Trying to understand

[Guest deleted34304850]

because you owe them.........

 

 

(joke)

[Zanderat]

Curious why you lump all the literally 100's of thousands (maybe millions) of mod users with with the very minor vocal ones/complainers. Most users, like 99% of them, either keep quiet or offer gratitude. Some have questions and need support. You don't want mod authors all painted with the same black black brush. Why are you doing that to users?

[Guest deleted34304850]

i think because of the ratio of users to mod authors.

 

you're absolutely correct when you say that the vast majority of mod users are silent, and presumably grateful for the work of the mod author, but the vocal and entitled minority are those that are seen, so it's logical (if not correct) to assume that all users are entitled and ungrateful, because thats most of the feedback people remember.

 

mean spirited or hurtful comments last longer in peoples minds than positive feedback.

[DarkGreyCat]

I know all of that. Still, there is a lot more to it. You have to find a provider, choose a software package and pay for a domain. Why should I do this to myself? Just to keep dealing with ungrateful users?

Sure, I was just putting it out there. It's free if you don't mind using their domain name and their ads. So, mod.wordpress.com no point in paying for a site that won't be making profit.

[WileCoyote68]

 

Something to keep in mind is it's very easy to got onto a viewpoint that is warped by the vocal minority.

 

Most users who enjoy your work won't tell you that simple fact. Most users who have problems with it are only too willing to tell you and everyone else that it stinks (of course their problems couldn't possibly be of their own making).

 

That said my experience helping others with their mod troubles over the decade before I uploaded any of my mods had me firmly in the camp you now find yourself in. For most mods I needed to research through the mod comments looking for a starting place for my troubleshooting.

 

That exposed me to too many of the worst the world has to offer which soured me to the thought of uploading anything I had worked on myself. It's taken years to gain insight into the actual balance of the modder/mod user equation.

 

The latest events here just tipped the balance back to it's old setting.

 

I am now at an age where the behavior of a few can no longer shake me. However, experience has shown that this also leads to further conflicts. My counterpart has to argue damn well in order to be able to move me to act. If you are not ready to respond to all requests, no matter how impossible they may be, the game starts all over again. Even if you explain that a mod has turned out exactly as you imagined it, many users do not accept that. You are then inflexible and do not respond to their wishes blah blah blah ....

[Deleted31005User]

 

You don't want mod authors all painted with the same black black brush. Why are you doing that to users?

Because everyone is doing it to authors as well, even Nexus, just because a few modders "might" take down their mods we now have to paint all modders with the same brush and remove their function to delete and take away their control over all modders, just because of what a few "might" do.

And no I don't paint all users with the same brush, but I totally understand why.

 

I guess Robin Scott will raise his prices, to increase the rewards for loyal mod authors. As long as there's no alternative (and I remember how much he worked against paid modding alternatives), it's going to be a strong incentive for mod authors to stay here

Stop guessing, Robin said himself on Discord he will do exactly that, hes going to increase the price for premium so...

But then he also said he will wait a few months with this since if he will do it now things will explode even more, and then of course he blamed modders for their "conspiracy theories", so its best to let modders cool down, so he says.

Just go on their discord and search comments from "Dark", its all there.

Edited July 15, 2021 by Guest

[WileCoyote68]

 

Stop guessing, Robin said himself on Discord he will do exactly that, hes going to increase the price for premium so...

But then he also said he will wait a few months with this since if he will do it now things will explode even more, and then of course he blamed modders for their "conspiracy theories", so its best to let modders cool down, so he says.Stop guessing, Robin said himself on Discord he will do exactly that, hes going to increase the price for premium so...

Just go on their discord and search comments from "Dark", its all there.

 

The current crisis and the behavior of politicians and scientists around the world seem to have been good teachers. They showed how one can successfully manipulate the population in the direction of their own agenda, even without scientifically verifiable facts. Everything that does not correspond with their own point of view is pushed into the corner of the conspiracy theories. Critical questioning is not desired and is nipped in the bud. Either you are for me or against me. There is nothing in between. The similarities are striking

[Neonsquare]

 

NexusDark0ne

The underlying chat about the influx of newcomers who just want things to work, and blaming mod authors for failings that aren't theirs, has some merit. Having said that, this does happen every time there's a major game release. Every single time (seriously, EVERY time).

The idiots who refuse to read mod descriptions/readmes/installation instructions/permissions/etc tend to outweigh the ones who don't, to begin with. Then those users bugger off and go and play other games (likely because they have short attention spans), leaving the more "hardcore" players who actually have the patience to understand a bit more about the modding scene. As a result, over time, as things die down, things go "back to normal" and become more manageable again.

That's not to say there aren't issues with idiots through all stages of a game's post-release life cycle. It's just the differences in ratios of idiots to normal/nice/good users changes as time goes on.

This most definitely isn't an excuse for people being complete pillocks. "Game is new, expect idiots", while not fair, is basically the general sentiment.

We'll continue to try and create systems that aim to combat the amount of idiots there are around new games, but unfortunately idiocy tends to be a hard ailment to cure.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/5f5bu1/the_state_of_skyrim_modding/daiuzya/

 

 

I assume that 'Collections' are the cure to the "idiocy" ailment?

 

 

And some missing context which was posted on the GMAD forum. The decision to make 'Collections' goes back at least 5 years:

 

 

NexusDark0ne

For Nexus Mod's part, we explored a full mod pack system via the Nexus Mod Manager 20 months ago now. It took around 8 months of work and we had a fully working system in place before I mothballed it. We still have a branch of it in our private NMM code repo.

Let me explain the issues we ran in to with mod packs.

The mod pack system integrated with both the site and NMM. On the site end you could view mod packs, see what mods were in them, and click a button to download and install them all via NMM. NMM would download all the mods in the pack (giving all the mods downloaded their applicable +1 to their download counters), setup your mod pack as a separate profile, and apply all the custom installer settings so they were exactly the same as the user who created the pack. Creating your mod pack was as simple as exporting your profile in NMM to the site via a single click. You'd input the name of your mod pack and a description of it and NMM would send some JSON to our servers with all the necessary data which, in turn, would make the mod pack available to others via a new section on the site that let you browse other user's mod packs, see the most popular ones, etc..

We were mere weeks away from releasing it but when I had a good play around with the near finished version of it I realised there were major glaring issues that prevented it working on Nexus Mods in its current iteration.

Perhaps the most glaring issue was in regards to version control and the rights we grant mod authors on Nexus Mods. On Nexus Mods, mod authors can do with their files as they please. They can upload version 1.1 to our servers and then delete version 1.1 when they have 1.2 released, then delete version 1.2 when version 1.3 is ready, and so on and so forth. Authors have grown used to this level of control over their files and many do not like mod users being able to download older versions of their mods for various reasons. For starters, older versions might have bugs in them that have been fixed in later versions, the vision of the mod might have changed, or any number of other reasons. This is a problem for mod packs, as mod packs need to remain "as is" from when they were first added. For example, if your mod pack contains "Mod A" version 1.1 when you add it to Nexus Mods, version 1.1 needs to be the file that is served to users as that is the only way we can confirm absolute parity with the original mod pack creator's mod pack. No ifs or buts. If it's been 2 years and the mod author has released 8 new updates for the mod, so it's now on version 1.9 with major bug fixes and expansions, that mod pack still needs to serve version 1.1 of the mod and not version 1.9, even if the mod author has deleted version 1.1 from Nexus Mods. If we serve version 1.9 instead of version 1.1, it might cause massive incompatibilities with the mod pack due to the edits that have been made since it's original 1.1 version when the mod pack was released.

As such, we had four choices.

First, never actually delete any mods from our servers. Sure, no longer show any mods that have been deleted to the end users on file pages (so deleting version 1.1 means it's no longer available in the "files" tab), but keep those files on our servers so our mod pack system can maintain absolute historical parity. This would be a major cause of contention with mod authors and it would cause an absolute riot. Many, many mod authors would leave because of it. One, because mod author's who are expecting their old versions to be deleted for good and no longer downloadable will find that their old versions are still available via the mod pack system. Two, because mod authors will be dealing with support requests from their users using old versions they've patched and fixed (potentially) years ago, from the mod pack system. And three, because many mod authors like having absolute control of what we host and what can and cannot be downloaded, and this would be removing, even partially, that right and ability for them.

Second, we could implement a terms of service change from this point onwards, essentially removing the "if you delete your mod we will remove it from being downloaded" current term and essentially saying "if you upload your mods to Nexus Mods you give us an irreversible right to serve it forever, whether you delete your mod or not". Naturally, that wouldn't fly with many mod authors either, and many mod authors would leave as a result.

Third, we could have a mod pack system that did not maintain version parity with the original mod pack. That is to say, any time a mod in a mod pack is updated and the old version that mod pack relied on is deleted, the mod pack would simply revert to using the latest version of that mod. I already provided a little detail above about why that's not a great thing, but we did try out this system by making some mod packs using things like the S.T.E.P. guide or our own custom ones using the Top 100 or the most used mods. Within hours our mod packs were rendered practically useless as they were almost instantly made out of date, and ergo questionable in terms of their workability/integrity/compatibility, due to the fact mod many (many) authors like to update their mods very regularly! Our website page for mod packs accommodated this by showing you what mods had been updated since the mod pack was originally released (green = same version as the mod pack, orange = new version, red = entire mod has been deleted from Nexus Mods and no longer available) but upon using the system, it simply fell short of the main aim and goal of the entire system in the first place, which is to provide a simple way in which mod users can download and install a stable, working setup of mods that others have curated.

Fourth, we could have an opt-out system where mod authors could specify whether they'll allow their mods to be used in a mod pack or not. This is obviously not ideal for a "one click mod pack install" system, especially if some of the major mod authors opt out, and at the time there was a bit of turbulence in the community (I honestly don't remember what drama it was at the time, but there was drama) and it was definitely NOT the right time to spring this on mod authors. Potentially paid modding. Honestly can't remember.

And that's why I mothballed Nexus Mod's mod pack system at the time.

Not long after that we stopped development on NMM entirely and focused on Vortex, and thus, the mod pack code was never revisited. I'm not sure I want to touch it any time soon. It's an absolute hell-hole of permission and rights issues mixed with data integrity issues. I'm not saying we won't, just that I'm very, very aware of the extremely delicate issues mod packs present to the community.

Core to all of this is the fact mod authors are the copyright holders of their work and can pick where, and how, their work is used, like any copyright holder is entitled to do. As per Bethesda's EULA, they grant Bethesda certain rights, but the mod author still maintains ownership of their work and the copyright attached to it. As such, you should treat mod author's work like you would any other copyrighted piece of work, whether it's art, literature, music, film or otherwise. Would a truly 100% legal, stable and working one-click download and install mod pack system be great for lots of people? Yes, I'm sure it would. In the same way a 100% legal online movie distribution platform would be awesome online, where you could access every single movie ever made from a single piece of software, like Spotify managed for most music. But Spotify certainly doesn't have all music ever made on its servers, and the reason for that is that musical works are copyrighted, and the owners of music have rights. Spotify need the right to distribute that music on their servers. The same applies to mods, mod packs, and any service wanting to distribute those mod packs.

I know there's been a lot of questions raised recently about what the issues are with mod packs, why there's been drama around it and indeed, why Nexus Mods doesn't just make such a system. Hopefully this puts that to rest.

Aside: I apologise if I went off on one or didn't make sense in parts, however I'm in bed with a real stinker of a head cold. I've re-read it a few times and it makes sense to my dizzy, ill self, so this will have to do. I'm sure I'll re-read it in a few days time and facepalm missing out important details or how I worded/wrote things.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/7n20ai/moddrop_apologizes/dryzuqm/?st=jd2822yr&sh=f785e9d7

[LeelooMinai]

The issue with off nexus - like for example, For me - who makes pretty detailed and complicated NPCs overhauls is the off nexus publish limitations many have. It’s fine for active members. Thou I really feel horrible to yet again bother everyone AGAIN over pm to ask AGAIN for permission which I did already 10 months ago. The issue is inactive members who didn’t thought something like this would happen and have no permission for off nexus or haven’t stated some other permission on their about page, nor the Mod.

 

As well - it was so much work to go through all my assets again and see whom

To ask, checking pages. It’s just another way of draining mod authors so they might say, fine I stay. It was truly devastating for me to learn the hard work of 10 months died on that announcement day. Because I as well use assets from others, which I can’t publish here because I have no right to violate THEIR right of ownership, with publishing it on a page that violates ownership rights. I immediately considered this as I Read the announcement.

 

I do a lot of things myself, but the beauty about my overhauls is - they are so detailed and rich because of TEAMWORK. I am so grateful for all the artists and authors who enable me to make this in depth overhauls. And I appreciate creators in any way so much, tbh that announcement was heartbreaking.

 

All the people who will lose hundreds of engagements - comments, endorsements, wholesome interactions that means something to them, to me. All lost at the 5th August.

 

The whole thing is just seriously heartbreaking.

[LeelooMinai]

@neonsquare

 

That’s pure comedy that he actually agrees with mod authors there in all points we raise - just to say now - we do it correct….I feel like watching Monty Python… O.o