The shaming of non-premium users needs to stop!

[GaStuSage]

 

 

 

Assuming my low ball estimates hold: 94.4k per month is a yearly income of 1.132 *million* before the lump sump shots and supporter buys and what little ad revenue they get. Are you *trying to tell me that the Nexus has expenses in excess of 1.1 million!?*

Maybe? Have you taken a look at the overview of their expenses at all? Nexus is clearly spending a lot of money on bandwidth.

 

 

I would guess their biggest expense is payroll. They employ 13 full-time staff members and all that entails.

 

 

That's actually not even funny. Not even as a joke.

Now, I don't know if this has changed in the last 10 years, but I do remember that when I left, FORUM staff were here as volunteers. So under that equation, we are talking about "skilled" employees, such as programmers, web developers, etc. People who make a pretty decent hourly wage, or they go elsewhere where they will.

Let's just say, that I work as tech support for Robin. (This is purely an example, I'm unemployed ATM so I don't currently work for Robin or anybody else, sadly). Here in NJ, decent tech support gets paid oh... say... $16 an hour. (Again, this is just an example.)

16x40 per week, $640 dollars. Per month, 2,560.00. Per year, 30,720.00.

Now, lets say that the other 12 co-workers made the same. $399,360.00 per year. Almost four hundred thousand, outta his pocket, for those 13 employees, per year.

And that's US, Not UK.

Now, I dunno about the UK and how their healthcare stuff is handled, but if one of those employees is located in the US, there's also the Obamacare health insurance mandates for full time employees. Even paying half the premiums, that ain't cheap to an employer.

 

That seems a shade low. What about benefit costs, raises, paid vacations. Let alone insurances for the company, legal fees, etc. Everything down to the paper, pens\pencils, chairs, toilet paper etc... costs money. I've never worked in those fields, so pardon my ignorance, but 1.1 mil for a single company (isn't that what someone quoted earlier?) really isn't much all things considered. Plus, big difference between what a company nets vs what it grosses.

[Pasquale1223]

 

 

 

Assuming my low ball estimates hold: 94.4k per month is a yearly income of 1.132 *million* before the lump sump shots and supporter buys and what little ad revenue they get. Are you *trying to tell me that the Nexus has expenses in excess of 1.1 million!?*

Maybe? Have you taken a look at the overview of their expenses at all? Nexus is clearly spending a lot of money on bandwidth.

 

 

I would guess their biggest expense is payroll. They employ 13 full-time staff members and all that entails.

 

 

That's actually not even funny. Not even as a joke.

Now, I don't know if this has changed in the last 10 years, but I do remember that when I left, FORUM staff were here as volunteers. So under that equation, we are talking about "skilled" employees, such as programmers, web developers, etc. People who make a pretty decent hourly wage, or they go elsewhere where they will.

Let's just say, that I work as tech support for Robin. (This is purely an example, I'm unemployed ATM so I don't currently work for Robin or anybody else, sadly). Here in NJ, decent tech support gets paid oh... say... $16 an hour. (Again, this is just an example.)

16x40 per week, $640 dollars. Per month, 2,560.00. Per year, 30,720.00.

Now, lets say that the other 12 co-workers made the same. $399,360.00 per year. Almost four hundred thousand, outta his pocket, for those 13 employees, per year.

And that's US, Not UK.

Now, I dunno about the UK and how their healthcare stuff is handled, but if one of those employees is located in the US, there's also the Obamacare health insurance mandates for full time employees. Even paying half the premiums, that ain't cheap to an employer.

 

It's not a joke. Did you look at the expenses detailed in the link that in the post to which I responded? It details their 13 full-time staff.

 

BTW, the UK has NHS, which is government sponsored health care - at least for now.

[GaStuSage]

 

BTW, the UK has NHS, which is government sponsored health care - at least for now.

 

Ahhhh...derp... of course. :facepalm: . I'll go back to eating raw elk and polishing my musket now.

[acidzebra]

between https://www.nexusmods.com/about/money/ and https://calculator.aws/#/estimate (just configure a DB service, EC2 instances, EFS, Data Tranfer, CloudWatch, and ELB as outlined in the Nexus page, with rough numbers they provide) it's fairly easy to see that bandwidth, storage, and compute costs are a very significant cost driver. Even if you didn't go AWS and do everything on-prem or in a datacenter, you'd end up with comparable costs.

 

disclaimer: I've worked with and for AWS and if you actually bother to put some numbers to the above and think "that's way too much, I'm doing it wrong" you are probably doing it right and that's the actual cost of running business on the internet at scale.

 

Then there's 13 staff with salaries, pensions, insurance, and all the other stuff you don't have to bother with if you're an employee and not an employer, plus office space which isn't cheap either. But frankly I think the internet side of things outstrips even that. And that is constantly growing while staff is relatively stable.

[HadToRegister]

The only free thing free users and supporters are complaining about is the free redirecting web page that is unnecessary and dumb. removing that would be a start to get the majority of the complaints to stop.

 

It's not like you have to pay to access the mods.

Free users get everything the paying users get, except fast download speeds.

 

What if Free users couldn't post to the forums, or download mods?

Nexus is allowing you to have access to all of that WITHOUT paying, and you STILL find something to complain about.

 

Try going to any major newspaper site now. You either get to read about six articles a month for free, after that, when you click on a news story, a popup blocks the entire screen and tells you if you want to continue reading, you need to subscribe.

 

At least free users here get access to EVERYTHING, while Nexus continues to compromise, such as increasing the download cap speed in good faith to the free users, but all they do is complain anyway.

Imagine if Nexus switched to something like that.

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth

[minervamaga]

Okay, popping back in to see pages of long time users staunchly ignoring what the rest of us are saying. I want to outline exactly why so many of us find these changes a large step in the wrong direction.

Yes, Nexus has a right and a need to support the high traffic they get. However, acting like shady file sharing sites is not the way to go about it. I personally bought the supporter level after the first few months of using the site, since I was on here frequently and CANNOT, for health reasons, take off an ad blocker. And since I know some entitled person is going to ask, yes, some people can have migraines and/or full blown seizures from ad flickering and it is not in any way safe for them to take that blocker off and risk their health.

After purchasing supporter level, I was gifted a premium membership from a user of my mods and ended up using some of my DP to continue it. I would have kept up with this, but forgot to renew when a three month term expired. At this point, I decided to save up my DP to purchase a lifetime subscription, since I didn't have to worry about ads anyway. At my rate of DP income, it would only be a few months anyway.

 

And then, things started sliding downhill. Repeated issues of stolen mods (not my own) being reported and taking days or up to a full week to be removed, to the point of even needing to directly contact a mod about why they were still up. Most mod authors in the SDV community will know of the incident(s) in question, it only needs to be referred to as "that house mod" to be met with groans and much yelling.

On top of this, the SDV community had a primary point of contact in the form of a community manager, who is also a member of our server. We had been told in the past to ping with any issues or questions, which worked out well (though obviously with a bit of delay to account for time zones). We often had a return ping within a few days or faster if DM'd. Around the time we started having a surge in stolen mods, we started seeing a lack of responsiveness from said manager as well. Repeated pings received no answers at times. DMs were better, but not always.

Then we got to the banners a few weeks ago. Let me remind you, I am a user who paid for no ads, purchased several monthly premium memberships, and who is also a fairly popular modder within the SDV community. Certainly not Pathos level, but not a stranger to front page and several thousand DP per month (which in turn means revenue for the site). So needless to say, having a banner pop up on every page that couldn't be dismissed was a bit off putting, but I was willing to adopt a wait and see approach.

Cue Friday morning, logging on to check the latest updated mods (of which there have been an avalanche thanks to the 1.4 update). I open my slew of tabs from the front page as usual, click over to the first one in the set, and what do I see? Something straight out of the early 2000s and mega.upload. Not gonna lie, it was like being in high school all over and trying to track down that one file you wanted. The resemblance only grew when I realized the pop up was not a one time thing, oh no. It was on every single file I downloaded. Mods with multiple downloads required going back to the files page and going through the entire process again.

As a whole, I was impressed with Nexus when I first wandering into #modding and started checking it out. The site was fairly easy to navigate and had a wide variety of files, plus different sorting features (always welcome). As incidents and unaddressed concerns have started becoming more frequent though, I'm sadly reminded of great fansites that rose and fell because of alienating their userbase. I would hate to see a collection of works such as this lose the support of a community, as that's never good for anyone. BUT, a balance must be struck. I myself mentioned a few suggestions and I've seen other SDV modders in here echoing similar ideas: timed ads (perhaps once per day, once per week, etc) for going premium; the sticky banner; fundraising drives (possibly with small incentives); making premium memberships more than increased download limits/message storage; and more. As it stands, I don't see the value in a premium membership, as even when I did have it, it made no real difference to me or my experience.

Another point to make, recognized mod authors receive a message that they will not see ads after they hit their 1000 download marker and access to the mod author forums. While this is a nice touch, a good portion of us may have already purchased the supporter tier. A tier system for mod authors (possibly weighted for each modding community due to the differences in download volumes) would be an alternative to invasive advertising for these users and help provide incentives for authors to make more content (which means more traffic, which means more incremental revenue).

This has been a bit of a ramble and while I apologize for that, I felt it needed to be said. Our community in particular has been suffering a lack of support from Nexus recently and this latest change has many up in arms. To add onto that, many feel that they are being attacked for voicing their concerns about the direction the site seems to be headed in. So in closing, I want to remind everyone that we are all here because we love our respective games and want to be able to enjoy modding in peace. Nobody is arguing that the site doesn't need to support itself, just in the manner they are presenting this need. Deliberately reducing the experience of free users is not the way to go about things, as many others have learned in the past. And we all know what they say about those who do not learn from the past.

Happy farming (and gaming) to you all. I hope the Nexus staff take the time to seriously consider the points of concern brought up in this thread and are transparent about future changes, for the better or for the worse.

EDIT: trolls can kindly not engage. I want civil discussion, not blind support or snide comments.

Edited December 16, 2019 by minervamaga

[fireundubh]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTERNEX - "The Nexus of History for the Known Universe!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome, Free User!

Search Query> civilization:Earth AND species:Human AND donuts

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
18,933,350 records matched your query. Returning the most recent one:
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Record ID: af9b507f-3ea6-4aac-948b-fd4ebcaa3235
Record Type: Summary [Limited Access]
Record Content: [expanded]

Every Monday morning, employees assembled in an open meeting room for free donuts. After indulging their sweet tooths, they started their work days happy in their cubicles.

And then one Monday morning the employees arrived at work to a different world: there was a line to the meeting room, and the door was closed.

The manager decided employees who did not contribute to the donut budget would wait before entering the meeting room to obtain free donuts, and while they waited, an assistant would be posted outside the door to distribute pamphlets outlining the reasons to contribute to the donut budget.

After begrudgingly waiting in line and indulging their sweet tooths, instead of heading back to their cubicles happy as they were the Monday morning before, the employees found their way to the manager's feedback box. In messages hastily scrawled on used napkins, they expressed their displeasure with the new donut policy.

• Some criticized the style of the pamphlet; they wanted the pamphlet to be redesigned to look less like other pamphlets they had seen.

• Some said that although they did not take issue with waiting in line for free donuts, they thought the door should stay open; the door constantly opening and closing was annoying.

• Some claimed they couldn’t afford to contribute to the donut budget, but that in recognition of their desire to contribute, they should be treated like contributors regardless.

• Some complained they had been teased by employees who contributed to the donut budget, and if the teasing did not cease, they would consult with human resources about their options.

• Some argued the workplace was a community and the new donut policy was dividing the community along strict party lines.

• Some said that nobody should have to pay for free donuts because— [Translation Note: These messages could not be translated completely from this civilization’s records. The phrase "DONUTS FOR ALL" accompanied some messages. We apologize for the inconvenience.]

• Some stated they would start looking for new jobs with another company where they would not have to wait in line for free donuts.

• Some assailed the manager as greedy for hoarding all the free donuts behind a paywall. [Translation Note: These messages may not have been correctly translated from their original language. We apologize for the inconvenience.]

• Some claimed the new donut policy spelled disaster for the company, their profession, their industry, and the entire world.

• Some laughed that everyone else was crazy because the donuts were still free.

• Others stood next to the feedback box to explain what they saw as the obvious rationale behind the manager's decision: there wouldn’t be enough free donuts for everyone if the donut budget didn’t scale with the company’s growth.

The manager was unaware the new donut policy had been so controversial; he was on vacation.

[ Other messages were found in this civilization’s records. Would you like to UPGRADE your account to view more? ]

Edited December 16, 2019 by fireundubh

[GaStuSage]

 

[Other messages were found in this civilization’s records. Would you like to upgrade your account to view more?]

Yes. How much for a baker's dozen?

[DoctaSax]

Keep in mind there are people that provide this service so that we can all enjoy it. Should they do this for free, or for what little comes from ads when most users, myself included, run ad-blockers? I say that knowing full well that I have been one of the many that has exacerbated this issue for years, which I'm sure plays a large part in the Nexus having to resort to more extreme measures to encourage membership.

I doubt that Nexus's ad revenue can be called 'little', and both the existence of adblockers and the comparative low number of Premium members (if the cited number of over 100k can be called low) will have been taken into account when the decision was made to invest in more full-time staff and an office. I'm not informed of the rationale behind the UI change, but I doubt it will have much to do with users suddenly driving up costs. For the past year and a half, there've been fewer downloads than in the same period before it, for instance.

 

 

Perhaps the reason is not that it's been underadvertised, but that people don't think Premium gives enough value for money.

So, you expect the differences between free membership and premium membership to be even more unequal? Or are you looking to have your dog walked, car washed, shoes shined, steak cut up for you, etc, to encourage you to pay for a service you've enjoyed for as long as you have? Would a hug, or a birthday card be enough? Both?

 

What I, personally, am looking for is nothing at all. I haven't downloaded much of anything on Nexus for ages. For what little I do download, I can live with the capped speed, no problem. Even the new nag screen's much less likely to end up bothering me than other users. Which means I have no incentive to buy Premium, other than charity.

It's been said time and again that Nexus isn't a charity itself either, but a business. If a business wants people to pay for its services, the only viable way of doing so in the long term is to make sure you sell an attractive product. In order for a business to sell me a product, it should be more than the lack of an inconvenience that doesn't trouble me to begin with.

Simple as that, no need to bring up that steak nonsense.

Edited December 16, 2019 by DoctaSax

[GaStuSage]

Okay, popping back in to see pages of long time users staunchly ignoring what the rest of us are saying. I want to outline exactly why so many of us find these changes a large step in the wrong direction.

 

Yes, Nexus has a right and a need to support the high traffic they get. However, acting like shady file sharing sites is not the way to go about it. I personally bought the supporter level after the first few months of using the site, since I was on here frequently and CANNOT, for health reasons, take off an ad blocker. And since I know some entitled person is going to ask, yes, some people can have migraines and/or full blown seizures from ad flickering and it is not in any way safe for them to take that blocker off and risk their health.

 

After purchasing supporter level, I was gifted a premium membership from a user of my mods and ended up using some of my DP to continue it. I would have kept up with this, but forgot to renew when a three month term expired. At this point, I decided to save up my DP to purchase a lifetime subscription, since I didn't have to worry about ads anyway. At my rate of DP income, it would only be a few months anyway.

 

And then, things started sliding downhill. Repeated issues of stolen mods (not my own) being reported and taking days or up to a full week to be removed, to the point of even needing to directly contact a mod about why they were still up. Most mod authors in the SDV community will know of the incident(s) in question, it only needs to be referred to as "that house mod" to be met with groans and much yelling.

 

On top of this, the SDV community had a primary point of contact in the form of a community manager, who is also a member of our server. We had been told in the past to ping with any issues or questions, which worked out well (though obviously with a bit of delay to account for time zones). We often had a return ping within a few days or faster if DM'd. Around the time we started having a surge in stolen mods, we started seeing a lack of responsiveness from said manager as well. Repeated pings received no answers at times. DMs were better, but not always.

 

Then we got to the banners a few weeks ago. Let me remind you, I am a user who paid for no ads, purchased several monthly premium memberships, and who is also a fairly popular modder within the SDV community. Certainly not Pathos level, but not a stranger to front page and several thousand DP per month (which in turn means revenue for the site). So needless to say, having a banner pop up on every page that couldn't be dismissed was a bit off putting, but I was willing to adopt a wait and see approach.

 

Cue Friday morning, logging on to check the latest updated mods (of which there have been an avalanche thanks to the 1.4 update). I open my slew of tabs from the front page as usual, click over to the first one in the set, and what do I see? Something straight out of the early 2000s and mega.upload. Not gonna lie, it was like being in high school all over and trying to track down that one file you wanted. The resemblance only grew when I realized the pop up was not a one time thing, oh no. It was on every single file I downloaded. Mods with multiple downloads required going back to the files page and going through the entire process again.

 

As a whole, I was impressed with Nexus when I first wandering into #modding and started checking it out. The site was fairly easy to navigate and had a wide variety of files, plus different sorting features (always welcome). As incidents and unaddressed concerns have started becoming more frequent though, I'm sadly reminded of great fansites that rose and fell because of alienating their userbase. I would hate to see a collection of works such as this lose the support of a community, as that's never good for anyone. BUT, a balance must be struck. I myself mentioned a few suggestions and I've seen other SDV modders in here echoing similar ideas: timed ads (perhaps once per day, once per week, etc) for going premium; the sticky banner; fundraising drives (possibly with small incentives); making premium memberships more than increased download limits/message storage; and more. As it stands, I don't see the value in a premium membership, as even when I did have it, it made no real difference to me or my experience.

 

Another point to make, recognized mod authors receive a message that they will not see ads after they hit their 1000 download marker and access to the mod author forums. While this is a nice touch, a good portion of us may have already purchased the supporter tier. A tier system for mod authors (possibly weighted for each modding community due to the differences in download volumes) would be an alternative to invasive advertising for these users and help provide incentives for authors to make more content (which means more traffic, which means more incremental revenue).

 

This has been a bit of a ramble and while I apologize for that, I felt it needed to be said. Our community in particular has been suffering a lack of support from Nexus recently and this latest change has many up in arms. To add onto that, many feel that they are being attacked for voicing their concerns about the direction the site seems to be headed in. So in closing, I want to remind everyone that we are all here because we love our respective games and want to be able to enjoy modding in peace. Nobody is arguing that the site doesn't need to support itself, just in the manner they are presenting this need. Deliberately reducing the experience of free users is not the way to go about things, as many others have learned in the past. And we all know what they say about those who do not learn from the past.

 

Happy farming (and gaming) to you all. I hope the Nexus staff take the time to seriously consider the points of concern brought up in this thread and are transparent about future changes, for the better or for the worse.

I think those people who are taking the time to form a coherent argument, yourself included, are being heard. Although, some of us are having are hard time understanding those that use this site, gain from this site, and are now POed and flying off the handle about a free service that is still free and is just waving to us for more support. Looks like you've gained through DP and a bit of a fan base, congrats on that! Some of us have been here for years and suck modding, yet here we still are.

 

I think several people on both sides of this thing - debate, I suppose... although, I wonder at times what we're all debating about... can agree that the way this flag for extra support was implemented was "mega.upload" tacky, as you put it. It doesn't mean that those responsible for implementing it didn't have a reason to do so. A few folk such as yourself have shared a number of decent suggestions on better ways to accomplish the same goal, but there are some that sound like new ways to p*ss off yet another group of users. In the end, it's not really up to anyone in this thread how the Nexus handles this. Glad to see some folk offering actual suggestions though. Happy modding to you!