In the latest Bash&Slash podcast, entitled "BASH 108: Are Mods Dead?", Jock Yitch speaks to Buster and Jag-Five-O from "The Company Hub". They try to get to the bottom of why players arent playing the many, many MP maps produced for COD5, and some of the conclusions they come up with potentially have an important impact on how mappers make their maps.

Essentially, they claim that one of the main reasons players dont play on modded servers is because players dont want to downoad 30-50 mb maps.

In older COD games, like UO, the average map size was only 2-3 mg, and players didnt mind hanging around to download a map of that size. But with maps in COD4 and WaW averaging between 30 - 50 mg (all 3 of the files, including the IWD file), players simply leave the server.

With the average WaW player being also obsessed with stock ranks and unlocks as well, and what with these not being translated over to modded servers, players are then also faced with huge downloads, which often abort anyway due to Q-port errors and such like, and so modded servers are sitting empty.

If you dont know the site already, here is a link to it:

http://bashandslash.com/

Listen and weep!

Personally, I think the future of modding is in trouble unless Infinity Ward and Treyarch dont make ranks and unlocks (i.e. customkits) work across the board - in both stock and modded servers.

There is simply no reason to not make your custom kits and ranks available on all types of servers. Ever since the COD4 1.5 patch, when IW made the setStat() function work on modded servers as well as stock so that ranks and unlocks would be persistent, the distinction between so-called "online" (stock) and "offline" (modded) servers has been redundant. Why dont they go the whole hog and simply allow universal ranks and unlocks to work on all servers?

Mods have historically only made up a very small percentage of the total number of MP COD players anyway (about <20%), but what with the stock game being complex enough not to even need mods, custom maps are really the only custom content that can enliven the game even further. If our maps have to be so big in size due to the very nature of how the game compiles them, how are we going to get players to play them?

COD5 has had a lot of the people who play mods spending their energies on nazi zombies, and these have proved hugely popular with the younger COD player. But its looking like MW2 wont have Zombies/Coop, so what will the zombie mappers do for MW2? Leave it behind and stick with WaW mapping?

Some points of interst for us to think about.

edited on May. 18, 2009 08:01 am by DemonSeed

Posting to news.

I don't know how any argument can be made over the 50mb files, if they want custom maps that actually look and play good then 50mb is extremely good!

if they don't want to wait for a 50mb download, they either don't like good looking maps or they may return to UO for smaller downloads

but i agree with the stock raking which isn't used for custom maps

The clan I belong to (demon) dont run custom maps on our modded server anymore. We stopped it as soon as we saw what Buster and Jag were seeing - that players came on while the stock maps are playing, but leave as soon as a custom map came up in the rotation.

So, we removed all custom maps, and only run stock and our demon mod. Now, our modded server is always full.

The same thing happened to custom gametypes - non of them proved successful, the server emptied pretty quickly when we tried HTF or VIP, so we only run stock gametypes now (mainly CTF, but a little of SAB and S&D at weekends).

Its hard to fathom with all this dislike of custom content. My demon mod has proved very popular, but the beautifull maps made by the mappers havent. When we played COD2, it was a completely different story. We had 3 modded servers running 24/7 with the Xtreme+ mod, and all 3 were chocker-block full of players all the time.

Is it as Jock says? That COD2 was "lite" of features whereas COD4/COD5 have all the mod features as stock so that there is very little that mods are adding to the game?

Or is it as Buster said, a generational thing? That todays players, newer to COD games than us "old timers", simply dont appreciate custom maps like we used to/still do?

But what's the answer.

Do we tell people, hey stop making your custom maps, stop spending months creating amazing content that will continue to expand the life of your game and even make it more rewarding simply because people are too lazy to spend 2 minutes downloading a 50mb file on broadband?

I think the problem is that people want to click on a server, click "join" and suddenly be in the server playing...I can understand them not wanting to wait.

People who spend the time reading about a mod and downloading it from the mods homepage are going to look for custom servers and want to play in them, maybe more focus should be put into advertising those mods?

Advertising links to a mod for a modded server in-game in the non-modded servers might help.

More effort should be made to have custom map competitions as well, as in gaming and mapping.

Well that's the point right there. I remember saying to Stryder that we should be running custom maps on our server. He told me that we don't get our ranks and perks.

The fact the you don't get all your guns and perks when playing custom maps and mods put's me off straight away. With waw the basic stock weapons are unbalanced and after we've looked around the place for awhile, I want my guns back to start killing.

It's a shame because the maps that i am seeing flowing through the site are excellent and people are missing out on them.

On the podcast they make the point that there is a generation gap between gamers and that the newer gamers don't know what mods are.

Correct me if i am wrong but the original idea behind mods was to fix or add things that the developers broke or left out. The days of the "flashlight" mod are gone.

Most of the things that would have been made as mods are now already included into the game. It's the same with maps it used to be that we would make custom maps because the stock maps were either boring or lacking something.

Now a days the maps are so detailed and rich in content it takes away from what modders would have been creating.

A problem with allowing ranks in custom modded servers is that they could make rank boosting maps to quickly increase your rank.

A valid point but are there not countless mods that already allow for this?

If everyone ranked up to the max we'd all be equal. Nothing wrong with being equal

techno2sl writes

But even with everyone at the same rank level, the game still isnt "equal" for everyone, is it? Customkits are all fine and dandy as far as gimmicks are concerned, but people who want to fight dont want their enemies to be on an uneven playing field to themselves. They dont want their enemies to have flakjackets or martydom, or laststand. They want the game to be about who is the better shot - not who has the greatest arsnel of weapons.

Im firmly of the belief that COD4/COD5 gives people too great an inventory of weapons and perks. In the end, the perks end up acting like glitches or hacks, giving them an unfair advantage.

My mod (Demon mod), which I previewed here:

http://www.modsonline.com/Forums-top-102050.html

has 3 modes, the mode which has proved the most popular (the players kept asking for it back) is the "classic COD" mode, where there are no perks, no ranks, only weapons by nationality.

You choose your weapon, and then its about whether or not your a better tactical player, with a better aim than the other guy.

As soon as we switch our modded server back to the "Customkit" mode of the mod, the players stop coming back.

When we switch back again to "Classic mode", the server starts getting all its traffic again. I think this is telling us something about what people want.

The competative mods out there, like Promod, have taken a similar approach to Demon mods "Classic COD" mode - they have fixed weapon loadouts, with no perks. I believe this is because the comp players also want the game to be about skill in aim rather than a clever array of perks, which makes you invunerable or stronger than your enemy.

edited on May. 18, 2009 01:21 pm by DemonSeed