Mod of the year has come and now gone, and once again showed why I don't bother with it. I'm sure most of you have seen the top 10 so I won't go into too much detail about them but seriously, wtf?
Starting with something familiar, while I'm not a fan of LA for many game balancing reasons it has to represent one of the single biggest collective efforts and dedication to a game I've ever seen, and where did it come? Fucking THIRD, what come first? Some bloody truck simulator that looks like it could of been knocked together in a week.
Mod of the year should be about recognising the level of love and care authors have put in to mods, which nicely leads me to my next issue, looking at all the top 10 most of them come from the same genre of game or very similar, all of the "winners" from 9th to 5th in fact. Let me ask you, with odds like that what chance do other mods played by fewer people but have authors who have put infinitely higher levels of love and care put in to their mods have of getting a well deserved pat on the back?
If moddb are going to continue with this mod of the year stuff they seriously need to organise it better, at the very least make it so the top 10 can't have more than 2 mods from the same/similar game genre. if something like this isn't done its not going to be long before tripe like The Sims mods are going to be occupying most of those top 10 places.
I could also talk about how even looking at best upcoming and editors choices seems to be nothing but star wars, star wars, and fucking star wars, but I won't. I've mentioned it, thats enough. The only mod to truly catch my eye, perhaps because I've done similar for SoC, is a mod called Stargate Space Conflict, which I will even link to to try and get it some recognition it deserves; Moddb.com, this mod is made using the Homeworld 2 engine, which makes it all the more impressive.
So what are my final thoughts? Something is very backwards with mod of the year, it should, nay, must, be about recognition for a modders or groups talents, not just whatever gets moddb the most site traffic.
Just try really hard bud, you will get your reward, I'm not a big fan of the mod selection either but you can do it, theres next year. A lot of great mods dont see the daylight of the top 10
I don't think there should be a limitation as to the genre, but there should be some kind of filtering for mods that had an actual release in that year, not just a small patch. Some of them didn't even have a single release this year.
As to Lost Alpha, I'll be honest: I'm still struggling to finish it, but the truth is that it was a colossal undertaking and had a lot of work and effort put into it.
Armada 3 was a worthy mod (it's really damn good), but then again, already had a release before 2014. And that Euro Truck MP mod clearly had some vote rigging.
Basically, there should be priority for mods which had their first release in that year, and mods which didn't have any release shouldn't even be qualified.
Damn shame that the staff just doesn't seem to care.
Personally I give myself no more than two votes per game (That's for games/mods I'm interested in) As an example for COP I voted for Call of Chernobyl and REDUX. In total I did 7 votes this year, 2 for COP, 2 for CS, 2 for SOC, and 1 for Homeworld 2. I should of done 1 for Far cry 2010 as well but I don't remember if I did or not. It's a shame if I forgot as it makes the original Far cry game look great.
Thats a fair enough way to do things, but for me mod of the year needs to rebuild its reputation and the only way it could even start to do that is by limiting members to 3 votes and visitors to 1 vote. As Capt.Host said, theres clearly been some vote rigging - to me in more ways than one, rules and restrictions need to be tightened for mod of the year to become anything even approaching respectable but I highly doubt that will ever happen moddb just sees mod of the year as one big chance to massively increase site traffic and get some sponsors to throw some money their way. Its not about the modders and the quality of their work, at least, not any more, which is a tragedy. I bet theres all kinds of immensely talented modders who could use mod of the year to get themselves a job with a dev team if mod of the year were actually run right.