100 réponses à ce sujet

[Martin E]

That's a pretty fair summary Adinos.



I would add a couple of other ones under heading 1.



That would be using any recognisable images (including textures), typically trademarks and logos, but would also include any recognisable content (or even designs come to that).



Martin

[elys]

Thread derailled into legal discussion

Unless you specifically specify for which country you are talking about, all the law blabla means nothing.
Each country has its own set of local laws, and each applies them more or less.
Even basic copyright related treaties have not been ratified everywhere in the world even if almost.
As for EULA "legality" it's even more wild.

Back on the topic, while I do like one centralized site for forums, because it's a good way to keep the community together and information in the same place,  I personally think alternative modding sites are good, furthermore when it's about mod hosting.

I think Oblivion was a good example, it has a the busy official forums, but various hosting sites, and it works fine.

Also alternative sites provide more freedom. When an official does not approve something for whatever reason , it might censor it. Fine after all since its their own site, but then alternative sites leave then the choice to the community to decide if it agrees with the official view or not.

And of course the last technical points, modding sites official or not might go down one day or another. Backup are always good.

Modifié par elys, 26 novembre 2009 - 05:39 .

[Astorax]

I just want to say, thank you guys for keeping this civil. I know there's a lot of opportunity for this sort of discussion to quickly devolve into flame wars and it definitely hasn't. I'm trying to get the web dudes to keep an eye here so they can watch for suggestions and such.

[Adaram]

Wow -- this is a great discussion for someone like me who has been outside the modding scene since around when HOTU was released for NwN. Lots of great points made by lots of people.



I suspect we'll likely see that mods will, for the most part, show up both here and on whatever personal site that the modder likes to use. Honestly, I had hoped that this site would be the "one stop shop", but I see both sides a little more clearly now.



Regardless, I am still rooting for this site!!

[giskard44]

I have noticed Bioware have been probably a little too quick to add features based on feedback so far, not all the changes will work out in the long run I fear. The new forums will I believe need reorganizing again later, they do not take in account the things modders will be doing right now.

Speaking about what a modder needs to make mods with testers or team members helping out.

Private upload access for misc files used in a mod.
Private or public forum to talk about and organize the mod.
Access to an announce forum to advertise the mod.

Most teams get by with those things, my own site goes a little further but ive been modding so long ive been spoiled

[Jim_uk]

I see mods being hosted across several sites as a positive thing, the old "don't put all your eggs in one basket" applies here. I don't doubt Biowares commitment, I do however worry about EA. If the bean counters at EA decide the returns don't warrant the investment and upkeep costs then that's it. Anyway choice is good thing and how hard is it to visit different sites? moving a mouse and left clicking every now and again isn't exactly back breaking work.

[giskard44]

Jim_uk wrote...

I see mods being hosted across several sites as a positive thing, the old "don't put all your eggs in one basket" applies here. I don't doubt Biowares commitment, I do however worry about EA. If the bean counters at EA decide the returns don't warrant the investment and upkeep costs then that's it. Anyway choice is good thing and how hard is it to visit different sites? moving a mouse and left clicking every now and again isn't exactly back breaking work.

I agree, the elder scrolls community found out their mistake when Tessource went down before changing to Tesnexus. Not darkones fault but it did demostrate the problem nicely. So I agree with you that several sites are better for that reason.

But its worth noting that after about 6 years, 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of you will have long since forgotten Dragon Age and be playing something else.

I have supported many games in my time and i find 6 years is usually about how long it takes for a popular game open ended  with multiplayer to die. There are some exceptions of course that last longer. A game with a clearly defined ending and no multiple tends to be died and gone before its 3rd year. Though sales of any good game do continue, most of the support has moved on by then.

But I hope to do something about that with my mods later
Creating some open ended game play to enjoy along side the plot.

[A1x2e3l]

Kids (we) always like to have secrets from their parents (BioWare)
and they (kids) are allowed to have their own party without adults.

 Why it is necessary to login in order to be able to read wiki (“the free encyclopedia
that anyone can edit”)? To write yes, but to read! What is so secret there that “anyone” can’t read for “fee”/anonymously? I found nothing.
http://social.biowar.../wiki/datoolset

This Forum is great but very divergent, difficult to
navigate, search, post (I am not able to understand format, CR works in a
strange way), etc. More compact focused Forums for more monomorphic groups of
modders as an addition are very attractive.

Modifié par A1x2e3l, 28 novembre 2009 - 03:27 .

[Happysin]

But its worth noting that after about 6 years, 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of you will have long since forgotten Dragon Age and be playing something else.

I actually disagree with that. The reason I disagree is that Bioware/EA wanted a platform, not just games. As such, we will likely be playing Dragon Age 3 in 6 years, and our mods will continue to be relevant.

[giskard44]

Happysin wrote...

But its worth noting that after about 6 years, 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of you will have long since forgotten Dragon Age and be playing something else.

I actually disagree with that. The reason I disagree is that Bioware/EA wanted a platform, not just games. As such, we will likely be playing Dragon Age 3 in 6 years, and our mods will continue to be relevant.

I hear you but things do not work that way, it takes 2 years to make a new game from scratch assuming they start production the moment the old game is released and assuming they do not make any other games like mass effect 3 in that time.

Also I found die hards are not as loyal as they claim to be, often webmasters with an interest in a game are still there supporting it long after those who swore they where here for life have disappeared. I have seen this a lot over the years.

Dragon Age lacks anything that would promote longevity right now, its primary hope for long lasting appeal lays with mods but the toolkit is every every hard to learn for a noobie. Whilst some of us will try and rectify that, at the end the of day DA being single player and having a clearly defined ending automatically gives it a limited life span.

Its one chance for a longer shelf life comes from word of mouth telling folk its a good rpg.
The rest eg the modding may never catch on, the toolkit is simply too hard to learn for most, not intuitive at all.

Still I believe that once your told where things are and how they work the tool kit becomes much much easier so that might have an effect.

Modifié par giskard44, 28 novembre 2009 - 05:16 .

[FalloutBoy]

Jim_uk wrote...

I see mods being hosted across several sites as a positive thing, the old "don't put all your eggs in one basket" applies here. I don't doubt Biowares commitment, I do however worry about EA. If the bean counters at EA decide the returns don't warrant the investment and upkeep costs then that's it. Anyway choice is good thing and how hard is it to visit different sites? moving a mouse and left clicking every now and again isn't exactly back breaking work.

Running a website is cheap, compared to paying some lousy studio to not ship games. EA is not going to shut down this website to save money. This site will still be here long after you have forgotten about this game.

It is not a question of how easy or hard it is to visit other sites. It is a matter of visibility. If there are multiple sites, then there will be people who don't visit all of them regularly. That means authors are forced to maintain current versions of their stuff in multiple places or else they lose customers. It is a needless hassle caused by impatient people who aren't willing to stick to a standard.

Modifié par FalloutBoy, 28 novembre 2009 - 08:01 .

[XaocSlack]

FalloutBoy wrote...

Jim_uk wrote...
I see mods being hosted across several sites as a positive thing, the old "don't put all your eggs in one basket" applies here. I don't doubt Biowares commitment, I do however worry about EA. If the bean counters at EA decide the returns don't warrant the investment and upkeep costs then that's it. Anyway choice is good thing and how hard is it to visit different sites? moving a mouse and left clicking every now and again isn't exactly back breaking work.

Running a website is cheap, compared to paying some lousy studio to not ship games. EA is not going to shut down this website to save money. This site will still be here long after you have forgotten about this game.

It is not a question of how easy or hard it is to visit other sites. It is a matter of visibility. If there are multiple sites, then there will be people who don't visit all of them regularly. That means authors are forced to maintain current versions of their stuff in multiple places or else they lose customers. It is a needless hassle caused by impatient people who aren't willing to stick to a standard.

You're right, running a website is cheap. For a single person, assuming they don't get thousands of hits a day. For a company the logistics are completly diffrent.

Lets get the cheap part out of the way:

This guy gives a nice idea of how much bandwith and a server costs per month (ignoring that it's from janurary of this year and only serving one 53Kb file, which most mods will probably put to shame.):
http://josephscott.o...bandwidth-cost/
That list has an average of $111.83 per month. Over a year, that's roughly $1,341.96

Next, you have to have a team of people to manage the site, lets say they can do it with 4 people. those 4 people make, say 50K a year. Why 50K? Well, we're going to assume that they also do all the website development work to save the company from having to have 4 more people do the front end and 4 more to do the back end. This site: http://www.payscale....eveloper/Salary puts the average of all web developer sallaries at roughly 60k/year (thats one just out of college w/ no experience at 30k and one with more than 20 years at 90k.) I'd also like to assume that EA will allow bioware to assign quality people to the effort of keeping this site alive and well maintained. So, in just HR costs we are at 200k/year.

Net total yearly operating costs based on the above mentioned estimated averages is $201,341.96. EA will spend about $1,006,710 in 5 years of operating this website. From a corporate standpoint this is far from cheap.

Assuming my earlier estimate is accurate on the length of time that this site will exist once development of the DA franchise has ceased, and assuming there is no sequel, we can assume that development of DA:O will cease within three years, and that this website will exist at most 2 years after that. Net operating time, just over 5 years.

Edit: typos, mostly homophones and misspellings.

Modifié par XaocSlack, 28 novembre 2009 - 09:21 .

[Happysin]

I hear you but things do not work that way, it takes 2 years to make a new game from scratch assuming they start production the moment the old game is released and assuming they do not make any other games like mass effect 3 in that time.

Unless I miss my guess, it's not the same team that does Mass Effect and Dragon Age at Bioware. Any reasonably large developer has a few teams working different projects at the same time, or at least, the ones I've worked at.  Also, they're not working from scratch, they already have the engine and the tool set (plus their own internal tools not practical to release to us). 

XaocSlack, your numbers aren't even close to real. I'm not trying to insult you, but software development and web hosting is what my company does, and I can tell you flat-out that maintaining a high-bandwidth site is not generally near that value proposition. Furthermore, you can find hosting companies that don't charge by the GB, they charge by the size of the pipe you want, and whatever you throw down it is fine. (and that is ignoring CDNs, another potential cost mitigator). Plus, I find it extremely doubtful that EA/Bioware would put work towards this site that couldn't be used for future games (or the social network as a whole), meaning that cost is really a sunk cost to have devs working on the site, not something that can be directly attributed just to Dragon Age's site.

So while I won't estimate on the initial dev costs of building the EA Social site and the Dragon Age, annual costs specific to keeping this site up should be less than $20k, and significantly less as the game ages and the web platform matures. Simply put, fewer people will be downloading mods later on, so direct bandwidth costs and break-fix costs should approach zero as the site slows down.

Modifié par Happysin, 28 novembre 2009 - 11:47 .

[Phaenan]

FalloutBoy wrote...
It is not a question of how easy or hard it is to visit other sites. It is a matter of visibility. If there are multiple sites, then there will be people who don't visit all of them regularly. That means authors are forced to maintain current versions of their stuff in multiple places or else they lose customers. It is a needless hassle caused by impatient people who aren't willing to stick to a standard.

That's pretty much my thought about it. That, and the fact that "having" to use DANexus doesn't leave me enthusiastic. Don't get me wrong : I adored Nexus as a Bethesda or Fallout player and I understand why it's easier to browse for end-players, but I find it unpratical to use as a modder (because of strangely conceived menus, as far as my tastes go) and I only do the effort of keeping a DANexus version of my project because I know a lot of people only go there. Something the uncategorized bioware projects pages doesn't exactly discourage. 
Having to host my project on two fronts. Having to follow user feedback and MPs on both sites, because people don't care you saying you'd rather have them contacting you on Bioware's social site (it's not like they're going to indulge your convenience, huh...)... Frankly, that's a royal pain in my ass and I'd rather have everything in the same place no matter how "easy it is to click on other sites".

Modifié par Phaenan, 29 novembre 2009 - 01:01 .

[krabman]

Astorax wrote...

I just want to say, thank you guys for keeping this civil. I know there's a lot of opportunity for this sort of discussion to quickly devolve into flame wars and it definitely hasn't. I'm trying to get the web dudes to keep an eye here so they can watch for suggestions and such.

You asked for suggestions and here is mine. Fix the search. A good chunk of all the people who come here come looking for something, information, mods, etc. Right now the search is next to useless and the worst I have come across on any website, ever. I am not saying that as "gosh this search sucks" I am saying it as an honest statement of fact. I cannot recall ever seeing a worse search feature on a major website. Right now I come here only to check and see if search is fixed, I look at a few posts and I am off. Good intentions are all well and good and I hope things get working here but this sight is pointless to me until such time as I can search it to get to what I am looking for. Not being a webmaster I have no idea what this entails but being self employed I now that having people who have come to you leave because they cant find what they want isnt good for business. 

[ladydesire]

krabman wrote...

Astorax wrote...

I just want to say, thank you guys for keeping this civil. I know there's a lot of opportunity for this sort of discussion to quickly devolve into flame wars and it definitely hasn't. I'm trying to get the web dudes to keep an eye here so they can watch for suggestions and such.

You asked for suggestions and here is mine. Fix the search. A good chunk of all the people who come here come looking for something, information, mods, etc. Right now the search is next to useless and the worst I have come across on any website, ever. I am not saying that as "gosh this search sucks" I am saying it as an honest statement of fact. I cannot recall ever seeing a worse search feature on a major website. Right now I come here only to check and see if search is fixed, I look at a few posts and I am off. Good intentions are all well and good and I hope things get working here but this sight is pointless to me until such time as I can search it to get to what I am looking for. Not being a webmaster I have no idea what this entails but being self employed I now that having people who have come to you leave because they cant find what they want isnt good for business. 

The DA Toolset Wiki is a good place to look for information on modding the game, the Projects Section is a good place for looking for additions to the game (it would be nice if there was a way to filter them by project status and if modders would learn what the various project types were for and use them as intended), and the forums are good for information about the game in general; the fact that search sucks is pretty much universal to any of the Bioware forums, to tell the truth.

[krabman]

ladydesire wrote...

krabman wrote...

Astorax wrote...

I just want to say, thank you guys for keeping this civil. I know there's a lot of opportunity for this sort of discussion to quickly devolve into flame wars and it definitely hasn't. I'm trying to get the web dudes to keep an eye here so they can watch for suggestions and such.

You asked for suggestions and here is mine. Fix the search. A good chunk of all the people who come here come looking for something, information, mods, etc. Right now the search is next to useless and the worst I have come across on any website, ever. I am not saying that as "gosh this search sucks" I am saying it as an honest statement of fact. I cannot recall ever seeing a worse search feature on a major website. Right now I come here only to check and see if search is fixed, I look at a few posts and I am off. Good intentions are all well and good and I hope things get working here but this sight is pointless to me until such time as I can search it to get to what I am looking for. Not being a webmaster I have no idea what this entails but being self employed I now that having people who have come to you leave because they cant find what they want isnt good for business. 

The DA Toolset Wiki is a good place to look for information on modding the game, the Projects Section is a good place for looking for additions to the game (it would be nice if there was a way to filter them by project status and if modders would learn what the various project types were for and use them as intended), and the forums are good for information about the game in general; the fact that search sucks is pretty much universal to any of the Bioware forums, to tell the truth.

As this is my only experience with bioware forums I have no comment regarding the others. I am not saying there is not information to be had here, its here. Finding it is another matter. I simply do not have enough time to click link after link in the hopes of blundering into the information I seek. It is part my own opinion and part fact when I say that this site is broken without search. Anyone like me that comes here or would come here seeking information will find it hard to come by due to the lack of a viable search feature and for the most part they will move on as I have done. I do recognize that some people might want to hang their online hat here rather than use the site as a tool and those people may not see it as broken in the way I do. I will keep checking in and hope they do fix things here because it would probably be the single best resource for the game if they fixed the search and continued to organize the file and mod areas to make them easily browse-able.

[LokiHades]

I for one love using both fanmade and original sites. The Nexus sites have always been key in my modding, as well as the vault sites. I can still see the Social Site picking up. Improvements have been made, and it's slowly taking form. I like to use both the Social Site and Nexus, adding popularity for mods I enjoy on both sides.

[Jim_uk]

FalloutBoy wrote...

Jim_uk wrote...

I see mods being hosted across several sites as a positive thing, the old "don't put all your eggs in one basket" applies here. I don't doubt Biowares commitment, I do however worry about EA. If the bean counters at EA decide the returns don't warrant the investment and upkeep costs then that's it. Anyway choice is good thing and how hard is it to visit different sites? moving a mouse and left clicking every now and again isn't exactly back breaking work.

Running a website is cheap, compared to paying some lousy studio to not ship games. EA is not going to shut down this website to save money. This site will still be here long after you have forgotten about this game.

It is not a question of how easy or hard it is to visit other sites. It is a matter of visibility. If there are multiple sites, then there will be people who don't visit all of them regularly. That means authors are forced to maintain current versions of their stuff in multiple places or else they lose customers. It is a needless hassle caused by impatient people who aren't willing to stick to a standard.

http://games.ea.com/information.jsp

A lot of those games are not very old at all, it didn't stop them pulling the plug.

[Lord Mephisto]

What annoys me is the need of logging in for simply viewing pages on the wiki. Why?

[Proleric]

Jim_uk wrote...
http://games.ea.com/information.jsp
A lot of those games are not very old at all, it didn't stop them pulling the plug.

Um... so since there's a risk that my house might fall down one day, I'd better go outside and take my chances in the snow with the wolves?

[ChewyGumball]

Projects are meant for projects... a mod is not the only kind of project that can be related to dragon age.