How I play: Single player, and private co-op PVE. In both, gathering yields are tweaked, along with turning off decay and a few other minor adjustments. With SP, I don’t use a lot of mods. Right now the only one that I run is the Undead Horse mod because one day I will build my necromancy palace. On the server, we use a ton of mods that generally augment building and give us a variety of placeables for decor.
Though now I might the Fashionist mod because I’d love to be make the armor set that I want with the stats/temp that I want.
Personally, I don’t use mods much because a lot of them, for me, just add too much, or change up the game in ways I don’t really want. I may, for example, like the placeables a mod offers, but don’t really want the expanded crafting, additional loot/etc that comes with them. (This, by the way, is not a knock to modders. It’s solely personal preference.)
As for charging for mods: Meh. I don’t see the value added to companies or modders. Most of the modders that I’ve spoken with start off because this ‘one thing’ about a game they love annoys them so they learn to change it to make the game more enjoyable for them and offer that to other people who want that change. Sometimes that desire grows into making more or bigger changes for various reasons.
The benefit for the modders is a more enjoyable game experience and perhaps introduction/experience in a field they might not have considered otherwise. The benefit for companies is a broader play experience for a larger group of people without needing to retool fundamentals of the game and support of content whose quality they cannot directly control.
Putting into place a team whose job it is to evaluate mods on pure technical level drives resources away from other areas and the money a company makes off of mods might simply not pay those bills. I like the Undead Horse mod, but how much money am I willing spend on a minor change? Is that amount across the people who also like it enough to purchase it going to be enough to justify the time spent evaluating the mod, etc, etc. For a small mod like that, should Funcom get the same amount per dl vs comprehensive mods like AoC?
As it is, companies get to say ‘we support modding of our game, but when it comes to the actual mods, they aren’t ours and if they break your game, you need to talk to the modders’ nor do they have to take into account hundreds of mods when they make changes to the game, deal with mods whose creator is no longer supporting the mod, and a list of other factors that would all require money to properly administer.
Btw some modders do end up making money from modding though not directly. I’ve seen some studios hire some people who mod their game because those modders did such a great job and have a proven, visible track record.
need to on official servers tho … think we broke our pvp official server … been there since day one tho so had nothing else too do… 6 grid base … runs fine but no one attempts to raid it when they see the size of it