Paid Modding .... So many conflicts of interest

[Deleted119721User]

I am very glad paid modding died on Steam ..... In the end it would be Steam making the money instead of modders.

 

But many modders deserve to be paid as they have done the almost impossible job of making compelling content on Beths creaky old engine.

 

But the biggest problem is that these talented people are all working independently of each other, competing with each other and making mutually exclusive content.

 

In order to feasibly get paid groups of modders need form teams that publish together to make cohesive bug free content. Payiing for single mods probably wont fly. QC will be a nightmare.

 

The Nexus should be proactive an open up a brand new kind of presentation system tailored for teams of modders.

 

Players can stop the horrible searching for mods, installing and troubleshooting and search for cohesive team content.

 

As no doubt someone will point out "Teams are against human nature"

 

If modders want to make decent money they will have to defy nature and release cohesive content that can be QAed as a whole unit. Then enough money can be charged to make it worthwhile to the modder and player.

 

And just maybe we could have real quest mods built on the platform of a given teams work.

 

 

 

[FrankFamily]

There are already teams of modders doing big mods and such, but imo for a lot modders it's the competition (not only with other modders, but with themselves) that makes them better. So i don't think the nexus should get into that, modders are free to team up or not.

 

" almost impossible job of making compelling content on Beths creaky old engine." Same old saying, and untrue. Beth games aren't that bad and modding isn't that hard, just as hard as game development itself. And they even provided ck wich is quite straightforward, if that isn't easy modding then nothing is.

[orian34]

 

And just maybe we could have real quest mods built on the platform of a given teams work.

 

Gh, sorry but i have to ask : aren't (legacy of the DB, CWO, Gray cowl of Nocturnal, Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, LAL, Moonpath to Elsweyr, Undeath, and a lot of other mods that i could've missed/forgot) really good? Are they less good because they are not done by a paid team of modders? Sorry for being rude but i do not liked at all the way you said it.

 

I know it's dumb from me to do that, but i enjoyed so much these ones that i think they deserve better(and all the work/hours of the people behind of course) than being qualified of low-quality content. This is something i can't let go.

Edited April 28, 2015 by orian34

[Deleted119721User]

 

 

And just maybe we could have real quest mods built on the platform of a given teams work.

 

Gh, sorry but i have to ask : aren't (legacy of the DB, CWO, Gray cowl of Nocturnal, Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, LAL, Moonpath to Elsweyr, Undeath, and a lot of other mods that i could've missed/forgot) really good? Are they less good because they are not done by a paid team of modders? Sorry for being rude but i do not liked at all the way you said it.

 

I know it's dumb from me to do that, but i enjoyed so much these ones that i think they deserve better(and all the work/hours of the people behind of course) than being qualified of low-quality content. This is something i can't let go.

 

Yes ..... those 8 mods are great ...... but there are probably 10,000 mods by now and only 8 great quest mods.

 

Wouldn't you rather have 9000 great quest mods instead of another 8 texture packs.

 

QCing a quest mod is a nightmare especially in the context of not knowing what mods people already have. That is why there are so few quest mods.

Because the Skyrim engine is still in the dark ages WRT quests and QCing quests is next to impossible.

 

The SKSE extensions and the mods may eventually allow enough control of the game flow enough to actually write decent quests.

 

To make the move to paid modding you need to write a great quest and writing a great quest depends on many peoples work besides Bethesda's.

 

That is the conflict. Paid work depending on free work. Free work would be easier for gamers to support if it was combined into complementary groups of mods for which the player could just pay for once and have it work perfectly. I think very few people would be willing to go through there entire mod list and pay each modder. That should happen but it doesn't.

 

How it would typically happen would be a player downloads a mod, but it may take 2 weeks before they understand the true value of it. It also may conflict with other mods and cause QC problems. In the end the final number who would pay drops to almost zero.

 

The Skyrim mod making community IMO should move from making content to making compelling Quests. The vanilla game without mods is crap for making quests ...... thats why there are so few good quest mods. Good quests can only be made in the context of other many other modders work.

 

The other modders work needs to be consolidated so we the player can pay for something that works together.

[RurikNiall]

Wouldn't you rather have 9000 great quest mods instead of another 8 texture packs.

 

To be perfectly honest, not really. I think the current balance of mods like Falskaar and Moonpath to Elsweyr versus assorted smaller mods is fine, I don't know about anyone else but even if there were hundreds of high quality quest mods I'd probably only have one or two in my load order at any given time. The only reason this ever became an issue at all was because of Valve and Bethesda's cashgrab scheme and their weak justification that it would encourage higher quality mods, despite the fact that out of all the mods they could have chosen for their launch to prove this idea to us the bulk of them were cheat weapons based on other games and cheat armours most of which lacked either male or female models, not exactly the most compelling case for paid modding producing higher quality mods when the best they could muster at release are cheat armour and weapon mods that we have by the dozens already.

[Levantinium]

We have to remember that one of the benefits to free modding is the never-ending quality testing the players do. One can only hope the players aren't obnoxious and rude, but when you have a good audience who helps you find bugs and also fellow modders who help you to fix or improve things, your mod immensely benefits.

 

It's a symbiotic relationship.

[FrankFamily]

You keep saying that mods people make are bad if they are not huge quest mods, and that's highly unrespectful to all the modders here.

 

"but there are probably 10,000 mods by now and only 8 great quest mods."

 

Just so you know, there actually 40,000 mods for syrim in the nexus, and you are basically saying that other than the 8 mods you consider great the rest shouldn't even exist?

Also you should look at the top mods, you need to go to the bottom of the first page to find one of your so called "great mods" so...

Not to talk about all those little mods that didn't took a thousand hours of work but rather a clever idea and in the end all those little things add up to make skyrim much better, or retextures, maybe it's just me but i prefer a good quest mod and retextures to make skyrim look good over 2 quest mods, just to put an obvious example i think everyone would agree with me when i say cabal's mod are period.

 

And imo the main reason why there are few huge quest mods is time, a huge mod takes a huge amount of time, making a team, voice actors, etc and most people just go ahead and make weapons, retexture or little mods.

 

pd: you don't really need skse or skse extensions to make quest mods unless you are going to make something really complicated script-wise.

Edited April 29, 2015 by FrankFamily

[Deleted119721User]

You keep saying that mods people make are bad if they are not huge quest mods, and that's highly unrespectful to all the modders here.

 

"but there are probably 10,000 mods by now and only 8 great quest mods."

 

Just so you know, there actually 40,000 mods for syrim in the nexus, and you are basically saying that other than the 8 mods you consider great the rest shouldn't even exist?

Also you should look at the top mods, you need to go to the bottom of the first page to find one of your so called "great mods" so...

Not to talk about all those little mods that didn't took a thousand hours of work but rather a clever idea and in the end all those little things add up to make skyrim much better, or retextures, maybe it's just me but i prefer a good quest mod and retextures to make skyrim look good over 2 quest mods, just to put an obvious example i think everyone would agree with me when i say cabal's mod are period.

 

And imo the main reason why there are few huge quest mods is time, a huge mod takes a huge amount of time, making a team, voice actors, etc and most people just go ahead and make weapons, retexture or little mods.

 

pd: you don't really need skse or skse extensions to make quest mods unless you are going to make something really complicated script-wise.

 

Isn't questing the reason we are all here?

 

Haven;'t you already collected enough and killed enough yet? The game is almost ancient now and the vanilla quests were mostly not compelling. Everything that can be improved is already done 10x over. Most new stuff breaks something else.

 

I am not in any way devaluing the work of modders that do not do quest mods. I am saying that their work is so good and so valuable that they should be paid for it. I am saying it is so good that it doesn't need to be done anymore. I am saying that it is time to stop fixing Skyrim and make new stuff in the context of excellent modders doing quest mods.

 

New Quest mods can only be done in the context of cohesive working packs of non quest mods.

 

The community needs to decide which non-quest mods the new quest mods will depend of on.

[Deleted119721User]

To those that think that I am bashing the work of modders .... I am not as I am a modder myself to some extent and I know how hard it is to work with Bethesda's aging engine.

 

I write this because there is no game quite like Skyrim, but the game itself is a missed opportunity. It is almost there but the quests have always been lacking, sometimes seriously lacking. Its not anybody's fault, it is just that originally the Engine simply wasn't designed for questing.

 

Based on my perception of the current mod landscape I think the community is finally reaching critical mass both in skill and content. If the community could be unified Skyrim could finally have compelling quests with great writing, world spaces, voice acting and environmental interaction.

 

This could allow making content that is better than any developer possibly could because you guys have talent and you are free of the the bulls$it that plagues developers.

 

But to do this you need:

 

1) To get paid directly from the player

2) You need to unify and release a platforms of mods that work together perfectly and charge 5-10$ for them.

3) Big quest mods would require certain platforms and should also be paid or at least donate.

4) The Nexus needs to evolve to support this.

5) Get the hell out of Skyrim .... it is too crowded there already and injecting any content into that already bloated gameworld is prone to instability. Even the Dawnguard DLC sometimes causes weird behavior when it injects vampires into cities. Getting out of Skyrim also gets you away from all the Beths issues with the Skyrim gameworld.

4) Start making Quest mods leveraging packs of mutually compatible content.

 

 

As an example ......CCO, RND, Hunterborn and Frostfall are an obvious choice for a base mod pack. The mod authors themselves need to get together and make a single Esp/BSA that the rest of the community can build content upon and they need to be paid by us for their efforts. I would quite happily pay for that combo but even that isn't enough to make a platform for questing.

 

An example of how the CCO, RND, Hunterborn and Frostfall could be used to naturally and organically make compelling quests would be.

 

The player meets an adversary or environmental calamity that they cannot hope to overcome ... like the eruption of Red Mountain. They are forced to flee into a new worldspace with nothing but their backpack. They then have to survive in a new environment with nothing but their wits until the modder triggers movement to a new situation. This is organic, it flows.

 

Another group of mods that could be incorporated into the platform is Skytest and One with Nature. Skytest needs to be debloated. One with Nature greatly inproves user experience as some people hate to kill certain types of wildlife and find suicidal wildlife attacks annoying when the character is levelled.

 

2) The next direction Skyrim could move into is destructible mini environments. Skyrim could never be destructible, but much smaller areas could be and this could be used to naturally balance the game in interesting ways to make compelling content.

 

As an example the player could pass though a natural choke point that triggers entry into a new worldspace .... a small village for example. Destructibility could be built both into the story flow and combat consequences with indiscriminate use of spells causing the whole village to burn to the ground. This would allow natural world scaling and compelling consequences for thoughtless courses of action. Destructibility is a pipe dream for Skyrim but not for small custom designed worldspaces.

 

It will be interesting to see if Witcher 3 causes a mass exodus of modders from Skyrim. Personally I doubt it.

 

I have happily donated for mods .... Dragon Tree Temple was a no brainer ... but the process is too convoluted in its current form.

[Deleted119721User]

To those that think that I am bashing the work of modders .... I am not as I am a modder myself to some extent and I know how hard it is to work with Bethesda's aging engine.

 

I write this because there is no game quite like Skyrim, but the game itself is a missed opportunity. It is almost there but the quests have always been lacking, sometimes seriously lacking. Its not anybody's fault, it is just that originally the Engine simply wasn't designed for questing.

 

Based on my perception of the current mod landscape I think the community is finally reaching critical mass both in skill and content. If the community could be unified Skyrim could finally have compelling quests with great writing, world spaces, voice acting and environmental interaction.

 

This could allow making content that is better than any developer possibly could because you guys have talent and you are free of the the bulls$it that plagues developers.

 

But to do this you need:

 

1) To get paid directly from the player

2) You need to unify and release a platforms of mods that work together perfectly and charge 5-10$ for them.

3) Big quest mods would require certain platforms and should also be paid or at least donate.

4) The Nexus needs to evolve to support this.

5) Get the hell out of Skyrim .... it is too crowded there already and injecting any content into that already bloated gameworld is prone to instability. Even the Dawnguard DLC sometimes causes weird behavior when it injects vampires into cities. Getting out of Skyrim also gets you away from all the Beths issues with the Skyrim gameworld.

4) Start making Quest mods leveraging packs of mutually compatible content.

 

 

As an example ......CCO, RND, Hunterborn and Frostfall are an obvious choice for a base mod pack. The mod authors themselves need to get together and make a single Esp/BSA that the rest of the community can build content upon and they need to be paid by us for their efforts. I would quite happily pay for that combo but even that isn't enough to make a platform for questing.

 

An example of how the CCO, RND, Hunterborn and Frostfall could be used to naturally and organically make compelling quests would be.

 

The player meets an adversary or environmental calamity that they cannot hope to overcome ... like the eruption of Red Mountain. They are forced to flee into a new worldspace with nothing but their backpack. They then have to survive in a new environment with nothing but their wits until the modder triggers movement to a new situation. This is organic, it flows.

 

Another group of mods that could be incorporated into the platform is Skytest and One with Nature. Skytest needs to be debloated. One with Nature greatly inproves user experience as some people hate to kill certain types of wildlife and find suicidal wildlife attacks annoying when the character is levelled.

 

2) The next direction Skyrim could move into is destructible mini environments. Skyrim could never be destructible, but much smaller areas could be and this could be used to naturally balance the game in interesting ways to make compelling content.

 

As an example the player could pass though a natural choke point that triggers entry into a new worldspace .... a small village for example. Destructibility could be built both into the story flow and combat consequences with indiscriminate use of spells causing the whole village to burn to the ground. This would allow natural world scaling and compelling consequences for thoughtless courses of action. Destructibility is a pipe dream for Skyrim but not for small custom designed worldspaces.

 

It will be interesting to see if Witcher 3 causes a mass exodus of modders from Skyrim. Personally I doubt it.

 

I have happily donated for mods .... Dragon Tree Temple was a no brainer ... but the process is too convoluted in its current form.