6 ms·

I love Skyrim and Bethesda games because the developers give the community tools to mod the games, but IMO the majority of the modding community evolved in a ve

I love Skyrim and Bethesda games because the developers give the community tools to mod the games, but IMO the majority of the modding community evolved in a very bad place, a egocentric place. Most of the modders only give you the right to download the mod from the Nexus site using an account and a browser so they the modders get a bump to their downloads counter and hopefully an endorsements. The effect is that a lot of people wasted their time modding their game , and this process is very time consuming(reading each mod instructions carefully, reading the bug reports and posts, executing the steps, starting the game and testing it) and modding is very error prone , some weird bug can trigger late in the game and ruing everything, disabling a mod can cause problems too , finding the cause of a crash is also very time consuming and maybe impossible. In other games you have the concept of a mod pack (is a bit like a distro) but this is not possible with majority of this Skyrim mods, the Nexus website invented a concept of Collection that is a complex process that might work but has best results if you pay a subscriptions. Anyway the recent events in open source community made me thingk abut Skyrim community, if Open Source projects with a big downloads or star counter get some money or some badges the developers might fall in the trap of Skyrim moders and wanting to bump their counters will restrict their distribution, I am afraid we will see licenses with restrictions like MIT + GitHub restriction where you can use the code only if you downloaded it from GitHub and from this specific repo(no forks or re hosting allowed). This seems impossible now but as we see in my example with this Skyrim community it will happen slowly. There are open source and/or non restricted Skryum mod and I think most of this ones are inspired by Free Software philosophy.

throwawaycuriou 4y ago
While the modding restrictions are bemusing to me as well coming from open source software, the introduction of Wabbajack a couple years ago greatly streamlined things so that you had one curated install that could encompass hundreds of mods. Collections as I understand is Nexus' take on the same idea.
Athas 4y ago
It's always surprised me that game mods tend to be developed behind closed doors. Why don't they follow common open source development processes? Is there a cultural or perhaps technical reason why open development doesn't work for mods? (The one in TFA is an exception of course.)
- bloqs 4y ago
  Because so much of it is done by the young and inexperienced who don't want their thing ripped off despite usually ripping off others etc
- poisonborz 4y ago
  Maybe because games as a genre are really different from the tools most open source communities are centered around? Games contain a lot of art (subjective, made by a few/single persons), lot of authority is needed to hold it together, and the product is mostly not something to be refined for years but a one-big-release affair which is would only be used/played with for a limited time. The same way how you couldn't open source a poem or a book - the most you can do is be very community-based, like how most modders - akin to indie game developers - do. Are there any major open source game development besides maybe OpenTTD or Spring (which are more like frameworks and less of a games themselves)?
- h2odragon 4y ago
  Mods are often open source, but: You're creating, but your creation is totally dependent on the copyrighted work of someone else, and usually can't even be seen without it. "derivative works" bite that way. The audience has already paid for the base game and there's not likely to be ways they can donate to you even if they wanted to. This is being worked on but still not quite there yet. Lots of the games customers feel they've paid enough already; which adds tot he usual "entitled user" problems. People making mods tend to be non programmers passionate about an idea they had and wanting to make it happen even if they have to learn new things and extend themselves beyond their comfort zone. The social aspects of software development that encourage FOSS structures haven't occurred to them yet. Many will feel they're not "real" developers, this isn't "real" software, and thus those concerns don't apply to them or their work. Since having a "mod community" is popular, many game publishers want to have one. They often have no idea how to foster a community and allow their inner demons to come out in their efforts to do so. If a mod scene has politics before the game is released, bail.
  - simion314 4y ago
    This is not true, most mods are not open source, most mods created by developers might be though, usually this will mention that they are open , might even have "open" in their name and most of the time are a reaction to some shitty modder that does not accept contributions.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
github imo now provides sponsor only downloads or something to that extent so you are on the dot about that
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  It’s free under 1 GB, but I don’t know why you expect anyone to do free hosting with the sizes mods can get to (which nexusmods offsets with ads you probably don’t see with an Adblocker).
  - simion314 4y ago
    I don't expect free hosting, my original complaint is it is illegal to mirror a mod, so when Nexus will go down all mods will go down, we will have to share the mods in private because there is always some dude that will report you if you share a mod that dissipated in a forum. As long as the mirroring would give credits and link to authors preferred link then what is the issue ? (Nexus will not make money from ads and the modder will not get his counter increasses)
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      Ah I see now - good point.
franga2000 4y ago
Even in more open modding communities (like Minecraft) where these kinds of limitations are less common, it's really strange to me that most mods are not open source. By nature, mods can usually not be monetized in any way (without attracting the game publisher's army of lawyers) and are often developed by one person in their spare time (unsurprisingly leading to burnout and abandoned projects). So if you know you'll never make any money from it and that your time to work on it is very limited, why not open it up to contributions? Or at the very least, once you stop maintaining it for whatever reason, why not let others continue where you left off?
- ehnto 4y ago
  Is there anything in the parent product's licenses that suggest what licensing people have to use?
  - franga2000 4y ago
    Many game EULAs explicitly disallow paid mods, but I haven't seen any specifically mention broader licensing. Even without that, however, mods are a grey area in copyright law. Publishers tend to let mods exist because they bring publicity to the game, but when modders start making money, they usually want a cut at best or sue and shut them down at worst.
- ri0t 4y ago
  There's still the thing with donations and the illusion of getting rich that comes with it. Also: sunken cost fallacy + "this is MY baby".
ehnto 4y ago
> Most of the modders only give you the right to download the mod from the Nexus site using an account and a browser so they the modders get a bump to their downloads counter and hopefully an endorsements. Why is that so bad? Modders are just using Nexus as a way to host their mods and facilitate the community discussion. Some mods are huge after all, Nexus provides the hosting for the downloads, and software to manage them. > The effect is that a lot of people wasted their time modding their game Without a community site at the centre this process would be immeasurably harder. It's an inherently hard problem to manage hundreds of modders making independent mods and getting them all to work together. I'm not sure what the alternative is. There are certainly reasons to not like Nexus, but I think you'd find modding somewhat requires a site like Nexus. You have to make both the consumer and the creator's experience easy enough that people will be bothered to do it. If I had to sift through 40 different personal blogs to download .zips of mods and load them, I just wouldn't bother.
- simion314 4y ago
  I have nothing against Nexus, my pont was "you can only download this mod from this url" , this means if Nexus goes down it will be illegal for some kind soul to publish the mod on a different website. Other problems are when a mod has a bug, you will very often see in comments things like "I can share a fixed mod, the author is gone and I don't have the permissions, so JUST open the mod in this tool, and do this exact 12 steps" then the entire community has to do this process because you can't put a fixed version up. So I would prefer it to be a collaborative community and less of a store where you pay with your download and endorsement.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    Fair enough, it's a really muddy situation but I do see what you're trying to achieve. What makes it muddy is that some mods are just tweaks to the game, have no new IP or novel assets. While some mods are jam packed with newly developed and designed assets all of which surely deserve some level of protection if that's what the author wants. I think another reason why Nexus is so tightly controlled as a community is to avoid duplication, confusion and diverging mods. I guess this is a community problem more than a technology one, so I don't really have any solutions to offer except to try and encourage modders to be more free with their releases. On the same token, maybe there should be more clear ways for the community to have collaborative control over mods and patches.
poisonborz 4y ago
The false belief is that the mod community follows/should follow FS philosophy just because most of their produce is free. Why should they? The products they are modding are also closed source for profit endeavours. When a team pours so much time in a project, it's an understandable expectation that (when becoming popular) they could profit the same way the original game did (once copyright issues were cleared). Lots of mods could break out and be either sold as new games, the original studios endorsed them or straight up hire mod developers. Open sourcing would make that difficult, as it would play against the copyright/for profit angle.
- okasaki 4y ago
  Why should they? As the OP said, because installing mods one by one is very time consuming and error-prone.
  - fphhotchips 4y ago
    So why not use one of the myriad launchers (such as Nexus) that make it much easier?
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      Reading some comment chains makes you doubt the average users reading comprehension... This was all said in the first comment. The point is that the users likely don't want to only add one addon, but several. It's not permissable to create addon packs as a compilation of a known working combination. Nexus does have something that lets you install multiple add-ons like a package manager but few exists, because it doesn't work well enough if adjustments are necessary
      - yywwbbn 4y ago
        > Reading some comment chains makes you doubt the average users reading comprehension... Or maybe those users just think you’re wrong? AFAIK most people use a package manager to install multiple mods and it works just fine in most cases. In my opinion being able to install mods individually is much preferable to mod packs since you don’t have to add a bunch of stuff you don’t want and don’t have to wait for the pack compiler to update all the individual mods etc.
Waterluvian 4y ago
In my opinion this is backwards. Modders use Nexus for consistency, version control, and it trivializes mod management with one of the mod managers that works so well with Nexus.
- simion314 4y ago
  Do you want to see the reality? Let's gpo to skyrim modding reddit and ask (without flaming) How many hours people spent on setting up mods, reading, downloading, installing, testing, debugging, reinstalling, restarting the game play from zero again. This could be fixed with "distributions" one big file download one install but keep the tools for people who want the options to customize. But packs are not "legal" and the just recent created collection feature is still buggy. The issue is with the licenses the modders use and the restrictions they put, not the website , I think the website people would want to fix this but they can't.
  - musingsole 4y ago
    I've spent more hours modding Morrowind, Skyrim, and the Fallouts than I did playing the games. About 80% of that time is debugging various combinations of USER-GENERATED mods that would reveal bugs Bethesda has certainly worked to sweep under the rug. But that's not a failure. It's not some packaging problem that has persisted because of narcissism. I ENJOYED that time, getting to play with the very concept of the game in addition to playing the game itself. The Nexus mods community is a godsend to a world that was so disjoint and chaotic, most people thought modding a game was just an urban legend. Thanks to Nexusmods, nontechnical players could mod their games with a single click on a website -- They created a mod management system on top of a game that didn't care to think of it -- and you're upset about it? Contrary to your narrative, the modding community is filled with love and is built on sharing -- far moreso than the open source community. That you could see it as the opposite really just shows you've missed the history of just how far it's come -- all the while, being little more than a curiosity for a fraction of the gaming community.
    - simion314 4y ago
drexlspivey 4y ago
You can install modpacks using a tool called Wabbajaack (https://www.wabbajack.org/ https://www.wabbajack.org/) which downloads the mods from nexus (subscription required) and it’s an one-click install. I’m using it to play the Wildlander mod pack which is fantastic.
- simion314 4y ago
  This tools are a complexity thing , I tried Vortex and did not had good results for me. Why not have the collection in a big installer, then when you install it increase the download counter for all mods , maybe ncrease the endorments for all mods if you like the pack(it might cause drama though).
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    From sibling: "I am proposing something similar to Linux distributions, you could start from a minimal install Linux install and install exactly what you want , or you could download some random script that install stuff one by one from a website, or genius idea have distributions like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Stuio, Mint, Ubuntu Crhistian and Satanic editions and if I don't have time I install the distro that matches my needs and has a community." It seems like you feel strongly about this. You should make this solution.
    - mastax 4y ago
      Thing is that distro packages rarely conflict with one another, and when they do they're produced by a single organization who has processes to manage the conflicts. Mods are very often hooking the same functions or editing the same files, so you need patches for many combinations of mods. Mods are usually created by single authors who stop playing the game and there's no organization to take over maintenance or coordinate anything.
  - SSLy 4y ago
    vortex was never a good tool to start with (compared to MO2) and their collections are way subpar to WJ. So don't let you convince yourself just because Vortex is bad, WJ also has to be.
jackmott 4y ago
gunfighthacksaw 4y ago
When I used to mod morrowind and oblivion, there was another big site which I forget the name of. I think nexus bought them in the end which I did not enjoy because I always thought nexus was annoying wrt making an account etc. Some amazing mods out there though. DarkNuts greater dwemer ruins was one of the greatest experiences I’ve had in a video game and should ideally have been incorporated as an extended TES 3 goty, licensing etc aside. Tamriel rebuilt was mind blowing too.

throwawaycuriou 4y ago

While the modding restrictions are bemusing to me as well coming from open source software, the introduction of Wabbajack a couple years ago greatly streamlined things so that you had one curated install that could encompass hundreds of mods. Collections as I understand is Nexus' take on the same idea.

Athas 4y ago

It's always surprised me that game mods tend to be developed behind closed doors. Why don't they follow common open source development processes? Is there a cultural or perhaps technical reason why open development doesn't work for mods? (The one in TFA is an exception of course.)

bloqs 4y ago
Because so much of it is done by the young and inexperienced who don't want their thing ripped off despite usually ripping off others etc
poisonborz 4y ago
Maybe because games as a genre are really different from the tools most open source communities are centered around? Games contain a lot of art (subjective, made by a few/single persons), lot of authority is needed to hold it together, and the product is mostly not something to be refined for years but a one-big-release affair which is would only be used/played with for a limited time. The same way how you couldn't open source a poem or a book - the most you can do is be very community-based, like how most modders - akin to indie game developers - do. Are there any major open source game development besides maybe OpenTTD or Spring (which are more like frameworks and less of a games themselves)?
h2odragon 4y ago
Mods are often open source, but: You're creating, but your creation is totally dependent on the copyrighted work of someone else, and usually can't even be seen without it. "derivative works" bite that way. The audience has already paid for the base game and there's not likely to be ways they can donate to you even if they wanted to. This is being worked on but still not quite there yet. Lots of the games customers feel they've paid enough already; which adds tot he usual "entitled user" problems. People making mods tend to be non programmers passionate about an idea they had and wanting to make it happen even if they have to learn new things and extend themselves beyond their comfort zone. The social aspects of software development that encourage FOSS structures haven't occurred to them yet. Many will feel they're not "real" developers, this isn't "real" software, and thus those concerns don't apply to them or their work. Since having a "mod community" is popular, many game publishers want to have one. They often have no idea how to foster a community and allow their inner demons to come out in their efforts to do so. If a mod scene has politics before the game is released, bail.
- simion314 4y ago
  This is not true, most mods are not open source, most mods created by developers might be though, usually this will mention that they are open , might even have "open" in their name and most of the time are a reaction to some shitty modder that does not accept contributions.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

github imo now provides sponsor only downloads or something to that extent so you are on the dot about that

ShamelessC 4y ago
It’s free under 1 GB, but I don’t know why you expect anyone to do free hosting with the sizes mods can get to (which nexusmods offsets with ads you probably don’t see with an Adblocker).
- simion314 4y ago
  I don't expect free hosting, my original complaint is it is illegal to mirror a mod, so when Nexus will go down all mods will go down, we will have to share the mods in private because there is always some dude that will report you if you share a mod that dissipated in a forum. As long as the mirroring would give credits and link to authors preferred link then what is the issue ? (Nexus will not make money from ads and the modder will not get his counter increasses)
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    Ah I see now - good point.

franga2000 4y ago

Even in more open modding communities (like Minecraft) where these kinds of limitations are less common, it's really strange to me that most mods are not open source. By nature, mods can usually not be monetized in any way (without attracting the game publisher's army of lawyers) and are often developed by one person in their spare time (unsurprisingly leading to burnout and abandoned projects). So if you know you'll never make any money from it and that your time to work on it is very limited, why not open it up to contributions? Or at the very least, once you stop maintaining it for whatever reason, why not let others continue where you left off?

ehnto 4y ago
Is there anything in the parent product's licenses that suggest what licensing people have to use?
- franga2000 4y ago
  Many game EULAs explicitly disallow paid mods, but I haven't seen any specifically mention broader licensing. Even without that, however, mods are a grey area in copyright law. Publishers tend to let mods exist because they bring publicity to the game, but when modders start making money, they usually want a cut at best or sue and shut them down at worst.
ri0t 4y ago
There's still the thing with donations and the illusion of getting rich that comes with it. Also: sunken cost fallacy + "this is MY baby".

ehnto 4y ago

> Most of the modders only give you the right to download the mod from the Nexus site using an account and a browser so they the modders get a bump to their downloads counter and hopefully an endorsements. Why is that so bad? Modders are just using Nexus as a way to host their mods and facilitate the community discussion. Some mods are huge after all, Nexus provides the hosting for the downloads, and software to manage them. > The effect is that a lot of people wasted their time modding their game Without a community site at the centre this process would be immeasurably harder. It's an inherently hard problem to manage hundreds of modders making independent mods and getting them all to work together. I'm not sure what the alternative is. There are certainly reasons to not like Nexus, but I think you'd find modding somewhat requires a site like Nexus. You have to make both the consumer and the creator's experience easy enough that people will be bothered to do it. If I had to sift through 40 different personal blogs to download .zips of mods and load them, I just wouldn't bother.

simion314 4y ago
I have nothing against Nexus, my pont was "you can only download this mod from this url" , this means if Nexus goes down it will be illegal for some kind soul to publish the mod on a different website. Other problems are when a mod has a bug, you will very often see in comments things like "I can share a fixed mod, the author is gone and I don't have the permissions, so JUST open the mod in this tool, and do this exact 12 steps" then the entire community has to do this process because you can't put a fixed version up. So I would prefer it to be a collaborative community and less of a store where you pay with your download and endorsement.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Fair enough, it's a really muddy situation but I do see what you're trying to achieve. What makes it muddy is that some mods are just tweaks to the game, have no new IP or novel assets. While some mods are jam packed with newly developed and designed assets all of which surely deserve some level of protection if that's what the author wants. I think another reason why Nexus is so tightly controlled as a community is to avoid duplication, confusion and diverging mods. I guess this is a community problem more than a technology one, so I don't really have any solutions to offer except to try and encourage modders to be more free with their releases. On the same token, maybe there should be more clear ways for the community to have collaborative control over mods and patches.

poisonborz 4y ago

The false belief is that the mod community follows/should follow FS philosophy just because most of their produce is free. Why should they? The products they are modding are also closed source for profit endeavours. When a team pours so much time in a project, it's an understandable expectation that (when becoming popular) they could profit the same way the original game did (once copyright issues were cleared). Lots of mods could break out and be either sold as new games, the original studios endorsed them or straight up hire mod developers. Open sourcing would make that difficult, as it would play against the copyright/for profit angle.

okasaki 4y ago
Why should they? As the OP said, because installing mods one by one is very time consuming and error-prone.
- fphhotchips 4y ago
  So why not use one of the myriad launchers (such as Nexus) that make it much easier?
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    Reading some comment chains makes you doubt the average users reading comprehension... This was all said in the first comment. The point is that the users likely don't want to only add one addon, but several. It's not permissable to create addon packs as a compilation of a known working combination. Nexus does have something that lets you install multiple add-ons like a package manager but few exists, because it doesn't work well enough if adjustments are necessary
    - yywwbbn 4y ago
      > Reading some comment chains makes you doubt the average users reading comprehension... Or maybe those users just think you’re wrong? AFAIK most people use a package manager to install multiple mods and it works just fine in most cases. In my opinion being able to install mods individually is much preferable to mod packs since you don’t have to add a bunch of stuff you don’t want and don’t have to wait for the pack compiler to update all the individual mods etc.

Waterluvian 4y ago

In my opinion this is backwards. Modders use Nexus for consistency, version control, and it trivializes mod management with one of the mod managers that works so well with Nexus.

simion314 4y ago
Do you want to see the reality? Let's gpo to skyrim modding reddit and ask (without flaming) How many hours people spent on setting up mods, reading, downloading, installing, testing, debugging, reinstalling, restarting the game play from zero again. This could be fixed with "distributions" one big file download one install but keep the tools for people who want the options to customize. But packs are not "legal" and the just recent created collection feature is still buggy. The issue is with the licenses the modders use and the restrictions they put, not the website , I think the website people would want to fix this but they can't.
- musingsole 4y ago
  I've spent more hours modding Morrowind, Skyrim, and the Fallouts than I did playing the games. About 80% of that time is debugging various combinations of USER-GENERATED mods that would reveal bugs Bethesda has certainly worked to sweep under the rug. But that's not a failure. It's not some packaging problem that has persisted because of narcissism. I ENJOYED that time, getting to play with the very concept of the game in addition to playing the game itself. The Nexus mods community is a godsend to a world that was so disjoint and chaotic, most people thought modding a game was just an urban legend. Thanks to Nexusmods, nontechnical players could mod their games with a single click on a website -- They created a mod management system on top of a game that didn't care to think of it -- and you're upset about it? Contrary to your narrative, the modding community is filled with love and is built on sharing -- far moreso than the open source community. That you could see it as the opposite really just shows you've missed the history of just how far it's come -- all the while, being little more than a curiosity for a fraction of the gaming community.
  - simion314 4y ago

drexlspivey 4y ago

You can install modpacks using a tool called Wabbajaack (https://www.wabbajack.org/ https://www.wabbajack.org/) which downloads the mods from nexus (subscription required) and it’s an one-click install. I’m using it to play the Wildlander mod pack which is fantastic.

simion314 4y ago
This tools are a complexity thing , I tried Vortex and did not had good results for me. Why not have the collection in a big installer, then when you install it increase the download counter for all mods , maybe ncrease the endorments for all mods if you like the pack(it might cause drama though).
- motoxpro 4y ago
  From sibling: "I am proposing something similar to Linux distributions, you could start from a minimal install Linux install and install exactly what you want , or you could download some random script that install stuff one by one from a website, or genius idea have distributions like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Stuio, Mint, Ubuntu Crhistian and Satanic editions and if I don't have time I install the distro that matches my needs and has a community." It seems like you feel strongly about this. You should make this solution.
  - mastax 4y ago
    Thing is that distro packages rarely conflict with one another, and when they do they're produced by a single organization who has processes to manage the conflicts. Mods are very often hooking the same functions or editing the same files, so you need patches for many combinations of mods. Mods are usually created by single authors who stop playing the game and there's no organization to take over maintenance or coordinate anything.
- SSLy 4y ago
  vortex was never a good tool to start with (compared to MO2) and their collections are way subpar to WJ. So don't let you convince yourself just because Vortex is bad, WJ also has to be.

jackmott 4y ago

gunfighthacksaw 4y ago

When I used to mod morrowind and oblivion, there was another big site which I forget the name of. I think nexus bought them in the end which I did not enjoy because I always thought nexus was annoying wrt making an account etc. Some amazing mods out there though. DarkNuts greater dwemer ruins was one of the greatest experiences I’ve had in a video game and should ideally have been incorporated as an extended TES 3 goty, licensing etc aside. Tamriel rebuilt was mind blowing too.