Well its pretty much this: Ever since this game was born, it was moddable, you could change audio and music ingame or tinker with the cfg file to get potato settings if you pc was garbage, and later on modders discovered that you could mod textures and models ingame, to the point of certain “websites” giving Better and even higher poly versions of exiting player and creature models a la Morrowind’s Mackom’s BetterBodies/Roberts DMRA(which works on the Online Oblivion client since the engine was made for online games) and Oblivion’s own Oblivion Character overhaul.
But due to years of engine changes and even rewrites, people went on to use launchers to use those texture and graphic mods made by the community, which brought problems and even a banwave months ago which blizzard HAD to Undo, because Most of the players were using it to fix some of the stuff, like the ugly male nelf, goblin or worgen bodies or even low res vanilla armors.
which brings us to this question, Should blizzard finally accept let players work for them as other communities does with their mods? you can pretty much do this In the most recent Warcraft 3 patches with external file loading which causes no harm since its a skin mod like Quake 2 and such.
Or continue as it is, with most of the Art team maybe butturt by someone who did maybe a better job than them post WoD and later on in BfA, and still enforces this rule?
Here’s where the problem is. How does Blizzard ensure that the external files being loaded are, in fact, harmless? Do they run off of the assumption that no-one’s going to cross the line and allow everything? If so, what happens when they’re inevitably proven wrong?
Do they spend the resources to vet everything and host community-made resources? Is it really worth it for them, as a business, to do that?
I’m not exactly a computer wiz, but doesn’t opening up client-side modding potentially open the door to infectious malware somehow making its way into the code or otherwise affecting other users?
Even Dark Souls 3 couldn’t stop its community from hacking bad items into the game and infecting any player who happened to pick it up, getting those innocent guys hit with the banhammer.
Even without it causing security issues. Not everyone who used it was a weeb that just wanted nudity. People exploited it to make gathering nodes giant to spot them and farm them easier, among other things.
It would have to expose a very specific subset of carefully selected game components, which is a bigger can of worms than you might realize.
I remember back in AQ40 there was a client-side mod that turned the staircase at the start into a chicken, letting people walk right from Skeram to C’thun. That resulted in a well-deserved banwave.
Because Warcraft Model files Uses both M2, M3 model files, and textures are still BLP or TGA(Raw higher res default format), i mess up with modding for quake 2, and you can look at all of this on wowtools website.
Audio Files always used Ogg files for compression and better performance, war3 used wav uncompressed, and still uses it.
The most recent warcraft 3 patches now let players used external Model-texture and audio Files using the default folder files format, which never caused any harm to any multiplayer game that used it, including the most ancient of all which were the quake games that uses the same defaults.
its all ruse as i explained above, blizzard will rule out DLL files or modified executables. Stuff like Models, Textures and most older which is audio shouldn’t cause any problems.
In fact You can mod audio files ingame with the Sound folder, which people is doing ever since Cata when Blizzard Removed the Original Gun and other spell Sounds with weaker remakes.
Addons itself are Mods which uses the Interface folder to modify the game.
Again, Models and Textures should be OK since sounds and addons are too.
Which can be fixed with some Limitations or blizzard keeping it out of bounds, since the vanilla til WoD Node models are a trainwreck, compared to the animated ones from Legion and BfA.
again blizzard could work with the modding community about it, set rules about it.
This is correct. It’s similar to why browsers have been stripping away extension functionality lately: the modifications in question may be entirely innocuous, but they’re just as (if not more) likely to be malicious or cheaty in nature and there’s no good way to verify that which is which.
While I’m all for community modding in single player, or even some multiplayer games (Diablo 2 Open Battle Net for instance) - in games where balance is intended to be tightly controlled and exposure is universal…
Unless every such potential modification was vetted by Blizzard, there’d be no way to prevent abuse, and thus no way to maintain anything resembling an even playing field.
Blizzard would have to be willing to put the resources towards a vetting process, to that end, potential modders would have to probably pay a fee to have their changes stamped and approved. Some might be willing to do so, most probably wouldn’t, but I see no other way Blizzard could have both modding and maintain the game’s integrity.
I’m not against the notion, but I just don’t see it as realistic.
Yes, but this is mostly because of the new code language, which kills older stuff like flash and the late shockwave formats.
Older code is incompatible with new formats.
and you have shown no knowledge about it and this on the instated fearmongering by people who never modded or even learned about it.
it would be interesting if blizzard could make something like what Bethesda does with their own Modding website, and curate stuff, they even let CBBE bodies and armors being used by Xbox and PS4 users after fan pressure.
WoW’s case would be player made packs curated by them, as Higher res vanilla armors, Fixes to the model skeleton that they can’t do it and which exists in the wild alreadt, like the Clipping protruded shoulder problem that exists ever since Classic, male orcs being the biggest victim, followed by dwarves, if you ever played Wratch back then, All PVP warrior shoulder sets for Orcs always clipped in the left shoulder.
Blizzard can work with the community about curate all of it.
Imagine if one of the 1st curated ideas is Shem’s Judgement Armor remake, since he works as a artist for blizzard.
I’m not a programmer, but I believe it’s more complex than that. Add-ons use the LUA format which are sandboxed in a sense through the WoW API. Not to mention, Blizzard wants to maintain integrity over their product. Once you open up the client itself to all sorts of modding you have to start reviewing mods to make sure they don’t cause in-game issues, game crashes, etc.
Client side modding would only work if they came up what they consider acceptable models to change and how they can be changed. And the rest is off limits and changing them is just an instant ban.
Dawn of War games uses lua for modding, in fact, all of the Language Files and texts for DoWVanilla til Soulstorm use lua, which enabled Easier Translated Language mods and Crazier stuff like Ultimate Apocalypse.
Again, Blizzard can work with the community about curating this stuff, many fans are eager to do it, it may even serve as a way to find new talents to work at the company, it would be a bigger boost for them.
The communities you referenced, like Oblivion, are single player games. The only person possibly affected is one player. There’s no need for regulating multiplayer interactions because it’s not necessary.
Altering textures & models can alter hitboxes, changing how the game is played. This alters the game in potentially malicious ways.
In short, no. It’s their game and they can moderate it how they like. If you don’t like it, go elsewhere.
Or, OR blizzard could just add the option for HUGE BOOBS AND BOOTY. Also Blizz won’t because allowing the players to modify that kind of stuff just isn’t best practice.
