Comments - [ToD]Commando

Yah, it may sound like that and it is unfortunate that mods need to be tough, but in our experience it is the only way to protect the work of everyone on the team. The rules don't make the people less a part of the team because the stuff becomes owned by the team. They still have an equal team vote over their stuff and the stuff that every other team member has contributed. They are also still involved in all team decisions. Every decision may not always be to their liking, but that is what democracy is about.

And anyway, it is less about the stuff being owned by anyone and more about making sure that everything continues to be freely available to the fans. Mod teams are large diverse groups or people coming together for a common purpose, in any large group, fights arise between individuals sometimes. We try and stress that it is the team and mod as a whole that should be protected from such disagreements. That is what teamwork is about.

Differences arise on all teams and sometimes some team members get in fights with each other. This sort of thing happens on most teams and is unfortunate, but for the good of the mod community, disagreements shouldn't destroy a mod.

Most of us do what we do for the good of the community and are happy to give it away for free. If one member is allowed to come back months after a mod is released and request that materials be removed from the mod, it hurts the whole community, especially the fans of the mod. If this sort of thing continues, then people will get fed up and stop making mods. That is why we are offering our rules to the community. This is not about Tour of Duty, this is about all the other mods out there that may run into similar problems.

Making a mod requires cooperation from everyone involved and a great deal of teamwork. Sometimes teamwork requires accepting decisions made by the majority of the team even if you do not agree with them. One team member should never be allowed to try and get their own way in these decisions by threatening to remove their work from a mod. That is what this is about.

There is not much similarity between the Mod and the TV series except for the fact that they are both based on the Vietnam war. Tour of Duty just sounded like a cool name and invokes images of Vietnam :D

Thanks for the great comments guys, we appreciate it :D

We have been busting to let everyone know about this for weeks, but have been sitting on it for weeks just to be sure. It is a big coup for us and we are really proud that our mod was considered good enough. A lot of that is due to you guys though, without the support of news sites like moddb and of our fans, we would never have made it. Thanks, especially to everyone here at moddb for the great support we've received :D

I agree that you need to cull all of the vapour-ware mods out of the DB otherwise people will stop using the DB to search for new stuff because their is too high of a noise to signal ratio ;) I am sick of checking out mods to find they have done nothing but put up a web page and talk a lot, or even worse, have a few models and maps done and say they are 90% complete not realizing how much more they really need to do to create a successful mod :(

I think that you should probably leave all mods that are 100% complete in the DB though as long as the links to their sites are working and their mod is available for download. It is conceivable that a more mature mod like Counter-Strike will begin having infrequent updates and we wouldn't want to delete them from the DB.

Maybe you should also think about adding a feature to report broken links and dead mods? (or even automate the link checking) If a mod's website is down for more than a week, it goes... That leaves a fair amount of time for DNS changes to propogate if servers change.

Funny, but every review and preview of the mod says differently about the quality of Tour of Duty. Of course there are going to be people that don't like what we have done and that is cool. You say that you have beta tested for ToD, if you have, then maybe you should have spent some time constructively criticizing the mod in the beta forums to help improve it. Since none of our beta testers has ever expressed comments this negative (the majority are very enthusiastic) I can only assume that you have ulterior motives ;)

We encourage people to check out the other HL mods, CiN and SOG. We are all doing great things with the Half-Life engine and we all have different visions, so check them out and see what suits you best. We look forward to the day when CiN has something that Mod sites like this can preview and we can all get some unbiased reviews so our fans can make the choice for themselves :D

Don't worry about it too much INtense, we will just up it to 100% in a few days :D