My little rant about Mod development support posts

[bben46]

It can often depend on what time of day you post also. If no one who knows the answer is actually reading at that time, the question can easily be pushed down two or three pages. Posting in a wrong forum can also mean no answers - as the people who frequent that specific forum just don't know what you are talking about. Currently we are between major Bethesda game releases. That means a lot of regulars are just not spending as much time here. Instead they are off modding or playing some other games.

[lofgren]

I post answers when I can. Sometimes I am sitting at my computer and I have a few minutes so I give an extended detailed reply with screenshots. Sometimes I am replying on my phone and I can't do much more than point somebody (hopefully) in the right direction. Sometimes a question would require a response that is far too involved and time consuming for me right now.

 

Everybody here has lives and we frequent the forum and help people because it is fun and because we might need help ourselves sometime. But that doesn't mean we have unlimited time or interest to answer posts. Sometimes, unfortunately, you're just not gonna get the responses you need. That's the unavoidable result of trying to crowd source your questions. Getting help from another site doesn't mean that site has a better community or anything like that. It just means that the people on that site happened to have some cycles free to help you out. That's a good thing and there is no harm in posting your question to multiple places. It seems to me that we have a smaller community here than some of the other places mentioned above so that is also a factor.

 

I have no obligation to help people here but I do have obligations oher places. I have a kid to raise, work to do, dishes to wash, a dog to walk. There are going to be times when everybody on the forum who has the answer to your question (which may be as few as two or three people depending on the question) are all walking their dogs at the same time. That's not a failure of the community, that's just bad timing.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that almost every single modder is self-taught. Autodidacts tend to have very little patience for people who won't even try to answer their own questions. There have been many times that somebody asked a question and I though to myself, "Well I could answer this by firing up the CK and spending 15 minutes testing it through trial and error, or I could spend those precious 15 minutes doing the same thing for my OWN problems." Questions like "What happens if..." or "Will this work..." are highly unlikely to get a response from me because the way that I would answer the question is to LAUNCH THE GAME AND TRY IT. That might seem dickish but I have already done this thousands of times to answer my OWN "What happens if" questions, and that is the only reason I know literally anything at all.

 

While hording our hard-gained knowledge is counterproductive, it can be quite aggravating when somebody seems to think that we are here to test their little bits of code, as if we don't have better things to do with our time.

 

I think the accusation of elitism is a little ridiculous. The experienced modders who hang out here do so specifically to help out less experienced modders. If we were elitists we would spend all of our time in the mod authors forums.

Edited February 28, 2015 by lofgren

[Terra Nova]

I used to help, but I am hard to understand it seems. No matter how many different ways I explain something, people a lot of times simply don't get it, and come back and says something doesn't work.

 

Really, I SEE every "0" reply post on this boards. This is part of my desire to never ignore people when spoken too(unless we have beef), so stuff like that does not get past me. But I cannot help anyone, experience has taught me that. It is INCREDIBLY DEPRESSING.

[icecreamassassin]

I agree that it's annoying to be asked to help someone who isn't doing the footwork to try and figure it out. When I post a question it's because I've already tried multiple ways of doing it, trial and error examined it and searched all over hell and breakfast to try and find an answer (usually about 2 days of fighting with it) and when I can't find anyone who knows about it after that, it gets very frustrating

 

I also don't think anyone is being elitist, it's just what you say, folks are tied up with stuff and sometimes the post just has bad timing. I usually back burner things at that point and work on a other aspect if the mod, but it's really frustrating when that one problem is all that remains in order to start testing the newest version before release

[n0mad23]

I'm new to Skyrim and even newer to the mods here. As an info-junky, I pretty much read 95% of the posts just to further my own knowledge base, and have only answered a couple of questions here as they pertained to something I'd recently figured out or found the answer to.

 

My previous experience making mods for a space flight simulator reminded me of the original post here, as what I considered to be my most important questions posed to The Modding Gods resulted in total silence. Finally I did the same kind of post asking why the silence. The several answers that followed really surprised me. If it concerned things they knew they provided the most detailed and helpful answers they could. When they were silent it was because the questions were outside of any of their knowledge bases. Strangely enough one of them suggested I make an account on the official NASA forum site and ask my questions there.

 

Modders are modders like engineers are engineers. I suspect you questions going unanswered are because you're asking thing people don't have the answers to.

[Galadreal]

  On 2/28/2015 at 6:06 PM, Terra Nova said:

I used to help, but I am hard to understand it seems. No matter how many different ways I explain something, people a lot of times simply don't get it, and come back and says something doesn't work.

 

Really, I SEE every "0" reply post on this boards. This is part of my desire to never ignore people when spoken too(unless we have beef), so stuff like that does not get past me. But I cannot help anyone, experience has taught me that. It is INCREDIBLY DEPRESSING.

 

That is not true, you helped me a few weeks ago on the Quick Questions/Quick Answers thread. Your answer did not solve my problem completely, but it certainly pointed me in the right direction so I knew that my problem was with the head textures, not the body. And I really appreciate that. So thank you again.

 

  On 3/6/2015 at 8:26 PM, icecreamassassin said:

I agree that it's annoying to be asked to help someone who isn't doing the footwork to try and figure it out. When I post a question it's because I've already tried multiple ways of doing it, trial and error examined it and searched all over hell and breakfast to try and find an answer (usually about 2 days of fighting with it) and when I can't find anyone who knows about it after that, it gets very frustrating

 

I know what you mean there. I usually for several hours, search google, get lost searching google, get taken to sites that have nothing at all to do with what I am looking for, go back to google, search again...etc etc etc. This is never my first place to come for answers. And when you do not know the questions to ask in the first place, it is very difficult. I had a problem a couple of weeks ago with grey body textures. Everything I searched for pulled up the grey face bug. 6 pages into google search, I gave up. I redid the textures completely...still there. Thankfully Terra Nova said on a forum post that she thought it was something to do with the textures on the head. So was able to remake the nif file from a backup, and poof, no more problems.

 

Then again, sometimes the answer is there...buried in an 8 page long tutorial, and it gets really confusing when you just need 1 tiny piece of information, so you read the whole thing, cannot understand any of it and get very confused trying. While you could solve the problem another way, that would lead to 3X the work and effort, someone here might have an idea that would save you a lot of time...it is just something you never thought of.

 

I am fairly good at the modding I do know, but for the last year my ability to learn new things has been all kinds of messed up. I have to take it all in tiny chunks to absorb anything, and even then, sometimes things just don't stick. While I cannot always get answers here, it is not because I am being too lazy to google it, it is just that since my mind went haywire, I have days that I get confused very easily. On those days it is nice to have a place I can go to with people who can give me a clear and concise rundown without all the extra that will just make my head spin.