Donation Points system now live for mod authors on Nexus Mods

[matortheeternal]

In response to post #60377462. #60378147, #60380477, #60382372 are all replies on the same post.

andyjs wrote: I love the idea in principle, especially as I'm not in a position to donate directly myself. Ideally I'd like to see a modder's helpfulness and willingness to engage with users rewarded as well, but I realise that's almost impossible to measure objectively and you've got enough to be doing.

Off the top of my head though I can see an issue that could be fixed, or at least accounted for (apologies if already addressed).

Doesn't it skew unfairly towards makers of mods for the most popular games? As an example, the most downloaded Companion mod (comparing the same category to be more equitable) for Morrowind (comparatively high on the list of supported games at no.9) has had about 1,500 unique dls. The one for Oblivion (no.5) has had nearly 38,000. For Skyrim (no.1) over ten times that, at around 388,000 uniques. Even though the payout is based on downloads in the last 30 days, those numbers are going to skew similarly I think; probably even more so. That was a flawed example because doesn't take into account how long those mods have been available, but gives a rough idea (similar ratios can be seen just looking at recent mods).

I appreciate it's almost impossible to make a 100% fair system but maybe some sort of maths could be applied to factor in the game's overall popularity and give modders of less popular games a chance to get something significant from the pot?
Something like - take the number of unique downloads for the period for each mod, then divide by the total number of unique downloads for all mods for that game only over the same period, multiplied by (say) 100 to avoid too many 0.xxx numbers (unnecessary step, but handier for this example). This gives a figure that represents the popularity of the mod among nexus users of that specific game. For the sake of this example let's call that figure AP (Andy Points - what an ego eh?). Then use the number of AP to determine the number of DP (and therefore cash etc) each mod gets.

Example using made up (but vaguely plausible) figures for simplicity -

Albert makes a mod for Morrowind which gets 100 uniques in the first period. The total number for the game in that period is 1000.
Brenda makes a similar mod for Oblivion and gets 1000 uniques. Total for the game 10,000.
Chuck makes again a similar mod for Skyrim and gets 10,000 uniques. Total for the game 100,000.

Using your example figures from the FAQ, there are 2 DP to assign per unique. So, (without applying my idea), Albert gets 200 DP, Brenda gets 2000 DP, and Chuck is in the money with 20,000 DP. Each of them gave a similar amount of blood, sweat and tears, and each of them did work that was similarly popular among players of their respective game.

Using my idea, Albert gets (100/1000)x100=10 AP, as does Brenda (1000/10000)x100 and Chuck (10,000/100,000)x100.
Then let's say you've got (as per your FAQ example) 10 million DP to dish out, and a total of (say) 2,000 AP accrued across the site. Divide total DP by total AP, giving you a DP value for that month of 5000 per AP. So our friends above get 50,000 DP each (APxDP value), so $50 (which weirdly turns out to be the example amount in your FAQ). Someone who got 20,000 uniques for Skyrim would get 100,000 DP, someone who got 100 would get 500 DP, so it's still based on popularity, just now within the context of each game.

Does that make any sense? I'm sure there's a more elegant solution. It'd also need working on to avoid someone making a simple mod for a very, very obscure game, getting one download (maybe from a mate), getting 100AP and netting 500,000 DP. Maybe a minimum number of dls to be eligible and the game needs a certain number of mods in that month from unique modders? I'm sure a bit more maths could be applied to even that out. Some sort of taper like they use in benefit calculations. It's been a month since I've had a proper night's sleep, and three decades since I sat in a Maths lesson, so this might all be gibberish. Sorry if it is!

dikr wrote: I see your point and logic. Sadly in the last paragraph you touch on a big problem. Even if you set total unique dl thresholds for games with smaller user groups, the amount of DP per dl will inflate to such an extent that it will become much easier to break the system with fake accounts, to, say accrue 50 unique dl's for yourself to earn a big chunk of that game's monthly 'pot'. (And screwing up the files of the month with crappy mods at the same time).

And also: if you'd spread out even amounts of DP over all the games on Nexus, that would really mininize DP for the more popular game modders as the biggest DP chunk allocated to such a game needs to be divided over 100's of new mods each month rather than a handful in some cases.

Perhaps there could be some token amount of DP given to each and every new mod to balance it out a bit but that might promote people abusing the system by uploading as many as they can ... hard to solve the question. I guess we have to live with the fact that modding for less popular games means less DP. (People mainly do it for the fun and the sharing anyway so to me personally that's not a biggy).

Morghean wrote: There's a limited way that can filter out abuse of unique downloads, limited, as there's no sure fire method for it - or at least, I don't know it. IP address control. Like limiting the accounts to be created/used from the same IP address, therefore limiting the way someone could generate more unique downloads for their mods. The only weak point in this is internet cafes...

Now I'd like to extend andyjs' idea of equality across popular and less popular games, by stating, that a fixed number of divider (based on the game's age/overall popularity) is not good enough.

The divider itself should be based on statistics of the many factors of game's popularity, like unique downloads, posted mods, images, videos or feedback and of course their age. Which all boils down to the number, of ~relatively~ how many people are actually bothered with that particular game (per a set time interval). And yeah, bothering with older games should be a bonus, but really slight, not that much as andyjs have suggested.
We could also add things like the mod authors' frequency of visiting their own mods: checking on feedback, adding or repairing their own mod (newer version available, optional files available), how much they advertise their mods with Nexus (how many features are used that the site provides.. like writing a change log in it's own tab; bug report tab, adding images, videos). If you do a through out job to make your mod more appealing and informative, you could get a better rating to those who just upload in bulk.

Due to hardware issues, I'm limited to FO3/TES4 modding (and to be honest, I like those a lot more, than the newest versions of them), but I don't think, that modders for older games should be on totally equal ground with ones that adds content to newer games. So the idea of (andyjs') having 10 "AP" for Albert, Brenda and Chuck across the board is a bad one. Yes, there should be a _narrow_ difference between old and new games, but really slight. With the above additions (using statistics) would result a much fairer result, in my opinion.

andyjs wrote: Morghean - you're absolutely right, and some of what you suggest crossed my mind too. However, I saw somewhere (possibly the FAQ) that they've ruled out using anything other than Unique Downloads to make the calculations. So I tried to come up with something that would be fairer but only use that stat. All of the maths I did was really just to highlight the issue, and provide some sort of solution instead of just saying "wah it's not fair"!

dikr - Indeed. I still think it's a fixable issue by someone cleverer than me applying some sort of algorithm. I'm sure somewhere among all that stuff about logs and sine curves there's something that could do the trick. I just can't remember what all that stuff does anymore. Even something simple, like, if unique dls for a mod is less than 100, then they can only keep a percentage of the calculated DP based on the number of dls. So 1 download, you only get 1% of the DP, 73 downloads you keep 73%. 100 seems a reasonable point to say ok, you deserve it all.

anyjs: I don't think that makes any sense. DP should be distributed to creators on the Nexus platform based on the impact they have relative to other creators, regardless of the game they're creating content for. DP cannot be weighed against the "quality" of the content as that is not feasible to measure, it can only be weighed against the "impact" of the content, which can be roughly determined the number of unique downloads weighed against the total of all unique downloads on the entire platform (which is the platform's total impact). The only thing I could think of is allowing users to donate into DP pools for specific games. It wouldn't be too great an increase in technical complexity and it would mean someone who only uses Morrowind mods donating into the DP pool won't have 95% of their money going to authors who exclusively create mods for other games.

[steve40]

With the charitable donation thingie, does the user get to pick the charity or is does nexus decide that?

 

Nexus offers 3 charities to choose from atm. But you could always cash out your DP in PayPal, then use the money to donate to whatever charity you like without using Nexus as the middle man (and even claim a tax rebate that way, if applicable).

Edited May 25, 2018 by steve40

[andyjs]

In response to post #60377462. #60378147, #60380477, #60382372, #60393797 are all replies on the same post.

andyjs wrote: I love the idea in principle, especially as I'm not in a position to donate directly myself. Ideally I'd like to see a modder's helpfulness and willingness to engage with users rewarded as well, but I realise that's almost impossible to measure objectively and you've got enough to be doing.

Off the top of my head though I can see an issue that could be fixed, or at least accounted for (apologies if already addressed).

Doesn't it skew unfairly towards makers of mods for the most popular games? As an example, the most downloaded Companion mod (comparing the same category to be more equitable) for Morrowind (comparatively high on the list of supported games at no.9) has had about 1,500 unique dls. The one for Oblivion (no.5) has had nearly 38,000. For Skyrim (no.1) over ten times that, at around 388,000 uniques. Even though the payout is based on downloads in the last 30 days, those numbers are going to skew similarly I think; probably even more so. That was a flawed example because doesn't take into account how long those mods have been available, but gives a rough idea (similar ratios can be seen just looking at recent mods).

I appreciate it's almost impossible to make a 100% fair system but maybe some sort of maths could be applied to factor in the game's overall popularity and give modders of less popular games a chance to get something significant from the pot?
Something like - take the number of unique downloads for the period for each mod, then divide by the total number of unique downloads for all mods for that game only over the same period, multiplied by (say) 100 to avoid too many 0.xxx numbers (unnecessary step, but handier for this example). This gives a figure that represents the popularity of the mod among nexus users of that specific game. For the sake of this example let's call that figure AP (Andy Points - what an ego eh?). Then use the number of AP to determine the number of DP (and therefore cash etc) each mod gets.

Example using made up (but vaguely plausible) figures for simplicity -

Albert makes a mod for Morrowind which gets 100 uniques in the first period. The total number for the game in that period is 1000.
Brenda makes a similar mod for Oblivion and gets 1000 uniques. Total for the game 10,000.
Chuck makes again a similar mod for Skyrim and gets 10,000 uniques. Total for the game 100,000.

Using your example figures from the FAQ, there are 2 DP to assign per unique. So, (without applying my idea), Albert gets 200 DP, Brenda gets 2000 DP, and Chuck is in the money with 20,000 DP. Each of them gave a similar amount of blood, sweat and tears, and each of them did work that was similarly popular among players of their respective game.

Using my idea, Albert gets (100/1000)x100=10 AP, as does Brenda (1000/10000)x100 and Chuck (10,000/100,000)x100.
Then let's say you've got (as per your FAQ example) 10 million DP to dish out, and a total of (say) 2,000 AP accrued across the site. Divide total DP by total AP, giving you a DP value for that month of 5000 per AP. So our friends above get 50,000 DP each (APxDP value), so $50 (which weirdly turns out to be the example amount in your FAQ). Someone who got 20,000 uniques for Skyrim would get 100,000 DP, someone who got 100 would get 500 DP, so it's still based on popularity, just now within the context of each game.

Does that make any sense? I'm sure there's a more elegant solution. It'd also need working on to avoid someone making a simple mod for a very, very obscure game, getting one download (maybe from a mate), getting 100AP and netting 500,000 DP. Maybe a minimum number of dls to be eligible and the game needs a certain number of mods in that month from unique modders? I'm sure a bit more maths could be applied to even that out. Some sort of taper like they use in benefit calculations. It's been a month since I've had a proper night's sleep, and three decades since I sat in a Maths lesson, so this might all be gibberish. Sorry if it is!

dikr wrote: I see your point and logic. Sadly in the last paragraph you touch on a big problem. Even if you set total unique dl thresholds for games with smaller user groups, the amount of DP per dl will inflate to such an extent that it will become much easier to break the system with fake accounts, to, say accrue 50 unique dl's for yourself to earn a big chunk of that game's monthly 'pot'. (And screwing up the files of the month with crappy mods at the same time).

And also: if you'd spread out even amounts of DP over all the games on Nexus, that would really mininize DP for the more popular game modders as the biggest DP chunk allocated to such a game needs to be divided over 100's of new mods each month rather than a handful in some cases.

Perhaps there could be some token amount of DP given to each and every new mod to balance it out a bit but that might promote people abusing the system by uploading as many as they can ... hard to solve the question. I guess we have to live with the fact that modding for less popular games means less DP. (People mainly do it for the fun and the sharing anyway so to me personally that's not a biggy).

Morghean wrote: There's a limited way that can filter out abuse of unique downloads, limited, as there's no sure fire method for it - or at least, I don't know it. IP address control. Like limiting the accounts to be created/used from the same IP address, therefore limiting the way someone could generate more unique downloads for their mods. The only weak point in this is internet cafes...

Now I'd like to extend andyjs' idea of equality across popular and less popular games, by stating, that a fixed number of divider (based on the game's age/overall popularity) is not good enough.

The divider itself should be based on statistics of the many factors of game's popularity, like unique downloads, posted mods, images, videos or feedback and of course their age. Which all boils down to the number, of ~relatively~ how many people are actually bothered with that particular game (per a set time interval). And yeah, bothering with older games should be a bonus, but really slight, not that much as andyjs have suggested.
We could also add things like the mod authors' frequency of visiting their own mods: checking on feedback, adding or repairing their own mod (newer version available, optional files available), how much they advertise their mods with Nexus (how many features are used that the site provides.. like writing a change log in it's own tab; bug report tab, adding images, videos). If you do a through out job to make your mod more appealing and informative, you could get a better rating to those who just upload in bulk.

Due to hardware issues, I'm limited to FO3/TES4 modding (and to be honest, I like those a lot more, than the newest versions of them), but I don't think, that modders for older games should be on totally equal ground with ones that adds content to newer games. So the idea of (andyjs') having 10 "AP" for Albert, Brenda and Chuck across the board is a bad one. Yes, there should be a _narrow_ difference between old and new games, but really slight. With the above additions (using statistics) would result a much fairer result, in my opinion.

andyjs wrote: Morghean - you're absolutely right, and some of what you suggest crossed my mind too. However, I saw somewhere (possibly the FAQ) that they've ruled out using anything other than Unique Downloads to make the calculations. So I tried to come up with something that would be fairer but only use that stat. All of the maths I did was really just to highlight the issue, and provide some sort of solution instead of just saying "wah it's not fair"!

dikr - Indeed. I still think it's a fixable issue by someone cleverer than me applying some sort of algorithm. I'm sure somewhere among all that stuff about logs and sine curves there's something that could do the trick. I just can't remember what all that stuff does anymore. Even something simple, like, if unique dls for a mod is less than 100, then they can only keep a percentage of the calculated DP based on the number of dls. So 1 download, you only get 1% of the DP, 73 downloads you keep 73%. 100 seems a reasonable point to say ok, you deserve it all.

matortheeternal wrote: anyjs: I don't think that makes any sense. DP should be distributed to creators on the Nexus platform based on the impact they have relative to other creators, regardless of the game they're creating content for. DP cannot be weighed against the "quality" of the content as that is not feasible to measure, it can only be weighed against the "impact" of the content, which can be roughly determined the number of unique downloads weighed against the total of all unique downloads on the entire platform (which is the platform's total impact). The only thing I could think of is allowing users to donate into DP pools for specific games. It wouldn't be too great an increase in technical complexity and it would mean someone who only uses Morrowind mods donating into the DP pool won't have 95% of their money going to authors who exclusively create mods for other games.

matortheeternal - thanks for sharing your thoughts. You may be right. There's an argument to be made that says it's fair enough to reward based on the popularity of the chosen game, because you're providing to the majority. The people have chosen Skyrim and Fallout 4 as the games they use mods for the most so fair enough. To be clear, not a criticism of "the people", I like those games a lot too.
It's probably the great big lefty snowflake in me, but it just seems a bit wrong to me (especially as fixable) that someone can make (for example) a single outfit for Skyrim (not that that doesn't take effort or talent) that is downloaded by a small proportion of Skyrim players, and they'll do a lot better financially than if they'd made a fully-featured, full voice cast adventure for Oblivion or something that is downloaded by a high proportion of Oblivion players. I guess that's how the world works, oh well.
I get the impression this is all moot and the ship has sailed on this anyway, but it's been interesting thinking about it. Anyhoo, back to Fallout, gotta go kill some muties and find a nice outfit for Piper.
Edited May 26, 2018 by andyjs

[steve40]

 

In response to post #60377462. #60378147, #60380477, #60382372, #60393797 are all replies on the same post.

 

 

 

andyjs wrote: I love the idea in principle, especially as I'm not in a position to donate directly myself. Ideally I'd like to see a modder's helpfulness and willingness to engage with users rewarded as well, but I realise that's almost impossible to measure objectively and you've got enough to be doing.

 

Off the top of my head though I can see an issue that could be fixed, or at least accounted for (apologies if already addressed).

 

Doesn't it skew unfairly towards makers of mods for the most popular games? As an example, the most downloaded Companion mod (comparing the same category to be more equitable) for Morrowind (comparatively high on the list of supported games at no.9) has had about 1,500 unique dls. The one for Oblivion (no.5) has had nearly 38,000. For Skyrim (no.1) over ten times that, at around 388,000 uniques. Even though the payout is based on downloads in the last 30 days, those numbers are going to skew similarly I think; probably even more so. That was a flawed example because doesn't take into account how long those mods have been available, but gives a rough idea (similar ratios can be seen just looking at recent mods).

 

I appreciate it's almost impossible to make a 100% fair system but maybe some sort of maths could be applied to factor in the game's overall popularity and give modders of less popular games a chance to get something significant from the pot?

Something like - take the number of unique downloads for the period for each mod, then divide by the total number of unique downloads for all mods for that game only over the same period, multiplied by (say) 100 to avoid too many 0.xxx numbers (unnecessary step, but handier for this example). This gives a figure that represents the popularity of the mod among nexus users of that specific game. For the sake of this example let's call that figure AP (Andy Points - what an ego eh?). Then use the number of AP to determine the number of DP (and therefore cash etc) each mod gets.

 

Example using made up (but vaguely plausible) figures for simplicity -

 

Albert makes a mod for Morrowind which gets 100 uniques in the first period. The total number for the game in that period is 1000.

Brenda makes a similar mod for Oblivion and gets 1000 uniques. Total for the game 10,000.

Chuck makes again a similar mod for Skyrim and gets 10,000 uniques. Total for the game 100,000.

 

Using your example figures from the FAQ, there are 2 DP to assign per unique. So, (without applying my idea), Albert gets 200 DP, Brenda gets 2000 DP, and Chuck is in the money with 20,000 DP. Each of them gave a similar amount of blood, sweat and tears, and each of them did work that was similarly popular among players of their respective game.

 

Using my idea, Albert gets (100/1000)x100=10 AP, as does Brenda (1000/10000)x100 and Chuck (10,000/100,000)x100.

Then let's say you've got (as per your FAQ example) 10 million DP to dish out, and a total of (say) 2,000 AP accrued across the site. Divide total DP by total AP, giving you a DP value for that month of 5000 per AP. So our friends above get 50,000 DP each (APxDP value), so $50 (which weirdly turns out to be the example amount in your FAQ). Someone who got 20,000 uniques for Skyrim would get 100,000 DP, someone who got 100 would get 500 DP, so it's still based on popularity, just now within the context of each game.

 

Does that make any sense? I'm sure there's a more elegant solution. It'd also need working on to avoid someone making a simple mod for a very, very obscure game, getting one download (maybe from a mate), getting 100AP and netting 500,000 DP. Maybe a minimum number of dls to be eligible and the game needs a certain number of mods in that month from unique modders? I'm sure a bit more maths could be applied to even that out. Some sort of taper like they use in benefit calculations. It's been a month since I've had a proper night's sleep, and three decades since I sat in a Maths lesson, so this might all be gibberish. Sorry if it is!

dikr wrote: I see your point and logic. Sadly in the last paragraph you touch on a big problem. Even if you set total unique dl thresholds for games with smaller user groups, the amount of DP per dl will inflate to such an extent that it will become much easier to break the system with fake accounts, to, say accrue 50 unique dl's for yourself to earn a big chunk of that game's monthly 'pot'. (And screwing up the files of the month with crappy mods at the same time).

 

And also: if you'd spread out even amounts of DP over all the games on Nexus, that would really mininize DP for the more popular game modders as the biggest DP chunk allocated to such a game needs to be divided over 100's of new mods each month rather than a handful in some cases.

 

Perhaps there could be some token amount of DP given to each and every new mod to balance it out a bit but that might promote people abusing the system by uploading as many as they can ... hard to solve the question. I guess we have to live with the fact that modding for less popular games means less DP. (People mainly do it for the fun and the sharing anyway so to me personally that's not a biggy).

Morghean wrote: There's a limited way that can filter out abuse of unique downloads, limited, as there's no sure fire method for it - or at least, I don't know it. IP address control. Like limiting the accounts to be created/used from the same IP address, therefore limiting the way someone could generate more unique downloads for their mods. The only weak point in this is internet cafes...

 

Now I'd like to extend andyjs' idea of equality across popular and less popular games, by stating, that a fixed number of divider (based on the game's age/overall popularity) is not good enough.

 

The divider itself should be based on statistics of the many factors of game's popularity, like unique downloads, posted mods, images, videos or feedback and of course their age. Which all boils down to the number, of ~relatively~ how many people are actually bothered with that particular game (per a set time interval). And yeah, bothering with older games should be a bonus, but really slight, not that much as andyjs have suggested.

We could also add things like the mod authors' frequency of visiting their own mods: checking on feedback, adding or repairing their own mod (newer version available, optional files available), how much they advertise their mods with Nexus (how many features are used that the site provides.. like writing a change log in it's own tab; bug report tab, adding images, videos). If you do a through out job to make your mod more appealing and informative, you could get a better rating to those who just upload in bulk.

 

Due to hardware issues, I'm limited to FO3/TES4 modding (and to be honest, I like those a lot more, than the newest versions of them), but I don't think, that modders for older games should be on totally equal ground with ones that adds content to newer games. So the idea of (andyjs') having 10 "AP" for Albert, Brenda and Chuck across the board is a bad one. Yes, there should be a _narrow_ difference between old and new games, but really slight. With the above additions (using statistics) would result a much fairer result, in my opinion.

andyjs wrote: Morghean - you're absolutely right, and some of what you suggest crossed my mind too. However, I saw somewhere (possibly the FAQ) that they've ruled out using anything other than Unique Downloads to make the calculations. So I tried to come up with something that would be fairer but only use that stat. All of the maths I did was really just to highlight the issue, and provide some sort of solution instead of just saying "wah it's not fair"!

 

dikr - Indeed. I still think it's a fixable issue by someone cleverer than me applying some sort of algorithm. I'm sure somewhere among all that stuff about logs and sine curves there's something that could do the trick. I just can't remember what all that stuff does anymore. Even something simple, like, if unique dls for a mod is less than 100, then they can only keep a percentage of the calculated DP based on the number of dls. So 1 download, you only get 1% of the DP, 73 downloads you keep 73%. 100 seems a reasonable point to say ok, you deserve it all.

matortheeternal wrote: anyjs: I don't think that makes any sense. DP should be distributed to creators on the Nexus platform based on the impact they have relative to other creators, regardless of the game they're creating content for. DP cannot be weighed against the "quality" of the content as that is not feasible to measure, it can only be weighed against the "impact" of the content, which can be roughly determined the number of unique downloads weighed against the total of all unique downloads on the entire platform (which is the platform's total impact). The only thing I could think of is allowing users to donate into DP pools for specific games. It wouldn't be too great an increase in technical complexity and it would mean someone who only uses Morrowind mods donating into the DP pool won't have 95% of their money going to authors who exclusively create mods for other games.

matortheeternal - thanks for sharing your thoughts. You may be right. There's an argument to be made that says it's fair enough to reward based on the popularity of the chosen game, because you're providing to the majority. The people have chosen Skyrim and Fallout 4 as the games they use mods for the most so fair enough. To be clear, not a criticism of "the people", I like those games a lot too.

It's probably the great big lefty snowflake in me, but it just seems a bit wrong to me (especially as fixable) that someone can make (for example) a single outfit for Skyrim (not that that doesn't take effort or talent) that is downloaded by a small proportion of Skyrim players, and they'll do a lot better financially than if they'd made a fully-featured, full voice cast adventure for Oblivion or something that is downloaded by a high proportion of Oblivion players. I guess that's how the world works, oh well.

I get the impression this is all moot and the ship has sailed on this anyway, but it's been interesting thinking about it. Anyhoo, back to Fallout, gotta go kill some muties and find a nice outfit for Piper.

 

 

Nexus is a business and needs to generate traffic, so popular mods for popular games are the winners. It's that simple.

[SystemLordBhaal]

In response to post #60387807.

Vanguardascendant wrote:

Does somebody mind putting up a list of the charities presently available to donate DP towards? I've never published a mod, so I don't think I have access to that list.

Currently the following charities are available:
Donation to Against Malaria
Donation to the International Committee of the Red Cross
Donation to Wildlife Conservation Society

[matortheeternal]

In response to post #60377462. #60378147, #60380477, #60382372, #60393797, #60402592 are all replies on the same post.

andyjs wrote: I love the idea in principle, especially as I'm not in a position to donate directly myself. Ideally I'd like to see a modder's helpfulness and willingness to engage with users rewarded as well, but I realise that's almost impossible to measure objectively and you've got enough to be doing.

Off the top of my head though I can see an issue that could be fixed, or at least accounted for (apologies if already addressed).

Doesn't it skew unfairly towards makers of mods for the most popular games? As an example, the most downloaded Companion mod (comparing the same category to be more equitable) for Morrowind (comparatively high on the list of supported games at no.9) has had about 1,500 unique dls. The one for Oblivion (no.5) has had nearly 38,000. For Skyrim (no.1) over ten times that, at around 388,000 uniques. Even though the payout is based on downloads in the last 30 days, those numbers are going to skew similarly I think; probably even more so. That was a flawed example because doesn't take into account how long those mods have been available, but gives a rough idea (similar ratios can be seen just looking at recent mods).

I appreciate it's almost impossible to make a 100% fair system but maybe some sort of maths could be applied to factor in the game's overall popularity and give modders of less popular games a chance to get something significant from the pot?
Something like - take the number of unique downloads for the period for each mod, then divide by the total number of unique downloads for all mods for that game only over the same period, multiplied by (say) 100 to avoid too many 0.xxx numbers (unnecessary step, but handier for this example). This gives a figure that represents the popularity of the mod among nexus users of that specific game. For the sake of this example let's call that figure AP (Andy Points - what an ego eh?). Then use the number of AP to determine the number of DP (and therefore cash etc) each mod gets.

Example using made up (but vaguely plausible) figures for simplicity -

Albert makes a mod for Morrowind which gets 100 uniques in the first period. The total number for the game in that period is 1000.
Brenda makes a similar mod for Oblivion and gets 1000 uniques. Total for the game 10,000.
Chuck makes again a similar mod for Skyrim and gets 10,000 uniques. Total for the game 100,000.

Using your example figures from the FAQ, there are 2 DP to assign per unique. So, (without applying my idea), Albert gets 200 DP, Brenda gets 2000 DP, and Chuck is in the money with 20,000 DP. Each of them gave a similar amount of blood, sweat and tears, and each of them did work that was similarly popular among players of their respective game.

Using my idea, Albert gets (100/1000)x100=10 AP, as does Brenda (1000/10000)x100 and Chuck (10,000/100,000)x100.
Then let's say you've got (as per your FAQ example) 10 million DP to dish out, and a total of (say) 2,000 AP accrued across the site. Divide total DP by total AP, giving you a DP value for that month of 5000 per AP. So our friends above get 50,000 DP each (APxDP value), so $50 (which weirdly turns out to be the example amount in your FAQ). Someone who got 20,000 uniques for Skyrim would get 100,000 DP, someone who got 100 would get 500 DP, so it's still based on popularity, just now within the context of each game.

Does that make any sense? I'm sure there's a more elegant solution. It'd also need working on to avoid someone making a simple mod for a very, very obscure game, getting one download (maybe from a mate), getting 100AP and netting 500,000 DP. Maybe a minimum number of dls to be eligible and the game needs a certain number of mods in that month from unique modders? I'm sure a bit more maths could be applied to even that out. Some sort of taper like they use in benefit calculations. It's been a month since I've had a proper night's sleep, and three decades since I sat in a Maths lesson, so this might all be gibberish. Sorry if it is!

dikr wrote: I see your point and logic. Sadly in the last paragraph you touch on a big problem. Even if you set total unique dl thresholds for games with smaller user groups, the amount of DP per dl will inflate to such an extent that it will become much easier to break the system with fake accounts, to, say accrue 50 unique dl's for yourself to earn a big chunk of that game's monthly 'pot'. (And screwing up the files of the month with crappy mods at the same time).

And also: if you'd spread out even amounts of DP over all the games on Nexus, that would really mininize DP for the more popular game modders as the biggest DP chunk allocated to such a game needs to be divided over 100's of new mods each month rather than a handful in some cases.

Perhaps there could be some token amount of DP given to each and every new mod to balance it out a bit but that might promote people abusing the system by uploading as many as they can ... hard to solve the question. I guess we have to live with the fact that modding for less popular games means less DP. (People mainly do it for the fun and the sharing anyway so to me personally that's not a biggy).

Morghean wrote: There's a limited way that can filter out abuse of unique downloads, limited, as there's no sure fire method for it - or at least, I don't know it. IP address control. Like limiting the accounts to be created/used from the same IP address, therefore limiting the way someone could generate more unique downloads for their mods. The only weak point in this is internet cafes...

Now I'd like to extend andyjs' idea of equality across popular and less popular games, by stating, that a fixed number of divider (based on the game's age/overall popularity) is not good enough.

The divider itself should be based on statistics of the many factors of game's popularity, like unique downloads, posted mods, images, videos or feedback and of course their age. Which all boils down to the number, of ~relatively~ how many people are actually bothered with that particular game (per a set time interval). And yeah, bothering with older games should be a bonus, but really slight, not that much as andyjs have suggested.
We could also add things like the mod authors' frequency of visiting their own mods: checking on feedback, adding or repairing their own mod (newer version available, optional files available), how much they advertise their mods with Nexus (how many features are used that the site provides.. like writing a change log in it's own tab; bug report tab, adding images, videos). If you do a through out job to make your mod more appealing and informative, you could get a better rating to those who just upload in bulk.

Due to hardware issues, I'm limited to FO3/TES4 modding (and to be honest, I like those a lot more, than the newest versions of them), but I don't think, that modders for older games should be on totally equal ground with ones that adds content to newer games. So the idea of (andyjs') having 10 "AP" for Albert, Brenda and Chuck across the board is a bad one. Yes, there should be a _narrow_ difference between old and new games, but really slight. With the above additions (using statistics) would result a much fairer result, in my opinion.

andyjs wrote: Morghean - you're absolutely right, and some of what you suggest crossed my mind too. However, I saw somewhere (possibly the FAQ) that they've ruled out using anything other than Unique Downloads to make the calculations. So I tried to come up with something that would be fairer but only use that stat. All of the maths I did was really just to highlight the issue, and provide some sort of solution instead of just saying "wah it's not fair"!

dikr - Indeed. I still think it's a fixable issue by someone cleverer than me applying some sort of algorithm. I'm sure somewhere among all that stuff about logs and sine curves there's something that could do the trick. I just can't remember what all that stuff does anymore. Even something simple, like, if unique dls for a mod is less than 100, then they can only keep a percentage of the calculated DP based on the number of dls. So 1 download, you only get 1% of the DP, 73 downloads you keep 73%. 100 seems a reasonable point to say ok, you deserve it all.

matortheeternal wrote: anyjs: I don't think that makes any sense. DP should be distributed to creators on the Nexus platform based on the impact they have relative to other creators, regardless of the game they're creating content for. DP cannot be weighed against the "quality" of the content as that is not feasible to measure, it can only be weighed against the "impact" of the content, which can be roughly determined the number of unique downloads weighed against the total of all unique downloads on the entire platform (which is the platform's total impact). The only thing I could think of is allowing users to donate into DP pools for specific games. It wouldn't be too great an increase in technical complexity and it would mean someone who only uses Morrowind mods donating into the DP pool won't have 95% of their money going to authors who exclusively create mods for other games.

andyjs wrote: matortheeternal - thanks for sharing your thoughts. You may be right. There's an argument to be made that says it's fair enough to reward based on the popularity of the chosen game, because you're providing to the majority. The people have chosen Skyrim and Fallout 4 as the games they use mods for the most so fair enough. To be clear, not a criticism of "the people", I like those games a lot too.
It's probably the great big lefty snowflake in me, but it just seems a bit wrong to me (especially as fixable) that someone can make (for example) a single outfit for Skyrim (not that that doesn't take effort or talent) that is downloaded by a small proportion of Skyrim players, and they'll do a lot better financially than if they'd made a fully-featured, full voice cast adventure for Oblivion or something that is downloaded by a high proportion of Oblivion players. I guess that's how the world works, oh well.
I get the impression this is all moot and the ship has sailed on this anyway, but it's been interesting thinking about it. Anyhoo, back to Fallout, gotta go kill some muties and find a nice outfit for Piper.

There are other problems with your proposition. It would weigh new games with very few mods disproportionately heavily. Consider a hypothetical game, we'll call it H, which has only one mod, M, by a single author, A. In this hypothetical scenario, A would receive a lion share of DP because they make the only mod for the game. It simply doesn't make sense to distribute DP equally between each game the Nexus supports.

[Azulyn]

a shame this is really only going to reward Fallout4/Skyrim modders. meh

[mwadlin]

Sounds like a good system. It might be good if eventually users could make donations directed at specific games, but that would be an unnecessary complication at the outset. Thanks for always trying to improve the Nexus.

[Vanguardascendant]

 

In response to post #60387807.

 

 

 

Vanguardascendant wrote:

Does somebody mind putting up a list of the charities presently available to donate DP towards? I've never published a mod, so I don't think I have access to that list.

Currently the following charities are available:

Donation to Against Malaria

Donation to the International Committee of the Red Cross

Donation to Wildlife Conservation Society

 

 

Thanks. Sounds like a good starting list of charitable groups. None of them are particularly divisive or controversial. (Is there a strong pro-Malaria contingent out there?)

[calfurius]

In response to post #60424777.

Azulyn wrote: a shame this is really only going to reward Fallout4/Skyrim modders. meh

Well of course, the most popular mods get the biggest reward. Skyrim and Fallout 4 are the most popular modding communities at the moment.