• woelkchen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wait, the mod removed the option to set a gender in the character editor? Why don’t these people just make a male character and be done with it?

    • darq@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Because it’s not actually about the pronouns. These people aren’t actually angry about pronouns.

      They’re angry about trans and non-binary people. They’re angry that people are growing to accept these people, who they do not think should be accepted. They are angry that a group they don’t think is normal, is being accepted as normal.

      • Sludgehammer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think it’s even about that, they’re angry because the want to be angry. The why doesn’t matter, if the current right wing outrage du-jour had been… I dunno, left handed people rather than trans people, you’d see all the same people working themselves into a screaming tantrum if a game or movie had a left handed person in it.

          • librechad@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Who the hell are you to say that I hate black and gay people? You’re overgeneralizing a group, how much different are you in this case? Stop with that man, this is why we can’t have actual debates.

        • RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          For sure. And when there’s not enough people focused on trans people they’ll shift their focus to some other marginalized group to harass.

          These limp dicked losers have literally nothing better to do but jerk each other off in their seedy racist forums and message boards.

      • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        And the “replaced white people”. And the female leaders. If someone wants a taste, go through the Steam forums for the game. It’s a complete deranged mess.

      • DJVIIIMan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Let’s roll it back a bit. There’s a bit of a difference between “accepted” and “tolerated”. For the most part, the trans community is merely tolerated by the majority of the country.

        • darq@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know what the point of your comment is.

          Trans and non-binary people are becoming more accepted as normal over time. The people screaming about pronouns don’t actually care about pronouns, they oppose that gradually growing acceptance.

    • ForgetReddit@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They need to force their views on others. If anyone believes what they believe, then they are suddenly just like everyone else instead of the bigot they know they are deep down

      • underisk@lemmy.ml
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        They aren’t really forcing their views on anyone though, they’re just jacking themselves off. No nonconforming person is going to download this and inflict it on themselves, and they have no reason to use it themselves unless they’re just really closeted and lack the will to not express their own nonconformity. It can literally only exist to rile people up who sought out the mod specifically, which includes only them.

        • ForgetReddit@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If they weren’t trying to force their views on others they’d just make their character a guy and move on. They go through the trouble of coding this mod to push their agenda on others.

          • underisk@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            What I’m trying to say though is that most of them just do make their character a guy and move on. They don’t need the mod and the people who they think do need it aren’t going to install it. It’s not just a transparent attempt to ignite culture war arguments online, but it’s a stupid and ineffective one.

            • AmbleHamble@lemmy.world
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              The point of the mod is not to change something in game, its to appear in the list of mods and remind some people that they are hated and bigots will never stop hating them.

              Its a weird “I was here, and I hated x people”.

          • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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            1 year ago

            Apparently nexus mods has some sort of ad sharing with mod makers. Could be a grift. Grift is popular among right wingers, possibly because they are on a fundamental level stupid.

            Some grifter makes an anti “woke” mod that probably took 5 minutes. A bunch of stupid chuds download it to pwn the libs. Grifter makes money. Chuds feel good about their shitty lives.

      • AmbleHamble@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I’d see reaction videos before I played, and I honestly couldn’t find how to change my pronouns for a good 30 seconds.

        God, Bethesda sucks at UI.

  • Nath@aussie.zone
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    To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:

    • Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called “Starfield”.
    • They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
    • Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
    • Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
    • Nexus decided they don’t want to host this mod. It’s hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.

    That’s about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don’t even play the game. They’re just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they’d just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Moderation exists to identify and exclude people who are being absolute cocks.

    You don’t need any grand philosophical statement about values. You don’t need to defend the paradox of tolerance against absolutist demands for unrestricted expression. It’s perfectly fine to say: you were doing some diet Nazi shit, that’s awful, fuck off.

  • people_are_cute@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    This is all fine and well, but am I the only one a bit concerned about how NexusMods is practically a monopoly in the modding scene? Why does literally every modder have to use a rate-limiting host as a platform, especially when Github exists?

    • Ganbat@lemmyonline.com
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      Well, for one thing, Nexus gives modders a share of ad revenue. Under a different name, I have a mod that’s a backend requirement for a big, popular mod, and that nets me a reliable few bucks a month.

      That said, a good portion of the modding community also exists on Gamebanana. If you want BotW, ToTK or Source engine mods, GB is the go-to.

      • Aermis@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Wait I have a stupid subscription to nexus and idk why I haven’t canceled it (used it for one month for some mod back in the day). I use nexus for all mods. Should I keep my sub then because all I care about is modders getting something.

        • Ganbat@lemmyonline.com
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          1 year ago

          Well, if you’re paying for premium, you’re still part of the site’s profit, part of which goes to the mods you use, so either way shouldn’t matter.

    • Derin@lemmy.beru.co
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      I mean, github does exist. It looks like people just prefer platforms with a pre-existing community.

      • Chailles@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Mods uploaded to github does really suck for discoverability though. There’s the roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. The modding scene exists entirely on Github and you’d basically never find them unless you go searching for mods on their Discord channel.

      • ahornsirup@artemis.camp
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        That’s even worse though. Plenty of games (e.g. Stellaris and RimWorld) are also available on platforms like GOG or, ugh, Epic. But if you want to use mods and you bought the game on any platform other than Steam it’s fuck you.

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            1 year ago

            I know it is, developers can block downloads unless the user is signed into a Steam account that owns the game. But as an end-user that’s distinction without difference.

        • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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          1 year ago

          I know there are workarounds, but this is true. There are very little games I buy (at least directly) through steam nowadays, because I didn’t like what it became after the Greenlight/Direct debacle and I didn’t want my library to be that dependent of them anymore.

          I have playnite as a unified game library launcher (with GoG, itch.io, humble, Ubi, EA, even Amazon Prime and freaking EGS just for the free games), so where I get my games from doesn’t matter much for me now.

          But workshop integration is basically the only thing that makes me want a Steam copy for a game.

          Though among the games in that case, there were Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, and for both if you get a copy directly from the developers, you get DRM-free and a Steam key. So, that’s what I did.

      • Chailles@lemmy.world
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        There’s a couple issues with it. I mean, it’s simple for games where you’re not using a bunch of mods, but at some point it just becomes excessive. Not to mention that when a mod updates, the mod will automatically update breaking your game sometimes, or when you’re trying to play a game, a mod just doesn’t update causing it to break the game that way too. There’s just a lack of control that’s often necessary when modding.

        • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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          For beatsaber (which doesn’t use steam workshop), the there’s no steam integration and its a pain to deal with.

          For terraria (which uses steam workshop), the modloader is smart enough to know which mods don’t work with the current version of the game and disables them and steam lets you easily change which version of the game you have by using the “beta” options. Only time I’ve had issues with updates breaking things since 1.4 release was during beta-builds of 1.4 tmodloader (and those were generally easily fixed by going to the discord and finding the file to fix it). Since then, no needing to find files and paste them over the existing files, etc. No trying to install one mod at a time out of a dozen or two until you find which one breaks it and redoing the whole process over again. Pretty sure it also just uses the version of mods that support the game version you have, deals with dependencies automatically, etc… The modloader will also direct you to things like the non-steam pages for mods (sometimes forum posts, sometimes discord, etc).

          I don’t think the steam integration is needed for such a seamless mod experience, but its certainly compatible with it. And terraria is an outlier because the game devs encourage mods and has a huge and dedicated community. For smaller games with devs that don’t like mods, simply trying to keeping things working may take so much work, so that time that making a good integrated user experience is probably difficult.

          • Chailles@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Let’s be real here though, Terraria is an unfair comparison considering it’s modloader is integrated into the game itself and holds significantly greater support than most other mods with Steam Workshop support. (Oh and that the modloader is basically a community made mod manager anyways and is akin to using the community mod managers for the games mentioned below)

            Stellaris, Rimworld, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Total War: Warhammer 3, Binding of Isaac, Dwarf Fortress, Space Engineers, Cities: Skylines, all of these very popular games with massive modding support are still plagued by the issues I mentioned above. And you know what? It has the issues you mentioned as well. Did you subscribe to an outdated mod? Oh, well, good luck figuring out which one that is. Forgot to download a dependency? Crash. Did a mod update and Steam just didn’t update the mod? Figure out what mod that was and unsubscribe to it and subscribe to it again. Did a mod just update and Steam updated the mod, even though the update breaks save compatibility? Well, unless the mod author uploaded the older version of the mod, good luck trying to have fun.

    • stillwater@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Natural monopoly. Nobody else offers as good of an experience. The closest is ModDB and their UX is stuck in the mid 2000s.

      • Kazumara@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think that term really applies here. It’s not like the barrier to entry for a webservice hosting game modification data is all that high. It’s very different from the railway, waterworks and power grid markets.

        Also there are at least the competitors Loverslab, Curseforge, ModMD and Modrinth from the top of my head.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          Network effect creates barriers to new competitors, regardless of quality. Either for the upstarts or the leaders. See: Twitter. Once some choice is the default, anything else faces an uphill battle.

          Adoption is a feature you can’t design.

        • stillwater@lemm.ee
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          Indeed, it applies as much as accusations of monopoly. Two sides of the same coin. Really, it’s not a monopoly situation or any kind at all. It’s just by far the best of its kind and it has no competition.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          Does any one of those integrate with Mod Organizer or do I have to download the mod (often also with an annoying wait time) and then point Mod Organizer to it. Do they have an API that enables “a new version is out” notifications, or do I have to hunt everything down manually.

          It really wouldn’t be that hard, but none of them cares. Nexus kinda has itself positioned well there as they would not have to support any third-party API endpoints in Vortex, but Vortex isn’t even the popular choice for many games.

      • niemcycle@lemmy.world
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        I remember using ModDB back then, I’m shocked that they have never updated their site since then

    • XTL@sopuli.xyz
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      That went so well until your proposed alternative was Microsoft.

      • Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        At least github is easier than the shit that is nexusmods

        Also there are alternatives

        Gitlab… sourceforge…

        Ive downloaded a lot of mods from sourceforge over the years

      • people_are_cute@lemmy.sdf.org
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        I know what Microsoft’s general reputation is, but it’s undeniable that GitHub has only seen improvements since Microsoft acquired it.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            That only makes sense if Microsoft had a GotHub competitor lol. I think it was more about getting that juicy data and making copilot.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        Yeah, an alternative using git would be good probably, but maybe don’t use github. Preferably though, it’d be agnostic and just target some git repo anywhere. It’d pull from a description file for the page to ensure a uniform appearance preferably, and it’d show and manage versions from some uniformly named folder on the repo.

    • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      There’s also steam workshop. Neither are shining examples of a free modding community. I think nexus mods starting out better and slowly enshittified but I don’t know the extent of it.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        Nexus hasn’t changed much over the years. They just make a new mod tool every few years it feels like lol.

    • HipHoboHarold@lemmy.world
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      I think it’s just the internet being the internet. Or at least how it’s been for awhile. There are big sites that a lot of people crowd to and that becomes the default. Like auctioning things off online. Ebay. That was where everyone went to. Need to order a few different things online? Amazon. Are there other online stores? Plenty. But Amazon is seen as cheap and convenient.

      Nexus mods is just the popular site, but the moders have other options.

    • Rose@lemmy.world
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      We don’t. My ultrawide mods get thousands of downloads and I haven’t uploaded a single one to Nexus.

      • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works
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        Not really sure curseforge is better. Its another of those sites with an sketchy bloaty overwolf launcher that makes you jump through hoops to load mods onto a server.

        It’s concerningly hard to avoid overwolf in modding

        • rambling_lunatic@sh.itjust.works
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          Yeah no question Curseforge ain’t great and if you want to get a modpack as opposed to a singular mod you get kind of screwed by the launcher.

          Thing is, the alternatives tend to suck more. Plus my point was that Nexus ain’t alone.

    • Ech@lemm.ee
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      There’s stuff like Curseforge, but it’s only for some games, mostly Minecraft. The problem, if someone considers it a problem, is really that communities for games generally centralize around one site for their mods for the most part, and Nexus has garnered a lot of trust and therefore has more pull/inertia for communities working those things out.

      As for Github, I believe the vast majority of mods have Github pages, but Github itself doesn’t really have a UI suited for mod downloaders, and no real incentive to implement one. So sites like Nexus and Curseforge are still a necessity.

        • Ech@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Nice! Personally I don’t have any particular issue with Nexus, but it’s always nice to see diversity. Monopolies are pretty much never good for end users.

          • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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            My only issue with Nexus is that I have to create a login to download mods there. I don’t want to sign in to websites just to DL something. Curseforge is good for Minecraft mods and doesn’t hassle me with a login prompt

    • Kaldo@kbin.social
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      I was really hoping thunderstore and mod.io would take off more since they seem more platform-agnostic and FOSS-like with their integration with git and versioning (and for some games they have), but people just prefer convenience of nexusmods and steam workshop unfortunately. They just have a bigger community and better discoverability in the end

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      Their rate-limiting isn’t bad at all, their integration into everything is excellent, and for games without much of a community Vortex is often the only mod manager. Their API isn’t closed down, so Mod Organiser can integrate with Nexus just as well, and they probably would also do it with other mod sites if those ever bothered to set up a version check etc. API. They have an excellent search function.

      In short: They provide a good service. Like the most annoying part about Nexus as a freeloader is the five or what seconds wait before your mod manager picks up the download.

      And, no, their rate limiting really isn’t bad. 1.5MB/s for people with adblock, 3MB/s for people without. How often do you download gigabytes worth of mods it’s not like they’re bullying you into a subscription.

      • people_are_cute@lemmy.sdf.org
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        But any rate-limit is worse than no rate-limit. GitHub exists and can provide the same features in a better manner with no limits whatsoever.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          Github has other ways to make money, and Microsoft capital to back up everything. And granted Nexus could use a better bug tracker, but you won’t see them getting into the private repository business any time soon.

    • kamaii@lemmy.world
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      R2Modman and thunderstore.io has grown it’s catalogue quite a bit as of late, but it’s mostly (don’t know if it’s entirely or not) unity games. It’s my favorite modding platform with features that make sharing modlists for multiplayer a breeze.

    • yokonzo@lemmy.world
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      Nexus has the lions share, but only for some games, I had a premium subscription but still found for like half the games I mod that nexus either didn’t have a modpage for them or that most modders for that game used other sites to host their mods

  • frunch@lemmy.world
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    I swear to god, every time i hear about conservatives getting upset about gay and trans rights I’m more convinced it’s projection. They want to have the freedom to follow their own preferences but have been taught by someone in their family and/or society that certain preferences are completely unacceptable. Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy. All this because they want to explore their sexuality but they decided the social price is too much. Not allowed to have what they crave, now they just scorn those that are brave enough to face the storm they themselves avoided…or they just hate people having freedom. Probably both.

  • snipgan@kbin.social
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    Considering their policy doesn’t allow for other stuff like this, yeah I am not surprised.

    Content that may be generally construed as provocative, divisive, objectionable, discriminatory, or abusive toward any real-world individual or group, may be subject to moderation. This includes but is not limited to content involving politics, race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, or social class. We tolerate content related to real world issues and events as long as the appropriate tag (“Real World Issues”) is used and the content is handled in a tasteful, respectful, and non-inflammatory manner. Users who do not wish to see such content should make use of our content blocking feature.

    Reminds me of the time when a Spiderman mod removed the VERY few instances of a pride flag in a recreation of NEW YORK CITY and a Skyrim mod that removed any potential gay romances that only occur when wearing a very specific amulet (including a single dead skeleton couple off the beaten path.)

    Those got booted as well cause…come on now. Its blatantly targeting a group of people about their sexuality and gender who have BARELY any presence to begin with in these games.

    Starfield is even more egregious as its LITERALLY just a menu option and the rare use in dialogue…

    Really pathetic and sad people would even feel the need to make them to begin with. Let alone feel the need to upload them to a platform.

    • MomoTimeToDie@sh.itjust.works
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      Really pathetic and sad people would even feel the need to make them to begin with. Let alone feel the need to upload them to a platform

      I don’t have any experience with Bethesda games, but I’ve made a handful of mods for things, and something like this would be barely even a few minutes of work, assuming you have experience and tools already. Editing menus is easy. And personally, I upload every mod I make, regardless of how trivial, because if someone out there wants it, it makes no sense to have them do the work over again, trivial as it is.

  • Trantarius@programming.dev
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    I’m finding it very difficult to phrase this comment. I want to share my thoughts, but I know that if I am perceived as a bigot, everything I say will be seen as something to be defeated rather than understood. But tiptoeing around the subject doesn’t convey my meaning any better. So please, give me the benefit of the doubt long enough to hear me out.

    I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.

    Nexus has considerable influence. For many games, particularly Bethesda games, they are seen as the default and complete source of mods. When looking for new mods to install, most people wouldn’t bother checking other sites since everything is on nexus. If players aren’t aware a mod exists, in other words they are unaware an option exists, that hinders them from making that choice. Also, their vortex mod manager makes installing mods from nexus super simple. By removing the mod from their site, they are making installing the mod at least a little bit more difficult.

    I have seen multiple people posit here that removing the mod is fine because it does something so silly and pointless that no one should care about it. But we all care about silly, pointless things from time to time. I have spent days comparing all of the ways of getting unified GTK and QT themes on my desktop to try and get them just right. That was entirely pointless. But I wanted it that way, so I made it that way. I don’t have to justify it to anyone, and neither do the users of this mod. Installing the mod will only affect their game, no one else even has to know about it. Nexus’ decision does effect other people. They do have to justify themselves. Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun. If it is really so pointless, nexus shouldn’t have bothered removing the mod.

    People also claim that the political implications made by the mod are dangerous, and must be suppressed. I know you’ll roll your eyes at me, but yes: I’m making the free speech argument. It really is important though. If we, as a society and as individuals, accept suppressing speech for it’s ideological contents, then we are begging the question: which ideas are ok, and which aren’t? The ability to control public discourse is powerful, and highly coveted by anyone who wants to bend society to their will. It has been done before, and we know how horrible the consequences can be. It is incredibly dangerous. Answering that question at all is only justifiable in the face of a comparable danger. Is the idea of not being asked one’s pronouns really a comparable danger? Nexus seems to think so.

    Of course, free speech also protects Nexus’ right to control what they put on their platform. I am not saying they shouldn’t have that right. But nexus is a platform, not a person. They position their site not as a place for them to share their own content, but for others to share theirs. Any modification to the contents of their site is a modification to other people’s speech, not just Nexus’s. They ought to use their capability in this regard responsibly and sparingly. Their actions here are neither.

    I thought that others here on Lemmy believed in the same principles I do. That people should have total control over their own software and activities with it. That neither corporations nor governments should take any action to unduly control what they do with their own property. The belief in FOSS and decentralization seemed to go hand in hand with that. But if something like this can make you all turn on those principles, then maybe the resemblance wasn’t even skin deep.

    • steventrouble@programming.dev
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      It wasn’t removed because of the pronouns though. It was removed because the mod description violated their community policies.

      There are plenty of mods just like it that the site keeps up. Dozens of mods even remove black characters from games, which is way worse. The difference is, those mods don’t write long rants about how much they hate minorities and liberals in their descriptions.

      • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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        To be entirely fair, if it’s not the mods content itself, but the description, that got it removed, that should probably be clarified front and center. That’s a pretty big shift from the mod being removed based on it’s simple existence.

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        This finally explains it. I was about to write something similar as the comment you are replying to, because it did felt like a totally unnecessary PR stunt of another corporation that only exploits the issue for publicity, and I really hate that.

        But if the mod description was as bad as you say, then removing it was the right move.

      • Astaroth@lemm.ee
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        It wasn’t removed because of the pronouns though. It was removed because the mod description violated their community policies.

        There are plenty of mods just like it that the site keeps up. Dozens of mods even remove black characters from games, which is way worse. The difference is, those mods don’t write long rants about how much they hate minorities and liberals in their descriptions.

        if that’s true then it makes sense

         

        Edit: I just found out about the spider man pride flag removal mod debacle and read the official statement by Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14733

        In regards to the replacement of Pride flags in this game, or any game, our policy is thus: we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it. The same goes for people attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise. For our part, we will endeavour to do a better job of moderating our website to this ethos ourselves.

        We aren’t the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. We also note that we are not the only site that has removed this mod from their platform. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights.

         

        By Nexus Mods’ own words they will take action against anti diversity/inclusivity mods and actively take a stance on what kinds of mods are allowed on Nexus Mods.

        So regardless of what the mod descriptions may or may not have said, it seems Nexus Mods would’ve deleted this pronoun removal mod as well.

         

        These aren’t mods I would’ve bothered using (and I don’t even play these games either) but Nexus Mods trying to police what mods players are allowed to use is pretty shit.

        The great thing about mods is they only affect the people who choose to get them and gives everyone more choices to change games to what they want, and I don’t think anyone should try to force what kinds of mods are allowed or not.

        The whole point of modding is that you find something you don’t like or think could’ve been improved in some way, so you change it to your preference.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.

      I don’t think you’re a bigot, but I also think you’re off the mark.

      First off, the mod has quite literally zero value. Installing it is more work than ignoring an option during character creation. I constantly ignore options I don’t care about during character creation, it really isn’t hard. It’s hard to interpret the intent of the creator of the mod, as well as its users, as anything else but being out for blood.

      That alone though isn’t a reason to remove the mod – Nexus is full of useless mods. But something neat happens when you do nuke the mod: Bigots come out of the woodwork, you can ban them in one fell stroke, and thereby lessen your moderation load in the long term.

      Last, but not least, the curse of neutrality aka the Nazi bar thing.

      Oh, EDIT:

      Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun. If it is really so pointless, nexus shouldn’t have bothered removing the mod.

      You don’t have to select a pronoun. The default will match the phenotype of the body you select.

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        I am now totally confused as to what is even going on. After reading multiple top level comments, many responses and then reading the article (gasp I know… blasphemy) I can’t tell if conservatives are mad about pronouns being an option or not being an option. Many of the comments made it sound like they added pronouns, the way the article is written makes it sound like they removed the ability to choose pronouns.

        So which is it. Who is mad, and why exactly?

        Edit: Okay, maybe I understand now. Someone created a mod that removed pronouns. The place that hosts mod downloads, removed that mod from their list of downloads. Now people are mad it was removed. Do I have that right? If so, my only remaining question is if one were to use the mod, does it mean others not using the mod can’t see their pronoun(s)?

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          Selecting the sex of the PC has been a standard feature in practically every RPG with character creator ever, and definitely in Bethesda RPGs, what they added is an option to change pronouns the PC is referred to by NPCs from the default. If you want them to match you simply don’t touch that option, done.

          From a developer’s perspective it’s dead simple, similar in triviality as allowing people to mix+match any voice to any body type. Cyberpunk’s free choice of genitals needs some implementation care but if you’re planning for it from the start it’s also easy.

          Where things get more complicated is things like dresses for male bodies, especially if you don’t have any shape keys in place. But if you use one body mesh for everything and simply shape key it into male and female then it’s again no issue (you also need to lerp animations then, probably, male and female bodies walk differently because hips). Basically it’s hard if your asset pipeline is simple, if the pipeline is sophisticated it’s easy.

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          If so, my only remaining question is if one were to use the mod, does it mean others not using the mod can’t see their pronoun(s)?

          It’s a singleplayer game. Nothing you do can have any effect on the experience other people have with the game.

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          I think this is the reply that prompted me to reply at the top of the post. Does your edit mean I was of some help? You appear to have the right of it, yes.

          As to your second question: what mod loadout a player has will have zero bearing on another’s experience. If one were to use the mod, others would not be affected.

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            Yes, I believe re-reading your comment (not sure if it was post or pre edit) finally made me put all the pieces together.

            If this is single player, the controversy is even more dumb than I had originally thought.

            Now I am curious what the default pronoun options are, and if you were able to skip choosing it entirely, or pick “other” or “none”?

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              Apparently it defaults to the one matching your phenotype. The game gave you the option to change it if you felt like it. The mod removed that option and may have had a rant against the existence of LGBT+ people in its description and that description was the cause for removal (I can’t verify since it was removed, but that’s what others have said).

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        And are these “progressives” in the room now? No, they’re clearly not. Nobody is attacking him and he’s not even being downvoted.

        He wrote the wall of text because he has the self awareness to know that the comment he is writing is functionally identical to what a far-right reactionary “hiding their power level” would write.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      This mod is taking away a choice though.

      I’m pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are. So choose that option and play the game.

      Why should Nexus devote resources to a mod that removes options from a game? There’s no point to this mod for anyone that’s of sound mind. The only reason for it’s existence is some petty bullshit from people that hate trans people so much they will install a mod in a feeble attempt to feel like they hurt people in some small way.

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        If the mod just totally skipped character creation and the goal was to just save time, I could see the purpose. But its clearly not there to save anyone time; its just there as an excuse to tirade against certain demographics for existing.

      • SwampYankee@mander.xyz
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        I’m pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are.

        If you’re a hardcore heteronormie, congrats, the default behavior of the game conforms with your worldview. Simply choose a male or female body, and don’t even touch the pronouns. They’re automatically what they’re “supposed” to be.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun.

      No, it defaults to body type.

      This option is literally nothing to people who don’t care - and the people who care enough to dislike it, are assholes. They have their private reasons and their private reasons are bad. Bigotry is not an OK idea. We’ve had that discussion, it went very predictably, and it has a right answer. We don’t need to endlessly litigate whether we’ve been too harsh about demonstrable bigotry.

      A website saying ‘no thank you’ to an act of petty bigotry is a non-event. There is no fucking danger in moderation excluding that. That’s what moderation… is. That’s why we have human beings reviewing stuff, instead of offering an unfiltered pile of everything all the time.

      In this context of moderation: game modifications must successfully and safely do something useful. This fails on two out of three points. It successfully removes a feature. But that feature is easily ignored with no side effects or consequences, and the blindingly obvious motivation behind its removal is overt sexual prejudice. While safe in the sense that it won’t brick your computer, it’s plainly a threatening message to the people who use this feature - it is dehumanizing. It is treating the possibility of their existence as something intolerable, to be excised. To be physically removed.

      You can still install this stupid mod. It hasn’t been erased from reality. It’s just not approved on one website with clear rules against exactly that sort of thing. Making bad things harder to do is not some betrayal of your right to make terrible decisions. A lot of things that are possible have barriers for good reasons.

      And none of you grasping at freedom as an excuse to entertain bigotry seem remember - we all have a right to freedom of association. We don’t want to deal with that shit. You can’t make us, and still pretend you care about choice.

    • uglyduckling81@lemmy.world
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      This is not a place of acceptance. This is a left wing echo chamber. You either tow the narrative or GTFO.

      I think of myself as very moderate. I’m neither supportive of right wing horse shit or the lefts batshit insanity. I’ll get downvoted into oblivion every time for pointing out this place being extreme left, or for making any comment that doesn’t align strictly with the narrative taking points.

      • teuast@lemmy.ca
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        what exactly is the left’s batshit insanity in this instance? literally that the game lets you pick your pronouns?

        did you know that fallout: a post-nuclear role playing game (1997) also allowed you to do this? a few other games that have let you do this are fallout 2 (1998), mass effect (2007), fallout 3 (2008), mass effect 2 (2010), skate 3 (2010), the elder scrolls 5: skyrim (2011 and also every year since), mass effect 3 (2013), fallout 4 (2015), sonic forces (2017), mass effect andromeda (2017), cyberpunk 2077 (2020), trackmania 2020 (2020), and literally every other game ever to feature a character creator. if this is batshit insanity, then i can’t wait to find out what you think of unions.

        • saze@feddit.uk
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          Yah, how dare someone not be a polarised momo and make me have to assess their pov without a convenient label with which to dismiss it.

      • saze@feddit.uk
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        Dude I thought reddit was leftist and then I came here. Funny thing is I’m a pansy lefty European (believe in social healthcare, UBI and all that good stuff) yet this place is a bit much for me.

      • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
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        Depends on the community. I have had reasonable results, but I do have to be extra careful. It probably helps that I’m kind of a stealth leftist.

  • underisk@lemmy.ml
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    Does anyone even install these mods or do they just exist for people to get outraged at?

    • Rottcodd@kbin.social
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      I would imagine a bare handful of people install them.

      There’s some number of people who are so angry and stupid that the mere sight of something like an option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage, so for them, mods like this are essentially QOL improvements.

      More’s the pity…

      • RiikkaTheIcePrincess@kbin.social
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        option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage

        Yeah I was there when BATTLETECH (still dunno why its name has to be so LOUD :P ) launched. Every hatefool was raging about it, apropos of anything or nothing. Try to talk about any part of it and it’s “OH YOU MEAN FUCKING PRONOUNWARRIOR?!?!” and a bunch of incoherent senseless bile. There’s a sizeable group of people who deeply love being offended, and it’s not us (queerfolk/LGBTQIA+/QUILTBAG/GSM/whatever). Like, I’m neck-deep in queer over here and every time I play a game with a pronoun selector at the beginning I promptly forget about it but oohhhh nooo, not these bellends. They somehow think a button at the beginning of the game that matters like three times ever has entirely DESTROYED videogames with LIES and FALLACIES 🙄

        They’d be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn’t deliberately make messes of everything else (say, going to MWLL/other games, ranting about “pronounwarrior,” pretty sure some critters got teamkilled over it…) for no good reason.

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          They’d be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn’t deliberately make messes of everything else

          My opinion exactly.

          In ways, I actually feel sorry for them. In the first place, it has to suck just to be that angry and spiteful, but underneath that, it must really suck to feel so powerless and desperate and insecure that something as trivial and irrelevant as pronouns can send you into a compensatory rage.

          My pity is greatly diminished by the fact that they’re toxic assholes who try to force the world to accommodate their own failures though.

        • SolOrion@sh.itjust.works
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          Wait, Battletech? The turn based one? From 2018?

          That’s amusing. I played that a couple months ago. I don’t recall ever selecting a pronoun, but I’m sure I did and then just moved on like a normal person.

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            Yeah, that’s the one. There was so much outrage because it had the word “pronoun” in it at all 🤣It’s just a little thing on the side during character creation and its effect is absolutely trivial. Actually I think the other MechWarriors ‘have pronouns’ too if you deliberately open the character editor for them. It’s really the bare minimum, like I’m trying to come up with something sarcastic but those people were freaking out over nnnnooothing like the one word in one game is gonna ruin videogames for them forever, or some crap.

            Which, like… if we could somehow trans so hard they’d go away don’t they think we’d do it instead of just getting yelled at?

        • Laurentide@pawb.social
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          Meanwhile, my canonically enby commander is rocking a fabulous magenta mohawk and having fun headshotting all the King Crabs so they can sell them to afford catperson surgery.

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              I’m not hunting them specifically, their cockpits just happen to be magnets for my Marauder’s laser and autocannon rounds. :P

              The first one I saw, in an early “titan” mission, got taken out by a single alpha strike from long range and dropped three salvage. (I renamed it Queen Crab when I noticed that some parts of the mech were white after applying my blue/pink paint scheme.)

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          I just cannot get over what a terrible name “quiltbag” is. How do you say that out loud and not immediately think better of it?

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            Well, it’s… pronounceable? Technically?

            Okay I don’t actually like it and don’t know anycritter who does but it’s there soooo putting it there seemed like a good idea at the time? 🤷

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        I’ve seen that in videos, but I always assumed it was for show to get their viewers riled up. I honestly can’t imagine an actual person doing this on their own, unless they were encouraged to do it by some influencer.

        As in, how many people fire up a game, get mad that pronouns exist, and then search online for a “fix”? I think that number is pretty small.

        But then again, I tend to be pretty careful about distancing myself from bigots.

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    How are these people not seeing that they are actively trying to censor shit with the shyte excuse “keep politics out of my games”, and then turn around and yell censorship as soon as people ignore their bigoted crap.

    You don’t need to answer, it’s rhetorical.

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    Incredibly petty mod to make in the first place, so Nexus might as well be petty too and remove it.

  • Hal-5700X@lemmy.world
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    I don’t see the big deal about the pronoun mods. You have to download and install it. Just don’t download the mods.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      It has no reason to exist besides being a middle finger to a queer minority.

      This is a website deciding not to become a Nazi bar.

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      By the same token, I don’t see a big deal about the pronoun choice. Just choose She/Her or He/Him. You don’t have to choose They/Their.

      • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
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        Huh, just considering practicality, how many new characters would one have to create in order to save rather than waste downloading this? Given the time required to download, read, and set up, I’d guess somewhere in the range of 20-30 characters.

        Speedrunners might download a mod to skip setup entirely, not a single option. Of the millions who purchased starfield, perhaps a few dozen might use this ergonomically. Neat.

        • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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          Speedrunners might download a mod to skip setup entirely, not a single option.

          I’m pretty sure that this would disqualify the run, unless it’s specifically allowed in a particular category.

          • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
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            Practice mods are occasionally used if, say, there’s a tricky section 1.5 hours in. With route highlighting or landscape deemphasizing, if necessary. Speedrunning has slowed to a crawl in the last decade so that seems unlikely.

      • tomi000@lemmy.world
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        It is not a big deal. It doesnt have to be. Its just a small mod with a small change that some people apparently wanted for their experience. They didnt demand to change the game. I dont see problem with choosing pronouns, but I also dont see a problem with changing pointless stuff in your game.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      Just pick your pronouns when you create your character. These are people getting their panties in a twist because they are being reminded that other people can choose different pronouns.

      • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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        These are people getting their panties in a twist because they are being reminded that other people can choose different pronouns.

        That’s nothing new. The vast majority of far-right reactionaries know exactly zero trans people. They’re getting upset because a stranger, who exists entirely in their imagination, may have an opinion about their own body that the far-right have not approved as “okay to have”.

        Of course, there’s probably deeper reasons that they won’t say out loud. What if they accidentally find a “man” attractive? What if they have to treat a casual acquaintance with basic human decency?

        The horror.

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        I’d imagine for some, the problem is being reminded they too can choose. And they’ve had the option to choose for a long time.

        Honestly, that was my biggest issue the idea of asking other people their pronoun was sort of a trend (at least according to the rightwing media? idk; I’ve never once seen a person ask another person their pronouns in IRL). For some reason I never wondered why I, as a “cis man”, I’d be afraid of such a question (especially since I was the type to like when people mistook me for being gay, so it wasn’t like I was afraid of having my “masculinity questioned” or was anti-LGBT).

        • MomoTimeToDie@sh.itjust.works
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          I’ve never once seen a person ask another person their pronouns in IRL

          I have, various times in college when I was in a new class/group, they’ have everyone introduce themselves, and pronouns were expected as a part of it. I mostly just found it annoying because a lot of people really didn’t like taking “don’t care” as an answer.

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    Nowadays everything seems newsworthy… I would not be mad about it if Bethesda did not include a pronoun setting, i am not mad someone made a mod to remove said option, i am not mad nexus keeping its sovereignty to decide what they host…

    What is everyone mad about? Just let ppl do whatever they do.