Letter to the Dev Team (Of Praise and Sub Mods)
I tend to scoff at the average “Letter to the Dev's” type posts since they often come across as blind ass kissing or as if the author is trying to threaten the team into changing something. I'm trying my hardest not to have this be one of those letters. This is also not a letter you could write on a napkin, so I apologize for its length.
It seems that King Kong and some of the developers might be regretting even allowing sub mods at all. I don't think anyone wants them to feel that way. This is the only way I felt I could attempt to explain the benefits of finding a proper balance and atmosphere that will leave the original creators happy, while still fostering new fun sub mods for everyone to enjoy.
TATW Dev Team,
I have previously said that most games that allow modding of their source material allow their users to do so unrestricted so long as it is not sold. King Kong made sure to remind me that TATW is actually a mod and not a commercial product. I would definitely agree that most mods for almost any games don't have sub mods of their own. Some of that's due to the creators not allowing it, much of it is due the actual source material being hard to edit, but most commonly I think it's because they aren't worth modding. Your mod most certainly is and I don't want anyone on the developer team to regret allowing sub mods to be made.
I believe, with the highest of praise, that TATW resembles a separate game more than a mod. The entire project is at such a professional level and the amount of content is more than I find in most expansion packs to commercial games. TATW embarrasses every other LoTR game made by companies with multimillion dollar budgets. It's to the point where I have a tremendous fear that the huge success and popularity of this mod will alert right's holders who will try to shut it down.
To better illustrate my point, I spent four hours just trying to find my MTW2 discs so I could install and play it. I know four friends who after showing them the mod bought either Kingdoms or both the original game and Kingdoms just so they could play TATW. After seeing the previews, the variety of factions they were already hooked. When I told them they even supported modding it sealed the deal. They essentially paid $15-30 to play a mod your team created! Your team should be immensely proud.
Previously I was trying to compare submods to your mod, like mods to a commercial game. When players see how easy it is to make mods and they also see that there is an actual officially supported place to do so, they may go overboard and assume they can edit whatever they want. To them it can seem the same as taking a texture from their favorite shooter game and replacing it, as is common practice with most commercial games. They aren't accustomed to operating on such intimate levels with the creators of their source material. Professional development teams are typically distant, mysterious entities they never interact with and the thought that an artist might actually be offended at their changes isn't something they think of. I do believe that over 99% of modders are not willfully trying to ignore the rules or intentional steal and harm your intellectual property.
I understand your situation. I'm also a mod/game developer and have been for years, so I have had some similar experiences. My current project is an open-source RTS and I am in the exact type of situation as you are. My mod is a total conversion that runs on an existing commercial game engine, just like TATW does. Just like mods for MTW2 there is no way I could hide the code even if I chose to do so due to the nature of the engine. However, just like you, I had the decision to actively support submods and their creation, or attempt to stop the almost unstoppable. I decided to allow and provide tools to foster submods.
At first, it was frustrating. The first sub mods I started to see were full reversals of gameplay decisions that were designed, debated, and tested over months. Some of the changes players were making were the exact things I vowed never to include in the mod because they would create the exact opposite type of gameplay that the mod was trying to achieve. I even had the same frequent calls for adding powerful hero type units that TATW gets despite the fact that there was little to no way to incorporate them without greatly changing the game and its balance.
Some of these decisions were simply the modder switching a single value in a text file. The fact that these "modders" were being hailed as heroes by a small, but significant number of players was extremely frustrating as they were essentially getting huge amounts of unwarranted credit. It is similar to how newbie modders that make a cheat script or a nudity patch will receive more praise and downloads for their ten minutes of work than full rebalance mods that may have taken hundreds of hours to create.
Next came a lot of terrible and stupid five minute mods and other pieces of crap that looked like they were designed by three year olds. Every request that I ever denied was resurrected as the living piles of crap I knew they would be (things as ridiculous as the basic infantry units of the game firing map destroying nuclear missiles).
After some time I started to see the bright side. If people wanted to play with the craziest, unbalanced units or settings I'd ever seen then I might as well just let them. Many of these players were simply so set in their preference for a certain type of game that they would have never played my game at all without mods. Even though they weren't fans of the type of gameplay I initially provided, they were able to love and enjoy playing versions with varying degrees of modification. I always wanted to make sure my product was enjoyed by as many people as possible and sub mods definitely increased my audience. Surprisingly, some of the worst mods actually indirectly found bugs and oversights that eventually helped improve the core game.
So if someone wants to make a mod that adds magic, or superheroes, or turns TATW into an arcade game, I think you should really be proud that despite their very differing preferences on what makes a game fun that they still enjoyed your mod enough to spend the time to mod it. Middle Earth mods are inevitably going to attract strategy newbies who just want to see balrogs fighting fell beasts. They might never be the type to play your strategy game as you intended it, but they can still enjoy your works with some modifications. Best of all, when you keep getting requests over and over for the same outlandish idea all you have to do is say “You don't like it? Use/make a sub mod.” It's a great way to reduce the overall number of repeat requests and still keep most of your target audience happy. It also really helps reinforce your design decisions when people see how gimmicky and unbalanced some of the communities ideas actually are in practice.
Given time, the quality mods in my community finally rose to the surface. Things I didn't want to do due to time constraints and other amazing ideas I never even thought of started appearing. I also realized that a lot of the people who were initially releasing terrible mods started to release quality stuff. Some of them were literally only learning how to mod because of features they specifically wanted to add to my game. Knowing that their small changes might actually still be used and enjoyed by others was all the encouragement they needed to continue to grow as modders. I'm sure there's people doing that for TATW, and it is a great honor that they are learning to mod because of you.
All of these experiences have happened to me just within a small community, around a few test servers. When I fully release and publicize my mod I know this is going to happen all over again, but on a larger scale. I still think I'm doing the right decision in supporting sub mods.
There's always going to be people complaining (often rudely), people suggesting game sweeping changes after one hour of play, and people who think their sense of balance is better than the 500+ hours of testing and observation a multi-man team did. It might simply be preference compared to them thinking your wrong (I even suggested to the RC team to put arrow damage closer to vanilla values, despite mostly only playing a single Gondor campaign because that was simply how my preferences on archery, not because I thought their system was game breakingly stupid). People are complaining because they care. If they go to the effort to stay around and try to help improve your game that says something. It says that out of the thousands of games they see and ignore that they think that your mod is worth the time to try and improve. They wouldn't even be here if they didn't like it. Just keep trying to please the majority of your target audience without severely compromising your vision, and let sub mods take care of the rest.
I really hope you try to look at the results of allowing sub mods in a better light. When I look at Stainless Steel and the massive player base it has and then I look at other major mods like BC, Stainless Steel is a towering behemoth in comparison. I know BC is a more specific mod and I know Stainless Steel has more content, but Stainless Steel still allows sub mods and that plays a huge role in why the community is so much larger. Because KK and others allowed sub mods, we're all going to be able to come back to Stainless Steel years from now and even the most experienced veteran will be able to find new content and mods to freshen up a game that might have lost its magic for them. I want to come back to TATW in a few years to find even more content and additions I might not have thought were even possible.
So please keep allowing and monitoring the submods. Overall, they are a great positive resource for you. Just having them allowed let's people know that you are receptive to the community and you don't actively walk around thinking you are infallible gods. At the very least, sub mods let people quickly patch bugs between versions so you don't need to feel pressured to rush out hotfixes which can potentially cause more confusion and/or problems. At the most, you might find amazing gems to incorporate into official releases and new content to breathe new life when the mod grows old.
Remember that the vast majority of players play because we enjoy your work. We are thankful and interested in what you have to say. Many of us (like myself) aren't just interested in what else you can make for us. I'm very interested in how TATW's development went and how you dealt with various issues. If any team members ever get the time or will I would be delighted if you would answer some interview style questions for me to post here and elsewhere, or if the team would be interested in doing a podcast. I'd be happy to transcribe a podcast for the forums if you chose to do one.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=257397
Best regards with future versions and endeavors,
Lap
(To remind you of the magnitude of my thanks I'd like to let you know I've spent a few hours formulating this instead of sleeping or preparing for a massive medical biochemistry evaluation I have in six hours.)
Reply With Quote
Re: Letter to the Dev Team (Of Praise and Sub Mods)
Originally Posted by Lap
) and it was a well thought out and consice piece, particularly in light of some of the tensions around here lately.
Seriously though there's no way to tell quality by post count. I've lurked TWC for a long time, but only felt the need to register when TATW was released and I think the consensus here is that this thread isn't total nonsense. Rep is a little better, but the actual post content should be what you're using to judge.
