Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

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> Most of the modders only give you the right to download the mod from the Nexus site using an account and a browser so they the modders get a bump to their downloads counter and hopefully an endorsements.

Why is that so bad? Modders are just using Nexus as a way to host their mods and facilitate the community discussion. Some mods are huge after all, Nexus provides the hosting for the downloads, and software to manage them.

> The effect is that a lot of people wasted their time modding their game

Without a community site at the centre this process would be immeasurably harder. It's an inherently hard problem to manage hundreds of modders making independent mods and getting them all to work together. I'm not sure what the alternative is.

There are certainly reasons to not like Nexus, but I think you'd find modding somewhat requires a site like Nexus. You have to make both the consumer and the creator's experience easy enough that people will be bothered to do it. If I had to sift through 40 different personal blogs to download .zips of mods and load them, I just wouldn't bother.

I have nothing against Nexus, my pont was "you can only download this mod from this url" , this means if Nexus goes down it will be illegal for some kind soul to publish the mod on a different website.

Other problems are when a mod has a bug, you will very often see in comments things like

"I can share a fixed mod, the author is gone and I don't have the permissions, so JUST open the mod in this tool, and do this exact 12 steps" then the entire community has to do this process because you can't put a fixed version up.

So I would prefer it to be a collaborative community and less of a store where you pay with your download and endorsement.

Fair enough, it's a really muddy situation but I do see what you're trying to achieve. What makes it muddy is that some mods are just tweaks to the game, have no new IP or novel assets. While some mods are jam packed with newly developed and designed assets all of which surely deserve some level of protection if that's what the author wants. I think another reason why Nexus is so tightly controlled as a community is to avoid duplication, confusion and diverging mods.

I guess this is a community problem more than a technology one, so I don't really have any solutions to offer except to try and encourage modders to be more free with their releases. On the same token, maybe there should be more clear ways for the community to have collaborative control over mods and patches.

I understand what you mean, some original creation needs protection if the author wants it, but this is not like a movie, the modders can demand money so the only protection they should get is crediting them for their work, why copy-right should protect stuff like "only download this file(that is not 100% original since is a derivative from Sky rim proprietary stuff) from this website" , or "do not make it easy for users to install my mod by making a mod pack" or "don't touch my mod , not fixes allowed, even if I am gone".

There are cases with mods that are broken now because of updates and because the author is not around to give their permissions the community can't put a fixed version up, they need to use convoluted steps to patch the original mod.

Would be great if modders would be inspired by programming open source/free software communities where at this moment you are allowed to fork and fix things, package/build for new platforms, mirror things on different websites.

The problem is this stuff is all done by kids. So you get teenage level maturity.

Bethesda could fix this for the new game by putting in the license of the Creation Kit and tools the clause that your creation can't have restrictions, anyone can remix it if they provide credits and respect the Bethesda ToS.

That would be super cool. ++

The simplest reason that Nexus is 'bad' is that it throttles free user downloads, so you may spend hours downloading a large mod at 2MB/s. There's nothing wrong with a site like Nexus, but Nexus specifically is very annoying to use.

And to add before someone will say that we should not expect free stuff, it will not be legal to mirror most of the mods because the modders don't allow it (Even with disclaimer, even if they abandoned it, even if Nexus is down or evil)

Why are you trying to do something that the modder doesn't want?

This is a mod, a modification using Bethesda tools and assets, the purpose of those tools is not for someone to make money or increase a star counter on a specific website, putting restrictions on mods is IMO against the modding tools and ecosystems implied terms, IMO Bethesda need to update their ToS for next game to ensure sharing and remixing with credits is allowed. It would filter out some modders but would improve things for the players and the rest of the modders(less drama, less wasted time, no more attacking creators in real life because you think they used your asset/code)

Under this same logic, some of these mods wouldn’t exist. Games that have mod support usually only go so far. This goes a bit beyond that. Nexus as a site, a collection of mods that can be searched, is great. Nexus as a service, throttled downloads, timed ad pages forcing you to see an ad for revenue, sucks, but is necessary for them to keep it going.

The argument that a mod can only be downloaded from Nexus is a courtesy and not anything the mod authors can enforce. Likewise, you can just download the zip from GitHub and build. There’s no real control the authors can do to make sure their mod is downloaded from nexus. Hosting it anywhere else may be against the mod authors wishes but it won’t stop people from hosting the installer/archive.

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