After the last post and some of the comments that came along to it, you might have a preconceived notion about this post, from the title.
Well, it isn't one of those; so those of you not blessed with an affinity for toilet humor can breathe easy. (HA! Get it? Toilet? Breathe easy? OH, THE WIT!)
I was on the Nexus earlier this hellish summer's eve (must not make feminine hygiene joke...) answering one of those questions that make me wonder; and I happened to notice that NCCS has picked up thumbs-down numero dos. So, we now have one: The user couldn't get the file to work and one The file didn't do what the description implied; and neither with stones enough to leave a comment with their rate-down.
Now, here's where I'd normally hurl a bit of invective in a slightly passive-aggressive manner, but I'm not going to. In fact, I'm probably going to stop bitching about morons around here altogether. It serves no purpose except to bring down drama on the blog; for it seems stupid people don't like being called stupid. Who knew? Besides, I don't really care anymore.
What I am, is curious. What is it that people expect from mods? What do they want?
How good does it have to be, for you to take thirty seconds out of your day of cruising AZN PR0N and trolling forums to rate a mod up?
How much do you have to hate it to take those same thirty seconds to rate it down?
This is becoming a philosophical quandary to me. Why does one type of mod, one type of modder attract a crowd of sycophants; while another attracts a field of crickets with the occasional furious special olympian among them?
Is it the quality of the work -- or lack thereof? Is it the subject matter? The willingness of the author to "get out there" and whore their product in every forum on Earth that's even vaguely related?
This I must think on for awhile. The common threads are seldom seen, and I refuse to believe that it all comes down to simple random actions and whims.
I'd expect that a lot of it is due to the type of mod.
ReplyDeletee.g. a texture mod is (should be!) easy to install, has immediately visible effect, is useful to pretty much everyone and you can decide if it's good or not quickly.
OTOH, something like NCCS is only going to be looked at by people developing companions, so you start a much smaller audience who require much more time and work to see if they like it or not.
Even worse, it's one of those things that only draws attention to itself when things go wrong. When it's working, you don't notice it.
And, most importantly, people are lazy procrastinators.
I wouldn't lose heart though, though the audience might be small, I expect they appreciate your work, if only to think "Thank Nos I don't have to write that stuff myself" ;)
I'm one of those folks that's thankful that Nos writes this stuff so I don't have to, yet I've come to understand enough about Gamebryo scrpting to also appreciate the hard work that he continually puts into it. Plus I fell in love with the ability to easily create my own companion characters the first time I ran Oblivion with CM Partners and some of Divine Avenger's peeps, so I'm also thankful that he's opted to make his Fallout companion systems feel very similar.
ReplyDeleteAs for downloaders of the mod who claim it doesn't do what the description implied, I too am totally perplexed. Perhaps they were expecting carbon-copied rip-offs of the vanilla companions? I really just don't know, but I'm beginning to think that these folks are somehow filtering in from the DoomWorld community...
"Thank Nos I don't have to write that stuff myself" ;)
ReplyDeleteWhat you did, I saw it; and referring to me like unto a deity will not help you...
...Okay, it probably will...
Don't worry though, I'm not losing heart. You can't lose what you don't have. Lost that... couple months ago, now, I suppose it was.
I'm just trying to figure this out. Doesn't make much sense to me.