Skyrim multiplayer mod may never release as devs “don’t owe the community anythi - Sensationalist Headlines

Well sure, but you’ll always upset someone no matter what you say and do and it’s magnified when you’re in the spotlight. (Although in these guy’s case they deserved it)

I was being sarcastic, but the fact is that gaming is now undergoing a tragedy of the commons of epic proportions, hastened by big players becoming run by outside corporate types that don't recognize gaming for the art, only the profit potential. The answer is not to reverse two decades of mainstreaming by exiling "normies reeeee", of course, but they're half the reason we've arrived here.

Our one good shot at multiplayer Skyrim and these asshats have to be the ones running it and ensuring it will never see the light of day. Fuck everything.

As one of the developers who's working on this mod (and have been doing so for years now), I will say that I don't see us ever ceasing development, as it's a mod we're all working on for our own wants and desires as much as anything. I certainly have no plans on dropping it, that's for certain. Even though the experiences with dealing with our earlier "team lead" of Tool/Lagulous left me burnt out for almost half a year after we finally got rid of him from the project. As an aside, the Patreon money is still only being spent on the servers we're running as part of the project, and while I'd love to see us do something more with the income - as it's far larger than we could ever spend on hosting - I don't think anyone would accept a change in the listed uses for the donations at the moment.

Any input on the words from the developer in the article?

I imagine that the intended message would have sounded more along the lines of; "We don't owe it to you to finish this mod, we owe it to ourselves." I can also quite understand the frustrations that could've led to something like the less thought-through of a message that actually got posted, what with people making up and/or assuming everything from about his character to his state of employment or education. Not to mention the overall harassment - and actual death threats - that have been aimed at the entire team after the leftover SKSE code debacle, over everything from unsubstantiated rumours, to outright lies and fabrications. We're still human, and despite the best efforts to remain civil, frustrations tend to overwhelm even the best of us at times.

You posting this reminds me of a non sexual modder for some reason. Apollodown, a guy who was a massive shitposter and basically always shat on people who had issues with his mods. He created some good shit though, like a fucking Skyrim Civil War Quest restoration mod. And then he removed all his mods from the Nexus after Trump got elected in 2016, and his excuse was basically "I don't want Nazis to download and enjoy my work." Hell, I also remember Arthmoor creating some drama with his Open Cities mod initially. He stuck Oblivion gate remnants in the cities as it's mentioned in the lore, but people kept asking him to make it an option because some people didn't like that. He, for the longest time, basically kept telling people that this was "HIS MOD" and that the cities should be this way. He even took down mods to his mod that removed the Oblivion gates since he wouldn't make the option. To his credit, he eventually did make it an option, but my god. Skyrim really just resulted in the TES modding community becoming a drama pit, I guess due to the massive influx of new players and new modders to the scene. And yeah, we all know the paid mods dilemma did not help matters at all.

What is the point of keeping the source code private, there is zero use of it outside of the Skyrim and you can't sell mods. Making things public only benefits the project, look at the OpenMV. And after all the SKSE drama it looks like the only reason it's kept private is because there is lots of other stolen code or it's just a shady way of "selling" and milking the mod via "donations".

In my experience, professional game artists have been some of the nicest people I've ever met. In fact, drama like that is not even tolerated. It's when you get to the online communities where drama kicks off, and all of this definitely comes into full effect.

I kinda avoid communites like the plague because of this. Every time I try to join one, there's always some bullshit going on. It's a shame.

I happen to also be the Windows - and Flatpak - maintainer for OpenMW, so I'm well aware of how open-source projects can work. OpenMW is probably not the best possible example though, as the main reason for it going as well as it does at the moment is due to a heavy lead who was pushing the engine for use in their own closed-source project. I'd more like to point at OpenTTD or the Dolphin emulator for examples of how open-sourcing something can help a project, as none of those had that same support. In the end though, the reason to do Skyrim: Together with closed source was due to the main developers wishes, as his open-source code had been stolen multiple times before and been used against him at the time. I can personally understand why he'd want to keep the code closed after such troubles, and from some of the messages I've gotten from the overall modding community during these years, it seems like it's definitely been the right choice for now. And to reiterate my earlier point; all of the money we've collected so far has gone into the explicitly stated purposes for its collection, none of which allow us to actually retrieve any of it for personal use. So for a scheme designed to "milk" money, it's not all that useful. We're also working with accountants at the moment to provide better transparency in the whole area, and we're not going to do anything to rush through that process, so it might take a while. I'm not even going to bother responding to the accusation of stolen code, as anything I say will undoubtedly be considered lies. People who fear that their code might've been stolen are perfectly welcome to search for traces of it in our binaries if they want though, personally I'd quite happily help them in said task if necessary. We were actually looking at providing the SKSE team with limited (as in read-only) access to the code so that they could verify that all the old leftover code had been removed to their satisfaction, but their frankly immature responses and handling of the situation has since removed that option entirely from the table.