Once and for all, can we get the released mods in a top level forum?????

[bryce777]

There must be 10 stupid threads started every day about some mod in the 'general' mod development board.

The cartographer's guild (which should have a mode obvious name) should be at the very top of the modding area!

The forums organization has gone from bad to worse since the reorganization.

For most people, there is no real reason to poke around the in development section except curiosity, and little they can contribute except "OMG! OMG!", so why push all the traffic into such an inappropriate place?

 

[morgoth2005]

I agree. Since any mod moved into the Cartographers, they've been having absolutely minimal traffic. While noobs who don't see anything spam the Pioneers.

 

[Highlander]

Yeb, there is no point for the Pioneers forum to be the first board.

 

[Highelfwarrior]

Since it's being brought up - I've always liked the mod forum better, before the reorganization.

I say change the mod forum back to the way it was; all the mod threads in one forum and on top the subforums. Give it some stricter regulations, extra threads about mods and stuff get deleted - just post in the mod's actuall thread to avoid a crowded place full of "noob" threads.

That would solve all the traffic problems and the screwup with childboards everywhere.

 

[bryce777]

Since it's being brought up - I've always liked the mod forum better, before the reorganization.

I say change the mod forum back to the way it was; all the mod threads in one forum and on top the subforums. Give it some stricter regulations, extra threads about mods and stuff get deleted - just post in the mod's actuall thread to avoid a crowded place full of "noob" threads.

That would solve all the traffic problems and the screwup with childboards everywhere.

When it was all one big mishmash it sucked, too - though adminittedly not as badly as it does now. 

But I agree completely about the child forums being way too hard to see. If we keep everything else the same and move the "cartographer's guild" above the "Pioneer's guild" and renamed the first to "Released mods" and the second to "Unreleased mods", then it will all start to make some sense.

As it stands now it's not serving ANYONE well. Not the people looking for mods, not the people with released mods, and not the people with announced mods.

 

[Archonsod]

The Cartographer's Guild
Released and downloadable mods

Anyone too lazy to bother reading the actual forum title doesn't deserve mods in my opinion

Furthermore, I see only one post in the board actually asking where to find mods (barring those in the AG, but that's what it's there for). The rest are actually asking for directions to decent mods, which would indicate to me that the poster knows where to find the mods, they just want to know which one's are worth playing.

As for traffic, the mod ideas section has always been the busiest. One of the reasons we split the board up was so that users could find the released mods - before the reorganisation they tended to drop to page four or so within 24 hours.

 

[bryce777]

The Cartographer's Guild
Released and downloadable mods

Anyone too lazy to bother reading the actual forum title doesn't deserve mods in my opinion

Furthermore, I see only one post in the board actually asking where to find mods (barring those in the AG, but that's what it's there for). The rest are actually asking for directions to decent mods, which would indicate to me that the poster knows where to find the mods, they just want to know which one's are worth playing.

As for traffic, the mod ideas section has always been the busiest. One of the reasons we split the board up was so that users could find the released mods - before the reorganisation they tended to drop to page four or so within 24 hours.

I think people mostly find mods either by mountandblade.com or else because they've downloaded them in the past.

People may not be asking for mods, but they constantly ask questions about released mods...which they would not do if there were others around.

As for ideas always being the busiest, I disagree. Before it was all one bit mishmash, but the threads (or subforums) of the released mods got a bunch of traffic. Now the ENTIRE cartographer's guild and all its subforums seem to get about as much traffic as the TLDs forum used to get.

You can say 'tough luck', but you have to realize most people who come to a forum look around very quickly and if nothing grabs their eye they move on.

We should also split it up to released for current version, and released for legacy version....

 

[Archonsod]

I think people mostly find mods either by mountandblade.com or else because they've downloaded them in the past.

Probably the repository, though again it has a rating system so it's again down to knowing what your getting.

People may not be asking for mods, but they constantly ask questions about released mods...which they would not do if there were others around.

The only questions I've seen in the PG regarding released mods cover those hosted on MBX, which is to be expected. Many players won't necessarily want to sign up to a new forum just to ask if there's a new version on the way or similar. Besides which, the point of the PG is not only to announce new mods or ideas or similar, but also to discuss mods.

As for ideas always being the busiest, I disagree. Before it was all one bit mishmash, but the threads (or subforums) of the released mods got a bunch of traffic. Now the ENTIRE cartographer's guild and all its subforums seem to get about as much traffic as the TLDs forum used to get.

TLD was the busiest forum for quite some time. While we had the link board up, it was about the third busiest board overall, which would indicate a lot of people were following the link, yet MBX on the whole is relatively quiet. On the whole, if the CG was getting the same traffic as TLD it would indicate an increase in the amount of activity for released mods. I never saw TLD's threads drop to page 4!
Simple fact is that a released mod tends to get a burst of posters when a new version is released, then very little actual posting unless there's a major announcement (or a new release of M&B, in which case there's a few 'when will it be released for version xxx'). If you looked at the TLD board while it was still here, the vast majority of posts were Tolkien discussion rather than anything relating to the mod itself.

You can say 'tough luck', but you have to realize most people who come to a forum look around very quickly and if nothing grabs their eye they move on.

That's mainly a problem with how mods are presented than the boards to be honest, and that's something for the modders themselves rather than the boards. Like I said before, the main question we see regards which mods are worth trying rather than where to find them, something which you're going to see no matter how well the mod is actually marketed.

 

[bryce777]

Well, since TLDs is over at mbx now it's hard to compare, but I think it's hard to deny that there has been a huge dropoff in the posting in the threads of released mods since the reorganization.  The band of warriors mod probably has the most replies and even it, compared to before, has virtually died.

It used to be that a mod would get MORE responses once it was released, as was the case with the band of warriors mod - until it got hidden away int he cartographers guild and died.

I think a lot of the reason the age of ash mod has so much response is that it's just very visible, whereas good mods like m3 and fantasymod that used to get tons of response now have a subforum but are virtually forgotten because the subforum is recessed two levels deep.

When you look at the main page all it says is child board and "cartographer's guild". I don't think that is nearly enough - of all the things on the website, this should be bolded and triple underlined. Mods are the best thing by far about this game, and most of the people who play probably have no clue what a 'mod' even is. That may sound unlikely, but for most games 90% of people never play mods. For a game like this I think that figure is different, however, because it is a different crowd - for one thing they all have internet access and came here in that fashion in the first place.

I think this is having a lot of bad effects - first, the people who take a casual glance at the forums (which probably makes up 80%) will probably never even notice the released mods.  Second, the released mods are languishing and are not in general finding the help that they might have gotten in bygone days whereas age of ash has had like 20 people helping so far to various extents (part of that is because of GD's awesome work inspires people, but I seriously think a lot of it is because traffic is being driven into our thread.). And of course there are the noob questions, which I see all the time and are not all dealing with mbx boards - it is not so much that they highly annoy me, but to me they scream that there is an underlying problem with the way things are set up. As for the numbers, well, I am there all the time, and it honestly seems like a lot of it to me....

 

[DJNad]

All I have to say is that the Cartographers Guild is extremely out of the way and I didn't find it for over 2 months before noting it.

 

[morgoth2005]

For example: the Battle for Sicily got about 20 pages within about a month of it coming out and then it took them 3 months to get another 20 pages. Now the older members know it exists but noobs never get that far, so it begins to lack support and eventually fades.

At the moment it is only nijis' personal interest which keeps that going and he barely gets any support, except from a few dedicated members.

The same is happening to most other mods in there. Even the childboards dont have much traffic, except maybe the Gladiator mod, and I'm sure that it could get much more support as well.

 

[bryce777]

To me it's pretty obvious. To nearly everyone that seems to be the case. I mean, do we wear our shoes on our feet or our heads? How much debate does this question need each morning?

So let's change it to something sensible!

For a game like Oblivion with 2-3 MILLION users having a poorly organized forum means "Oh well, fewer people will play mods". For a community like this where it's more like 10-20k...it means death of the modding community.

 

[Archonsod]

Well, since TLDs is over at mbx now it's hard to compare, but I think it's hard to deny that there has been a huge dropoff in the posting in the threads of released mods since the reorganization.  The band of warriors mod probably has the most replies and even it, compared to before, has virtually died.

No, there never was a huge posting in the mod threads post release. With the notable exception of TLD and perhaps one or two other mods (which is the reason they got moved to child boards). The rest tended to get activity after release, then drop of the first two pages of the forum. The reason the Cartographer's Guild exists in the first place is due to the complaints we were getting about mod threads disappearing from the front page and thus getting very little attention, or causing people to post new threads regarding the mods.

I think a lot of the reason the age of ash mod has so much response is that it's just very visible, whereas good mods like m3 and fantasymod that used to get tons of response now have a subforum but are virtually forgotten because the subforum is recessed two levels deep.

Again, this comes down to actually marketing and publicising your mod. You lot advertise in your signatures, which helps draw in the curious. I have twice requested help from the community to help publicise the mods, and I've also asked several times if the modders themselves would like to create advertising posts to help draw in players. So far, one member has actually shown any interest. I can't do everything myself here.

As for the posts patterns, it's usual for mods to recieve less attention once they are released for a number of reasons. Even now, we have mods which have been around for as long as I can remember still barely catching up to the amount of pre-release posts.

Mods are the best thing by far about this game, and most os the people who play probably have no clue what a 'mod' even is.

Again, if people were willing to help publicise the mods then we could eliminate problem two, unfortunately nobody seems too bothered about it. As for the first, the prime point of this website is to sell the game, not the mods, so spangly lettering and big arrows would be out (unless we can make the AG & ZTS even bigger ). I don't think it's possible to hang around on these forums for more than a couple of days without finding out about the mods, and it's not exactly hard to figure out where they are, even if you post to ask There'll always be a significant number of players who won't touch mods though, not a lot we can do about that.

I think this is having a lot of bad effects - first, the people who take a casual glance at the forums (which probably makes up 80%) will probably never even notice the released mods.

In my experience, if someone is actually interested in a mod then they'll usually follow it's development up until release. For the rest, again it's marketing. Looking in some of the subforums I see mod threads which actually show a version changelist on the first page rather than describe what the mod is about. Not helpful to the curious, casual player if they need to dig through six or seven pages just to find out what your mod actually is. The simple fact is this is a niche market game with a small potential audience for any given mod, with mods which further drive into the niche category (Gladiator for example). You can't expect a hundred posts a  day when you're fanbase consists of ten people.

Second, the released mods are languishing and are not in general finding the help that they might have gotten in bygone days whereas age of ash has had like 20 people helping

Nothing is stopping the modders posting in the PG asking for help if necessary, indeed it's far more useful than posting in your own thread or board if you want to maximise the amount of people looking at it. In part though the community can share some of the blame for this - I'm sick of seeing posts where a newcomer has been shouted down for requesting help making a mod. You can't then complain that there's few people willing to help when there's such a hostile atmosphere to both newcomers and those who ask for help in the first place.

And of course there are the noob questions, which I see all the time and are not all dealing with mbx boards - it is not so much that they highly annoy me, but to me they scream that there is an underlying problem with the way things are set up. As for the numbers, well, I am there all the time, and it honestly seems like a lot of it to me....

Like I said, apart from the odd one in the Apprentice's Guild, I've only ever seen one post asking where to find the mods turn up in the Pioneer's Guild. I've seen several asking about mods on MBX, and I've seen several asking for recommendations or if mod X is any good. The only other posts I've seen is those regarding problems with version numbers, but to be honest you could probably include the version in the mod name and still get idiots wondering why it isn't working on their version. Such is the nature of the user.

 

[morgoth2005]

If the noobs are willing to learn then they get all the help they ask for. they generally get shouted down on, when they give an idea, not knowing how to implement, not willing to learn, and the idea is stupid, because it cannot be implemented as the game is now.

Maybe the link to the Cartographers should be as big as to the Pioneers rather than be a child board of the Pioneers. Childboards get less traffic than mother boards, by definition.

 

[Archonsod]

they generally get shouted down on, when they give an idea, not knowing how to implement,

And if all they get is a load of abuse, they're never going to learn how to implement it

not willing to learn,

I've only ever seen one post where the poster said they didn't have time to learn. I've never once seen anyone offer to help someone learn, nor have I seen anyone suggest that they would be interested in helping someone learn to do it themselves. Come to that, it's rare anyone actually asks if the poster would be willing to learn. Usually it's a bunch of unwarranted abuse until the thread finally dies.

and the idea is stupid, because it cannot be implemented as the game is now.

They said that about Pirate mod.

Maybe the link to the Cartographers should be as big as to the Pioneers rather than be a child board of the Pioneers. Childboards get less traffic than mother boards, by definition.

Not really, the Privy Council gets more traffic than the Kings Court, and that has the same setup. You can't expect me to believe players who are capable of figuring out that layout become utterly lost when they reach the mod board.

 

[morgoth2005]

They don't become lost, just that the board seems so far away. I know its just 2 clicks but it kinda acts on the subconscious. For the same reason most members prefer to stay in taleworlds and not on MBX.

I never knew anything about Pirate mod, because relatively I am a noob.

People get abuse, because the top-level members just get annoyed with just rifling through so many of these suggestion threads. Also abuse is often caused by the noobs themselves, who often demand help and guidance. I demanded something once on this forum, and I got a sharp cutback. Looking back on it I realise that it helped me, because it taught me some manners.

 

[Archonsod]

People get abuse, because the top-level members just get annoyed with just rifling through so many of these suggestion threads. Also abuse is often caused by the noobs themselves, who often demand help and guidance.

Stating "I don't know how to mod, so I need a scripter and modeller" is not demanding, it's stating a fact. It's no different from someone saying "I can't model, so I need a modeller".

Furthermore, if people don't want to read suggestion threads, they could try not clicking them. It's not exactly rocket science As I said before, if you're not going to help, don't bother posting. I doubt the poster is interested in anyone's opinion unless they're offering help.

 

[morgoth2005]

I generally try to help. Also most people just give suggestions and say please make this mod for me. Most people are generally working on mods of their own, and probably they wouldnt do it anyway. Maybe someone could make a mod suggestion thread, from which modders can look and choose, rather than spamming everything.

 

[Highlander]

I generally try to help. Also most people just give suggestions and say please make this mod for me. Most people are generally working on mods of their own, and probably they wouldnt do it anyway. Maybe someone could make a mod suggestion thread, from which modders can look and choose, rather than spamming everything.

There is one, but most of the noobs think their opinion is more important and people might not notice it in this thread or they do not find it (it isn't stickied).

 

[bryce777]

Archonsod, you make a lot of good points, but I don't think most of them are relavent.

As for threads tending to get a lot of activity til release and then dying off, I don't believe that that is true at all. I do believe that when a mod doesn't have a release for the current version then yes its activity is probably going to die off. Same if the mod is abandoned by its maker.

For mods that actually get released and have current development (and didn't completely suck and were not riddled with bugs), the posting actually always increased after release. For mods that have a huge delay in release and then are more or less abandoned, sure, it might look like it works how you say, but for the last year I have followed all the modding threads as closely as anyone and I don't share your opinion in the least.

Again, band of warriors is the example that sticks in my mind because its release is at a time that shows the effects the forum has had on it.

It got announced, and it had some activity, but not much. Then it got released, and activity went through the roof! To be sure, it was one of the first .808 mods, and got more traffic due to this - but as I said, of course having no current release is going to hurt your traffic - which is a lot of the problem with many mod threads that have basically died. 

Of course, a lot of it is that people just play and don't like it. Not all the mods are that great - some I have played don't even make any sense to me or else did not work - more often, I see just one or two lame things and ditch it so as not to waste my time. Maybe it was good, but maybe not, and seeing some really bad grammar or design choice right off the bat is going to decide it for many people then and there - like you said, modders are bad about marketing, and I think a lot of the alpha release put out would have been better off to do some polishing - even if just some spell checking!


As for your comparison to the privy council, that just doesn't hold any water. There is nothing to 'figure out' in the privy council, for one thing. I am sure dozens of people (including myself) have tried to start a thread in the king's court and said "WTF" to themselves and then realized that they have to go to the privy council to start one when they read the message saying so.

It's also no big surprise that the privy council gets more traffic. How could it *not* get more traffic? Only a tiny number of threads are allowed into the king's court, and they are usually only allowed in after they have practically run their course! A better question is does the privy council setup limit the amount of traffic and the number of suggestions. Well, since that is part of what it was seemingly designed to do in the first place, I would think that answer would be pretty obvious. I do strongly believe that that is the case. I still wish that anything in the privy council that didn't follow the rules STAYED there and anything that DID followed the rules made it to king's court.  Otherwise, really what's the point??? If the point is to screen it for armagan, then he will end up ignoring all the good suggestions that don't get much discussion. It in effect makes the original problem (weeding out unique suggestions) even harder because most of them will be buried in the prvy council. I know 5-6 of mine died that way, and I have seen dozens more which presumably won't even be considered.

As for sales, yes the main thing is to encourage sales, but how do we do that? By having thousands of popups that say "Buy now!"? By having people play the game and then get bored of its incompleteness after a few hours and forget about it? Or maybe by building up a large and loyal fanbase.

I know I personally got bored of native after about two hours. I was about to yank it from my hard disk when someone on another forum mentioned there were some good mods. So, I installed TLD, and wow. I played for about two solid weeks. It was not long until I decided to buy a serial key,a nd since then I have introduced a few others to the game who have bought serials, as well, and have been actively modding the game for some time now. While I don't think we need to do anything like put mods at the top of all the forums, I do think the setup is backwards for these forums in many, many ways, and that especially we should do what we can to make the mods readily accessible and easy to find.  The more and better mods we have, the larger and more rabid the fanbase will be. You may think once someone buys the game that person becomes unimportant, but the exact opposite is true. Every rabid fan we get (even if they are more a rabid TLD or for that matter AoA fan) means someone out there evangelecizing and someone who is on the forum keeping discussion going - NOTHING kills a game like having a dead forum. A visitor sees that and they simply close their browser.

Like I said before, this one is pretty obvious. No one but the mods thinks here this setup makes the least bit of sense.  Because it doesn't!