I hope you have put some thought into countering the massive issue at final release where thousands of people will be buying the game and installing masses of mods that 100% break the game.
I really hope you have some system in place at final to counter this serious issue.
At least the workshop needs to be have old mods made invisible, if you don’t have time to check mods just make a post on the workshop asking users to tell you which mods are working and not working.
It is 100% NOT their responsibility to monitor COMMUNITY made mods. If people are dumb enough to install 3rd party mods the day of a massive launch patch, then it’s their own fault that they can’t get their game to work. This is common sense…
Modding was added to the game in order to increase sales (blame skyrim), they even have people paid to work on the modding portion of the game and devkit.
Modding is important to the game and the success going forward, it is in their interest for it not to be a shambles as it is now.
Washing their hands of it is not only a waste of the massive investment they put into adding modding (and the headache the devs had to go through to work around it) but also it will lead to people refunding the game and countless “the game is broken” complaints that will come from those mods being broken.
Most people will install a mod and then blame the game if the mod breaks it, this is how games get a bad reputaion for being broken.
As examples:
This is the most subbed mod on conan workshop:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=861790997
It’s completely broken, installing this mod will remove huge chunks of content from the game and most likely make it crash all over the place.
Why is it still there? There are lots of prominent mods like that.
Click on most popualar mod or most subbed and you’ll see large numbers of the top ones are broken, to the point of really breaking the actual game when you try to play it.
Taking down an abandoned mod is the responsibility of the mod author, not Funcom. That mod has not been touched since 2017, as reflected in the comments.If the author has abandoned it, then that’s a reflection on them and not FC. Mods are not their concern, nor should they be.
Server owners know that mods will break on a new update. They always have and they probably always will to some degree. Responsible ones will disable them prior to release and keep their players informed of the changes and the roadmap ahead for their particular community server. Many are instituting wipes. Some are backing up data tables and map files to replace things after a wipe, and others are just doing a fresh start in vanilla and will re-integrate their mods later.
The burden is on the community, not the publisher. If you do not manage your server properly, including the use of mods, then whatever happens, happens.
It’s incredibly difficult to prep a dev kit for the release of a game when you’re not sure what content will be available to the modding community. There’s a lot of stuff they purchase behind the scenes that is licensed to funcom and isn’t available for modders. It’s annoying that people assume they understand half of what that team does in terms of getting this content out to folks much less catering to entitled gamers who think they know dick about development. Just my two cents from being around these guys and seeing how much love they pour into it.
To use an example like Stacks is just muddying the argument. I am part of the modding community and trust me, we know the mods will break and we prepare ahead of time by staying directly in touch with funcom’s developers (which are awesome, Scooper is number 1 dev). If you want to use an example of a mod that people actually use and not just garbage metrics, look at Pippi. Joshtech is probably the most brilliant modder and his mod has become essential to life in Conan Exiles.
I’ve ran my server for over a year now and I can tell you, if there is one company that cares about the player base, it’s funcom. Sure, people will blame the mods for breaking the game and rage quit/refund but that’s just the nature and maturity of the gaming community today. People expect ridiculous things and have no patience when they don’t get exactly what they want. Bottom line, it’s not as easy as everyone thinks and I can promise you this group of developers at funcom are trying to stay ahead of things as best they can.
True but many of the old mod creators not only abandon mods but they unsub from the comments of them too, so they will never come back. They don’t care the mods are broken, it won’t hurt them to leave them up forever.
Funcom should care (at the very least for release), cause they are the ones that will hurt (financially) if the game gets an unfair bad rep for being completely broken due to people downloading broken mods and blaming the game.
Most people don’t know how mods work, they don’t get that if you download a mod for increased stacks / add a new sword it can make half the game items dissapear or cause perma crashes.
The post was a suggestion to the developers, I’m not ordering them to do it. They will do what they want, but they should at least think about it.
Funcom make money from the it, it’s in their interest to care about a feature that can have a negative impact on the game. Many modders don’t care of any negative impacts their mods have because they lose nothing no matter what.
Most modders who abandon mods unsub from the comments on their mods anyway, so they don’t care in the slightest if it breaks the game.
Anyway I get the impression that this is a non-issue to funcom, well ok. That’s a very odd outlook to a major feature of a 50-60 million dollar game about to launch but it’s thier decision.