The point of Profiles?

[Drengade]

Question for anyone who has an answer.

 

I would have thought that profiles would be used to swap between mod lists, makes sense, the only other difference you can set up between them seems to be saves, but those are separate anyway. Anyway - recently ran into a big issue with my game, so made a new profile to save my mod list in the old, and reset the game to vanilla, before fixing the issue.

After a bit of stress testing with some mods, I decided it was stable enough, so went to reactivate my old profile to get my mod list back. It's not like I'd deleted the mod files and needed to re-download them. Then, instead of giving me back my old mod list, it set the old profile's mod list to the same as the test profile. Just propagated the settings the game had already instead of bringing back the old one.

 

My question is, if profiles can't be used to save and recover mod lists - what is the point of them?

[Tannin42]

Profiles do let you have separate mod lists but you seem to be confused about the different mod states.

 

If you uninstall a mod (removing the archive or not doesn't matter), it gets removed from all profiles - because it's no longer installed.

What the profile stores is the Enabled/Disabled state of mods. Only the "Enabled" mods will be applied to the game when you deploy.

[Zanderat]

@Tannin42, I agree with OP. I made a feedback request via the app to make profiles truly independent and it was kinda dismissed. But I feel if you have a separate profile, it should be, well, separate. You should be able to do what you want with it. This came up again with collections testing. I had to make a hacky separate instance of Vortex to be able to test profiles properly, to keep the test environment truly separate. Using profiles clouded what was going on too much.

[showler]

For a test profile that might make sense. But, for most people having a ten gigabyte texture overhaul duplicated across multiple staging folders might be an issue.

[Tannin42]

@Tannin42, I agree with OP. I made a feedback request via the app to make profiles truly independent and it was kinda dismissed. But I feel if you have a separate profile, it should be, well, separate. You should be able to do what you want with it. This came up again with collections testing. I had to make a hacky separate instance of Vortex to be able to test profiles properly, to keep the test environment truly separate. Using profiles clouded what was going on too much.

Profiles are what they are and they are useful this way.

I understand that there are problems/situations that they don't solve but then profiles aren't the tool you're looking for.

 

You don't insist on cutting your meat with a spoon and then complain it's not sharp enough. ;)

[rmm200]

I have to chime in that I really like the current implementation.

Each of my (many) profiles has only the few mods enabled pertinent to that profile - but I can see my full pool of mods I can draw from.

Some mods have version dependencies. It is nice to have all those installed, see them, and only enable the right ones.

I will say - when I uninstall a mod - I want it gone. I have never not checked the box "Remove Archive". Seems redundant.

[Zanderat]

Remove archive removes it from your downloads folder, as well.