LupoTheButcher

Okay, I surrender. Once "not a right, a priviledge" comes out, it's all over but the bruised feelings. I'll just leave you with three words: free content providers. They're like earthworms or blue-green algae: easy to ignore or take for granted, but absolutely necessary and, in a way, all-powerful. There's a word for people who run a website without free content providers doing the heavy lifting. They're called Blogspot users. I was reading about an anime mod on a non-English site last night and suddenly this expression came to me, like a line from a movie I'd seen or a book I'd read: "Excuse me, this is machine translation to english, sorry but I cannot give support [to this mod]." Some people are multilingual and some are not. It's no crime. But if a heavy-hitter mod author whose screenshots always feature Korean or Cyrillic characters has trouble with English, do you think they're going to stick around for the Roman Coliseum treatment when their well-earned egos are used to nines and tens? Do you think they'll stop modding altogether because one foreign-language site changes its policies or closes down entirely? Do you think they've cut this discussion into 760 pieces and fed it into Babelfish so they can fully participate in the thought-experiment of binary ratings? Obviously the last one is a "no," but as for the other two, well, I guess I'll find out. Long live Oblivion!

It's possible that my reference to the decline and fall of FileFront was not fully understood by people whose defensive aggression seems to spring from a position of weakness. I'll try again. The Nexus is a mod collective. It is one of many Oblivion mod collectives, all of which allow users to download mods written by authors. Please bear with me -- some people require a cold shower and a pot of coffee before attacking the big picture. Mod authors are the source of product, just as the Sun is the source of all energy. Mod authors produce because they are driven. Ten-year-old games have regularly-updated mods because the authors can't stop, they are driven. (Operation Flashpoint, from the late 90s, has fresh mods falling out of the walls even now. If mods were illegal, OFP would continue add-ons of new weapon systems on pirate networks.) Mod authors produce. Mod users consume. Sophisticated mod users offer feedback, and serious mod users offer useful feedback, positive and negative. This is ecology. In the middle, there are content aggregators. They make it easy for authors to upload and update, and simple for consumers to download and comment. In an open market, some middles complicate things for their providers and consumers, and some don't. An open market provides several channels for providers and consumers to interact. (Quick question - how many mod teams does the Nexus host, or have exclusive contracts with? I think the answer is zero, but I could be wrong.) If free content providers stop providing content, the consumers go away. If the consumers go away, the free content providers find more rewarding channels to provide, er, FREE CONTENT. If a middle-man in a free market turns into a snarling, self-justifying bowel blockage, the providers and the consumers re-connect elsewhere, with a minimum of effort and inconvenience. If the middle-man is seriously devoted to buying cheap and selling dear, he and his cronies will stick it out to the bitter end, offering three-year-old content to anyone willing to pay a premium for it. This has happened many times, and will happen many more. But it's not interesting or important, once the providers and the consumers have made other arrangements. I hope I haven't offended anyone.

I forsee Top # lists aging into irrelevance and eventually becoming useless (out of 50 files, two people bother to rate one and one bothers to rate another one -- make your own punchline; should be interesting to see the results). In the past, people typically used the ratings as an entree to an ongoing discussion about a file. It was typical to see 3-5 pages of comments, with most commenters appearing in a puff of numerical smoke, so to speak. Now even the good old crowd-pleasers are going a week with 0/0 scores, and the comments are few, slim and mostly either complaints about missing elements or outright rating-avoidance: "I like it" or "I don't like it" without the waiting period, in other words. Seriously, I'm interested to see what happens. A couple of regulars turn off ratings as a matter of course, but rather more, I suspect, keep making content because they like seeing those nines -- which is perfectly human and makes everyone happy, frankly. It's really a question of whether mods start showing up here late (or not at all) compared to other TES sites. I like the Nexus. It would be depressing to watch it dry up and blow away like FileFront... hopefully some mechanism I can't possibly imagine will cause a million flowers to bloom as a result of the new changes.

It's been less than three hours since I read the, eh, thinking behind the adjustment to the ratings and comments. So I don't know anything yet. My mind is a blank, totally. It would be unfair to sound off with a binary "good/bad" judgement, unless I spend a long lunch in study and prayer, seeking the path to wisdom. In 181 minutes, though, I'll drop what I'm doing and fire up my browser and come right back to this topic, several pages from the front, and I'll be sure to leave feedback. No, really, I will. Because nothing else will have been posted in the meantime, and I won't have five other things to do, and nothing says "nuance" like "good/bad". I notice the comments have fallen to dead slow and the ratings are practically nonexistent since this upgrade took place. I await further improvements with breathless anticipation.

If you Google this: "Old File not found. However, a file of the same name was found. No update done since file contents do not match." you get TWO POINT FOUR SIX MILLION hits, with Bethesda / Oblivion a distinct minority. Of course there are at least 2.46 million clueless users who are too stupid to use the bathroom without help; that's just sense. The interesting part is the very broad spectrum of software packages that spit out this exact same message at the slightest provocation. Gotta love the Capitalization of "Old File." Talk about your forensic dead giveaways. It's Friday and I'm frankly bored. I'm gonna hop on the horn and find out exactly which Acme Generico Software Inc. brain-trust is responsible for the Old File patch plague. With TWO POINT FOUR SIX MILLION hits, come on, there's nowhere to hide, you know. Strictly from curiosity, you understand. My installation will be complete "nalyevo" this evening, so I don't have to scrape and beg for solutions, but I do confess I'm intrigued in a car-crash-slow-motion kind of way.

2.46 Million Hits. Google this: "Old File not found. However, a file of the same name was found. No update done since the contents do not match." 2, 460, 000 hits as of ten minutes ago. The big winner is some box-busting game from 2K Software, then the exact (byte for byte) same message for many, many Java users. I fell asleep clicking "NEXT" looking for Oblivion, so I included Oblivion in my next search. Apparently: 1. I am a pirate!!1 2. I seriously don't know what language I speak, and am using the wrong patch. 3. I HAX0R shad0r philes!1 4. I really am a pirate and should confess my sins. The punch line is that, once again, having paid US dollars for PC software and obtained a bona fide serial number, my best remedy is to, um, invite my nephew Zero Day over and turn him loose on my machine. Somehow he always manages to fix these whoopsies for me, even when TWO POINT FOUR SIX MILLION responses show up on Google when I go looking for my -- heh, "my," like *I* scrambled the software or am somehow to blame or something -- anyway, yep, MY software problem's solution. Here's something to Google: oenophile. The difference between wine and software is that a fifty-dollar bottle of wine takes more than six weeks to reveal itself as sewage. Gee, I wonder why PC software sales have been tanking year-over-year since Caesar was a road guard. Mysterious. Anyway, I charge too much per hour to debug software to do it for free. Excuse me, someone's at the door. Beating on it with drumsticks. Probably Zero Day. Toodle-oo, you Java pirates. Keep your hands off the shaders!