Therumancer said:
Well to be fair I think "skins" and "meshes" are among the least shady parts of this due to those requiring some artistic talent (usually) on the part of the mod creator. They are actually doing something as opposed to just throwing a bunch of stuff together with the toolkit. It becomes more worthwhile if people create their own animations and sound (as you point out). Simply creating say a sword or gun with ridiculous stats and dropping it somewhere in the game world isn't exactly a worthy mod for example, IMO at least. When you add custom animations, a custom look, and perhaps self-created sound effects, and do a good job with it, that changes things considerably.
That's the point I was making earlier, and repeatedly. It's not that most of the mods were "shady," it's that they just weren't paying money for. That's all on Valve and Bethesda because they're the ones that set the ground rules for the initial offering.
It's a problem that would have been dealt with if the program had been allowed to continue forward. Mods that weren't worth spending money on wouldn't be getting sales. But, because Bethesda lost their nerve, that problem has been trapped in amber as how this "would be."
Therumancer said:
That said I'm against paid mods for a lot of reasons many of which have been covered here. A donation system strikes me as being fine however as long as it isn't spam-tastic.
Which you're never going to see. I mean, a large part of this is that Bethesda wants a cut of this. Actually letting modders get a piece of this is probably the best way to handle it, all things considered.
I mean, we were honestly looking at a lot of old projects getting revived, with new updates on the slate for paid versions. The Sky UI team and Wet and Cold developer(s?) were coming back to the projects to produce new content that would have been time prohibitive before. But, if they were actually getting paid? They figured they could do that. But, now that's all shot to shit.
Therumancer said:
I'll also be blunt in saying that the very infrastructure needed for paid mods will probably lead to censorship. This means a lot of "adult" mods or those doing things based on other IPs will likely cease to exist. Valve for example wouldn't host "Coito Ergo Sum" (an adult business simulator/adventure campaign for New Vegas) or perhaps more directly things like "Who Vegas" (massive Doctor Who mod/campaign for New Vegas), not to mention the big question of people taking money for using people's IPs without permission which is usually fine when it's not for profit, but when it's for profit not so much. I mean heck there are even "Doctor Who" mods for Skyrim through the workshop. Let's be fair, for a lot of people running around Fallout or even Skyrim dressed like Darth Vader and using a light saber can be amusing. Once this goes paid however... well even if such mods are still free there will likely be a crack down due to the attention focused on the newly formed industry.
Yeah, this is actually getting into some serious media bullshit that Valve's actually partially responsible for. By sticking that crowbar and HEV suit in one of the paid mods (at least, I think it was there) they were pointing people right back at the exact kinds of mods you could never sell.
If Valve's people hadn't signed off on it, you could never see that kind of IP infringement in a paid mod. You can get away with it now because of fair use claims, sometimes, but if you're selling it, that gets a lot harder.
As for censorship? Yeah, that's a noose that's going to tighten, regardless of if the mods are being sold or not. We've already seen that with the Elder Scrolls mod community in general. I mean, here's the thing, it pisses me off, but it's caught in the discussion of games as art v as toys. For those who view them as toys... they're going to keep pushing that kind of censorship.
In this case, some of that is, "it's Valve's shop, they get to make the rules," but, it does open the door to Bethesda closing off all other venues down the line. It's something to think about, but, in this specific case? It's not an immediate issue.
That said, if Bethesda did close off free modding on a game, by encrypting the files the way DAI does, or something similar, I
think they're smart enough to understand that would be killing their tails. But, if they're not, and they do that, it'll be sad, but I'll find other games to try to keep my attention.
Therumancer said:
All this aside you mentioned being a mod maker, who was considering getting back into it if mods went paid. What mods are you responsible for? I'm curious.
They've all got my name on them.
But, seriously, the two coherent ones that actually added stuff were a magic re-balance for Skyrim that adjusted the proficiency perks to scale the effectiveness of their associated spells organically. (You can find it here [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/52308/?].) What you won't find is the Dawnguard Vampire compatibility patch. I was working on it when the paid mods thing went sideways, and after the response from places like Brodual to that, I could stomach the community enough to polish it up. This is also a rare mod that can be removed from a saved game without any harm done, because of how it functions and what it modifies, if those vanish the game literally cannot choke on it.
I've also got an unarmored mod on my system that runs without scripts, by adding new perks to Alteration (it made sense at the time). But, again, I know I was working on that when this went down, so the unarmored perks are in there and work. The unarmed combat perks are there but don't actually have any effects tied to them. And shit like Brodual's "celebration" of the paid system being killed are why you'll never see it. Sorry if that sounds petulant, but, like I said, for what that guy posts, especially now that he's flogging for G2A at the end of every episode, I found his response repulsive.
There was also the "enhancement perks" for Fallout 3 that started as a simple perk tree for the Cyborg perk and then later expanded to include genetic and nanotech altered character perk sets. Looking at the dates on the file, I think I ended up having to abandon it because of a hellish semester in college, and never came back to it. Either way, I was never particularly happy with the implementation, and to get it working the way I actually wanted it to would have taken a lot of time and energy I didn't have. Which, I think I said in this thread. (The upload is here [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/52308/?] if you're curious.)
Beyond that, like I said, strictly very lightweight stuff. There's a tweak for the .45 if you're using WMX to keep the sights on the pistol itself, a modification to the Chinese Stealth Armor in New Vegas that allows you to remove it's helmet (though, honestly, I do not recommend my mod here, there was someone who came along a year or so later, who put out a much better one with reworked meshes), a couple mods that revert the AP and Carry Weight calculations to the classic Fallout (1 and 2) values (technically the AP is classic fallout x10, because of how the AP costs in 3 and NV work), stuff like that.
Weird thing is, I know I published some mods for Morrowind and Oblivion, but I can't remember the details, and if they're on the Nexus, they're not associated with my account. Which makes me think it was probably on filefront or that IGN site that folded a couple years ago.
Beyond that, I had a full combat rebalance for STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl. I think that got posted to filefront, but I'm not sure, and can't get it up and testing. I did a fair amount of STALKER modding in general, and I'm honestly not sure how much of it ever got posted anywhere. But, because of how STALKER modding works, I never kept very coherent archives of my work.
