Simple Statement… Moderators for the Mods, as the Title says.
Vermintide 2 is a great game, a load of fun to play and mess around with and even more fun to mod and tweak the settings of, but unlike Vermintide 1, Vermintide 2 has its mods “Sanctioned” and “Unsanctioned”, meaning that many or most so far are not useable within the “Official” Realm of the game, and can only get there by the allowance of Fatshark’s crew. This narrows down the amount of mods and the lifespan of mods to when it is convenient for Fatshark to allow them through. Thats why I ask/suggest that Fatshark creates a group of trusted members of the community that test and approve mods for “Official” gameplay.
A group like this would obviously have to be monitored and trusted by Fatshark themselves, but it would allow a select few, who were trustworthy to have the rights of putting mods into “Official” gameplay. The group would also need restrictions and mods would have to be voted upon so that “hacks” or “cheats” wouldn’t slip through.
This is my personal opinion, if anyone wants to add to it or to agree or to disagree, feel free, and if anyone wishes to contact me, my steam profile is at http://steamcommunity.com/id/gvasvdb. I would love to serve the Vermintide 2 Community as a Moderator and am eager to hear what Fatshark and others think of “my” idea.
How can you choose a trustworthy one out of their company for doing some probably unpaid work? I think right now they don’t have time, and the risk of messing up it’s too much high (and having to handle it, would mean more resources).
So I understand your good intentions, but I disagree.
My understanding is that, at the moment, FS simply can’t administer a whitelist for officially sanctioned mods. They’ve announced that they hope to have that in place “this summer”.
Once whitelisting is in place, I’m pretty sure (based on conversations with devs) that which mods make it onto the whitelist will be up for discussion, and FS will be listening to the community. The goal of officially sanctioned mods is to provide a zone where unmodded players and modded players can coexist peacefully and progress normally through the grind game while allowing players to install mods to customize their gameplay experience.
Again, where exactly the line gets drawn between “mod is merely helpful” and “mod provides too large an advantage over vanilla players” is going to be a bit fluid and up for discussion.
That makes sense, and it’ll be good we’ll have input. If no one has a problem with a mod that doesn’t fundamentally change gameplay, it’ll be more acceptable for whitelisting, whereas one that’s divisive is less likely. That sounds good.
Frankly, I’m just still super happy that the game will allow so much modding. Most game makers nowadays really don’t want their players to have so much access to content.
As mentioned, whitelisting/sanctioning will be coming soon and Robin (the Technical Director and dev currently focused on modding) appears to be making good progress towards getting that system up and running. Last week, it became possible for modders to mark their mods as “applying” for sanctioned status.
On the last stream, Robin also mentioned the idea that it might be possible for some modders to gain a sort of “trusted” status whereby their mods could be auto-sanctioned. Remains to be seen if that’ll happen – there are definitely some issues involved with that idea – but I think it speaks to FS’s attitude towards mods. They understand the longevity that mods can bring to the game, and they very much want to build a strong modding community.
Your idea of a team of mod-moderators is interesting, and I could even imagine something like that happening, but I reckon there are technical concerns, and possibly legal liability issues, surrounding that. Fingers crossed though!