I believe that that's simply not true. I'm a console gamer, but my friend lent me his PC copy so I could see what mods are like. Maybe I'm super smart for a console gamer, maybe all the mods I chose happened to be simple ones, but the longest I spent trying to install a mod was 10 minutes, and the few times I got stuck, google was there to help. I don't understand what's so difficult about shuffling around a few folders, tbh.
That's because there is nothing hard about shuffling around a few folders. At least if you know how to do that which some people may not even be able to do. But that is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to modding
there's:
1.managing conflicts which can be caused by an enormous amount of things some of which can only be managed through use of third party tools like the bashed patch in wrye bash like leveled lists, race edits etc(not to mention some people have trouble even getting wrye bash to work) some might not even be noticeable like scripts interfering with each other.
2. managing overlapping/overwriting resouces which can be done manually but it's tedious work and is way more effective through a third party mod manager such as BAIN (more flexible with annealing but more complex) or OBMM (easy to use but just overwrites files or doesn't)
3. archive invalidation (which is made easy through use of third party tools)
4. making sure you have all of a mods requirements, be it another mod or something like obse or obse extension (plus you have to keep them up to date and some mods only work with a certain version of obse meanig you have to research a bit too.
5. Making sure the mods you're using will work on your system without it turning into a slideshow
6. Dirty edits, which can be done accidentally by a modder or even by the CS itself and often goes unnoticed by the modder and then users and then they're wondering why the game keeps crashing when there shouldn't even be a conflict. And guess what? The easiest way to fix the was dadadada a third party application!
And all that's just what I can come up with off the top of my head.
So yeah there's a bit more too it than playing with folders as you trivialize it as. I'd like to see the face of a person with no knowledge of mods console or PC user try and install and use a 250 mod setup including FCOM or even OOO or MMM. the sheer number of people who know what they're doing and still have problems using mods should be enough to tell you it's nothing so simple as shuffling a few folders and voila you have a modded setup. Some mods might be as simple as that but only minor mods and even they can cause problems if you don't know what you're doing.
You must have not used anything other than very simple mods and don't know anything about mods whatsoever or you wouldn't have said what you did.
To keep this on topic I'm wondering how Bethesda would juggle all that considering they didn't do most of it themselves even on the platform that had mods the whole time they gave us the CS and said have fun. Anything else was mostly handled by third party tools. If they are going to have mods they're going to be very very simple like changing armor stats or adding a quest or house and even those have potential to cause problems. I just can't see it working out. Maybe I will be surprised though, who knows it's all speculation?
» Wed Mar 30, 2011 7:04 am 
