After 20 days of nominating your favorite mods we have narrowed the contenders from 4,000 to the top 100. It was a tight tussle with some new faces making the cut as well as a few of the classics which continue to churn out updates year after year. Now it is time to separate the best from the rest and narrow the field down to the top 5. Your vote decides who wins so download, watch & play any of the mods and indie games which are among the top 100 elite.
Is this about the 100 best mods, or about the 100 mods based on the most popular games? The flaw with this voting system is that whoever has the biggest playerbase wins.
And you don't even need this whole ceremony to determine the winner. Just look at page hits and download numbers.
Why not allow people to rate each mod from 0% to 100% and then give the award to the mod with the highest score? That way, people won't just vote for the one mod they happen to have actually played.
But hell, if the point of modding (being individual, unique, creative) is to pick the engine everyone is using, and make a clone of the most popular games and mods...
Nicely said. For example there is not one single Deus-Ex mod in the list. Hell TNM ( The nameless mod ) or New Vision wipes the floor with a couple of entries there and has not found it's way into the top 100. :/
It's a shame there just isn't a max of each game for a mod.
so like, there could only be 5 mods per game.
it would really cut off how the HL2 and BF2 mods dominate.
This is complete rubbish, as my MAX PAYNE 1 mod has got into the TOP 100 shortlist for the past 2 years now, & theres virtualy nil community left for MAX PAYNE 1 anymore. In fact there's only me & one other modder modding for MAX PAYNE, & both of us have reached the TOP 100 shortlist this year, so there's a floor in your argument.
flaw?
I agree and disagree. One part of me says these mods are popular for a reason and thus they deserve to be there.
The second part of me says, but god damn there are some amazingly good mods out there which don't have a massive Mod DB fanbase and consequently miss out. We have to draw the line somewhere but where to draw it, because at the end of a day only 100 can make it.
We opened up to community suggestions and none were put forward. I am happy to accept feedback and will be actively trying to improve these awards because we love the MOTY and we want all the gamers to love it. Perhaps an idea like madkill's where games are capped to the top 5 is a good one? Because we want this top100 to essentially recognize the best mods from all games so gamers can come in and find mods to play from the games they have.
the floor in your plan is what if a lot of mods get 100% etc. Also look at the number of indie games etc. Yes Half-Life 2 and BF2 dominate again but so what just enjoy the fun! Still shocked the 2 mods i work on made it in :S
Hey guys, I think you mean flaw! ;)
Yea that's what I ment to put, it just didn't seem right when I was typing it, but my brains been fried with all this modding, well that & the fact that i'm more of a maths man myself......;)
The whole things flawed from the word go. The fact that non members can vote means the whole system is wide open to abuse. This isn't about the community voting for the mods, it's about how many people you can get to click a link on myspace (think what you can do with bullitins).
Whole thing is a load of bollocks.
I think it's great that outsiders can vote in these awards, as it evens out a lot of this, lets just vote for our mates mentality.
Actually guests can vote but there vote is weighted extremely low vs. members votes. For example a mod with 5 guest votes vs a mod with 1 member vote will lose.
Plus the voting system has 3 levels of checking from ip hash to cookies which does make it more difficult to cheat than just pure ip checking
This is a very old chestnut: just about any voting system is open to abuse, not to mention a vast amount of disagreement from the losers :)
At the end of the day, what the ModDB team have is the simplest system. Of course the Mod with the largest following should win - but isn't that the point? What people are trying to achieve is to get profile with their work - and that is represented by their fanbase. Of course it is hard for those mods that work off a base game with a very small following - but those are the choices people make when choosing their game engine!
gah, oa's not there. my life's ruined.
Well, it didn't make it into the top 100 last year and you STILL won third in the standalone category, so good luck again this year! ;)
OA missed by about 1 ~ 2 votes. Like I said the results were tight around the 100 mark and I don't think I ever saw you encouraging your massive fan base to vote. If you had of it would have made it and i'm sure you know that
To be honest I have to agree with Leilei,
The fact is only a hand full of mods/games are going to win. And like everyone said it is going to be the one with the most players and has been going for a few years. And to be honest I would not be surprised If some of the same games/mods that won last year are nominated (obviously don't win as its against the rules).
I mean who really cares anyway? All your going to get is more advertising and whatever the prizes are. If you care that much that a Half-life 2 "gosh" mod is going to win then simply don't vote for it.
So stop your wining! The system is flawed and always will be, just like everything in life!
With one problem. Simply "not voting" doesn't change anything, right? ;)
I'm not saying don't vote I'm saying don't vote for a Half-Life 2 but something else if you care that Half-Life 2 mod will win.
The top 100 seems a bit lacking this year compared to other years. Sure there are a few good ones, but most of them seem like people were going through the list saying "Oh this looks cool; I'll vote for this." without even playing it.
Your arguments flawed mate seeing that these awards are open to both released & unreleased mods so people can vote for mods that they haven't yet played.
I'm going to call it right now, Project Revolution will win...by a wide margin, the "Unreleased Mods" category. Lucky bastards getting all their promotion done by Blizzard with SC2. ;)
Great, my post got buried.
Disagreeing has never been so much fun. Instead of having to put forth your own point of view and defend it, you just bury the original poster to shut him up. I love this function.
QUOTE: 'Of course the Mod with the largest following should win - but isn't that the point? What people are trying to achieve is to get profile with their work - and that is represented by their fanbase'
I thought this contest was to reward the best mods, not the ones with the best advertising or the FPS mods with a giant player pool to win over. You promote a Darwinist point of view where it is your own fault if you choose the road less travelled. I thought this was the whole point of mods.
Looks like the message is that all those creative mods and indie games should just switch to the HL2 engine and make a dystopic shooter.
The feature just needs some smoothing out. People need to stop complaining about it already. I'm sure Intense is working hard on it!
It dosen't matter how good or bad the voting system is there will always be someone that's not happy with it, it's just human nature. I should know I done my fair share of complaining this year.
So I think to end all arguments the top award should go to the modder with the cutest butt, & that'll be me.
There's a little too much HL2 for my taste.
Next year, can we have a separate section for all the mods based on non-original IP? That would ease up on the issues a bit since the random "based on" <insert generic anime/sci-fi/console shooter> would be shoved into their own category.
That's a good idea. After all ModDB wants to promote also original mods and not generic rehash, isn't this the case INtense! ?
I've suggested this over and over. Don't hold your breath. The problem moddb.com faces is that by having such a category it would essentially be publicly admitting that they host ip-infringing mods. Then they'd lose their advertising. Alternately, they could expunge the ip-infringing mods, lose over 1/3 their content and 90% of their page views. In which case they'd also lose their advertising.
Simply having another category for "originality" might do the trick though.
I like the idea with the originality category. It would help to boost more the out-of-box thinking. For example here we have like only FPS ( mostly besides the few RTS in between ) but there exists much more from puzzle mods over sport mods to unconventional mods ( iris anyone? ). Would encourage people to do also this kind of mods instead of making yet another shooter on Source.
The "originality" category suggestion certainly has a lot of supporters. Posts of the type have garnered plenty of replies and votes. It doesn't matter however as Intense! has flatly refused to have such a category.
Interesting idea. One change I made this year was grouping the released / unreleased which I think is tons better than mixing them all in. I guess there maybe ways to break things down more in the future
Apparently I've voted for something I definitely didn't intentionally vote for - is there any way of removing votes?
No way of removing votes sorry
Fair enough - I've voted for quite a few other things, and must have clicked another one by accident. Slightly boozy lunch, natch... ;-)
Obviously the mods which base themselves off the most popular games are going to win as they have the bigger fanbases, hence more voters. However as a modder you just have to accept that really and try to get your mod in the best possible place you can.
To be honest I am more interested in the lower positions of the awards rather than the top 5, as usually you can pretty much guess who is in contention for the top places. Its seeing the little gems that you haven't heard of before and looking into them in more detail that makes the awards good, and I think the MOTY awards are the best way to achieve this!
Your postition is going to count on one of two things:
-The amount people enjoy your mod (including high player base)
-The amount of advertising you do.
Some mods, naming no names, send out messages to people that are on a mailing list, and this gets them into the top 100, even if there arn't any players on the game, ever.
Allowing players to rate mods is always going to favour: less origional, polarising mods that some people love and some hate.
Since Moddb got bigger, those contest are bringing up a controversy. But realy, what a lot of you guys forget, is the whole idea behind this contest.
The titel is "Best Mod". Since I am part of this show by working for Eternal Silence, I see both sides, actually all 3: Fan-side, Moddb, and Mod Side. You guys need to keep in mind, that a good mod isn't only based on the artwork, the gameplay and the webdesign. It is more. It starts with the game idea itself. It goes on with the desicion on what engine you run this game.
Those desicions are critical for the later development and the success of the game. If you pick an old engine, for instance the Max Payne one, it could possible happen that not too many people will notice your game cause they don't have that base-game anymore. Its a crucial desicion. It doesn't say your mod is bad or your desicion is bad - its just not the main market.
So, all that counts for a contest like this. The engine you pick, the PR work you do. Cause after all, if you set your goals on a massive market and develop a game that already has the interest of the public, yeah you get more votes compared to a sub-category game, like Eternal Silence.
-continued-
We are not mass market, since it is a SciFi mod and I am sure not everybody diggs space fights with huge capships, frakkin fast interceptors and intense ground battles inside the ships.
We are part of this contest cause we love the competition of it. We are not in here to win, but to show our baby to more and more people. Cause that is our reward: to see you guys enjoying our game or the games of other indy developers here, who put their heart and soul into their work.
Cause that is what its all about. So if you are realy into this competition and if you want to win this for whatever reason, make a game that the majority enjoys. But if you are making what you would love to play and if you are creating something you believe in, don't focus so much on this competition. Don't focus on any competition. Just focus on your game and get it done! Game development is about the passion of it. There are so many crappy commercial games out there, make something new. Make something different. Make it fun!
All the best,
Marc
PS: Vote for ES ;)
Does anyone have info on the song that starts around 1:17? Thanks..