Please keep the model bans in place

Community General Discussion
46

The irony is Bethesda, or actually ZOS (who controls ESO), don’t allow model edits at all. It is hard coded into the game to be impossible to make.

Your game is given a checksum and if you edit any file you’re not allowed to touch your checksum won’t match and the game will refuse to launch. So if Blizzard is banning this change cause hackers are abusing it for other means the only sensible thing for them to do is to make a path for it to be okay to edit character specific textures. Or make it so that it’s impossible to launch the game with the changes in place period.

One or the other. This awkward middleground just adds confusion and leaves room for exploitation. Personally I’d be in favor of a WoW Workshop where CM’s and the player community can curate this sort of content but that would take a small bit of effort on their part.

I’m not sure where they’d find the funding for this with their record breaking multibillion dollar quarterly profits…

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47

it was a decent idea…kind of. Something for the people who are scared of the modding scene.

But but…how can we trust this mod? Stick to go to main mod authors who have likes and download numbers in the 10’s of thousands and general you are good.

My issue was it proved what I knew already. Game company management can ruin anything. They pulled in some of my fave mod authors (MA). Thing is these MA’s work in the club was, well…, not up the better and more fun standards of their independent work.

I don’t blame the MA’s. I know that was some idiot project manager going nope…not how we do this. Which is kind of why we used their work as independent MA’s. It made the game company’s work look bad lol.

48

What if you dont even know what these things do or where they come from, and get banned, then unbanned. I mean if you have never used them or even know how to go about using them or finding them, and get banned, what else could cause this coming up? Viruses? Malware?

49

How much bigger do you feel up on that soapbox? Grow up, homie. Blizzard doesn’t need you to tell them how to police the community in regards to the game client.

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50

if not scared of ban…i would use mods to get back in game assets.

Nightborne weapons assets from suramar guard? yes please

Night elf armour from dark shore BFA prelude/the lead up scenario to city attack in nazmir? Hell yes please.

But i am a good boy lol.

51

I’m more or less saying it’s a blessing in disguise that Blizzard isn’t Bethedsa cause Blizzard didn’t think to monetize modding unlike Bethedsa which they did with Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4.

Speaking of Fallout 4, Creation club is the reason why the game is still updating all the gosh darn time, and it keeps screwing up mods, most noticeably: f4se, which is needed in practically everything.

I would be in favor too of a WoW workshop, and maybe even a green light to edit… well armor pieces, skins and hairs colors. Only textures i would see. Maybe some light model editing (where you just hit checks to have certain model pieces show up) and ability to apply spec maps or etc.

The concept of paid mods was done terribly by Bethesda back in 2015 with steam workshop, not to mention the initial reaction to the video on creation club on 2017 was terrible, nobody asked for it, at least nobody i know. And to top it off Fallout 4 has a mod to block creation club news. Not to mention as it mentioned above, it screwed with modding. And then theirs Tod saying “it wouldn’t be paid mods, it would be “mini DLC’s”.”. To quote from Jim Sterling from his video on about the creation club, “it’s paid mods and microtransactions in a premium game, together at last!”.

By all means if you work hard on something and think you should be paid for it, even if it’s a modification to a game, go for it. Their some corporations that even make that their M.O. like Valve for example. And that Bethesda has a right to their games and do whatever they want with it. I just think what they implemented and tried to do was pretty terrible, in a company has a rap book of mistakes and sometimes deliberate terrible decisions.

And again, i like to stress that, I’m not saying i’m against the idea of paid mods, if the idea is implemented excellently, i wouldn’t begrudge it’s existence. Same thing with Fallout 76, being a multiplayer fallout with survival elements, the idea is nice… if Fallout 76 isn’t ungodly broken or hyped to hell where it started to become detrimental to the game, we wouldn’t be raking Bethedsa over the coals.

Using another game as example, The Sims (doesn’t matter which one) has a pretty darn large modding community, to a point where theirs even paid mods every now and then. Whether they are dubious in quality or given the greenlight by EA along they give their share or something like that, i’m not sure, but their done in a way where not only people don’t begrudge them for that, but might even look at that and saying “wow this is actually pretty good for 5 bucks, this is worth it” and will support that guy who made the said paid mod. People will support things worth buying if you give them things worth buying.

1 Like
52

It was a 180 day suspension, which is a bit minor. I can see that if they had other bans in place, then yes a perma ban would have worked out.

Now I know many people are going to play the ignorant card, which they very well might be, i just don’t buy it. You should know that using this non-supported part party app will get some sort of ban. It isn’t a mod which are supported by Blizz and readily available on multiple supported second / third party sites.

This is why I say that Blizz really needs to take a “No Third Party” stance on WoW. That means it is easier to track bots (which this ban was planned for), multiboxers, etc.

53

In an ideal world we shouldn’t have to mod it ourselves. But Blizzard clearly has better things to do than give us customization options. All their work and attention goes into content and balance that immediately becomes irrelevant the second a new tier comes out.

It’s not like it’s BC where Kara was relevant even in the Sunwell patch. Or where people still did MC even when Naxx was out. Back when progression involved more than one raid. Is anyone doing the launch BFA raid for reasons outside of xmog runs? The same reason you’d do ICC today…

Xmog runs… cosmetic options… aka the stuff players really want.

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54

i’d love to see a program for modding Warcraft models to make them look better. something like Textools for FF14. because it isn’t like having a distinct appearance really gives you a mechanical advantage if you are the only one who can see that appearance. and really, people who PVP already have plenty of access to skimpy vanilla mogs for the PVP distraction factor,

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55

I know right. I would love to look extremely better. And have terrain, nodes, everything look extremely detailed, right down to the core.

But this OP seems to be upset on something like this. Or something.

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56

literally bothers me that dead or alive competitive tournaments had to ban very specific alternate costumes for providing an “unfair distraction advantage” when an important part of kunoichi strategy the game embodies is using a foe’s “interests” as a distraction.

57

Right more adults play this game than kids why can’t we of the 18+ group get a little attention?

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58

I was wondering about reasoning behind the the bans, for what seemed like pretty harmless activity to me. Until I read through the post on WoWhead.

  • Quote: “However, some users have found more exploitative ways to use these programs, such as resizing flags in Battle Grounds to make players easier to find, manipulating model scale to increase the size of resource nodes, exploit their way into areas they otherwise shouldn’t have access to, and otherwise manipulating the game world.”

Makes sense to me now. Modding your characters personal visual appearance is harmless enough. But doing the activities in the above quote? Common sense should tell you you are asking to be banned.

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59

The players that were banned should be thankful. Now they can go play an actual game that won’t treat them like garbage. Also, the “community” in this game is non-existent. The people who actually play for community and fellowship were banned. 99% of the playerbase can just swap out random NPCs for people they recruit for their M+ runs, and be none the wiser. It’s not like anyone talks, unless it’s to insult someone. “Community”, indeed.

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60

Eh seems harsh for people just wanting to make their character look better.

Glad the bans were repealed, seems silly, if anything this would be a good talking point about further customization of player models.

But hey that’s just my opinion man.

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61

lol a six month ban is not minor

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62

I can generally agree that more customization options would obviously be beneficial. However, modding game files is a very slippery slope. Sure, maybe they’re just making their character look good. Or, maybe they’re modding a pillar in arena. Or nodes. Or a slew of other possibilities that would give them an undeniable advantage. Potentially game-breaking. I won’t pretend to know how Blizzard can detect it, but since it’s client-side I can imagine it’s pretty difficult. Let alone detecting the specific way it’s being used. Therefore, just a blanket response of “no” seems appropriate (completely ignoring the fact that it’s already covered in the TOS).

Now this quote, I have a serious problem with. I have a problem with it because you either played during BC and are being disingenuous, or you didn’t play during that time and have no clue what you’re talking about. Kara was not relevant in the Sunwell patch. Sunwell was relevant in the Sunwell patch. And BT considering some T6 came out of it. There’s a couple reasons Kara was still being run.

  1. If you wanted to raid and didn’t have a guild to carry you in T5+ to get your gear, your only option was to start from the bottom. The bottom being Kara.

  2. Some guilds were stuck in T4/5 the entire expansion due to guild hoppers. People that would join the guild to get fed gear, then leave to move on to a more progressed guild.

I have experience with the second reason, as my first guild in BC was stuck in progression hell for a good amount of time before it just dissolved. I loved Kara. Was a superb raid for the time. But to say it was relevant during Sunwell is just a flat-out lie and is a major reach for some reason to hate on Blizzards current game design.

Edit to address MC/Naxx:

This can kinda be covered with the same reasons. If you didn’t have a guild to carry you in BWL/AQ40 then you had to start from the bottom. Also iirc bosses only dropped 2-3 pieces of gear. With some quick napkin math - 40 players with 18(?) gear slots = 720 pieces of gear. That’s 360 kills with 2 drops or 240 kills with 3 drops (disregarding duplicate drops). It could take quite a long time to gear up a raid and get enough people willing to stick around to progress. A lot of times people would leave once they got the gear to move on to the next guild with more progression. Again, this doesn’t make MC relevant during Naxx. It’s just a stepping stone you had to pass if you didn’t find a shortcut.

63

I dunno, find a way to white list armor textures and player model updates? If people want to update things for your game, let em. Player customization in wow is embarrassingly dated for a game in 2019.

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64

Agreed. Plus a lot of those people are pretty scummy.

65

That isn’t all what that was used for. Certain female body parts were enhanced greatly.

1 Like