didn't raise it again after your response. Anyway, I definitely don't want to derail this topic into a discussion of my ban specifically. I hope that my using it as an example along with my other points is constructive, as that was certainly my intention. This is a great site and I know that takes an awful lot of effort and energy to achieve, so thank you to all of you for that.

if I may, I'd like to add some thoughts on this topic coming as a relatively new user, but one who has already had a somewhat negative experience of Nexus moderation. I only just saw the topic tonight, hence my somewhat late quoting of the above two comments. And apologies in advance for the very long post, I do understand if it's a "tl;dr"! Firstly, and importantly, I'd like to say that this is an awesome site. I hope it will be clear that I mean all comments constructively, and am giving them only because they seem to me relevant to the issues and questions raised by this thread, and because I feel I have some personal experience despite my newbieness. I want to emphasise that because as a new user, I have no "stake" here - no huge post count over many years to justify giving my opinion and my suggestions. So if anyone is feeling "who are you to come here and say this," then fair enough; just know that my intentions are constructive and are written because even as a newbie, I can see that this a great site worth spending time on. First, a brief intro. I'd never modded a game before Skyrim - in fact I'd always had a rather negative impression of modding. I had (completely baselessly) assumed it was generally similar to the people who port Android to run on iPhones: in other words, technically challenging and clever, but in practice pretty pointless and full of caveats and problems. Or at least, far more effort than the results justified. Skyrim - a game I've now played for 150+ hours, which is more than all other games combined over the last few years - has of course shown me that that is utterly untrue. I've got 35 mods installed so far, and they have revolutionised my playing experience. Many of them add content that I'm sure the original developers would have added, had they had more time and budget - in other words, they are of a quality worthy of a professional development team. All of them have made the game more enjoyable, immersive, and/or challenging. I honestly can't imagine playing the game without them now. And I'm already planning a couple of my own. I'm now a major modding convert, and Nexus has played a vital part in that. I can say for certain that if modding was a lot of effort, I wouldn't ever have bothered. That's not because I'm not technical (quite the opposite), but simply because I'm lazy and too much technical effort, at least of the mundane kind, feels like work and not gaming. So Nexus with its comprehensive mod lists, comments, endorsements, screenshots/videos, and most of all NMM, has enabled and encouraged me to expand on Skyrim significantly. When I first got Skyrim, it was a great game. Now it's a great hobby. I'm extremely grateful to Nexus for that! But unfortunately I have had an experience that has tainted my experience a little. Shortly after I started reading the site, I discovered chat. I went in and chatted happily and copiously for an hour or two, having some good conversations with several people. Then suddenly I was unceremoniously banned, without a warning or any other communication. We'd been talking about consoles, and I had said that I really liked the Wii, because although it has technical limitations, it was great that, unlike the 360 and PS3, it was possible to run homebrew. As I was writing that, I made sure to emphasise that I was talking about homebrew and the ability to add new features to games one already owns: which is exactly what I do use Wii homebrew for - ripping my legally purchased games to a HDD so I don't have to disk swap, and so I can enable cheats and the like. I knew that piracy talk was forbidden, and didn't want it to seem like I was encouraging anyone to play pirated games. So I was rather surprised to be so promptly banned, with no warning. But I did realise that I'd gone into chat without fully reading the rules. So my first response was to PM the mod who banned me, apologising for not having read the rules properly, explaining that I had absolutely not meant any reference to piracy, and asking if he could please re-consider. Shortly after that, I discovered the "I've been banned" thread in the "Forum rules and strikes" thread. It mentioned a form to fill out to request an unban, but that was a 404. So I posted in the thread. I said basically the same things as in the PM, but putting more emphasis on the apology and fully admitting that I should have read the rules first. I said that "ignorance is no excuse," but that I hoped I could have a second chance. To that I got a single, somewhat sarcastic reply saying basically "so you found the unban thread but not the thread about no console modding?" That was when I first realised that all discussion of console modding was completely banned. I replied, explaining again that no I hadn't read that (or any forum thread) before joining chat, and agreeing that yes that was a mistake - for which I apologised again - and saying again that no harm had been intended and so I'd be very grateful for a reconsideration. That was 11 days ago. I got no further response on the thread, nor did the original banning mod ever respond to my PM. There was a subsequent post to the Banned thread by a different mod, in response to someone else, saying one should "apologise and commit to not repeating the offence" and then unbans would usually follow. That's precisely what I'd already done. I could I suppose have responded to that and asked again, but frankly by that point (now two or three days later), I'd lost interest and chat had lost a lot of its appeal. I felt by then that I'd already been as apologetic and conciliatory as was necessary, and I certainly wasn't going to beg. In fact if anything, I felt I'd been more apologetic than should be necessary. In my original post in that Banned thread, I said the ban was "fair enough", but in retrospect I changed my mind: what would have been much more reasonable in my view would have been a PM'd warning with a link to the "no console modding" thread. That's certainly all that would have been required to ensure I never talked about it again. Perhaps with a kick for emphasis and so others in the room could learn from my mistake as well. I suppose what I found most galling was the sarcastic response I got from one mod - who took the time to respond, but seemingly not to read my explanation or at least take any notice of it. It felt very much like I had been unfairly tarred with the same brush as those chatters who troll, who scream racist obscenities, or who try to ask for assistance with their pirated game. It seemed that the moderator hadn't really read anything I'd said but just assumed "you've been banned, you must be bad." Now it's just a chat ban and clearly it's not kept me from wanting to enjoy - and contribute to - the rest of the site. Had I not seen this thread and the comments I quoted at the start of this post, I'd likely never have mentioned it again. But this thread exists, and I suppose therefore that there must be some general anti-Nexus feeling out there. It'd be easy to dismiss that as sour grapes from banned users, and to assume that all banned users got what they deserved, so I wanted to contribute my own experience and impressions. I was struck particularly by Halororor's comment that there is a "zero tolerance policy of questioning moderators' decisions". I have to say that does ring alarm bells for me. Moderation is clearly of vital importance - the internet can be a total cesspool, and indeed usually is without good moderation. And I know from personal experience (I ran a fairly popular IRC chat server about 10 years ago) that moderation is often a thankless task. But if it's true that the mere questioning of decisions can lead to a punitive response, then to me that suggests that moderation might sometimes be going beyond what is necessary into the realms of power-play or censorship. In the wider world, a key hallmark of a free society is free speech and the ability to question the decisions of those in power. I know of course that this is not a society, this is a privately owned site. You don't have to be accountable to anyone. But I feel that that's not a good road to go too far down. I've seen many sites fall foul of it: at worst reaching the point where they feel like 1984. I can understand the temptation - when a moderator is working hard, without pay, to try and keep a site friendly and popular, it can seem rather galling to have decisions called into question. But without questioning, without accountability, it is in my view not moderation any more. I believe that moderation should be hard. Anyone can click ban and move on. It's much more challenging - and therefore rewarding - to try and resolve the root issue without having to get rid of anyone. And I feel strongly that there should never be a problem with the questioning of decisions, because decisions taken fairly will be fair and reasonable and will stand up to any scrutiny. Of course when one bans an idiot for being an idiot, they're going to question it idiotically. But those cases should be pretty obvious for what they are, and can be closed down after the obvious explanation is given. But if one never allows polite, measured discussion of decisions, and therefore takes the stance of "its my/our way - right or wrong - or GTFO", then I think the whole attitude and nature of the site can change, for the worst. I agree of course. But I find it's not necessarily black and white. When I've moderated in the past, I've always taken the "banhammer" as the absolute last resort, with the first, second and third resorts always being communication - talking to a person, and explaining why whatever they did is not allowed. In very many cases, I've found that someone who at first glance appeared to be a trolling idiot is actually not. Maybe they thought they were being funny. Maybe they don't speak great English. Maybe they're just having a bad day. Whatever the reason, I've seen plenty of times when an "idiot sighting" has actually been borderline, and the "hard" way (talking to them patiently, at least at first) has revealed them to be decent people, where the "ban" would turn them into slathering trolls. One can certainly argue that decent people will always behave decently, but it goes both ways: if someone makes a genuine mistake, but is then treated with seeming contempt, they're far more likely to turn on their 'alter-ego' - indeed they may even feel they're just fitting in. Of course there still are plenty of black-and-white cases. Someone who screams hate-filled obscenities (whether racist, homophobic, sexist, or whatever), can usually be taken at face value and dealt with immediately. But there are plenty of other cases that I believe need deeper inspection and more careful thought. I should emphasise again that my experience at Nexus is only what I described at the start of my post. Anything else - e.g. people being banned for criticism - I am surmising purely from what Halororor said, and perhaps (I hope) is not true. And my own experience was certainly not terrible - I wasn't treated with contempt, just perhaps a little disdain. But I thought my experience, though mild and non-terminal, did speak to the same principles, and therefore meant I didn't find what Halororor said to be a big surprise. I agree with this completely. But I feel that an important corollary is that the non-idiots should be encouraged to be here, and that time and effort should be taken to establish on which side of the fence they fall. And treating everyone as "innocent until proven guilty" as a first stance does in my experience do wonders for helping as many people fall on the right side as possible. It's a bit like those traffic wardens who give you a ticket if your car is parked 3 millimetres over the white line. "Rules are rules," they say. And technically, they're correct. But following only the letter of the law, not the spirit, and giving no-one the benefit of the doubt makes the world a much more unfriendly and tedious place. In being banned without warning, I certainly wasn't given any benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the moderator was overwhelmed with idiots that night and had no time to talk to me. What I find much less understandable is that even after I bent over backwards with every effort to both apologise and to show that I wasn't one of those general idiots, I saw not the slightest shift: I got one sarcastic response that seemed to imply that maybe I actually was one of those idiots, and then I was just ignored. The mod who actually banned me ignored me completely, not even acknowledging that he'd read my PM. I can understand the temptation to think "we have hundreds of thousands of users, most of whom have never broken a rule: why waste time on one who has." But I think that's the wrong approach. Whereas any one decision for any one user makes no difference (other than to that user,) if it occurs repeatedly and becomes a pattern, then it creates an unfriendly vibe which in turn could lead to an increase of dissatisfaction with the site. That'd be a great shame, because one of this site's great strengths is as a central, one-stop-shop repository: if people leave and post mods (and their feedback) elsewhere, inevitably users are going to find it harder to know about every great mod that is available. Anyway, thanks for reading all this, if you did! I'll say again that I think that this is a wonderful site. I hope that the very fact that I've written all this will indicate my strong feelings in that regard - I'd not have bothered writing anything unless I felt the site was well worth the effort.

Hi, I wanted to report a small bug I've noticed a few times when adding comments to Skyrim mod threads. I searched this forum and did see a thread about stripped backslashes, but it was from 2009 and the symptoms seem different (was related to editing not adding, where I am seeing the opposite,) so I thought I'd raise it (again) now. I've commented on a few mods, and so far I've always added comments direct on the mod itself, with the Add Comment button - i.e. not via the main forum thread interface. In a couple of those comments, I've mentioned Windows' file paths, for example: "Documents\My Games\Skyrim". The bug is that the backslashes are stripped out, resulting in: "DocumentsMy GamesSkyrim". But if I then edit the post and add them back in (using the same mod-page interface), they stick the second time around. I assume this is a character quoting issue - i.e. the post form is taking the backslash in the Unixy "quote next character" sense, and therefore treats \M as meaning "a literal M" and removes the backslash. If I'm correct then writing Documents\\My Games\\Skyrim would give the desired output - I've not tested that yet, but will if I remember next time I'm writing about file paths in a comment. As editing a post fixes it, and the problem doesn't exist in the main forum editor that I'm using right now, I assume it's not a general forum bug but specific just to the Add Comment mod-page form. Not a big issue by any means, just thought I'd raise it in case it's an easy fix. And thanks for a great site!

OK, yes I see. No, I hadn't read that: prior to being banned, the only posts I'd read on Nexus were comments on individual Skyrim mods. I'd not read any of the general forums before I went straight into chat. I fully realise now that it's not permitted to talk about it at all - my mistake was that I wasn't aware of that before I did. But as I said, I realise ignorance is no excuse. To be clear: I am not saying that the ban was unfair, I fully accept that I should have been aware of all the house rules before joining chat (and indeed before entering I had clicked an "I agree" statement specifically saying that.) I just wanted to make it clear that it was ignorance, and nothing more serious: my intentions had nothing to do with piracy or intending to promote it. I was therefore hoping that perhaps you'd allow me another chance. Thanks.

Hi, I'd like to appeal a chat ban applied this evening by DrGrimm. After the ban I PM'd DrGrimm with the same details I'm giving here, but I can see the PM has not been read yet and now I've seen this thread I thought I should put details here. I tried clicking the Unban Form but it's a 404. I'm not sure if I should put details here, or wait for DrGrimm to read my PM and respond, or PM someone else. So I hope it's OK if I explain here publically. I was banned for mentioning console modding. But I was not referring to piracy or anything similar. I did not realise that the mere mention of any console modding was bannable. I apologise for that, clearly I should have read the rules properly before signing in. As to what I said specifically: referring to the Wii, I said "One advantage of the Wii is that it got rooted and there's some excellent Homebrew available. You can rip your game disks and play them from a HDD." I had hoped it was clear from "rip your game disks" that I was referring only to games you already own legally. I was talking of the homebrew and convenience benefits of modding, not piracy benefits. I have modded my own Wii but only so I could play the games I'd already bought legally in a more convenient way, and apply game mods/cheats etc. I hate piracy! I know ignorance of the rules and not reading the terms is no excuse, but I hope you can see that there was no malice on my part and no intention of promoting piracy. However in hindsight I can see that even though I was not discussing piracy, what I said could be seen as promoting it anyway, given that most console modding IS related to piracy, even if mine wasn't. So yeah, it was stupid to bring it up at all. I would appreciate it if you'd review the ban - there's certainly no chance of me making the same mistake twice! Thanks in advance.