Grymmoire wrote:Somewhere there's a line, when the quality of any mod crosses the line (in a bad way), then it just can't be/shouldn't be ignored.
Why not? What's the worst that could happen? Is this mod going to become sentient and start attacking people in real life? Is it going to become viral and start infecting/corrupting (again a matter of one's personal viewpoint) other mods?
Personally, I see this community as this - a bunch of mostly unrelated people just working on something in their own free time (usually when they're bored), mostly to satisfy themselves. If people like their mod? Great. If not? Oh well, could really care less. I don't see any sort of "line" - people make what they want to make. If people keep churning out 1994 WADs then good for them - it doesn't personally affect me or how I spend my own free time. I certainly don't feel that it is my god given duty to start lambasting the author about their work and saying how they have defiled my computer with their filth (largely because I haven't downloaded their work in the first place). I don't download many mods at all anymore, and even if I thought "well that level sucked" I move on and do something else. So what?
I agree with CaptainToenail about levels being present in gameplay modifiers. Back when I really started downloading Doom mods (having come across WolfenDoom), I thought wouldn't it be neat to play with Wolfenstein weapons and Wolfenstein enemies in the regular Doom levels? If you loaded Doom II up with Operation: Eisenmann or something similar, most Doom II levels would be unaffected but then there would always be the 13 or so levels of Doom II that I wouldn't be able to play because (of course) those were the levels of the actual mod - how (not-so) annoying. In more recent times, when I randomly feel like playing through a megawad I have already played dozens of times before (like Scythe for example), I think of a gameplay mod I can load up as well to make the experience somewhat refreshing. I don't want to have to start Scythe on level 14 because that would break up the flow of the megawad more so than the gameplay mod itself.
CrystalWolf: I still don't really know where your perspective comes from. I can't think of more than a handful of shuffle or weapon mods to be released in the last few months (that is, in these forums, I don't really follow anything like the /newstuff chronicles). As I mentioned in another topic, even if there are "very few quality maps" being made as of late, can you not draw upon Doom's 17 years of modding history? Must your latest Doom delights be cutting edge contemporary projects? Also why should you worry about an author's personal reasons for making a mod ("People don't think they have to do any better")? Who are you to say what is better qualitatively than something else, and also why does it affect you? I don't profess to start claiming I know what is "better" as in my first point, I just leave people alone to do whatever they want to do. (I know this argument can be turned on its head, why should I care about what you think? The answer is I'm a moderator and need to keep these discussions - which inevitably get very
heated opinionated - closely monitored. I also cannot see what you hope to achieve with these discussions so I can't see the point in having them other than a group of users getting really distressed about nothing at all but this is my viewpoint as another user of the forums, not as a moderator.)
I'm not saying that criticism is wrong, but you have stated many times now that you have a problem more with the concept of these mods rather than their actual content. Criticising a mod's content (for example, the Shotgun Rocket Launcher is under-powered) works because then the author is closer to achieving a gameplay balance that is in line with the concept behind the mod (modifiying the gameplay of Doom II). Saying "It'd be pretty great if this came with maps" is completely besides the point of the mod because it completely changes the concept of the mod. To use an unusual analogy, criticising the drawing of a cat saying "the cat's legs are too long and thin" is fine, but saying "no, no, no, that drawing shouldn't be a cat, it should be a dog" is where people are saying "if you don't like it, don't play it".
I realise that I come across as being quite
heated opinionated, and that's because I am (and I apologise as such). One of my core philosophies as a human being is to give people the total independence to do whatever they want to do, so this subject rubs me the wrong way right from the start so it is only expected that I get quite passionate about this.
