The State of WU Modders and Modding

[WittleBunnBun 149]

I am really curious to hear from modders what they are thinking and feeling. After the devs announced no more development on their end, everyone was happily saying WU was given to the modders, but I've been looking and I don't hear any modders celebrating this new found freedom. 

 

I host my own server, and depend heavily on modders for new content, so I am invested in the feelings of the modding community. I am curious if modders are planning on continue making mods for WU, or if the general thought is "no, its a loss cause".  

 

 

[Ayluin 170]

Right. So I am not here to speak for everyone, but I look at it this way. 

1.9 Release April 2019
New Beta/End of Life Announced November 2019

 

Date of this thread: April 2020

 

Beta has been in beta for five months. Radio silence about it after numerous complaints from modders about the way the beta was packaged. I do not anticipate to ever see the new beta materialize into an actual release. Big enough to admit that I could be wrong about that, maybe two minutes after I post this it will go live. The obvious focus of Wurm is to promote the Online Retail and Steam development. It's all fine and well to say we are putting WU in the modders hands publicly, but then sit on your ass and do nothing to materialize that for 5 months. The consistent optimism of hopefully they'll do the right thing from people who have not actually watched mod after mod be ripped off and pushed into the retail game, watching former staff get booted for not falling in line or having an opinion of their own, and seeing long-time modders stop publishing things because there is no point of writing code that could go bad at any given point when they do another 1.9 push it out with maybe 12-24 hour notice and/or having their mods ripped off and pushed into retail is the probable collective reasoning why modders aren't publishing code anymore.

 

At this point, and it is not an attack on you or anyone, but if you want to run a server and have dope mods, download IntelliJ, decompile 1.9, learn through the already published code, and keep your gits private. There is no benefit to making them public anymore. If you are even more paranoid, start cloning gits for when the authors remove their repos entirely. I cannot speak on behalf of certain authors, but there is a whole hell of a lot of 'new features' in retail that are just WU mods and since they gave us the finger on the situation dumping further support, I cannot imagine being one of the authors who actually made those mods public and now are being told sorry, we are done with you. 

 

As stated, I cannot speak for other modders, but given the absolute decline and almost deadness in the WU modding discord since end of life/beta announcement was criticized, aside from long-time modders who will help point you in the right direction but not write the mod for you I would not consider it a lost cause, just something you will have to spend time to learn on your own. Furthermore, you do not even see updates on popular repositories on github, let alone new forum posts. This is not to say there are not improved versions of existing mods or mods that servers keep private to keep their servers unique; i.e Sklotopolis has always had a pretty straight-forward policy to keep their mods to themselves, which I do not disagree with or criticize, Riviera implementing a Rift mod, or expanding on the VoteReward mod by implementing voting tiers for how often you vote and keeping that private which I do not disagree with or criticize, or any of the many mods that exist on old servers that are not public anywhere. These are just examples that come to mind off the top of my head. There is no value in publishing public mods so the retail game who dropped support can rip off more content while they have not given anything back in a year which honestly broke more than it added, and despite immediate and numerous bug reports prior to the merge with whatevercorp owns Wurm now, were ignored and laughably had to be re-posted when the beta came out and the issues were still not fixed.

 

That is my opinion, if readers take offense that are WU server owners I apologize, otherwise if you take offense I do not apologize and do not care. 

Edited April 20, 2020 by Ayluin

[bdew 2,462]

Personally i'm pretty much done with wurm. I can't work on mods anymore, just thinking about wurm and codeclub and their betrayal makes me angry and takes all the fun out of it.

Yet another game killed by corporate greed and mismanagement, RIP.

[Tenniel 57]

I'm enjoying modding more than ever, personally. It's just a hobby, I don't do it for profits or any such thing, just because I enjoy it. I've also found the removal of stressful updates every half year a relief. I've actually also started working on optimizing and fixing a lot of bugs in the WU core classes, but that's a very long term project. So for me things are going great, slowly but forward. I'm open to collaborative projects with other developers, but also work 40h weeks and my schedule doesn't permit helping server hosts who wants some fix for their server. But I wish everyone well, of course!

Edited May 1, 2020 by Tenniel