THE GOODWILL CAMPAIGN PACT

[Dildo_Baggins]

to all the patriots of Morrowind:

 

THE GOODWILL CAMPAIGN PACT

 

Disclaimer:

This letter is for everyone. Sorry for my English - I’m not a native speaker, my mother tongue is Russian. If a moderator finds a glaring mistake in my grammar or something else, I would gladly ask him to edit my post and correct it.

I hope everybody will take THIS seriously. The idea of writing it came to me some months ago, but till this very day I felt the time hasn’t come yet. Now I have a queer feeling it’s just the time to write a proclamation to all the MW community. I divided it into several posts under a common thread, and I really hope moderators won’t take it for flooding or flaming.

[Dildo_Baggins]

PART I: WHAT THE BIG DEAL IS

 

§1 What makes us unhappy?

 

I have been surfing through these forums for about a year and a half, but didn’t want to post anything.

An insignificant word of a simple hobbit can’t change all this mess, can it?

The topic isn’t quite new; in fact, it was raised for several times, and received some attention from the forum folk, and a great deal of responses came, mostly varying from “yeah” to “uh oh”, but not a single intelligible solution was brought up. The same problem, but in a different form, was also raised in threads like “what a hell we made of our forum!”.

The problem is:

Why every modder, despite of his skill and aims, actually works only for himself, not for the community? Why don’t all the modders (I don’t mean joining modding teams) unite to create not just a heap of modules, but a completely renewed culture of Better Morrowind?

 

§2 What is the very source of the problem?

 

Imagine a group of smiths who had long been polishing up their skills in making enchanted armor and weapons of great power. But they never raise their heads up from their hammers and anvils - so they never see the sun or the other fellow smiths. So are the mod-makers - they make wonderful weapons, armor, clothing, new models and textures much better than those Bethesda has stuffed the game with.

Moreover, there are a lot of global projects like Sea of Destiny, Wizards’ Islands, Better Bodies, Visual Packs and lots of other professionally made stuff.

But here comes a sad tendency - some particular mod, no matter how genial it is, eventually drowns in the mod databases of different sites, and its fame fades in the bog of forum talks.

Let’s take Personal Mobile Base - a fully functional flying fortress which you can buy and take to the city of your choice any time you want. It didn’t even slightly upset the game balance. There were many versions of it, the last letting the player to teleport the base all around Vvardenfell, Soltsheim and Mournhold. The base itself was a technical wonder itself: armories, swimming pool, training hall...

Who uses the mod now? Very few people indeed. It lies covered in dust in some distant corner of MWsummit, and few novice players of Morrowind have ever heard of it.

Many other great mods shared the same destiny with PMB. Where are Hurdy Gurdy’s Robes now? Still there, but few people know of them. Here I could list dozens of mods which were once super hits, and now are forgotten.

Why is that? An author made a mod. Posted it to some site. Wrote a [REL] thread in the forums. People admired the mod. But some months passed, and the mod is forgotten. And the author doesn’t give a good damn about it like he had written it only for himself, not for the community.

The mods are soon forgotten because they are not parts of a united Morrowind Culture.

Look at the MeMod - it has a strong united culture: numerous realism tweaks (sometimes bizarre), new technologies applied, new models, textures, every in-game component finely works together with the rest.

The world they’re creating is a finished, all-sufficient universe.

And what we have in Morrowind, that doesn’t look if we had any unity there. Actually it’s our mods that are tearing the land of Vvardenfell apart.

 

§3 What is the way out?

 

Why not try to build up a similar culture in Morrowind? Unite all the great mods, big and small, into one system? If the modding people have the energy to release thousands separate mods, new lands and total conversions, wouldn’t it be wonderful to create a completely new Game, Better Morrowind, instead of a bizarre panopticon of mods? Still the most popular question at forums is “Is my mod list right?” or, as a variation, “What are the mods every player must have?” So many people are looking for the must-have mods that it would be the kindest deed to find them all and make of them a must-have game.

What-mod-is-the-best discussion nearly flooded mod forums, and it seems to me that people are more willing to set up lots of fuss about Morrowind then try to make it better.

 

BRETHREN, WILL YOU HEARKEN TO ME?

AREN’T WE PROUD OF OUR WORLD OF VVARDENFELL?

AREN’T WE WILLING TO MAKE IT THE LAND OF OUR DREAMS?

[Dildo_Baggins]

PART II: THE GOODWILL CAMPAIGN

 

§1 What is the goodwill campaign?

 

The Goodwill Campaign of Morrowind (GCM) is not a team nor a sect nor a goddamn liberation movement of the Dunmer. The GCM doesn’t even exist yet, but we have enough energetic modding folk for it to come true. In fact, the GCM is a union of the people who want to give old Morrowind a completely new united culture, of course with respect to the old MW traditions and Elder Scrolls lore.

The only requirement for becoming a GCM member is your good will. Non-modders, just idea inventors or critics or simply dedicated players are also welcome in the GCM.

Each member of the GCM should have the following duties:

 

1) Make their mods compatible with other mods made by GCM members.

 

2) Merge GCM-made mods with similar functions within reasonable limits - I don’t mean sticking all the good mods together into a clumsy snowball. Just possible combinations like Corv’s Ranger Mod + Marksman Mod by Intelligentsia - both mods are a must-have for any ranger/archer and if merged together, people who know of the former will know of the latter and vice versa. Such unification of mods into groups is bound to make them much harder for the people to forget or lose among hosts of other mods.

 

3) Vote and decide if a mod is a must-have or is good, but not liked by all of the community, thus being an optional mod. If 90% of the community says a mod is a must-have, then it is.

 

4) Keep all the cool mods at one site, which would be the GCM headquarters. Local home sites are like feudal castles: they’re far less frequently visited by net-surfers than big portals; even must-have mods are easily lost if being hosted at such a site. But big portals like MWsummit or Euro-RPG have another shortcoming - really cool mods are mixed there with a thick ooze of insignificant or even idiotic mods. MWsummit hosts more than 3500 mods, and most of them are like the one once I saw there: a super brand-new mod adding a steel crossbow and some bolts to the Seyda Neen customs house. (No offence meant: maybe the author just wanted to give the player an anti-Fargoth emergency kit before the player faces Fargoth) Even all the 3500 mods were cool, the problem would remain the same: put three thousand of them in the same place, and no one will find the mod they need. So finding lost cool mods is another duty of the GCM members. The best HQ for the GCM would be Thelys site, because it’s already a home to some best mods ever.

5) This duty is probable the most important one: not to stuff the forums with threads like “what’s the best mod” and other ones which make little sense. Instead of asking the wretched question million times, try to find it out on your own and integrate whatever cool mods you have found into the united MW culture.

6) To develop the whole structure of the united culture of Morrowind - discuss, criticize and finally come to terms with fellow forumfolk.

 

§2 How to become a GCM member?

 

First, you put the words ‘GCM member’ in a bold font in the first line of your signature.

Second, from that very moment you start helping other GCM members in every way possible: share your genial ideas and critic opinions, vote for mods, create mods, find the lost ones...

 

§3 The GCM leader

 

If we want to succeed, we to ought to have a project leader, who should coordinate all the activities of the GCM members. Who’ll be the headguy? Not me! :) What about JDGBolt? He likes supporting scripters and modders in his forums, and he did much for MW realism and united culture - mountable animals (still not finished, sic!) and his forthcoming über-ship and all. Also JDGBolt is kind and tolerant to people of all kinds. The Puma Man could be the chief compilator - he compiled a damn lot of creatures and other pretty thingies into his awesome add-on packs. Many authors blame him for unauthorized use of other people’s work in his mods, but he’s the one who got the point that skillfully made add-on packs are more likely to survive than separated mods. Look at the download counters of his add-on packs at the Mwsummit - d’you see the advantage of merging alike mods into packs? As far as the rest of the GCM hierarchy is concerned, to tell you the truth that’s not my part of the deal at all. It’s up to the community to decide the matter.

 

SO I PROPOSE THAT EVERYBODY BEGIN THINKING THE MATTER OVER AT ONCE

IT’S MUCH BETTER THAN ENDLESS ARGUING IN THE FORUMS

IF YOU WANT TO SAVE MORROWIND, JOIN THE GOODWILL CAMPAIGN!

[Dildo_Baggins]

PART III: THE BASIC SKETCH OF THE UNITED MORROWIND CULTURE

 

You can change this the way you like, by no means it ain’t no a fanatic’s manifestation:

 

To Make Morrowind Of Our Dreams We Ought To:

 

I. FIND A HEADQUARTES SITE FOR THE GCM PROJECT AND ITS MODS

 

II. UNITE THE LANDS

Make all the new lands made by modders mutually compatible: Sea of Destiny, Wizards’ Islands (when finished), Garkistaag Isle and many others. Help the authors to finish their mods if they got short of creative inspiration.

 

III. BRING THE REALISM TO VVARDENFELL

Convince the community of realism being a must have feature.

Make up a realism standard.

Make the Necessities of Morrowind mod the chief and only realism mod and modify it the way the community decided (all the modifications should be made only by the authors of the Necessities not to screw the scripts up)

Place sources of water and food all over Sea of Destiny, Wizards’ Islands, CON3 and whatever new lands may come (as a separate addition to the original Necessities mod to prevent little nasty mod conflicts) This part of work is up to the authors of the appropriate new land mods, not the authors of the Necessities.

 

IV. UNITE THE NEW ITEMS.

Take all the new weapons, armor and clothing, balance them, and either put them into the new lands (which I would personally prefer) or make some heavyweight add-on packs (like Weapon Compilation or Assasin’s Armory, and this part of work is already nearly done)

 

V. UNITE THE GRAPHICS

Polish up all the Visual Packs and come to a standard.

Finish Better Bodies and Better Clothing projects and make them the standard for clothing and armor modelling.

Collect together all the new faces! Everybody goes around talking of different face packs, but it would be much better to stick them all together not to spend hours on the net looking for separate face collections?

Make the ultimate face replacer. We’ve already got some great ones, so the task is easy.

Make at last an über tree replacer (where are you, Gardeners of Morrowind?)

Make pixel shader grass and pixel shader leaves: the forum guy called Postaldudedeleo told me he’ll give us the rockin’ grass in a month and this ain’t no joke, so maybe he’ll make pixel shader leaves, uh?

Then either make all the above-listed stuff completely compatible or just unite all the graphic improvements into one über-great-graphic-pack (which will exist forever and no one will ever forget that it exists)

 

VI. ANIMALS AND WILDLIFE

Puma Man has brought together nearly all the animals and wildlife in his Wildlife 2.0 mod, so if we help him to collect them all (oh, I’m beginning to talk that Pokemon sh*t) this part of work will soon be done.

 

VII. THE BALANCE.

Make up the United Game Balance. No comments.

 

VIII. THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT.

I leave this point blank for you to fill - that’s why it’s the most important.

Switch your heads on and start thinking what Better Morrowind could be like.

Don’t be afraid to manifest your ideas.

United we’ll make Better Morrowind even better than MeMod is going to be.

 

P.S. You won’t find me on these forums ‘cause reading tons of argument slowly turns me into a psychopath hobbit running around with scissors. Besides I’m too a busy person to read all these discussions (no joke, I have a job and too little free time!)

 

But if you need my advice, e-mail me and I’ll have a machinegun burst of creative ideas right in your face! I’ll be happy to answer all your emails and though I’m no modder, I can be useful as a consultant or critic or just something.

 

Sincerely yours, banana Baggins.

 

TO ALL THE VVARDENFELL PATRIOTS:

 

STOP THE MOD-MADNESS!

JOIN THE GOODWILL CAMPAIGN!

[_it_]

your plan is a good one but it takes a large amount of time and organization to execute

 

what about the different systems of the gcm members and the different programs used by modders and the lack of .nif editors wich cost a large amount of cash

 

how can u come to a standart if one person is working with a 64mb v-ram graphics card and the other with a 512mb v-ram graphics card and how will u be sure that some mods wont conflict with eachother and that in 5 years the community will fall down because op a new rpg or maybe a new elder scrolls game (who knows)

 

you should have made this plan allot sooner

[Marxist ßastard]

I've moved on to greener pastures and I was in the process of permanently removing myself from these forums when I heard of this post. I just had to stop this process, if only to respond to your incredibly idiotic ideas. You are a cretin not far removed from Sludgewort or Evien -- and like both of them, you really should log off life while you're ahead. Things only go downhill from here, trust me. Better you get the Lead pill now than find yourself serving up burgers in twenty years -- you don't want to mess up somebody's happy meal with skull fragments, now, do you?

 

You are making a simple problem seem like the greatest injustice known to mankind, and proposing a solution that is completely ridiculous in the fact that it takes choice away from the player when the intent is to present the player with more choices.

 

There is no "mod madness." When somebody wants a particular plugin, they hear about it, search for it, and then get it off of an FTP in the Czech Republic. When somebody is simply browsing around for a quality plugin, they go to a good plugin database like TheLys or check out some mod listings in a few of the more popular forums and form their own opinions about what plugins instead of having a plugin shoved in their face, along with a mandatory trial of similar plugins.

 

Let’s take Personal Mobile Base - a fully functional flying fortress which you can buy and take to the city of your choice any time you want. It didn’t even slightly upset the game balance. There were many versions of it, the last letting the player to teleport the base all around Vvardenfell, Soltsheim and Mournhold. The base itself was a technical wonder itself: armories, swimming pool, training hall...  Who uses the mod now? Very few people indeed. It lies covered in dust in some distant corner of MWsummit, and few novice players of Morrowind have ever heard of it.

 

Private Mobile Base is among the top 2.5% of the most downloaded mods at Morrowind Summit. I could throw up a few more statistics, but the point is that PMB isn't rotting away in some distant corner somewhere. It gets recommended -- and downloaded -- all the time. It also isn't absolutely imperative that every member of the Morrowind community play this plugin. Did you ever stop to think that perhaps people have different tastes in houses than you? Some people would prefer Moon's Spawn, for some unknown reason. Some artsy types prefer Rain's Hand Hall. Still others want to be kosher, and thus just use a dwelling in the original game -- others want to be semi-kosher, and thus the market for stronghold expansion plugins appear.

 

Look at the MeMod - it has a strong united culture: numerous realism tweaks (sometimes bizarre), new technologies applied, new models, textures, every in-game component finely works together with the rest.

 

Are you seriously suggesting that we look to a mod we haven't even seen a beta of for proof of a concept that has been proposed well into its development?

 

Unite all the great mods, big and small, into one system?

 

What you're proposing is that we not only come to an agreement on what composes a "great" mod, something that every man has his own opinion on, but also put them in a big database. Everything without the database will be completely ignored, and thus great mods will continue to not get the attention they deserve and mods that were once in the spotlight will fade away, all because they will realize how much of a complete and utter idiot you are.

 

...So let's look over your action plan thus far:

 

1) Make their mods compatible with other mods made by GCM members.

 

• Contact mod authors and ask them to join an organization that seeks to end individual credit for their modifications and wipe out all traces of their modding style in order to create a single set of plugins, "Better Morrowind." Then proceed to say... What was that, again?
   
  ...the author doesn’t give a good damn about it like he had written it only for himself, not for the community.
   
  Ah, yes... Proceed to call the author of an underappreciated work -- one he created out of his own time with no promise of recognition at all, much less more material expressions of gratitude -- an ungrateful and selfish pig that has unleashed a great evil upon the world.
   
  ...And then remind him that you're seeking to end what little individual credit he's getting for his works.
   
  When you're done insulting him, tell him that he must make his mod compatible with one that a sane person with more than a single brain cell would never use with his, and use some interesting tactics in the process, which decrease performance, eliminate features, add bugs, and make the mod that much harder to edit.
  

 

2) Merge GCM-made mods with similar functions.

 

• Merge all mods in a single category into huge data files that force the player to use every mod your group think is worthwhile, even ones that differ wildly in concept and step on each others' feet.
  

 

3) Vote and decide if a mod is a must-have or is good, but not liked by all of the community, thus being an optional mod. If 90% of the community says a mod is a must-have, then it is.

 

• Assume that every member of the Morrowind community is participating in your polls, and then ask each one to rate a mod he probably hasn't even heard of. If 90% of participants give the mod a good rating -- a rating based on individual performance, mind you, and not how well the mod fits in with the other "mandatory" mods -- package this mod, which the remaining tenth of voters (a sample of one hundred thousand individuals out of one million) is known to abhor, with ones that will cancel out its changes and thus bring the desireability of the final product not to something greater than the sum of its parts, but rather something much less than the lowest common denominator.
  

 

4) Keep all the cool mods at one site, which would be the GCM headquarters.

• Without any plans for layout or additional content prepared, contact a host, and then sayeth unto him, "BROTHER! HEED OUR CALL! COMRADE, PLEASE! OUT OF THE COMMON FRATERNITY OF ALL MEN SHALL COME THE SOLUTION TO THE GREAT PLAGUE!" Explain that you'll need an ungodly amount of bandwidth to host a site that contains plugins that can all be found elsewhere, and you expect to have this sort of thing done with no funds whatsoever.
  

Oh, yes... And who do you want to make this happen? Puma Man and Clone?

 

Look, I'm going to tell you a secret... If you're making the point that the truly great mods aren't being downloaded enough, you probably shouldn't take your ideas of the best modders of all time from Morrowind Summit's top ten most downloaded mod lists... And this could be just me, but if you've seen the mods of Puma Man and Clone, you should probably know what a gigantic heap of crap a mod would be if it were composed of random poo some idiot collected off the Internet without giving proper credit to their creators.

 

BROTHER-IN-ARMS! I PLEAD THEE! LEND ME THINE EAR!

[Switch]

I agree with Marxist in some ways. This does seem a little bit like making a mountain out of a mole hill, no offense...

 

But Marxist, I'm warning you, calling someone an "utter idiot" and telling them to kill themselves is still flaming, regardless if your post puts across a good point or not. This forum does still have rules.

[Marxist ßastard]

Yes, I would really hate to get a strike now, considering what was said in the first paragraph of that post.

[websoul]

i think all mods are very personal, and combining them would only add mods that you maybe wouldnt want to play with

 

i like living in the house i created myself so i have no use of an mobile house that teleports and there are enough mods that i have no use for if those are put in one mega mod i will have to use those also.

[postaldudeleo]

I amde this kind of uber mod myself which is a mix of esp files all meged tgether. Im not realeasing it cause its to may tastes. Anyone can do this thing in a few hours. I made my to my taste. Someone else though will want something different so this idea thoguh good wont work for everyone.

 

Im off to play doom 3.....................