IMPORTANT! A SITE IS STEALING MODS!

[Kreisher]

A lot of modders' works aren't actually copyrighted, but this doesn't give free reign over what anyone does with them. It works on an honor system of sorts, and when someone takes advantage of that and put up mods when they don't have permission, it insults the modders who spent their time making the mods in the first place for the community to enjoy. Insulting the modders and community is not the way that you build up a community.

 

Now for some specific examples about what you say with modders being hard to contact. About 70% of mods will actually have a reuse policy listed in the ReadMe, and almost all popular mods have it in there to prevent situations exactly like this. Midas Magic in particular has a spot in its ReadMe: You must get permission from me before uploading this mod, in part or full, anywhere else. Without my consent you cannot upload it.

 

On a side note:

I was talking with Pronam earlier about the site, and we figured some stuff out. I think. Your site has some problems. First off, it's nearly impossible to navigate. Unless you want only the 10 most popular or latest mods, you can't find anything. You need a category or tag search like what the Nexus has, or at least a bigger list of the mods than your 10 thumbnails.

 

Next question: What's the point of a client for mods? There's nothing for it to launch like Steam does, and I really hope there's nothing to buy from it. There doesn't seem to be anything that a client can do that a web browser cannot.

 

 

I agree on all points Ub3rman123. Any mods that were uploaded where the devs requested prior notification shouldn't have been posted before getting their OK. Any such cases were a mistake and will be taken down as soon as they are found out. We desire to work with the community - not against it.

 

Regarding your side notes:

 

I agree that we should have a "Browse Mods for this Game" option. We have tags now, that's how we determine the various categories. Did you try the search option? If you search for content there are a variety of ways to filter and sort the results.

 

The GMOD client is still in development, and I'm not quite ready to discuss the details. However, I can promise you we WON'T be selling mods. Even if you (the mod dev) wanted to sell your mods through something like steam you couldn't thanks to the restrictions on mods found in the SDK's EULA. Maybe someday publishers will change their restrictions and devs would be able to make a living off creating awesome mods...but not today.

 

Finally, any service or subscription that we do roll out some day (similar to Nexus) will be Completely Free for active devs.

[Kreisher]

I have a question for you, Terry - What made you think that making people pay for mods was a profitable endeavor? If it's because it was being done in one modding community, that doesn't mean people in another modding community (especially ours, and many will agree with me) will also permit the same process. You want to know why we don't let such things happen? We actually make sure gullible people aren't taken in by a EULA-breaker's desire to profit on their own work, and the developer and publisher actually backs us up on it. Not like someone else, who doesn't care about what's going on with one of their most popular series...

 

Did you read Terry's reply?

He says they are NOT charging money for mods.

 

Addition by Dark0ne: Zaldir is right. nothing has been mentioned about them charging for mods and any implication has been fabricated by other members and then spread like chinese whispers. The main issue here is about mod theft, not about charging for mods, which would be an issue if and when it were to happen. It's not the issue right now, so no more on it please.

 

 

Thank you to Zaldir and Dark0ne for pointing this out to everyone. I was getting tired of repeating myself.

[ub3rman123]

Sorting mods by game isn't enough. Look at the Nexus's sorting methods. There are a ton of different mods, and you need more separation between the games so that people will know what they're downloading a mod for.

 

As for the mods: Saying "We'll remove them when you point them out" is not good enough. We won't sit here and list every last one of the mods you don't have permission because practically all of the mods are without permission.

[Kreisher]

Sorting mods by game isn't enough. Look at the Nexus's sorting methods. There are a ton of different mods, and you need more separation between the games so that people will know what they're downloading a mod for.

 

As for the mods: Saying "We'll remove them when you point them out" is not good enough. We won't sit here and list every last one of the mods you don't have permission because practically all of the mods are without permission.

 

Are you looking at the game pages? If you click on one of the games listed on the home page (also shown by clicking on the G in the circle in the menu) it will take you to what we call the "Game Profile Page". All the mods on this page relates to the game selected and only that game. You can also search within the mods database for that game by searching via the "Search for mods in this game" search box on the Game Profile Page right below the featured window.

 

As for the mods we have up now: We don't expect the community to find our problem mods for us - We are going back through now and checking the mod permissions. If we find mods that ask to be contacted first - they will be removed.

[Webbstre]

So it turns out that I have an old account here, from my Fallout 3 and Oblivion days. Nice.

 

I just thought I'd drop in and say hi to Mr. CEO here, who bailed on our thread on the Runic Games forums after everyone ganged up and told him to take down all the mods he stole and start over properly. Ironic that this is the EXACT SAME THING that this community came up with. I'm going to enjoy watching as the other sites you've taken mods from catch on and do the same thing.

 

Like I said before, and someone else said here, we like having proper competition, and legitimate alternatives to our sites. It gives us all reasons to improve our own sites. This kind of thing is just dirty though. As it was pointed out, some of the mods you've taken from this site even had Readme files with explicit instructions not to distribute them. Good work.

 

Still waiting for a response to my questions over on the RG Forums btw. I'd like a straight answer on what your business plan is with all this, and why you think taking content from other sites is going to help you become a successful company with groups over gamers who are fiercely protective of their work.

[Pronam]

To add to ub3r's point. We're not a scary bunch of people that will resist to share their mods elsewhere, everyone gets a fair chance here and most actively endorse the possibility of another place to upload their mods. I'll admit I even like some of the features that are working, despite the lack of some basic things like mod removal, search/order functionality and other navigation functionality that definitely need to be added.

 

The reason most are worried here is the fact it hasn't even been asked if their mods could be on there and no single announcement on this board or the official game forums have been made to even notify people gmod.com existed, we had to hear it from someone else that told it by chance. The fact that an indie game developer didn't put his email address in his install doesn't mean I can just upload his game on my site 'to make sure it doesn't get lost'. The main reason of success at nexus and most sites is the fact that authors are in control of their files.

 

People don't make mods for downloaders, they made them for themselves and choose to share them. Requests only fit for 'made for downloaders' and those make less than 5% of the mods and never any major mods. The tendency of people uploading their material without their permission caused several authors to move to private sites or simply not make any new mods at all. So yeah, this is the main piece that causes 'resistance'.

 

As for the mods we have up now: We don't expect the community to find our problem mods for us - We are going back through now and checking the mod permissions. If we find mods that ask to be contacted first - they will be removed.

As long as that's not linked to the duration of the 'beta'-stage of the site. Someone can't possible always hold onto all their promises, but some are already broken and any more wouldn't do any good.

 

 

So it turns out that I have an old account here, from my Fallout 3 and Oblivion days. Nice.

I had that after 4 years ;).

Edited July 6, 2011 by Pronam

[Kreisher]

So it turns out that I have an old account here, from my Fallout 3 and Oblivion days. Nice.

 

I just thought I'd drop in and say hi to Mr. CEO here, who bailed on our thread on the Runic Games forums after everyone ganged up and told him to take down all the mods he stole and start over properly. Ironic that this is the EXACT SAME THING that this community came up with. I'm going to enjoy watching as the other sites you've taken mods from catch on and do the same thing.

 

Like I said before, and someone else said here, we like having proper competition, and legitimate alternatives to our sites. It gives us all reasons to improve our own sites. This kind of thing is just dirty though. As it was pointed out, some of the mods you've taken from this site even had Readme files with explicit instructions not to distribute them. Good work.

 

Still waiting for a response to my questions over on the RG Forums btw. I'd like a straight answer on what your business plan is with all this, and why you think taking content from other sites is going to help you become a successful company with groups over gamers who are fiercely protective of their work.

 

Webbste, I bailed on the Runic thread b/c no one was reading my posts. I was repeating the same thing over and over - but too many people just wanted to rant. Also, when I realized that you started the thread - it seemed less like a fair fight. You own the primary site for Torchlight mods and have made it very clear (despite what you say here) that you see us as competition. I joined the thread on Runic's forums because I was hoping to have a meaningful conversation with the mod community.

 

As for our business plan - our goal is to create an awesome site for the sharing of mods - the rest will follow. I want to be clear though - we will NOT be charging for access to mods!

Edited July 6, 2011 by Kreisher

[Arthmoor]

The best thing you guys could do at this point is cut your PR losses, dump the mod database, and start over. Seed the database with your own work or with dummy files or something. The longer you go on trying to fight against this the worse it's going to get as news spreads of how you're stealing mods and ignoring the legal rights of their creators.

[hector530]

 

Webbste, I bailed on the Runic thread b/c no one was reading my posts. I was repeating the same thing over and over - but too many people just wanted to rant. Also, when I realized that you started the thread - it seemed less like a fair fight. You own the primary site for Torchlight mods and have made it very clear (despite what you say here) that you see us as competition. I joined the thread on Runic's forums because I was hoping to have a meaningful conversation with the mod community.

 

As for our business plan - our goal is to create an awesome site for the sharing of mods - the rest will follow. I want to be clear though - we will NOT be charging for access to mods!

 

so you took mods without permission (stole) to re-distributed them of your own site and somehow youre surprised people are piss off at you?! really?

[Dark0ne]

As for the mods we have up now: We don't expect the community to find our problem mods for us - We are going back through now and checking the mod permissions. If we find mods that ask to be contacted first - they will be removed.

 

It's ironic that you claim others haven't been listening to you when you have not been listening to us. You need to go back and remove any mods that either say you can't upload them elsewhere OR mods that don't have any specific instructions. Once again, if a mod has no instructions in their readme or file information pages about redistribution you don't magically gain the distribution rights for the file through the author's omission. You know why lots of authors haven't added distribution rights to their readme's? It's because every major site in this community has rules against the uploading of other people's work, so they don't feel it necessary to include it. Especially the older mods.

 

This is important, so I'd like you to reply on this matter with what you're going to do. Your response will largely influence whether your site becomes a "taboo" site, that cannot be linked here. I'll even go the extra mile and cook up a script that'll stop, and ban, your developers from spamming authors with private messages about your site.

 

Sort it out.