I'd like to discuss something I call "mod lifetime". I define it as the period of time a large number of TW players are actively interested in the mod: posting, downloading and playing a mod. This lifetime is forcebly tied with releases by CA, which are, on average, roughly about a year apart. Since a complete mod takes, at best, 1/2 to a year to develop, this gives a mod a maximum of about half a year of call it "unfettered" lifetime. For Rusichi TW, this unfettered lifetime is actually negative since we released it a couple days after Empire TW. This alows us to experiment with call it "absolute" lifetime, or popularity. From the release date (11 March) about 1000+ people have so far downloaded the mod from our two servers, one in Moscow and the other in the Netherlands (about 670 Gb of traffic). Interestingly, the traffic and downloads are divided about half/half between the english and the russian version. A big thank you to all the people here who have downloaded the mod!
Right now, the daily traffic has started to fall at a rate that would lead to 0 traffic in about two weeks. Could this mean that the "absolute" lifetime of is a little over a month @ several thousand users for a non-updated mod?
The point I want to raise, and with your help analyze, is the following: a complete modification takes, in practice, over a year to complete. This is a problem in that modders aren't able to follow the rythm CA sets. Even taking a best-case scenario, where you spend half a year and the second game, or more accurately addon, (aka Kingdoms) isn't all that different, you don't have very much unfettered lifetime, time without "competition" from CA. For example right now, MTW II modding is the best it's ever been. Architecture is finally unlocked, most things are known, tools exist, a lot of interesting scripts are written etc. etc. But! Since Empire TW is allready out, how much sense does it make to spend the effort modding MTW2? Just remaking the architecture for one culture/faction would take at least a couple of months for a dedicated team, by which time we should start seeing the first Empire mods. Would there be a point, if by that time even the mod creators spend more time playing Empire than previous versions? Should CA release the source code for RTW tommorow, how many people would actually care? Personally, I'd be super interested, but only from the point of view of programming, not modding.
Do you think that this is in fact a problem? And how can we deal with it, if it is?