Minecraft modding community - something I don't understand

[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.

[thebird]

I think I understand why mod developers don't want people to modify their mods but I don't understand why some of them have a problem with their mod being distributed in modpacks.

I know that I wouldn't like it if I made a mod and someone used my work in their own mod.

I don't understand why some people are so against modpacks or hung up on needing permissions to distribute the mod in a pack. Before I found out about the Technic pack, my friends and I only played with Industrial Craft. For some reason, I was the only one that could install mods without messing something up every time.

For some strange reason that I never discovered, I could not install the mods on my copy of Minecraft and then just send the files to my friends (we all own copies, this was just to save them the installation steps). When I tried this, they would crash with various errors.

This meant that I had to repeat the installation procedure with each person, some were located out of state so I had to walk them through it. Since it was such a hassle to play with mods, we only played with Industrial Craft or Buildcraft. I didn't even bother looking for new mods since I would have to install each mod about 6 times.

Then I found out about the Technic pack. It was wonderful, someone had done all of the work for me! All I had to do was make sure everyone downloaded the installer (this was before the launcher) and ran it with the same boxes selected.

Suddenly it was stupid easy to play modded Minecraft with my friends. Without the Technic pack, I would never have played with mods like: EE2, Balkon's Weapon mod, or Redpower 2. I would have tired of this game long ago and stopped playing.

So, yes you can just install the mods yourself and it is fairly easy to do so, but I don't see why some mod developers think that you should do it this way. It is enough of an inconvenience for me personally that I would rather stop playing Minecraft than install the mods myself.

[Gamabunta00]

Well for the Microsoft vs Elorram example, i would have to say its the whole idea of Microsoft being a "big bully" company that makes people feel it is justified to do such things, whereas Elorram is just a developer who is doing this of there own free will, and that makes it right to protect them (though i the case of FlowerChild the community kinda screwed him over, so of course as many of us would, he screwed them over lol)

As for the diffrence in wanting a mod to be a part of a modpack, i think its a 2 pronged problem.

1. The mod developer (while credited in some way) isnt the one that get praise for the modpack, the modpack dev's do. Now you have to think, who is the one that put the work in to make theese things that make the modpack possible, of course with the convenience of a modpack with an installer such as tekkit, its easy to just assume they did all the work. When to be completely honest, they just created a launcher, not even from scratch (not to discredit them) its a fork of spout, who also probably get little credit as well. The technic pack team may try to credit them, but there is only so much you can do to make a obviously lazy person do anything.

2. The 2nd part is more negative. Modpacks are inherently buggy, there are 3 diffrent types of people who cause the issues and can solve them. Stupid/oblivious Users, Modpack Developers, and Mod Developers. Generally speaking Mod Developers tend to take flack from people who run into any of theese issues. Now how is Mod Developer A supposed to make sure his stuff is compatible with Mod Developer, B, C, and D, if Modpack Developer, E is changing things to make them compatible. The answer is they cant, and trying to leads to real problems with the mod being sunk under hundreds of clashing block id's "bugs". People tend to say, "Hey, i placed a buildcraft enginge in tekkit and it crashed, it didnt crash before, so it must be buildcrafts fault." Now this is an understandable assumption, it is justified within reason and probably within most users understanding of modding minecraft. So now the bug is being reported to the wrong person, the mod developer is trying to fix a bug that isnt there problem, and the user is generally oblivous to all of this as they just dont know any better. Its no-ones fault in particular, its just a simple misunderstanding. But it led to all of that trouble for the mod developer, who will eventually figure out its not there bug and report it to the modpack team in place of the user, while recieving spam on there thread like, "WHY UR MOD NO WORK!!!"

Thats the way i see theese issue's. The other part is that some mod developers have a vision of how they want minecraft to be played with there mod( Better Than Wolves by FlowerChild for example). Better Than wolves is a very VERY well thought out mod, the point of it is to slowly extend vanilla minecraft play and provide Endgame rewards, whereas redpower, buildcraft, and industrial craft, all tend to push you in an all out sprint to the finish line using automation as the way to get to the endgame vs the endgame being where automation begins. Also they may just want proper credit for there work and they may want to keep it distributed by them because they want credit where credit is due.

The big difference between the xp patch and the 1.4.5 update, and why some Minecraft Mod authors dont want their work distributed is that its not an injustice to force people to take some time and install a mod for free, especially when they are kind enough to make it for free and only want proper accreditation, whereas it is to make people but a 100$ operating system to play a 60$ Game that they already own.

[Xylord]

I know this is a very extreme over-simplification, but honestly, look at modding communities like Oblivion's, Skyrim's, Mount and Blade's, Civilization's. Just people sharing mods, and people playing mods. Nothing more, nothing less. Why is the MC community a special case? The biggest problem is that we have here a thing called the cult of personality, which is absent from the examples I cited above. Now, I'm all for giving the option to donate, and congratulating modders on making great mods, but here, it kind of degenerated. Just look at all those god-forsaken ad.fly links, at all the X vs Y flamewars, at the made up copyrights, at the fanbois and at the haters. An example of this terrible mix taken to the extreme? King Dong XIV. He literally has an army of ass-kissers on one side, who agree with him on every word he spits, and on the other side, haters that find every of his actions despicable and evil. This is probably the most representative example of the problem with MC's community. Whilst every other modding community is 95% modding, 5% thanking the modders for making them, MC is 90% drama, 9% ad.fly links, 0,9% being thankful toward the mod authors.

There is something wrong here.

[warpspeed10]

Whilst every other modding community is 95% modding, 5% thanking the modders for making them, MC is 90% drama, 9% ad.fly links, 0,9% being thankful toward the mod authors.

There is something wrong here.

I'm just going to assume that last 0.1% is for looking at cute pictures of kittens and puppies. You're right. That percentage should be way WAY higher. There is something very wrong here indeed.

[Mooseman9]

I'm just going to assume that last 0.1% is for looking at cute pictures of kittens and puppies. You're right. That percentage should be way WAY higher. There is something very wrong here indeed.

Actually, through some hocus-pocus I was taught in math class, 0.9 = 1.

[racingpro]

Actually, through some hocus-pocus I was taught in math class, 0.9 = 1.

Lets not go there...

There was also a time when it was difficult to get even a half dozen different mods working together. All the devs worked pretty much independently of each other, and if you wanted to make two different mods work together, good luck. Modloader was a way of helping this, but even then installing more than a handful of mods led to errors and bugs and crashes. Forge came in to help that so much to the point where you can literally get 100+ mods working together with only a few issues. But some modders didn't want to rewrite their code to be forge compatible (King Dong XIV (nice name)), and most want(ed) credit. mostly in the form of adf.ly pennies. Not even pennies, or any other currency. Fractions of money. It all is a little absurd, but at the same time, kind of understandable (Not King Dong XIV though. Get over yourself). But it is out of hand, but will never change.

[Just Another Minecraftian]

(replying to comment 2) To contradict what you said, if you made a mod and someone wanted to put it in a mod pack, they would give you credit for making the mod, the only credit that the mod pack maker would get would be adding it to that mod pack.

[theprolo]

(replying to comment 2) To contradict what you said, if you made a mod and someone wanted to put it in a mod pack, they would give you credit for making the mod, the only credit that the mod pack maker would get would be adding it to that mod pack.

It seems that way when you look at it, but you would be amazed at the amount of people who come here expecting the Technic team to be the ones who make the mods, and begging for features to be added to mods which the Technic team has no control over. It's true that, without downloading the mods themselves, there are many people who don't realise that the modpacks aren't actually just one mod made by the modpack team.

Perhaps the main reason Minecraft's modding community is so different is because people are allowed to mod by Mojang. Instead of the "We're all in this together, let's work together" kind of attitude, because they're all doing the same thing, with Minecraft, which is so easy to mod and to learn to mod, you have people being more protective, because there are so many kids playing Minecraft and learning to mod, which means more people can be ripping off work, stealing mod ideas and, I guess, it just creates an atmosphere of mistrust. Instead of working together, the mod makers seem to fear that their work will be stolen, and this extends to modpacks sometimes. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons, but that does seem to me to be a factor in it. If it wasn't, wouldn't all the mods be open source?

[freakachu]

I hadn't heard that there was a 1.4.5 RP2 patch that got released, that's pretty cool. personally, I don't see the difference. if there's enough demand for something, it's going to happen regardless of anything else. there are tons of examples of this. technic itself is an example of this, forge is an example, BWF is an example.

anytime you have something really cool, and the creator puts arbitrary and restrictive limits on it those limits will be broken provided the thing is cool enough and the limits are restrictive enough. I honestly have no idea why eloraam thought it was a good idea to release only for 1.4.6 when she had a 1.4.5 version as well. no one wants to play JUST RP2, and people had been chomping at the bit to get their hands on an updated red power. knowing that, she released for a version of MC that pretty much no one else had updated to yet and withheld the version that people were actually looking for. I don't really think anyone should be surprised by what happened.

if you don't give people what they want, and it was clear that they wanted it in this case, someone else will. welcome to the internet and real life.

as for why authors don't like their mods getting modded, it is a little ironic isn't it? usually it's because when you make something like that, it's your baby. you don't want anyone screwing it up because it's yours and surely they don't understand its beauty like you do. it boils down to a trust and pride issue, IMO. it also depends on what is being modded. if someone makes an extension that builds on another mod, that is usually less of an issue than something that takes mod a and changes half the things in it to basically make mod b. it's rather nebulous and depends a lot on the personality and outlook of the modder. there's not much of a definitive answer.

[HalibutBarn]

I know this is a very extreme over-simplification, but honestly, look at modding communities like Oblivion's, Skyrim's, Mount and Blade's, Civilization's. Just people sharing mods, and people playing mods. Nothing more, nothing less. Why is the MC community a special case?

You might be surprised. A member from another forum I read put together his own collection of Oblivion mods, and the modding community there flipped out over permissions and demanded he stop until he'd cleared permissions for every single item in his pack.

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

[Xylord]

You might be surprised. A member from another forum I read put together his own collection of Oblivion mods, and the modding community there flipped out over permissions and demanded he stop until he'd cleared permissions for every single item in his pack.

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Oh I stand corrected then. But it does seem like it's given more importance here than in other games, at least when I take my main points of reference, Civ V and Skyrim.

This thread is an extremely interesting read, I find it hilarious that their arguments for protecting this modpack are the exact same ones we use to protect Technic.

[warpspeed10]

I'd love to see the legal filing for that. How dare you freely distribute a freely-distributable modification to a commercial product that allows free distribution of modifications?!

This is my favorite quote from that thread.

[Xylord]

This is my favorite quote from that thread.

People from 2008 thought just like us.