I completely disagree. Beth took a long time, but they were doing SO MUCH. Think about it. If I can single handedly make 30 hours of gameplay, then if I had a team of five, in theory that's 150 hours of gameplay. Cut that down a bit since not everyone would be purely making quests/dungeons/worldspace. I think a small modding team could certainly make over a hundreds hours of gameplay in a new land if they were experienced enough.

then why 100 people in 5 years couln't make 5000 hours of gameplay but only 300?

Well, because, first, it was 3 years not five. And second, because again it takes FAR longer to make an actual game that it does a mod. Beth had a huge portion of their staff working on the engine, animations, combat systems, etc. When you mod the game, all of that is done for you, you just have to design the levels, places, and quests. That's it. Beth has done most of the work. How much gameplay would I have been able to make if I had to make the entire game? Probably like 10 minutes. It's a VERY very different boat. Making an entire game, or simply modding a game that's already been made.

That's why.

Case in point, Nehrim at Fate's Edge. Also, modding teams have less bureaucracy to go through. Everything a dev team does must be checked checked and rechecked.

Well, that's usually to ensure artistic consistency. I've seen larger mods done by several people and you can really tell who made what because it doesn't quite snap together flawlessly. So that's more something that modding teams SHOULD have. A strong pyrimid of command is important, I feel. (Part of the reason by ValveTime? exists, they don't assign jobs, they let people randomly pull from a pool of to-do's)

not convinced yet....
Skipping the game making as involved other stuff... The dlcs barely added 10 hours of gameplay according to them , so ?
Several dungeons ,several quests lot of new content and 10 hours of gameplay ....

I actually think that anything above 3 hours made by modders is already an achievement ( i mean just inquest not time spent killing monsters )
Its hard to make an estimation but also I think that it depends on the design of the landscape you want to do...

I personally prefer large landscapes where content is well distribuited ... Honestly for the mass of content they added to the game in skyrim , by my point of view they should have made the landscape 2 or 3 times larger... I find it a bit annoying that I cant walk for a couple of meters without meeting someone begging for a quest , a monster or the next village... Too much content packed in too small land...
I personally would have more liked a large landscape where you can even just walk and admire the landscape just by itself.

But the DLC are made by very small teams. Once the game launches like 90% of the developers move on the to next game. The DLC haven't been creations of 100+ people, or they would be HUGE.

Well the the counts get right .... A smal. Team is similar to a modding team perhaps , so 10 hours of comtent of extremely polished quests , mainquests ,side contents , dungeons etc is a lot and I think ( not sure ) their land is quite small perhaps 1024x1024.?

I expect the biggest expansions made by modders to hit at 10 hours content or more , but those are like huge ...

Anyway how about classification by points? If you assign points to quest hours , dungeons types ( according tomprevious classifications) and land dimensions , as well as perhaps other factors extras like content made , custom stuff etc , summing all up cold give a good classifications in points and so find a category ...

Then entirely different mods with the same number of 'points' would be in the same catagory... I don't really see the point of all that. And land mass size doesn't matter, the quality of it does. Someone can generate a 4096x4096 forest but if it's all bland generated land, I'd hardly call that any good. I'd prefer a 512x512 land full of detail and content.

I wasn't referring to QA testing but approval by the many groups that run a company, the groups outside the team.

I doubt that's too much of a hassle. It's not like they completely stop working every other week while the higher-ups grind over what they've done to make sure it fits what they want. Anything like that would be planned in from the start in the dev meetings and whatnot.

I agree but the ize lone with a point evluation sytem won't count ....
Also I am not poposing a competition or a scale of what i better orgood but. Scale of classification that can make understand what's to be expected in terms of modded content , so a 512 land could have a 100 gameplay hours quet and ne classifed as a huge quest mod for example...

What? Regardless of land size, be it 4096 or only 100, I'd call 100 hours of gameplay a HUGE mod. That's why I'm saying time should be the classifyer if anything. I don't care if the mod's land is 16038x16038, if it's entirely empty and has two dungeons in it that take 15 minutes to beat, I'd call it a very very small mod.

yeh I am saying the same thing but also with a point classification the hours won't be the only parameter .... you can have also a mod that focus all on a beautyfull landscape , with everythign but not quests , still it needs to be classified somehow .

*doesnt understand a word these people said*

You can add a tag saying 'beautiful handcrafted nature'

I would however base it on the amount of gameplay it add for most.
A beautifull world without any other content would mostly add for the ones that explore every inch of the world. For most others, it won't add much.
A smaller land with a long complex questline but below average quality on the world would add more gameplay for people who do quests, and I'd assmue most who play RPGs do quests.

It also seems to me like 'ugly' graphics get more 'fixes' than bad quests.

To interrupt the discussion on classification...

Windhelm Guard, would you consider adding my mod:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/22650
Adds skill, quest, and level requirements in order to advance in the Companions Guild, transforming the questline into a much longer one. Restores a voiced radiant quest and other voiced content; introduces more dialogue options for better roleplaying and to flesh out the guildmember personalities; new quests and features in the works.

I suppose it would go under "Big Quests"; status would be "some version released."

There is some great stuff coming. Can't wait to play some of the mods in this thread.

Why not classify mods in two separate ways: landmass and content. Then a third stat called density which is a guestimation of content per square cell/quad.

So you would say: "[mod name]: Landmass=[number from 1 to 10]; Content=[number from 1 to 10]; Density=[number or a more generic term]

That would be best I think. More like a listing of stats.

How about a system that told us if the mod is wip / alpha / beta / v1 / finished / etc. I get so frustrated downloading mods that turn out to be wip or early beta. If you know it is a beta and you wish to download it - that's fine. If you think it's finished and you download it and it's a beta, that is just plain annoying.

I certainly think mod authors should make this abundantly clear. Releasing betas, and more-so alpha's that aren't anywhere near complete is a growing trend and I always wonder why. Sure I guess it helps for testing, but I almost wonder if people do it more so that they can get the attention from their mod earlier on... Just run a controlled private testing area. I have my ~5 testers and they provide a great amount of insight on the mod.

I could see doing a public beta right before release to really grind over things, but a public alpha as you develope? That just seems like it would waste time and slow down developement. :/

Yea I'm all for releasing WIP mods, as long as they're playable. I've seen a number of new lands mods for example, that just had the heightmap and maybe a couple of trees and buildings. What a waste of time that could be spent developing.

I must say that the betatesting of Conan Hyborian age is doing great , we have found some very few minor bugs that we didn't find befoure and most of all a vanilla bug had been also countered somehow ...

also a bout the listing of the mods as big mods or the like ....

What defines a mod to be called big ? what is it like compared to the other? a nicer description , a more informative list of the contents , the gameplay hours , size of land , stage of development would be very nice to get informed . Time Ago I proposed a wiki section of the elder scrolls wiki to host those large ( only active ) mods informative pages.

i added the companion thingy.
I do want a mod that adds new random encounters...
e.g. a naked courier dancing harlem shake in the middle of winterhold while teabagging nazeem's duck

I agree that modders shouldn't have false or misleading advertisemant.
But I'm going to comment because this quote just sounded a tiny bit alien to me.

"just" get 5 testers?
I mean maybe you have a great efficient system to recruit testers, give them instructions, and get information back from them. And it would be great if you could teach or encourage the community to do more of that.
But I think the vast majority of modder are both inexperienced in that and not motivated to learn on their own.
I mean how many modders on these forums, or on skyrimnexus actually have even a single beta tester?

Also, the comment on attention.
Of course they are doing it for the attention.
Maybe the individual act of forgetting to list a mod as a beta in the description is a novice mistake.
But every modder makes mods partially for the attention.
The desire for it might bring about misguided actions like misleading advertising.
But under no circumstance would I fault a modder for wanting more attention for their mod.