Big NOPE…
EDIT: Also ANOTHER ONE.
I knew the Witch Hunt would go on.
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And they already have. All of those mods are fine. No further discussion needed.
A) Low effort and all it takes still wasn’t enough to make it worthwhile for VT2 Sanctioning to work.
B) What extreme cases? There are no extreme cases.
C) It doesn’t affect them. The only mod that affects others is the soundbite For The Emperor and naked rejects.
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They’ve never actually addressed any of them other than certain features of FTD and the Gas Outlines mod when asked, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Maybe some other cases they also made a definite statement, but they’ve certainly not ever said “all the mods currently on the nexus are fine to use” or anything like this. To begin with, Fatshark is not affiliated nor in control of what’s on the nexus. I’m not sure where this sentiment comes from that because it’s on the nexus, it’s fine.
A) VT2 sanctioning is very different from what I proposed, please don’t conflate them.
B) For example, loves me not online functionality, the Always Outlines mod, or the Always First Attack mod. The latter more concretely is not on the nexus anymore, but I still see it ingame from time to time and I report these players. I don’t actually know if my reports do anything. Fatshark never actually gave any info on wether or not it’s fine.
C) When I see someone lawnmower hundreds of mobs per second at clearly non intentional attack speeds, then it does affect my game. It’s a coop game, we all fight the same enemies. If someone exploits or uses such a mod to kill many of them very quick, it does affect me.
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I want mods to stay as is I guess, because I don’t want to restrict people in what they can do.
But to be fair, people playing with certain mods which give a clear advantage (spidey sense) or change the goal of the game (scoreboard) should not influence vanilla player’s experience. Maybe they should give each player who uses mods a tag in the lobby (modded) and maybe you should see name of the mods everyone in the lobby uses, so you can decide if you want to play with those people or not. There’s certainly a tech for that in the game/modded tools, just pull the names of the mods from the menu where you turn them on and off.
You want to use mods that give you info which others do not share with you? Then prepare to share your own info. You really don’t think spidey sense or healthbars aren’t cheating for most players? Okay, but everyone in the game will see that you use it.
I don’t want my experience to be influenced by third party tools, I don’t want score chasers in a co-op game, I don’t want people who use borderline cheats in a game where skill expression is one of the most important things.
They have a right to play with the mods, and I have my right to enjoy the vanilla DT experience with slight QOL mods or without any mods at all.
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They gave very clear rules when modding started and all the mods currently available stick to those rules.
In the entire history of Darktide modding, there were 4 notable exceptions that did not adhere to the rules:
- Underwear mod. This mod’s distribution is clamped down on, but it isn’t outright banned.
- Free paid cosmetics mod. Apparently there is a way to manipulate the shop with LUA code. Forbidden and you won’t find it anywhere.
- For The Emperor mod breaks the guideline by making your character play the voice clips for other players, too. But it was greenlit specifically by Fatshark and they even recorded the “For The Emperor” voicelines themselves for jokes and giggles.
- That one cheaty weapon-swap mod, that allowed insanely fast attack times. It was up for about 2 days and then Fatshark fixed the game itself by having a minimum wait time between attacks / weapon swaps. That broke the mod and prevented it from working.
If I missed any other cases you’re free to name them. But those 4 instances are the only ones I’m aware of, that fell outside the modding restrictions set by Fatshark (must not disturb other players, must not break monetization, must not break TOS).
A) Perhaps, but this is what it will devolve into. What you need to understand is that once a company deems something low-priority or even mid-priority, it can be there on their to-do list for years. I work in B2B sales, I see it on the daily. Even matters of acute importance can get pushed back to foreverland. So any extra step of work should be avoided, always.
B) Dunno about always first attack, but the other two are clearly fine, else they wouldn’t be around anymore or would have been patched. Although “loves me, loves me not” does have abuse potential.
C) Yeah, as I said. That was up 2 days or so and worked by exploiting the lack of delay between weapon swaps. Once the secret was out it was patched immediately. Not your standard modding situation for this game. It was a one off clearly.
I suggested such a “purity” system to gpk in a previous thread, but I don’t think he was interested. I very much doubt that FS would bother to implement this into the core game, but I do believe there’s a possibility that the DMF maintainers would at least consider adding some kind of self-reporting system if there was actually a significant number of individuals who wanted it (and someone like gpk, who can code, did the work to implement it).
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Well, my whole point is that I don’t either and that nobody does. I just wish they would be direct when questioned. I get your reference to sanctioning in VT2, but it’s very different when all they have to say “No, this affects players, report people who use it” and then they’ll have a few cases of that in their tickets.
Like to begin with, a lot of the recurring theme of these threads is
this affects me!
nuh uh!
yeah huh!
But why can’t Fatshark just not say if it’s an acceptable level of impact or not? Why does the community have to go with, you have to admit, slightly nebulous TOS? It states
But as we just had our exchange, it became clear that neither of us actually know for sure if Always First Attack falls under that or not. They need to be more clear on these things, both for the benefit of people who feel bothered by mods they perceive as cheaty, AND players who want to use those mods.
As that’s a bit of an outdated example you could obviously apply this entire argument to anything similar that’s up right now (such as the staff light attack spam macro, which is still on the nexus as of right now - does that mean it’s fine despite being the same thing as always first attack conceptually, which was removed?) or something that may arise in the future.
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Because it’s working. If FS was getting a stupid amount of reports about cheaters in the game, they’d maybe reassess their modding policy. But as of ~2 weeks ago, we know that they continue to maintain that it’s not possible to wrest control of modding away from people without anti-cheat and they still believe anti-cheat would cause more harm than good.
EDIT: As for Always Attack First: the first version of the mod, which has been showcased by exactly 1 (so far as I’ve seen) Reddit post was replaced with a version that wasn’t so abusive within a couple of days of release, based on feedback in the modding Discord. I don’t know why or when it was eventually removed entirely from Nexus, but the Reddit post came weeks after the “fixed” version of the mod. My assumption is that the creator didn’t want people to edit the “fixed” version to (quite trivially) enable this abusive behavior. But I don’t really know. At any rate, people abusing stuff like this should be reported, because they are a tiny tiny tiny portion of players.
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My issue is just that I don’t know if that’s actually the case. Does Fatshark act on reports for that? Cause I sure have never received an answer for anything like that. That’s really my main issue. Even if it’s working for them, you have to admit it’s a bad equilibrium for anyone who doesn’t want to play with that sort of thing.
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It is FS policy not to respond to reports for any reason, including racism and direct personal abuse. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it is.
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The notable difference though that makes it different for me is that racism is very certainly and unmistakably against the TOS. The always first attack mod not so much. In my proposed mode of operations, Fatshark would actually reply to the question on wether this is fine or not by either saying yes or no. Then I know wether I should bother reporting and I will assume the reports are actioned. If not, the behavior persists and I’m probably not going to keep bothering trying to do something about it. It’s just not really a good circumstance.
Imagine if the Darktide TOS just said
Chat messages that affect other players negatively are against TOS and are actioned
You would probably want them to come out and say what actually counts as affecting other players negatively. The TOS actually does that, in satisfactory detail outlining player conduct rules. It’s not actually up to interpretation, it says racism is against those rules.
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If you have reported such behaviors then you know they won’t communicate on what they will do.
However, you receive an answer. Here what you receive:
Here I reported someone for insulting an other player. But it fall under same topic, called “Report a player”
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I’m aware of this reply, but it doesn’t really solve the problem that persists from having 0 official word on wether that particular mod is fine or not.
I realize I wasn’t being clear upon re-reading, I didn’t really mean to say that there’s no answer at all. Obviously there’s that automated reply. What I want an answer for, and where Fatshark doesn’t provide one, is telling me wether or not that mod is actually against TOS or not. I don’t actually have any way to know if I’m wasting my time with the report or not.
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Yes, but meanwhile…
If it is on Nexus, then it is fine.
My problem is different. I would like to know what are the mods that are forbidden. That, we don’t have the list as they are removed from Nexus.
But the ones authorized, we have the list. Check Nexus website. All mods that are released for a long time are validated for sure.
Yeah I’ll agree it’s easier to tell that a mod is generally tolerated that way. I still think it’s imperfect. As the party that actually takes action (or won’t take action) I do think Fatshark has an actual responsibility to communicate, at least when asked about a particular mod, wether that one is fine or not.
I’ve been talking from the angle of “I queue a game, and someone in my game uses the always first attack/warp attack spam/etc mod”. But this is relevant for the people who want to use these mods too. Say I have that mod, and I want to use it. It’s on the nexus now after 2 days. Am I allowed to? What if it goes away after I downloaded it because it’s no longer acceptable? Can I still use the mod? Fatshark doesn’t really communicate a thing.
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Yes, the problem is they won’t do it, Fatshark because it’s not a priority and because they don’t want to stir the wasps’ nest, and modders because of their pride and complete lack of self-awareness that they’re sometimes playing with an advantage, and not everyone is fine with that.
They can come up with 1000 reasonings on why they use certain mods, hide behind cheeky words like “convenience”, but it’s not a singleplayer game and your personal playground, it’s a multiplayer co-op where everyone tries to enjoy the same game and not some twisted version of it.
Of course nobody wants to share their personal info on which mods they use-- shame that every person playing with scoreboard is completely fine with them seeing everyone else’s stats and playing the pointless competition game.
People at Fatshark behind modded policies are honestly a bunch cowards, and I’m saying this as someone who really, really likes the game and has supported it since day 1. They’re scared to alienate talented modders and modded players, many of who probably also buy premium cosmetics, but they just can’t bring themselves to go back on their modding policy officially by stating that from now on every mod is a fair game, even wallhacks and cheats.
In my opinion, if they just want to keep everything as is with total freedom on how you mod the game, it’s the least they can do-- admit that their policy of “no mods that influence other players” is a bunch of manure that serves no purpose.
So yeah, the current heated debate on the topic of mods is entirely Fatshark’s fault. They want to stay in good graces of both modded and unmodded players, so they’d rather fuel debates with their vagueness than make a statement that settles it once and for all.
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Naked was patched out.
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No, the language is as vague as the modding policy imo. Here is an excerpt from the language:
is grossly harmful, racially or ethnically objectionable, disparaging, blasphemous, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, vulgar or offensive
Just like “cheats that ruin my matches” this is in the eye of the beholder and, barring some hidden system for tracking infractions, it is the duty of those who find content objectionable to report it. And it is FS’s duty to address it as they see fit. Just like mods. I’d refer to your “gaggle of bros” argument where no one gets offend.
Ultimately, I don’t think there really many people abusing mods and there aren’t really many people so offended by mods, and so aware of their use, that they report much mod-related abuse to FS.
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I don’t agree with this, and I’ve personally stopped using several mods I thought gave me an advantage I thought verged on cheesy.
I did. I don’t care. I’m not ashamed. Neither are the streamers who use mods. Nor the people who gpk bemoans posting their clutches and great gameplay vids on Reddit.
Fully disagree. I think the modding policy in DT is one of the most trusting and best things FS has done. If nothing else proves they care about people enjoying their games, moving away from the busted sanctioning system to what we have now is proof positive in my mind.
EDIT: to be real clear here, I think there definitely could have been (and maybe still could be?) repercussions for FS allowing mods to the degree that they do. A dev saying in public (even if that’s on the public modding Discord and not in these barely-tread forums) that they think the current situation is fine, even though they know wall hacks and aimbots exist, because the alternative is anti-cheat and that’s worse is…the opposite of cowardly.
The policy explicitly says “direct” in it, and I think that language is very deliberate. And I think it is very true that no mods on Nexus directly impact other players…except for FTE, which I pray isn’t removed.
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