What a lot of excitement in here over some basic logical/kinda-obvious guidelines Happily weâre allowed mods for this game. More happily the Modding community are on the whole superb and long-long-Looong suffering.
1, 2, 3, 7, 8, and 10 for the Admins/Players in the main. Why any Admins/Players think they can be unpleasant/abusive for free content, usage 100% based on personal choice, is completely beyond me.
4, 5, 6, 9, and 10 obviously aimed at the mainly awesome Modding Community that, to my extraordinarily limited knowledge, already stick to these points.
Thank Crom (and Andy and Ignassis) the guildelines donât âpickâ on Admins and the servers they have running mods.
I always remind my players on my servers that ALL mods are free and are enhancements to the game, not a requirement. Until I pay someones actual salary, have a specific job contract stating terms and conditions, I have no rights of Demand. Simple as that. I can politely, using the agree channels, escalate an issue and then remain absolutely patient until itâs updated or, if no longer supported, the mod is removed.
Same applies to players on modded servers. No-one forces a player to stay on a server. Unless agreed terms of service are in place, no-one have rights to make demands.
ps: any mod harvesting user data, breaching local laws, causing corruptions of game files, indulging in discriminatory nonsense, etc. absolutely should be booted.
Brief history: I was a PC DOOM PvP player until the PS came out. Got a PS2 and never looked back until Conan brought me here from GTA Online. This game changed my life. And not because they acted backward, silent and shifty, but because they were open and to me, honest. I prioritized gaming for âgood,â and broke my own inner rule â âno gaming on a work device.â Like @biggcane55 I work on many Machines a day and by the end of the workday, or even if thereâs a break, it seems anathema to play on a computer.
In the PC world, there are mods. And when I came over from the PS4 that was the real nagging thing: on the console, cheats are rare, and mods is a dirty word. Thanks to this whole debacle, and again having it verified there is indeed another supersecret backchannel via Discord, I think mods are more unattractive than anything I can imagine. This thread, and the others are a condemnation, frankly.
If certain conditions are met, then yes it becomes funcoms responsibility, the mod would have to be in the workshop âandâ funcom would have to be aware of it.
For example, workshop mods are considered an extension of the game and keep players active which increases the games popularity and results in funcom making money, if they are aware of a mod that is doing something illegal and do nothing about it they themselves become liable as they are profiting from it.
This only applies to mods added to steams workshop, also if steam becomes aware of it they also become liable hence they tend to take a heavy handed approach to copywrite disputes, I believe this is also the reason why funcom (or anyone) wouldnât contact the author prior to taking the mod down.
TBh reading this thread, if I were Funcom i wouldnhave a ToS, Mod CoC, that read,
Our IP
Our Official Servers
Our DevKit
we will do what we want, when we want, to whomever is using those three as we want. Thier are private, nonmodded servers for those that dont agree.
Because whenever they try and be transparent, people fret over ârightsâ and âfreedomsâ like this is the Gaza strip dispute, and franklyâŠit is just a game.
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.
The work one does for free doesnât deserve special dispensation just because itâs done for free. The only time âI did it for freeâ is relevant is when someone demands something from you, but you donât get to deflect criticism or claim special relevance because itâs free.
If someone shŃts on BUGLE, I might not be happy about it, but I wonât care too much either. I did it for free and that allows me to define what and how much Iâm willing to do. If someone doesnât like it, theyâre just as free to express that in whatever terms they want as they are to sit down and write something like better.
Let me clarify this in case it wasnât clear from the title of this thread.
This âdocumentâ is exclusively aimed at mod authors who have publicly available mods⊠(or seek to develop such a thing)
It is NOT aimed at mod users / players in any way⊠this is something that Storm confirmed with us and they further confirmed that they will never accept any form of report based on the above from third party players to prevent this being weaponized by mod users.
They said they would discuss and release some form of announcement to make this abundantly clear to the players, so Iâm hoping that will actually happen.
No, the emphasis there wasnât on the free part, that is just an additional factor⊠(and yes⊠regardless of any idealistical views of the âold school hackerâ you may harbor⊠it is a factor in a world where not even the sun comes up for free anymoreâŠ) People spending time on creating things for free does imo. hold more and more value as we evolve and everybody wants to be paid for their âtimeâ.
However the emphasis here was on the fact that people are very quick to âsacrificeâ things that donât matter to them.
Criticism would be valid had Barnes had even the slightest experience with using these mods, but criticizing something you never tried⊠is not really valid in my opinion.
I am not doing that. I am saying that seeing people using human rights as a guideline to judge FCs ToS is kind of bs and âself righteous narcisticâ. Ido use mods, i also jave dabbled in it. But i also know it is a hobbie of mine, not the end all be all to my rights.
This is where I disagree with you. Things arenât inherently more valuable just because theyâre harder to do.
For example, I miss Cattibriaâs impact as a moderator on these forums not because they were a volunteer, but because they did a good job as a moderator. I wouldâve missed their moderation even if they had been paid by Funcom.
I respect the sacrifice of doing something for free, and I respect people who do it, but letâs not conflate respect and value. Iâm not saying that the sacrifice doesnât have itâs own value, I just donât think it adds value to the product itself.
I agree that @Barnes shouldnât be criticizing mods themselves, or modding in general. Thatâs why I wrote my long-ass reply to him
I donât disagree with his criticism of the Conan Exiles modding community. Even if itâs not dead center, itâs not that far off the mark either.
That is something I definitely do get. From my very first DOOM WAD I recognized the power of crafting oneâs own experience in a game that allowed it. But never in a million years would I have expected a subculture to arise where I would sniff my own gaming chair and call myself a god of DOOM creation because of it. This is really what I reject, because itâs no longer about the mod then, is it?
Personally I enjoy the contributions of Multigun and others, whoâve worked carefully and diligently with Funcom to ensure their mods are tip-top and in the best of ways, compliant. If it werenât for his stellar contributions to the craft, I would still have that ingrained PlayStation âmods are badâ philosophy. I am happy to have shed it.
Iâm going to merrily quote Quigley Down Under and say âJust because I donât have any use for a thing, doesnât mean I donât know how to use it.â Go easy, @Xevyr, without equivocation I am explaining why I was resistant to mods and their authors, and why that has changed over time.
You and I have spoken about this a time or two so I wonât bore you â as you well know I wanted very badly to create Competition Servers back in the day, before one fiasco or another. That would of course require mods, and I really appreciated your input back then ⊠weâre waiting on the game to be fully cooked. And then you can launch your servers and I can try out my tournament servers.
Without this being a paean to Official Servers once again, but like the PlayStation itself, there is something beautiful about playing the game the way the devs intended it. I think we have that in common as well.
Iâve been playing Arkham Asylum again, but on the PC. Using my PS4 controller with a published mod gives me all the right symbols for my controller. But still, in the Control Panel it says XBOX 360. Would I be in the right to make an offshoot of this guyâs work and fix that, and publish it as my own?
First of all, can you? Itâs an offhand question, itâs important. If the âsourceâ for this mod is available, that implies that reusing the source is not an unexpected course of action. If it isnât, then youâre not really taking that guyâs work, youâre making your own that does the same thing.
Second, what kind of ârightâ are we talking about? Legally, there should be nothing stopping you. But is it ethical? Depends a lot on the circumstances. The first question has something to do with it. For example, if the author deliberately open-sourced their work, they probably included some kind of license with it and possibly even guidelines for contributors. Maybe you could even contribute your change to their mod instead of making your own.
Thatâs just an example, though. What I would suggest is reaching out and checking how they feel about it. And if I had access to their source and reused it, I would not simply publish it as my own without attributing the original author. Hell, even if I merely used their source as a reading material to learn how to do something, I would probably include some form of attribution.
The point that Iâm trying to make is that the old-school hacker culture depended a lot on the spirit of sharing. When someone shares their knowledge and their code, thatâs one thing. When you take it from them, thatâs another.
How wrong is it to just take? Again, it depends a lot on the circumstances. Say I took one of @Xevyrâs mods, found a way to âdecompileâ or otherwise reverse engineer what he did, changed one little detail, and published it on Steam as my own without even a mention of the original work and its author, and without ever contacting @Xevyr about it. That, in my opinion, is not âold-school hacker ethosâ, thatâs being a dick. I might not be breaking any laws, but I would be dishonest.
On the other hand, if I reached out to @Xevyr and said âhey, could you either change X or at least let me help change itâ and he cussed me out and called me names, you can bet I would, at the very least, feel okay with making my own mod that does the exact same thing with my change in it. Whether I would try to reverse-engineer his work or whether I would simply try to replicate it on my own is a different discussion.
In between those two extremes thereâs a huge grey area where you have to apply your own judgment and risk that someone might disagree with that judgment. For example, if someone elseâs mod suddenly starts interfering with yours, and you reach out to them, and they blow you off, what do you do?
Anyway, I went off on another tangent from my previous tangent
The short answer is, as always, âit dependsâ. If I painted the old-school hacker community as some kind of utopia, it wasnât my intention. Itâs not like people back then didnât make honest mistakes or that there werenât any dicks or any drama. I simply wanted to point out certain differences that I value and consider important.
I say this right at the top of my discord because I want people to understand where Iâm coming from; I make mods for myself because I enjoy it. I hope others like them too but I didnt start modding to get people to like my mods, I did it because its something I wanted to add. Iâm open to suggestions but I dont look for permission.
The reason I say that is because I consider myself just another player of a sandbox game. I dont think of modders as anything other than players. We all have access to the devkit to make mods as part of the game (only useful on pc of course). I dont think Iâm entitled to any special dispensation because I make mods. Its just one other tool in the sandbox, and Iâm just playing the game with extra sand in the box.
Apparently I can, because someone else already did. I was wondering whether Iâd be right to ask that this mod be taken down, barring the addition of appropriate attribution.
I really donât know the answer to that. I donât know what the rules are for Arkham Asylum modding, i.e. whatâs permitted and what the limitations are, according to their EULA (or whatever legalese document they have about this). I donât know if they have their own Code of Conduct or a similar set of non-legalese rules, and what it says. I donât know what happened in this particular case: who did what, who talked or didnât talk to whom, etc.
I can only offer you my own personal, biased opinion: if you didnât make the original mod or the copycat mod, if you didnât participate first-hand in whatever transpired between those two modders, if you donât know what rules are already in place, and if the existence of the copycat mod does not negatively impact you directly, then I donât think you have any real justification to ask for that mod to be taken down.
Weâll see what they say, because I think I can say with certainty that most mod authors will want to keep doing the following:
Keep steam comments off if they donât wish to hear the mess players typically do (nothing against those who keep them on, you have my condolences).
Telling players that if they donât like a mod, a feature in the mod, the time of day a mod is updated, delays in updates to the mod, or whatnot that they can unsub or deal with it.
Ignoring âfeedbackâ from players unless they want to hear it.
Deciding when and where they wish to engage players or if they even choose to do so.
All despite what point 7 says.
Engaging with players should be something mod authors should be able to opt-in or out, and be able to do so in any manner they wish.
Happily weâre allowed mods for this game. More happily the Modding community are on the whole superb and long-long-Looong suffering.
Go easy, 