My Support of developers - Read before you judge
- Thread starter GreatOrator
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Was quite impressed with that post. Somehow, they managed to get one comma in there and a fullstop, but neglected any further sentence forming. Those 3 lines were painful to read...
Anyone got any paracetamol along with those snacks and drinks? Got bit of an headache.
Anyone got any paracetamol along with those snacks and drinks? Got bit of an headache.
Damn. A topic I take interest in but nobody wants to discuss... *munches on popcorn*
Modders, in my opinion, have a right to put in any arbitrary restrictions on their mod they want. Don't like the restrictions? Don't play the mod. It's not like you need it to survive and many more mods have alternatives now than in 1.4.7.
The revenue streams are in a huge gray area, and "seeing people wanting it" happens via other means too: OpenEye, IRC, forums, download analytics (from which I found out someone's adf.lying my mods, not good)... or even Googling. I do, in fact, google my mods once in a while to see where they end up.
You have to make bad packs before you make good packs. Learning is a process and adding complex permissions on top of mods hinders that process, as people want to play and not bother with our internal modder politics.
Besides, you're not obligated to be the one to help your users. In the case of my mods, many other people have submitted patches and even took up development of them in many areas; more support has been offered in #oc by random programmers for Computronics than in my own, official channel.
I have no problem with requesting permission from developers either, but sometimes I find it easier to just pick a different mod and help its developer. That's why I like open-source mods so much: if I find a bug, I don't need to put extra burden on the mod developer; I can just go and fix it while he works on exciting new features.
Now that is true. While I don't believe in complex permission restrictions as a good way of stopping it, I do believe that too many people in the community feel entitled to be getting work for what is essentially free. But we're not the only ones to have that problem and we need to stop acting like it: piracy is a widespread issue which few people have been able to solve for themselves.
Thank you for your insight asie! I can only comment from a non coder mindset, so nice to have another modder throw in their outlook on this topic. (Great mods you have by the way, two of them I am planning on implementing in my own WIP modpack for 1.7.10)
I only have one mod of my own, and that is Computronics (though I am working on a next generation wireless redstone/data transmission mod), the rest (Chisel, Statues, Immibis' Peripherals, ...) are ports with little fixes - please do not misattribute them, it slightly bothers me.
If you want to discuss it more, meet me on my IRC channel! I am making a WIP modpack for 1.7.10 as well and would love to discuss that too.
I'll succinctly state my view : "Don't look a gift-horse in the mouth."
In other words, I almost always come down on the side of the mod-makers. In almost every situation, they don't *owe* anyone squat.
In other words, I almost always come down on the side of the mod-makers. In almost every situation, they don't *owe* anyone squat.
I will do that when I get home. And apologize for the attribution mistake, will correct that when I get home as well. Look for me in IRC this evening!
I was gonna walk in and talk about how much i hate permissions, yet think they have their place in a sense.
Then i decided "I can't be bothered and I'd rather watch the fireworks"
*grabs some popcorn out of a bag*
Anyone care to join me?
Then i decided "I can't be bothered and I'd rather watch the fireworks"
*grabs some popcorn out of a bag*
Anyone care to join me?
Hating the idea of permissions is a different thing from hating the specific licensing of specific mods, or specific ways of licensing. Is that what you mean?
It's very fun, I like to do that too
It's fun to see how many sites rip-off my mod with their ad-covered sites. I'm on mod-minecraft, 5minecraft, and a few other sites.
It's also interesting to see what other mods people use with our mods.
Spotlights are interesting as well. A popular spanish youtuber spotlighted me, this cool dude spotlighted me, a guy in quite a rush, and there's my low-quality spotlight.
Modpacks too. I got put into an interesting modpacks, the 1.7 version of UTOPIA 3.
And this is all from the shitty mod I made in a day for modjam. Once I put out a real mod, I wanna see what happens then :3
Here's my succinct two cents: less drama more minecraft \o\
Sent from my angry toaster to distract him from destroying the planet. Some appliances just want to watch the world burn.
Sent from my angry toaster to distract him from destroying the planet. Some appliances just want to watch the world burn.
I want to say, that while there has been little discussion compared to posts, I want to thank everyone for keeping it civil, much appreciated. Even more so to have modders weigh in as well.
I used to play Doom. You could "mod" Doom with wad files from the community. That was it.
I used to play GTA. You could add new cars or guns with add on mod content from the community. It was cool.
I like that system. No request system. No drama. Here's something I made, I hope you like it. That's it.
The perm system is stupid to me for these reasons:
1. If you make a mod for a game, don't you want people to play it? Why be selective? Mojang isn't selective about who plays Minecraft other than only supporting people who paid for it. Is money the elephant in the room that motivates perms?
2. You don't have to give user support. Period. If someone can't fill out a crash report in a manner you deem logical, then ignore it. The logic of only wanting to offer support based on credible mod packs falls away completely with someone like me who plays in SSP. I don't need perms for that. Plus if I'm playing with a pack, I've changed it sufficiently to not really be like the original. Yes there's baseline interactions but that's flawed logic. I didn't need your perms to play by myself.
I play by the perms rules just to be polite. But perms don't really affect me anyway. If it really is art or a hobby, then you should want people to be exposed to it. If there's an ulterior motive like money, then the restrictions make sense. I don't care either way. I'm not arguing for change. I am stating merely that perms are stupid and hiding beta access behind pay walls is shady. I like mods and modders. Do what you want but I don't have to like it.
That's all I have to say.
I used to play GTA. You could add new cars or guns with add on mod content from the community. It was cool.
I like that system. No request system. No drama. Here's something I made, I hope you like it. That's it.
The perm system is stupid to me for these reasons:
1. If you make a mod for a game, don't you want people to play it? Why be selective? Mojang isn't selective about who plays Minecraft other than only supporting people who paid for it. Is money the elephant in the room that motivates perms?
2. You don't have to give user support. Period. If someone can't fill out a crash report in a manner you deem logical, then ignore it. The logic of only wanting to offer support based on credible mod packs falls away completely with someone like me who plays in SSP. I don't need perms for that. Plus if I'm playing with a pack, I've changed it sufficiently to not really be like the original. Yes there's baseline interactions but that's flawed logic. I didn't need your perms to play by myself.
I play by the perms rules just to be polite. But perms don't really affect me anyway. If it really is art or a hobby, then you should want people to be exposed to it. If there's an ulterior motive like money, then the restrictions make sense. I don't care either way. I'm not arguing for change. I am stating merely that perms are stupid and hiding beta access behind pay walls is shady. I like mods and modders. Do what you want but I don't have to like it.
That's all I have to say.
My additional cent: We need to remember what is drama and what is legitimate discussion/debate. Sometimes, we forget.
Sometimes it's money (adf.ly, for instance). Other times, it's a desire to know where your mod is ending up, possibly for giving feedback (despite not having a real permission system, I often give feedback to packs I find out my mods ended up in) or just for boosting your self-value (which is important!). At other times, like RailCraft, it's a desire to make sure modpacks and servers only use stable versions of the mod as to reduce the number of broken things.
Hiding beta access behind pay walls is perfectly fine in my view. It's a great source of money and some people would like to (or do!) mod full-time as what is essentially a job thanks to Patreon and other donation sources.
One reason for perms is that you don't want a horde of less skilled users complaining about "it crash, fix it pl0x" when it wasn't your mod but the modpack they were using. Modpacks give easier access to mods, enabling less tech savvy users to use them, but that also can lead to a wall of posts all clamouring for fixes with little detail and excessive caps. Modpack developers need to be very careful to have users report bugs to them first before reporting them to the devs. Requiring modpack devs to ask for permission at least limits the number of packs and sets some kind of a quality bar. Better packs are more likely to handle bugs more efficiently and catch most of the stuff you don't need to see. Randompack999 may just be a bunch of mods thrown together with little balancing/tweaking and is likely to result in many "bugs" that are modpack issues.
Another reason is that you worked hard on your mod and don't want someone to just take your code, tweak it a bit, and claim it as theirs. You worked hard, you want some credit for it. You are proud of your code so you want to protect it to some degree. If you worked hard on a painting, you would be unhappy if someone took pictures of it, posted it online as their own, and charged $10 for reprints.
There is such a thing as too many restrictions, but that's the mod author's problem. If they want to limit their audience that is their business, but to be honest I don't think that happens very often.
However, all of this really only affects mod distribution. Regardless of what the mod author says, they really can't stop me from 1) putting the mod in a private pack, 2) decompiling the mod for educational purposes, or 3) decompiling, changing the code, and recompiling it for my own use. Once the mod is on my computer, I can do pretty much as I wish so long as it stays on my computer. Once we are talking about posting it on the web, the restrictions come back into play.
Another reason is that you worked hard on your mod and don't want someone to just take your code, tweak it a bit, and claim it as theirs. You worked hard, you want some credit for it. You are proud of your code so you want to protect it to some degree. If you worked hard on a painting, you would be unhappy if someone took pictures of it, posted it online as their own, and charged $10 for reprints.
There is such a thing as too many restrictions, but that's the mod author's problem. If they want to limit their audience that is their business, but to be honest I don't think that happens very often.
However, all of this really only affects mod distribution. Regardless of what the mod author says, they really can't stop me from 1) putting the mod in a private pack, 2) decompiling the mod for educational purposes, or 3) decompiling, changing the code, and recompiling it for my own use. Once the mod is on my computer, I can do pretty much as I wish so long as it stays on my computer. Once we are talking about posting it on the web, the restrictions come back into play.
Repeating myself, "You have to make bad packs before you make good packs." Also, no-names cannot really prove they make good packs as easily as, I don't know, FTB or Technic developers.
That's what code licenses are for, my friend. You put a license on it and, if someone steals it, you have the legal right to fire a DMCA takedown request at them; if they fail to comply, you forward it to their server host (which you can easily find with a few minutes of whoises and googling). This has actually happened.
RailCraft and MystCraft come to mind, though there used to be many more examples of it back in the 1.2.5/1.4.7 days.
Of course, but some people would rather prefer you not do some of these.
I agree, but it's sometimes just easier to restrict distribution than to try and go full License ninja on them.
Well, let me define restrictive permissions (at least in the context of my original post).
The mod developer doesn't usually turn down many requests for permissions, however in his process he asks that whoever is requesting perms to be creative and have fun with the request and prove they are doing something unique either with the combination of mods or the theme of the pack which leans more heavily on trying not to have 1000 packs all the same (which honestly I feel helps the community at large) and to have a little fun along the way with some of the more creative posts.
There are more restrictive mods perms for sure, but those are not necessarily the ones I am discussing (and don't wish to).
I do want to thank everyone again for keeping it civil, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to have happen.
The mod developer doesn't usually turn down many requests for permissions, however in his process he asks that whoever is requesting perms to be creative and have fun with the request and prove they are doing something unique either with the combination of mods or the theme of the pack which leans more heavily on trying not to have 1000 packs all the same (which honestly I feel helps the community at large) and to have a little fun along the way with some of the more creative posts.
There are more restrictive mods perms for sure, but those are not necessarily the ones I am discussing (and don't wish to).
I do want to thank everyone again for keeping it civil, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to have happen.