Stunami

In response to post #35138655. Very much this, a tagging system would greatly help people find what they want.

Personally I'd argue even if lots of people are donating to authors for the wrong reasons, it's still a better outcome than very few people donating for the right reasons which seems to be the current situation on the Nexus. Knowing others are donating and seeing it happen can also help nudge others into actually making a donation.

While I'm sure he has his reasons for not wanting to know who is donating to whom, I feel it's one of the barriers that is preventing people from donating as much as they possibly could. I know it's meant to be donating, to be done out of good will and you shouldn't expect a reward out of it other than knowing you supported somebody, but I find most people aren't interested in that kind of system. I learned that the hard way working in a charity shop. People will however donate if it's seen as a competition with (optional if you want to be known) names and ranks, or if there's even just a teeny tiny little reward for doing so.

I'm just happy knowing ideas are being listened to. I want to support modders, but I don't want to do it simply because their content is locked behind a pay wall. Feels too impersonal and starts to turn into PSN/XBL/Steam etc. Another idea I had was perhaps gifting users a very small period of premium membership if they donated, or perhaps even giving them access to premium servers for a specific author if they donated enough. e.g. 1) You have donated $5 to T3nd0, you have been given three days premium membership as a gift. 2) You have donated $50 to Apollodown, we have given you access to all premium servers across Apollodown's files for life. These are just examples and most definitely would require tweaking to be feasible, but they're nice little incentives to donate to specific authors. Whether Dark0ne would be up for it or not I have no idea, as in his Totalbiscuit interview he said he didn't want to handle exchanges of money between users.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot since this whole Steam Workshop debacle started only yesterday. It may not necessarily be a good idea, you're free to disagree with me. Those I've spoken to seem to be split 50/50 on what I came up with. So I thought I'd share it on a public forum to see what others think. So to start, the only reason I can see ANYBODY agreeing to taking the scraps Valve offers for their work in exchange for them gaining full control over your content is that, simply put, nobody is seeing any real money through the donation system we have here on the Nexus. We have a system to optionally support our local modders while they provide their free content, but it's rarely if ever being used. Hell I've seen several posters over the years who didn't even know the donation feature existed because it's hidden away on the user's profile. I want to support you guys, I really do. I just donated to Brumbek, the creator of the Static Mesh Improvement mod, in the hopes that he never moves to the Workshop because of how scummy the system is. The way the Steam Workshop is treating you like content whores is quite frankly disgusting and I want no part in it. So, how to actually encourage people to donate? In my opinion you make it plain as day to see for all, so people understand how much an author is getting in relation to their work. The current system hides itself on the user's profile behind their work, it may as well not even exist. Here's a quick MSpaint job I did in like two seconds just as a visual example. http://i.imgur.com/aelP8a0.png If there's anything Twitch has taught me, it's that people are quite happy COMPETING in who can donate the most when it comes to their favourite things. People will throw their money at somebody because five seconds ago some other guy donated like $10. It's an effective form of encouraging people to hand over money for something that is and always will be FREE. This is I believe the system the Nexus needs to adopt, it doesn't affect how the Nexus currently operates, no content is locked away and people can still download their favorite mods for free, only now the donation button may actually be clicked more than once a month. 100% of that money goes to the mod creator, it does not get disected into a little chunk for the person who worked for hours while a greedy corporation snatches the rest.