A mod donated would be given (with all needed files) to Funcom, and be part of official server modded play (a new concept). Free content / mod that’s included on official servers as Funcom see’s fit. The mix of which official servers have no mods or have mods would of course be Funcom’s call.
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I love mods. I love modders. It’s an amazing, creative, generous community. That said, there’s a whole range of issues involved with doing this. Any, all or none of these may apply in specific cases.
In no particular order:
Rights to various underlying assets used. This could be textures, code snippets, anything. Most modders don’t have a legal department (!) checking that everything they’ve created is legal to distribute commercially.
Quality of product: Modders don’t have to worry about the big picture, and can devote as much or as little energy as they see fit to integrating their work in the greater whole. This is both in terms of balance, them and various other things that you see on screen, but it’s also a concern on a technical level.
Clashes with the mod itself: In the event that Funcom were to proceed with this, they neither could nor should guarantee that the mod-turned-content would survive entirely unchanged into the hands of the community. This would mean that current users of the mod might well find themselves in a quandary: If they remove the mod, that could be a big problem for their server. If they don’t, they might run into all sorts of issues from the kinda-sorta double content.
All of these could of course be handled. I am not at all sure whether it’d be worth the effort to sort through a mountain of dubious-quality submitted content* though. Funcom could already reach out to various mod authors should they wish to.
*the are many AMAZING mods available. There are also very many weird/incomplete/bad ones. Nature of the beast!
Aside from maintenance and other things associated with mods, there’s probably some legalese jump-ropes reason that they can’t do it. A similar topic came up on another developer’s forums and they popped their head in to explain. I don’t remember the details, but basically even if all the assets checked out fine and the mod creator handed them everything and made a public announcement saying “Please, use it however you want. It’s all your’s.”, the company is still open to litigation involving copyright and whatnot, in no small part because the creator isn’t on the payroll.
In short, too much hassle for too little gain.
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