Mod portal wishlist Mk XIV
Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2018 1:35 pm
A lot of this isn't new but just to re-register some of the issues.
- Discussions absolutely need notifications of new threads (at the very least) and probably replies to threads, for the mod owner (at the very least). Otherwise the discussion area is just a burden and an option to turn it off completely would be welcome instead.
- Colour scheme for the discussion area is poor - I can barely read the dark grey text on a dark grey background.
- There needs to be more finesse than the binary choices for listing order of "Recently updated" and "Most downloaded". Otherwise the same old ho-hum mods are going to stay top of the hill forever in a perpetual feedback loop, which is boring for players and discouraging for new modders. A "Trending" option (mods which have an unusually high recent download rate compared to past history) or simply "Most downloaded this month" option etc. should be a pretty easy fix for that. A related issue: there are one or two folkks out there who are beyond prolific with mod uploads, to the point where it's pretty much spam, uploading tens and tens of (in my opinion) very low quality stuff which attracts little interest, drowning out genuinely interesting finds. If people persist in spamming the portal then a rating system (tick box thumbs-up, star rating etc.) would be useful.
- The mod portal should be able to read the zip files' change logs. It's an unnecessary task to have to publish changes in two or three places.
- In the game client, we need more granular control over which mods get updated. Furthermore, it would be a lot better if we could see the change log of an impending update before it's downloaded and then use that to make the decision to update individual mods. For example, the battery icon just changed in the 0.16 development branch, but if I upload a 0.16 version of my mod with altered assets to match, people who are still using 0.16 stable will "accidentally" be forced to update to a mod which doesn't match their game yet, and have no way of knowing that this was going to happen - unless they minimise the game and scrutinise the mod portal manually, for every mod that might be updated.
- Discussions absolutely need notifications of new threads (at the very least) and probably replies to threads, for the mod owner (at the very least). Otherwise the discussion area is just a burden and an option to turn it off completely would be welcome instead.
- Colour scheme for the discussion area is poor - I can barely read the dark grey text on a dark grey background.
- There needs to be more finesse than the binary choices for listing order of "Recently updated" and "Most downloaded". Otherwise the same old ho-hum mods are going to stay top of the hill forever in a perpetual feedback loop, which is boring for players and discouraging for new modders. A "Trending" option (mods which have an unusually high recent download rate compared to past history) or simply "Most downloaded this month" option etc. should be a pretty easy fix for that. A related issue: there are one or two folkks out there who are beyond prolific with mod uploads, to the point where it's pretty much spam, uploading tens and tens of (in my opinion) very low quality stuff which attracts little interest, drowning out genuinely interesting finds. If people persist in spamming the portal then a rating system (tick box thumbs-up, star rating etc.) would be useful.
- The mod portal should be able to read the zip files' change logs. It's an unnecessary task to have to publish changes in two or three places.
- In the game client, we need more granular control over which mods get updated. Furthermore, it would be a lot better if we could see the change log of an impending update before it's downloaded and then use that to make the decision to update individual mods. For example, the battery icon just changed in the 0.16 development branch, but if I upload a 0.16 version of my mod with altered assets to match, people who are still using 0.16 stable will "accidentally" be forced to update to a mod which doesn't match their game yet, and have no way of knowing that this was going to happen - unless they minimise the game and scrutinise the mod portal manually, for every mod that might be updated.