Iâm gonna go on a tangent here. Weâre going off-topic, but this is something that needs to be said.
I come from a different background. I started programming when I was a kid, and continued to this very day. In my adolescence, I was motivated and inspired by the old-school hacker ethos, back before the work âhackerâ was changed to what it means today. Back then, âhackingâ was messing with the computer to make it do what you want, and hackers were people who relied on ingenuity to make computers do things others thought werenât possible.
Old school hackers admired each otherâs feats and shared their knowledge freely. They were both cooperative and competitive. Thereâs a competitive aspect to seeing who can squeeze more (or weirder) logic into a smaller space, for example, but hackers would gleefully share every such trick so that everyone else could use it to make their programs better (and weirder).
Why am I waffling on about this? Because the modding culture sprang from that source.
Nowadays weâre used to having games that have some kind of support for mods, but the first mods were total hack jobs. The first mods were done by people who played a game and loved it, but wanted to add or change things in it, and were crazy enough to sink a lot of time into it.
I never made a mod myself, but I remember spending an ungodly number of hours on a custom map maker for Battle Isle, because one of my closest buddies enjoyed playing that game and his birthday was coming up. The process of writing some bytes into a file, starting the game, seeing what changed, and often having to reboot the whole computer because you messed up badly enough that the whole thing froze â it might sound like masochism, but the rush from making a breakthrough is like a fuŃking drug. And the hours my friend and I spent designing custom maps, showing them to each other, and playing those maps? Those are some priceless memories.
Fast-forward to today, and mods are much more commonplace, and theyâre mostly developed by people who, just like the original modders, love the game enough to want to make it better. However, computers are now ubiquitous and programming is much more accessible. And thatâs not a bad thing, but it does mean that many modders wonât be the kind of person that I described when I talked about old-school hackers. Again, thatâs not a bad thing per se, but it could have some unfortunate consequences.
In this case, the unfortunate consequence was that there was a lot of drama around a particular modder and the mods this modder made. I wonât go into what Iâve heard second-hand and what Iâve seen discussed here and what less-than-flattering conclusions Iâve formed about the Conan Exiles modding community. Instead, Iâll let Funcomâs actions speak: they reinstated the mod and subsequently came up with this document. Yes, itâs a CYA measure, but itâs not aimed at the players, itâs aimed at the modders, and they can tell, which is why you can see them reacting negatively here.
TL;DR: Donât let what happened here be a condemnation of modding in general. Despite what the caretakers of the Console Walled Garden would have you believe, âmodâ isnât a dirty word. That impression has been influenced by the same people who put low-effort censorship filters in console text input UI, and it obscures and vilifies a creative culture of wanting to make the games we love even better than they are.
EDIT: I corrected a sentence about who this document is aimed at, per @Xevyrâs clarification further down in this thread.