JeremyZ

(I'll understand if this thread is locked, I wanted to give my thoughts and hopefully generate some polite discussion) When a big gaming company intentionally makes a game difficult to mod, The community rightfully complains. Sometimes the community creates their own modding tools, ignoring the company's desire for people not to mess with their game, because, hey, it's our game. When Microsoft released Halo 2 on the PC only for Windows Vista, so that people would have to buy the new operating system in order to play, the community created a Windows XP patch all on their own, and there was nothing Microsoft could hope to do stop people from using it. When Redpower was released for 1.4.6, it was pretty much the only mod. The dozens of others people were hoping to play with weren't ready, and somebody released a custom patch bringing Redpower 2 back to 1.4.5. Any links to it on various mod forums were almost instantly removed, as only Elorram was allowed to distribute it. Obviously the two are different, Elorram's not a selfish money grubbing bastard like Microsoft for one, she was even planning to do a 1.4.5 release if there was enough demand. She seems like a great person who was dedicated dozens of hours of her free time to create something for us, don't think I'm trying to rag on her. But still, my big question is: In one scenario, people are just fine with taking and modifying something to benefit the community. In the MC modding community, a decent number of developers adamantly refuse to allow their work to be modified in anyway, or give it only to a very select few. Optifine, Mo'creatures, Balkon's Weapons Mod, are all examples of mods that are almost never allowed to be distributed. Since, for one reason or another, a very large percentage of the people who play Minecraft are more casual gamers that don't know how to install separate mods on their own, it means the overall quality of modpacks suffer. I don't understand why so many mod developers absolutely refuse to allow their work to be modified, after Minecraft has gone out of it's way to allow them to modify and distribute their work in the first place. I'm not trying to start a flame war, I just really, really don't get it.

Wouldn't using the lite pack imply you have a weaker computer that can't handle the full set, meaning a greater need for optifine?