To me, the Oblivion mod forum seems like home; It has been one of the most helpful, trustworthy and amiable online communities I have seen to date.

With the release of Skyrim and the announcement of the staggering number of copies sold, I was ecstatic for Bethesda for attaining such a position. However, because of these numbers, I harbored a fear of having the Elder Scrolls modding community torn to pieces. While I can't base much of the claim, the first example of such a situation that comes to mind is WoW (Vanilla being compared to it's current status).

I've been lurking long enough to have seen some amazing modders be driven off by flames that held no substance or direction, and ended up landing on the modders themselves. I believe that due to the massive increase in sales from Oblivion to Skyrim, that type of mishap may very well multiply; So I pose a question to most/all of you:
Will you, if the Skyrim community turns out to be amassed with ungrateful players, continue to release or make public your mods?

To note, the only reason I did not post this in the Skyrim section is that I don't wish for this to turn into a war, nor to run any emotions high. I would just like to know the honest opinion of some of the modders that aren't too busy playing Skyrim to frequent this forum.

I don't see how the skyrim community has any effect on the Oblivion community. I've been on the Morrowind forums for a while and recently came to the Oblivion side, and for the most part, there isn't much overlap in the forum people. Generally the majority of people go forward with new releases, so I don't any of those 'ungrateful players' would affect the Oblivion forums since they won't come in this part of the forums.

Yeah this is going to be drama. You're basically stroking mod makers and casting any the presence of any derision, criticism, or problems on the heads of ungrateful mod users.

Mod users = people = mod makers. People can create their own dramas without help from others. Further if you get to know folks and talk to them through PMs and so on - you may find that many modders not only don't agree with each other but are the first to cast derision at each other.

Hierarchies? Good versus evil?

As soon as I posit a difference there is suffering.

You know, the Oblivion forums were just as bad as the Skyrim ones when Oblivion was newly released.

As for releasing mods, maybe I would wait to release them publically (i.e. release threads at ES-boards) until it has calmed down a bit here.

But it will still take at least a months befor the CK arrives, and I'm still not sure how the Steam-thing will affect modding and modders. So for now I'm just having fun playing Skyrim and modding Oblivion.

I'm really hoping that's the case. I was more referring to the fact that I've seen a large portion of the Oblivion modders over in the Skyrim mods section and there may be an effect on how mods are released for Skyrim, but it's good to know that there generally isn't much overlap from new to previous games.

I think it has more to do with seeing how some of the modders I respect to an enormous extent are being talked to over there (Nerevar, Arthmoor, Psymon, etc). I have to remind myself that most of the people on the Skyrim forum most likely don't know who they are.

Either way, hopefully I'm being paranoid and you are correct. Thanks~!

Edited in to address your post, Psymon; When I refer to these 'ungrateful players', I am mostly referring to the ones that throw unwarranted criticism at modders for their own mistakes. Ie, those that don't read the Readme and then turn right around and put all the blame on the modder.

I am not, by any means, referring to the non-modding playerbase as a whole. In fact, I'm more of the non-modding playerbase as opposed to a modder seeing as my modding experience is a couple private patches for myself. I haven't really released anything. I do not, however, refuse to use the resources given to me to fix a problem that I caused by myself and then continue to lay blame on others.
Hope that clarifies.

Well the Skyrim community won't necessarily have an affect on the Oblivion community other than to divert attention from those of us who were modding Oblivion and are going to be moving on to Skyrim once the CK is out.

Give the Skyrim release time to shake out. In 6 months or so people will have settled in to where they'll spend most of their time. I don't see this causing any sort of hostility between the various forum communities. Morrowind and Oblivion modders have been largely separate, as have Fallout modders, and I don't anticipate there being anything different with Skyrim.

Alright, that's quite a relief then, thanks guys.

Yeah but there are some dynamite Fallout modders already making mods for Skyrim. I guess some of them didn't dive in with Oblivion, but made great stuff for those games.

Like we all expected Darn to be the maker of the UI/HUD overhaul, but my bet is the best of that will come from the Fallout team in the SKyUI thread. And there are quite a few Morrowind people posting there too with WIP threads.

But yeah the novelty is a factor.

and I'm not a mod maker.

Yes, I have noticed there's a much larger crossover into Skyrim than I recall seeing previously with the older releases. It's definitely interesting, and good to see new blood showing as well.

As part of the Morrowind mods community I felt the same way when the Oblivion mods forum was opened. Every single word you have written here could have been said by any of us in 2006. As Emma says, the Oblivion Mods community was every bit as ill-mannered and obnoxious and prone to throwing temper tantrums over the slightest thing, or nothing at all, as the Skyrim mods community is now.

I felt very much at home in the Morrowind mods forum back in 2006 and didn't feel the same sense of 'belonging' when the Oblivion mods forum opened. There seemed to be no 'community' here, no shared sense of purpose, no friendships. To me it seemed like an open-air market where everybody yelled at the same time and nobody listened to each other...or, worse, when they did listen it seemed it was only to get into arguments with each other.

The Oblivion mods forum settled down in time. It became a community. As Arthmoor says, give it time. It will happen there as it happened here, and as it happened in the Morrowind mods forum. Long-lasting communities are rarely forged overnight.

I think at least a bit of what you're seeing now in the Skyrim mod forum are people, some of them still very young, who are taught to believe that everything they want will be given to them at once, upon demand. They can't conceive of the fact that modders work at modding for the pleasure of it, not at their beck and call, usually singly and unpaid, rather than in companies. They have no idea what is required to make a mod or what can be made, and they just want it all done yesterday. I've seen some breathtakingly oblivious insults handed out to decent mod work already over there (one comment started, "I guess some people like what you're doing, but it's too complicated and I don't.") followed by requests for something else from the same person. As others have said, this will change. Many of these people have no patience for one thing, and the modding tools are simply not going to be made available by gamesas until sometime in January. By then, at least a few of them will have played speed runs through Skyrim, and gone onto the next Greatest Game Ever.

Gradually, as Emma and Pseron wrote, the Skyrim forums will follow the same path taken when Oblivion was new. (Though it's worse now, because the number of platforms and visitors are greater.) The screeching flames, inaccurate information, and relentless cheerleading will diminish. What remains behind will form a reasonably solid community that has its share of squabbles but still manages to coexist without drawn knives. Things will get less chaotic, threads won't reach 5 pages in one day, and mod requests will be sensible ones made by people who know the limits of the CS, because they'll be modders, themselves.

Also, there are a lot of people who are simply passing through. They're going to move on from Skyrim in a month or so, and probably won't be back for the mod scene anyway.

What's amused me have been people throwing a fit over the CK delay. I even saw one post over on Nexus where a guy said that the ~2 month delay for it completely ruins the mod scene, so he's going to make his OWN Construction Kit.

Good luck on that, buddy.

Anyway, in 4 or 5 years no one will remember what happened in the first few months after Skyrim came out.

I am more than happy to wait for all the dust to settle in Skyrim. It's why I didn't bother to purchase it right away:

- More patches to come
- Creation Kit
- SkSE team

That's all going to take time. Heck, porting over my mod to Skyrim could easily be a year away for all I know, depending on how long it takes to create and implement all the tools and reverse engineering that is required to support it. Assuming the folks who did it last time are willing to do it again.

But I can wait. I never did my "final" run of Oblivion anyway. I'm not finished with TES IV yet.

Patience is a virtue.
(and often can help avoid unnecessary drama)

Patience if a virtue
Virtue is a grace
Grace is a naughty girl who never washes her face


With Skyrim I'm already using bash, bain, SKSE, and three SKSE plugins.

Several high rez texture replacers and a few UI improvements.

Only a few regular esp to slow skill ups and make my horse essential. Those though I'm more wary of as they were made via hex-editing and there is no CK yet. But a few of those that do hex-editing did it with fallout too and so have a reputation of being able to do it right.

I predict that provided the CK is as useful or more than previous versions AND steam Workshop does not get too invasive that Skyrim modding will be robust for a long while.

With Oblivion I'd never done the Shivering Isle quest line, so I know I will return to do that. In the mean time I'm still staying up on Oblivion updates and all that, but each time I go to install or test something out I find myself rushing through it to get back to Skyrim. Which unmodded is already so so much better than Oblivion.