Oblivion talk:Recommended Mods

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Contents 1 Getting Started 2 Another List Idea 3 Wrye's Cool Video List 4 Aelius' List 5 Proposing my list 6 Another List Proposal

[edit] Getting Started

Mod recommendation lists are fairly important -- players moving past the novice (modless!) stage want some advice to help guide them through the huge number of mods that are available to them.

As a result, mod lists become well known and powerful resources in their own rights. Experienced modders know that making it onto the leading list of recommended mods will likely drive a x10 number of users to their mod. Which means that the subjective biases of mod lists creators can have a huge impact on the success of modders. But of course, mod recommendations are inherently subjective.

So ideally there should be several different well known mod lists. That means that the lists still have a "best of" filter applied to them, but that room is left for different sets of standards.

Going forward, it would certainly be useful to have more lists -- I'm just not familiar enough with others to list them. Possibly such lists could be hosted here -- but if so, my inclination is that the list should start somewhere else (e.g., on the forums) and then if popular, move or be copied here, and be somewhat "owned" by the creator/editor(s). I think that a good list will needs a dedicated effort by a small set of editors. (I.e., I suspect that our own Oblivion:Must Have Mods list is too open.) (For my prior suggestion on this topic, see: Proposal: Recommended Mod Lists.)

--Wrye 21:58, 14 April 2007 (EDT)

Nice page! I added a few more good lists here and updated my entry. --Dev akm 14:06, 5 July 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Another List Idea

Another idea that came to mind for a way to create a list of recommended mods is to have a page that summarizes mods that are popular with UESP editors. The basic idea is that any UESP editor could add info on mods that they regularly use, and the page would then summarize how many editors use various mods. It wouldn't provide any details on why editors like certain mods, just a count. Readers would then be able to scan through, see which mods are used by a lot of editors, and use that as one starting point for mods they might want to look into.

One reason this came to mind is that I've noticed several editors posting mod lists on their user pages. It seems like that information would be much more useful if collected into one central list. This would provide a way for anyone at UESP to contribute to a community-created recommended mod list, but it would also reduce some of the issues of biased lists brought up by Wrye.

To prevent someone from "stuffing the ballot box" I'd suggest that only registered editors should be allowed to vote. Also, I think that setting up some type of template to take care of the details would probably be necessary. My first thought is to set up a template so that the edited version of the page would look something like

 {{Mod Count | mod=Wrye's Awesome Mod
 |Wrye |Nephele |Ratwar |TheRealLurlock
 }}

 {{Mod Count | mod=Nephele's Useless Mod
 |Nephele
 }}
 

Which would then be translated by the template into something like:

Wrye's Awesome Mod: used by 4 editors
Nephele's Useless Mod: used by 1 editor

By having editors add their name to each mod they use it would make it easier to keep track of who has contributed and prevents problems with duplicate votes. But I don't think readers need to know the details, so the template would convert those names into a basic count.

Since I don't use mods myself, I can't do too much other than provide the idea and set up a template. Does anyone else think this is worth pursuing? If there is interest, having a few people provide me with their mod lists, so I could have a starting point for creating the template, would be useful to get the ball rolling. --Nephele^Talk 13:52, 19 April 2007 (EDT)

Thanks, but... I think that's probably not that useful. It would take a lot of edits and names for the rating to be useful, so that's a fair amount of work and a mild system drain. Besides, that sort of info is already provided (in spades) by mod download sites. E.g., go to Tessource, look for most popular mods. That's definitely a useful measure -- and based on actual downloads, so it's pretty accurate. --Wrye 14:30, 19 April 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Wrye's Cool Video List

Okay, another experiment. Here's a recommendation list that I would have liked to see somewhere -- cool videos. Some of these are just awesome -- (if nothing else, the dominoes are very cool.) First problem is that it's not actually recommending mods (falls under broader category of Oblivion Recommendations). Second problem -- it's by me, so I can't be counted as objective on this one. However, I would like this to be treated the same way as what I suggested earlier for mod recommendations lists. E.g., a limited editor page, where the editorship can be passed on.

Question: What namespace should it go in? "User" doesn't make sense if editorship might be passed on. "Oblivion" is a possibility, but I think a better choice is the so far unused "Review" namespace?

Again, what I'm trying to encourage is a few more good recomendation lists. But for this list, obviously I'm biased, so I'll leave it up to fellow admins and editors: stay or go? (And no, I won't hold it against you if you thumbs down it.) --Wrye 02:07, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

Moved it to Review namespace. --Wrye 20:04, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Aelius' List

The article mentions two problems in regards to Aelius' lists: 1) he's not playing, and 2) he doesn't read readmes if they're long and complex. Since that has come into question in an edit, here are some supporting quotes from his OOO, Francesco's and MMM topic.

• On Not Playing the Game
  • "I haven't played Oblivion in almost a year, I don't plan on playing it anytime soon either. And since I know what FranOOOMMM does, I know that I would not want it, so there's not much reason to even read about." -- Aelius
  • "Hehe, I get that a lot. Honestly, I don't really need to constantly play the game in order to get an idea of what mods are needed. I've played the game over 200 hours (though, suprisingly, I've never left the Imperial City island, except for mod testing purposes) so I know about the level scaling, and all that. Albeit, my experience in magic is poor. I've never casted a spell or used a scroll in my game, not even for mod testing." --Aelius
• On Not Reading Readmes
  • "I find that many readmes are mostly "New in version x.xx: ..." Or "New features" or something that's useful only to those who have been following the mod. It's hard for people new to the mod to find information about the whole mod, not just a new version. Martigen's readme would be one of those." --Aelius
  • "Because reading a readme incorrectly can cause a lot of undesired misinformation. It's better to get someone to put it in terms I can understand rather than risk confusion. If you don't want to spend time answering my questions, well... no one is forcing you." --Aelius
  • "I don't think you're hearing me, I'm not saying I don't read the readme, I'm saying I don't bother reading and confusing myself with readmes that are too complicated for someone new to the mod to understand." -- Aelius

That forum topic itself was a demonstration of his failure to play and read readmes -- he just didn't understand some of the basic ways that modding (e.g., leveled list merging) had changed since he had last played (a year ago). After this came out on the topic, there was a fair amount of irritation from modders that they were having to explain stuff to him "in person" that was already covered in depth in their readmes (which he wasn't reading).

Now, despite that, I regard his list as the number one Oblivion mod list. He works very hard at reviewing posted mods, and collecting opinions, and he does ask questions and is moderately open to suggestions and explanations on the forums. And yet, there's no getting away from the fact that not playing and not reading readmes when they get too complex is going to severely qualify the quality of his recommendations.

Of course, if he has since started playing and/or started reading all readmes despite complexity since, then article should be changed -- but I see no evidence of that yet. --Wrye 19:01, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

Response from Aelius in ESF forum discusison:

"This certainly implies that I don't get any information about some mods before adding them to my list, but you failed to mention a key point. If a readme is, in essence, incomprehensible to me, I may decide not to waste my time reading something over and over again trying to understand what doesn't make sense. So instead of wasting my time reading that readme, I would likely choose to contact the author and have him explain the mod to me. Under no circumstance do I not find out what a mod does, whether through a readme or through contacting an author. Dev_akm did just that...

"So while you're right in that I don't always read readmes, I do get the information. Whether that's from the readme or the author himself. So to the end user who reads my list, he is getting the information, regardless of how I got the information, understand?" --Aelius

I've clarified text of article in response. This still comes down to not reading readmes, but it's true that he does offset it to a fair degree. --Wrye 16:16, 21 April 2007 (EDT)

---

This has come up again in again in another edit. While this page is a bit different in making some judgements about mod lists, if you have questions about those judgments, you should rais them here. Re the "FUD" (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) comment. There's no fear nor uncertainty or doubt. Aelius states pretty clearly that he's not playing the game. The main factual question raised recently was to what degree he was reading the readmes. That's discussed here, and also here. This statement "Aelius' list is well worth using, but its recommendations or failure to recommend certain mods should be considered in light of his limited play experience." is reasonable summation of the impact of that. If you disagree argue it here. --Wrye 15:33, 26 April 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Proposing my list

This is just a suggestion, which you are more than free to ignore. I started my Recommended Mods page (http://princess.elricm.net/RecommendedMods.htm) because of the sheer volume of topics on the subject, and because at the time there wasn't a list of just a dozen or so mods that could be downloaded by a novice user who could know that they had been tested and worked together without fighting. All the existing lists were, in my mind, either too long and confusing, or very out of date - the same was certainly true for Morrowind. Anyway, I still suggest my list every time someone asks, and continue to update it and use the very mods I recommend. -- princess_stomper

Hmmm, I'm afraid the competition from the other lists is pretty fierce, princess. I think that you need to pretty much be obsessive about list building and/or come up with a different themed approach that's very well done in itself to compete with others. I understand point about smaller lists, but for that it's probably better to have a larger list and then include a "best of" section in it as several of the lists do.--Wrye 19:38, 30 August 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Another List Proposal

I've just started a new list on my user page. I was wondering if I could add my list here. Its quite short now, but I spend alot of timing playing mods, I started using mods about a week ago, and have about 70 of 'em installed. Please reply via my talk page, thanx.-Relic Kylias 07:06, 28 March 2008 (EDT)