Mod portal "favorit" feature

[ramyalexis]

TL;DR

Add Like/Favorite button/property to the mods in mod portal/game

What ?

1. Mod portal.
Should have like/favorite checkbox/button when you logged in so you can track what mods do you like. You can have your own collection of useful mods right in the portal for future use (like most download-recently updated-your favorites tab) and not stored in memory/notepad
2. Game mod install window
Should have new tab named Favorites. So whenever you start fresh you can immediately install favorite mods from one place and not search them through the mod portal/saved games/notepad or whatever places you store your mod information

Why ?

Just better track of your favorite mods composition. Looks like a lot of people have "favorite" mods they like to play with even distribution, helmod and so forth. The number could be somewhat large to track it inside your head. It would be nice if site will store that for you and there is already mod interface presented. Something like factorio prints have favorite button. That said in result you will have your own collection with simple interface in-game to install it.

[FuryoftheStars]

May not be a bad idea. I also see a 3rd benefit to this if the stat was publicly visible: better tracking of popularity.

Number of downloads and trend have their uses, but they've got their issues. IE, download count, if you have a mod that only 100 people have been downloading and it's updated 10 times, the total download count shows 1000. Only way to see the breakdown is to go to the mod portal web page and then to the downloads tab. And this doesn't take into account mods that seldom update and have a lot of people download to try them out (maybe something about the title, pictures, or description really peaks a lot of people's interest), but then they didn't like it (discussions may not give a sense of that), or mods that have had a lot of people that downloaded and liked it but then simply haven't played the game again since the last mod update, etc (does the mod portal filter out repeat downloads? (Edit: Yes, it does. Thanks Pi-C for the confirmation.)).

Not that making the number of people who've marked a mod as favorite public is perfect either (in cases were a modder changes the mod that many may not like, but some are no longer playing to unfavorite it), but I feel like it's downsides are less/less impactful than the current total downloads and trend stats.

[Pi-C]

(does the mod portal filter out repeat downloads?).

Screenshot at 2022-05-20 19-30-23.png (148.62 KiB) Viewed 2583 times

[FuryoftheStars]

(does the mod portal filter out repeat downloads?).

Screenshot at 2022-05-20 19-30-23.png

Thanks for the confirmation!

[Anachrony]

IE, download count, if you have a mod that only 100 people have been downloading and it's updated 10 times, the total download count shows 1000.

That's no longer how it works. That's how it used to work. They changed it near the end of last year so that it's now counting unique downloads in the total downloads fields. Easily confirmed, since if you look at downloads per version and compare it to the amount that total downloads increases in the same time, the total downloads will go up way more slowly, especially after a recent update. But downloads prior to that time weren't changed, so older mods still have large non-unique download totals from the old system. Note that this is distinct from the statistics graph, which is still counting downloads by the same user for different versions as separate downloads. The downloads per version were changed to not count duplicates from the same user, which means that presumably the old data (such as total downloads) does still include repeat downloads.

One effect of the changes is that old mods already had a huge advantage over new mods, but now it's unassailable, since most of their total downloads were under the old system with much bigger numbers. Even if they only had 20 or so updates over their lifetime, that's 20x the downloads a new mod can likely get.
And the most common way for new players to get a sense of what mods are important is to sort by most downloaded, so the same old mods will always have a large systemic advantage.

The "trending" sorting method has some obvious flaws in how it's calculated, leading to big swings from the top of the list to the bottom of the list for popular mods, often in ways that seem almost arbitrary compared to the statistics graph.

The "popular" method seems like an attempt to correct some of the flaws of other methods, but whatever it's trying to do, I think it perhaps went too far in the other direction. For example, I suspect it's trying to compensate for the issue that you mentioned of mods having a lot of updates and a userbase downloading each update, by essentially dividing the number of downloads by the number of updates, or something along those lines. However, that is flawed in ways that are perhaps even worse than the problem it was originally trying to solve. If mod A and mod B are roughly as popular as one another in terms of real user engagement, but mod A has updates only once per year, and mod B has updates twice per month, then mod A is going to have way more downloads per update than mod B. Not every user downloads every single update even when they're actively using the mod. Some may just not check, while others may actively avoid it for fear of destabilizing a playthrough. There's going to be a natural trickle of new downloads over time for both of them, but mod A is going to have 24x as many of the new downloads reflected in their single update. Longer periods between updates mean more downloads per update. A simple formula could easily overcompensate for the phenomenon of existing users re-downloading updates and create an even worse problem.

[Qon]

A good idea. I can use bookmarks in my browser, but when I then install the mods I prefer to do so through the in game mod manager to get dependencies immediately and toggle mods on/off that don't fit together with new ones I test and so on. Now I have to search for all mods again in game client after finding them in the browser first.

There are many mods I want to keep track of that I don't yet want installed. Potential installs for next playthrough, multiple forks of a mod I am using, mods I might get inspiration from for my own modding but don't need to download and test now etc. Having the vastly differing reasons for getting mods in the installed tab would clutter it up and make it unusable. I already can't really find things in it without ctrl f and it's just 50-100 installed at any moment if I keep it pruned and uninstall often.

[ssilk]

Again a sign how useful it would be to have different sets of mods on your computer. And just need to switch between them.

[ramyalexis]

Implemented a while ago.
Yarrrr!