On console mods, theft and Bethesda.net

[PonceMonster]

In response to post #39477440.

DumdogsWorld wrote: I'm sorry, but as soon as you all said we don't have the right to charge for mods, you said that the mods indeed don't belong to the authors. They apparently belong to Bethesda. So if they're on Bethesda.net, I don't see what the problem is.

WHAT?!?!?! WHO SAID ROBIN WAS AGAINST THIS!! GET YOUR s#*! TOGETHER MAN, READ THE ARTICLE. Or watch the Gtymka, because clearly you don't .. nvm.

[Ethreon]

In response to post #39477780. #39478180, #39478220 are all replies on the same post.

Alkpaz wrote: The modding community is nothing to a corporate entity like Bethesda. They don't care, they care about their bottom line, like any company, even you, should. I run a business myself. At the end of the day it is about paying your employees, rent/mortgage/auto/franchise taxes/etc. Customers are those who buy products, not sitting in your shop "chatting away". I paid Nexus because I support what your doing and I understand running a site takes, yanno, money. I've donated to authors who I feel deserved it. I will pull support of anyone trying to make a buck by charging for a "free service". But it is Bethesda's property. We are using it. Mod authors need to understand that what they create is ultimately owned by Bethesda. They can do as they see fit. If it angers the few people who "mod" their games, so be it. People will STILL buy their games. There isn't any money in it for them at this point. If they do start charging, that is another issue. Will I be fine with that? No, I will not support that, but I may buy a game or two by Bethesda down the road, but will be more selective. Just like EA, Valve, Blizzard, etc etc.. You vote with your wallet.

Feel free to disagree... I am not one of those "protesters". ;)

Ethreon wrote: Except you won your own creations.

PonceMonster wrote: It's just that they can get their mods uploaded without their permission. Bethesda never cared for the modding community other than to make money off of it, it's not what they're doing that is upsetting us, it's what they're letting happen for what they carelessly, just happen to do.

That one fish, and owning what you made yourself is another fish. The two fish are not same fish.

And even if beth would own all and any files you made, that wouldn't give Johnny McDickhead the right to take my mods.

[TheVampireDante]

In response to post #39477815. #39477935, #39477995 are all replies on the same post.

Canderis wrote: what about the mass amounts of mods you guys just reuploaded from filefront? I certainly didn't give my permission for mine to be uploaded here.

jim_uk wrote: There's a contact email at the bottom on this news article where you can get in touch with them about it http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/news/12810/?

jackty89 wrote: I think they did it for mod preservation , as filefront is closing down, if there is a real problem contact them, i'm pretty sure the nexus team is willing to help you

Then (as Jim_UK suggested) send us a list of linked files that belong to you and we'll remove them.

[Kira8002]

I've been using this website for 8 years I guess, and I never bothered coming out of the woodwork to express my opinions or whatever, but I guess now it's a good time. Here it goes:

 

Dark0ne, you are naive.

 

People gathered at Nexus for convenience and simplicity's sake. If things start getting too complex or full of drama (like this buzzwords filled post of yours), then we'll just move somewhere else, and this WILL happen to Nexus if you keep making mistakes like this. Your post will divide the community even more than console mods ever would.

 

We users and content creators own you nothing, you are entitled to nothing. If we see that this site isn't worth the trouble anymore, we'll just pack our s#*! and go.

[Jebbalon]

Thank you Dark0ne, I for one enjoy your level-headed take on the subject. You have always had your finger on the pulse of the modding community and the Nexus reflects that.

 

My opinions...

 

- Bethesda.net is a "new wheel". It's ruff and not all that round. In comparison The Nexus is a badass Lamborghini. Given time, will Bethesda.net get better? Sure. Is the modding community and the console community patient enough to wait? Hell no!

 

- Bethesda's inability to punish thieves by banning them ... Can they? The CK, and ability to make mods, the in-game function to download mods and the Bethesda.net to upload mods is all provided as part of the purchase price of the game. The thief paid for all that. So can the company that provides all that really just pull the plug on them?? I think they can't and the thieves know it.

 

2 ideas I'd like to put out there...

 

1. For the Nexus - is there at all a way to add NMM into the in-game mod browsing functionality? Beth would have to release its API or whatever/however it works, but could that maybe be a possibility down the road?

 

2. For the community - Could there be a master file type mod released containing certain keywords or global variable that then would be required to have in order for mods to work? In my mod I'd simply add the keywords and make that file a master. The idea being that if my mod is stolen it won't work without the master file and I don't have to worry about keeping track of other sites because the master file mod is being tracked. So moderators and such only have to watch out for the master mod not all the other stolen mods. Of course bypassing that system would be too easy but it's just an idea to build on.

[PonceMonster]

In response to post #39476840.

Namea wrote: Within hours of the trailer release for the new enhanced skyrim I saw a popular modder in the Skyrim community getting high and mighty and saying something along the lines of "Great, now all the pathetic console peasants will be flooding my pages demanding mod ports to consoles."

Let me just say that anyone who uses the term "Console Peasant" seriously and without joking intent is automatically a douchenozzel in my mind. This particular creator is usually a b&@*$, she's arrogant and clearly thinks herself better than everyone but I STILL expected more from her.

Personally I am excited for console users to get mods. I am a PC girl all the way but my husband is a console gamer. We have similar taste in games and often play them together, at the same time on our differing platforms. It's a fun way to bond as we discover new things and get to be excited together about it. To me he's not a console peasant, he's just another gamer.

My dearest hope is that mods for consoles will be a turning point in this stupid separation between console and PC gamers. Finally a way for us to meet in the middle and people to start just enjoying that we have a hobby in common.

Which brings me to mod theft and the biggest problems with it.

Yeah, stealing mods sucks, it's a horrible thing to take something someone else has worked on extensively and release it as your own. While many modders are handling this issue with arrogance and punishing the whole community for a few asshats there are those who are seeing the larger issue with this: Console gamers aren't used to modding.

What does this mean? Anyone who has extensively modded games for years knows that sometimes crap goes wrong. Sometimes a mod breaks your game or is incompatible with another mod. Sometimes you as the user have to go in and figure out what's up because a mod author is not responsible for figuring out every possible configuration and incompatibility of their mod. Console users can't do that. They have no access to the internal systems. No way to open a mod up and look, no way to manually delete it or fix it. No way to go in and completely remove every part of a mod if a mod author leaves the community and the mod doesn't get updated.

And if they could, would they know how? Now my husband is terrible with computers. He really is. I build them for a living but that man can kill one in 30 minutes if left alone with it. I know that's not typical for console gamers but on the whole most of them have less knowledge of the technology behind their consoles than PC users have about their machines. This is going to cause problems as well when inevitably mods break.

This, more even than morality, is the problem with mod theft. Making a mod stable enough to work on consoles is not as simple as ticking a checkbox in the CK. Mod authors, at least the good ones, will want to optimize their mods and actually build them to be stable for console users. There needs to be a quality control threshold here. No more shoddily built mods coded by amateurs. I can fix those on my PC but on a console? A console user will have to deal with the consequences and will be unable to fix it. There has to be a screening process in place for the protection of save games across the board so to speak.

In the end this whole situation is new, strange, and for me at least exciting. There are a lot of kinks that are going to need work and it might take a while. If everyone just pulls their heads out of their asses and starts trying to work together we might actually get somewhere towards a more peaceful gaming community.

And as for creators like the one I mentioned at the beginning of this novel of a comment? Well screw them. She may think she's the cream of the Skyrim crop just because she's released popular mods but at the end of the day she's just another person behind a screen who ports assets she didn't create into a bit of software she didn't create to put into a game she didn't create. If she wants to look down on people for their choice of gaming platform she's going to need some serious stilts because from where I'm standing it looks like better people, better authors, and a better mentality will hopefully be on the rise.

Ey now, she has that right considering he's in the visuals department. Unless you can do what she's doing on console, then you should know better. For one thing, you can't just take her visual mod and put it on Skyrim remastered or Fof4. And I can't say that ENB would be recommended for use on consoles either, as it may butcher performance, altogether. As people might have mentioned, Fof4 runs like shite and it is better off that you stick with the visuals it had already and only use visual mods on pc, it's simply not optimized. And no it's not that they are full of it, it's that it's not that simple and you can't just tell people one way or the other, THAT THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS. And even if she were to try and explain, how do you know it will even get to everyone. 15 minutes after she posts the damn thing, she could still be getting the same bs. And people hype console games a hell of a lot more than any mod, and so put those two factors together, and she's gonna get a lot of clueless people who couldn't even be considered a part of the community yet, already asking for her work to be on console already. Please understand their perspective, they're a hell of a lot more important and valuable than you think.

[Deleted1205226User]

I've been using this website for 8 years I guess, and I never bothered coming out of the woodwork to express my opinions or whatever, but I guess now it's a good time. Here it goes:

 

Dark0ne, you are naive.

 

People gathered at Nexus for convenience and simplicity's sake. If things start getting too complex or full of drama (like this buzzwords filled post of yours), then we'll just move somewhere else, and this WILL happen to Nexus if you keep making mistakes like this. Your post will divide the community even more than console mods ever would.

 

We users and content creators own you nothing, you are entitled to nothing. If we see that this site isn't worth the trouble anymore, we'll just pack our s*** and go.

Yes, do that, pack your stuff and go...

[Thumblesteen]

In response to post #39477440. #39478350 is also a reply to the same post.

DumdogsWorld wrote: I'm sorry, but as soon as you all said we don't have the right to charge for mods, you said that the mods indeed don't belong to the authors. They apparently belong to Bethesda. So if they're on Bethesda.net, I don't see what the problem is.

PonceMonster wrote: WHAT?!?!?! WHO SAID ROBIN WAS AGAINST THIS!! GET YOUR s#*! TOGETHER MAN, READ THE ARTICLE. Or watch the Gtymka, because clearly you don't .. nvm.

Actually, mods are derivative of copyrighted material. So, Bethesda has all the right in the world to say that they don't want people selling things based on their software.

And then there's the fact that in order to actually sell a mod legally as a product, you need to be a registered company, so that you can pay income taxes. Something which literally nobody did.

And, I'm not defending this, nor would I ever prostitute my artistic expression for money. I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm just saying, it was never a right. In fact, it wasn't even done legally. This is capitalism we're talking about, you have no rights unless you can afford to buy them. They've spent the last three centuries perfecting that particular formula.

And corporations telling you what to do is something you should get used to. Because they've basically been their own law enforcement agencies through the use of contracts, licences, legal firms and credit companies since the 1980's.

[PonceMonster]

In response to post #39478620. #39478950 is also a reply to the same post.

Kira8002 wrote: I've been using this website for 8 years I guess, and I never bothered coming out of the woodwork to express my opinions or whatever, but I guess now it's a good time. Here it goes:

Dark0ne, you are naive.

People gathered at Nexus for convenience and simplicity's sake. If things start getting too complex or full of drama (like this buzzwords filled post of yours), then we'll just move somewhere else, and this WILL happen to Nexus if you keep making mistakes like this. Your post will divide the community even more than console mods ever would.

We users and content creators own you nothing, you are entitled to nothing. If we see that this site isn't worth the trouble anymore, we'll just pack our s#*! and go.

everstitan wrote: then go and don't come back, right wing trumpeter

As much as I want to punch you in the face right now... Robin is love, Robin is life.

[Asuhrie]

Really good post Dark0ne. I especially liked the father analogy, really kind of sums up the concerns.

 

With no real response from Bethesda though, I'm afraid that maybe they don't see an issue with this. Bethesda is a business, and the dollar is almighty. I'm sure there are some within Bethesda that understand and care what is going on here, but their bosses and their bosses bosses won't understand why they should let a few hurt feelings get in the way of what could be another potential revenue source (as long as the lawyers say they are in the all clear, which they were obviously already consulted with).

 

More mods on consoles means more sales, more sales is more dollars - if they just ignore the issue for a little longer, they let some great mods get onto consoles. All moderation would be doing now would be hurting sales.

 

I would anticipate once not so many eyes from Bethesda are watching this little experiment, those who truly care about the community at Bethesda can make some changes for the good of the community.

Edited June 17, 2016 by Asuhrie