WIPs

[mousehands]

I appeal to you, modders, in great humility and great respect, please refrain from using 'WIP' with your submitted mods.

 

I've been working on two mods. Neither of those will see the light of day until they are finished.

 

I can understand that modders will make mistakes, thus providing second, improved, rectified versions of the original releases, but 'works in progress' is another way of saying 'unfinished' or 'incomplete'.

 

Can you imagine buying something from a shop, a wardrobe, for example, and you find the hinges missing. On the box it says 'Pine Wardrobe - WIP'?

 

It seems in vogue to stick 'WIP' before mods now - this is very much a Skyrim fad - it was never this bad with Oblivion or Morrowind.

[Ryan5280]

I agree. I will submit my minecraft mod NOT using 'WIP'.

[d0kefish]

I dont see what the problem is if you are making a mod, and you wish to have opinions and such along the way. Why not stick a WIP tag to it, as that is exactly what it is?

 

EDIT: Are talking about a lot of threads or basically naming the actuall modfile WIP?

Edited March 14, 2012 by d0kefish

[Ryan5280]

I dont see what the problem is if you are making a mod, and you wish to have opinions and such along the way. Why not stick a WIP tag to it, as that is exactly what it is?

 

EDIT: Are talking about a lot of threads or basically naming the actuall modfile WIP?

He is talking about mod uploads on Nexus sites, not threads.

[d0kefish]

That makes more sense. Sorry, not a native english speaker! I somewhat agree to that aswell then.

[Urwy]

Maybe modders do this to gain a reputation before its final release.. :unsure:

Using WIP on a forum topic, Fine. On a file upload, Not so much.

[sulmithgreysin]

it's either finished forever

 

or a WIP

 

it wasn't finished if you update it, change something, etc

 

WIP doesn't mean it isn't ready, it means it's a work that is in progress. progress is good, finished but not perfect isn't good.

 

99.9% of everything is a WIP

Edited March 14, 2012 by sulmithgreysin

[kromey]

Of my three mods, two I released finished, and one is a released WIP.

 

In many cases it does make sense to wait for a mod to be finished before releasing it, and makes no sense whatsoever for a WIP release. Can you imagine how silly it would have been had I released a "WIP" for my lockpicks or "advanced glass armor" mods? Both were trivial little things, and a WIP basically would have been an unusable, half-arsed piece of junk!

 

Dovahheim, on the other hand, makes sense as a WIP. What's there is perfectly usable as-is -- there's a quest, after which some bandits go away and some guards appear, and ostensibly the player now "owns" a small (former) bandit camp. Not all that exciting, true, but it's usable. Future updates will add on to this in progressive, well-defined stages ("episodes"), each of which will build on the previous work but otherwise be fully standalone. So it's a WIP in the sense that there's still a lot more work I have to do on it, but at the same time it makes sense to release things in stages like this because, well, it's fully usable already.

 

Why wait until the very end when I can put WIP releases out now, drumming up support and excitement and getting feedback that will ultimately lead to a much better finished product?

[meh12345]

I agree about not using "WIP", but for the opposite reason: nothing is ever finished. To think otherwise is to set yourself up for failure.

 

Just get it in a workable shape ("minimum viable product"), and then keep adding/fixing/refining.

[jet4571]

Some mods should be called WIP's because they are incomplete and not quite playable but most that are should not be uploaded yet or not have the WIP tag. But you need to consider that though WIP is an old acronym it wasn't a well known one and now with more people knowing that WIP stands for Work In Progress they add the tag to the name because they are still adding to the mod. WIP actually is for pre beta when it is not ready for release. after release you use version numbers would be the proper way of doing it but they dont know that yet.